How To Properly Hold Your DSLR While Taking PhotosbyWill GreenwaldonSept. 16, 20109 Comments
Photography is more than setting the camera, pointing, and shooting. You need to frame the shot just right, and depending on your lens and the design of your camera, that can be a trickier prospect than you might think. There are several tricks and guidelines you can use to better hold your camera and use it to get the angle you're looking for.
Forget Formatting: Paste Plain Text With Chrome ShortcutbyWesley FenlononSept. 15, 201023 Comments
Carrying over lingering formatting from word processors, emails and web pages can be a nightmarish experience for bloggers. Actually, it’s a pain for everyone--even Google, apparently--and instead of griping about the problem like the rest of us, the Chrome developers have built their own solution.
It works.
How To Sync and Consolidate Your Many Contact ListsbyMatthew BragaonSept. 15, 20103 Comments
Gone are the days of beefy address books and paper-filled rolodexes — that's what the internet is for, after all. But while all of our phone numbers and addresses are now stored online, they can't always be found in the same place, and consolidating all that information isn't the most enjoyable of tasks.
Android Task Killers are Dead—Here's What You Should Be DoingbyRyan WhitwamonSept. 14, 201023 Comments
As a general rule, people have a hard time dealing with change. Android, being perhaps the fastest changing mobile OS in history, can leave people in the dust as the platform evolves. Things don't work the same from release to release. Some of this is user-facing, and people can adapt. But some changes are deeper system level alterations that people might not notice at first, and then might not understand why they've changed. The functionality and usefulness of task killers is one such advance. A lot has changed in the underlying Android OS regarding how background processes are managed.
Windows DirectDraw Hack Helps Wing Commander Fly AnewbyWesley FenlononSept. 8, 201012 Comments
Keeping up with the latest and greatest in technology is a big part of being a gamer, particularly on the PC side. New graphics cards, faster processors, more RAM--we love that stuff, but over time the steady march of progress leaves some games in the lurch. With every new version of Windows, running games designed for Windows 3.1 or 95 becomes a whole new brand of complicated. DOSBox and ScummVM are godsends for what they support, but what about poor old, antiquated Windows games?
Finnish engineer and programmer extraordinaire Jari Komppa ran into just such a problem when he wanted to play the Windows versions of the first four games in the Wing Commander series. When faced with crippling display errors as a result of Microsoft’s DirectDraw 2D rendering, he skipped straight past the typical “get pissed and give up” response and decided to simply write his own DLL file. It’s a fascinating, enterprising solution--and, even better, it works with a few old favorites including Warcraft 2 and Fallout.
Wing Commander--and all the trials and tribulations that goal entailed.
How To Keep The Colors Of Your Photos AccuratebyWill GreenwaldonSept. 8, 20103 Comments
If you're a casual shutterbug, you might have noticed that the colors in your photos can vary wildly. Under light bulbs and natural light, everything has an orange tint. Under fluorescent lights, everything seems pale and blue. The shade of yellow you get when you shoot a flower on a sunny day might be drastically different from the shade you get if you shoot the same flower on a cloudy day.
How To Prioritize Your Network Adapters and Connections byMatthew BragaonSept. 8, 20102 Comments
Switching between wired and wireless connections can be annoying, especially if you do it often. The actual act of moving between the two is easy enough, but knowing which one takes priority isn't always clear. Plug in that Ethernet cable, and your wireless gaming session could easily be interrupted — unless you know how to configure things properly.
When and How To Clean Your DSLR's Lens and SensorbyWill GreenwaldonSept. 7, 20107 Comments
If you want to take consistently sharp photos, you need to make sure your camera's lens and sensor are both clean. If any smudges show up on the glass, or if any particles accumulate on the CMOS, you can expect fuzziness, spots, and other unwanted things to show up in your pictures. To do this, you need to do two things: protect your camera's sensitive parts, and clean your camera's sensitive parts when dirt still manages to get in.
How To Get Great-Sounding Audio for Podcasts and GamesbyMatthew BragaonSept. 3, 201023 Comments
We all know that guy — the one who jumps on team chat spewing more static than an electrical storm. Your friends may be attempting an enjoyable game of Team Fortress 2, but LickitungNorm92's awful mic is making the whole experience a futile one. You could mute him and move on, but there will be more — some with even worse audio than the last.
How To Take and Create HDR Photos on AndroidbyRyan WhitwamonSept. 3, 20106 Comments
HDR photography is all the rage these days, isn't it? A good HDR shot can bring out details in shadows, while not over-exposing lighter elements. This technique has the potential to give your shots a really great hyper-realistic effect. Apple announced in their recent event that the camera software on their i-devices would be getting built-in HDR shooting modes.
Will disassembles the new Kindle Wi-Fi and shows you its guts. Does it bleed E-ink?
How To Spot Scams and Malware Apps on AndroidbyRyan WhitwamonSept. 2, 201017 Comments
Android offers developers a lot of freedom in using a phone's hardware in their apps. While this leads to some really amazing functionality, it can also be a security concern. Google has chosen to run a more open marketplace for apps, and does not hold content up so they can review it first. There is no gatekeeper for the Android Market. All a developer needs to do is pay the $25 developer fee and upload their app to the Android Market. Naturally, this has invited some riffraff to join the party. By looking at an app with a skeptical eye, and checking the permissions, you can avoid apps that are shady, or just plain scams.
We know it's not *quite* the same sort of thing, but that doesn't mean the effect still isn't cool. These images are specially designed to produce the impression of 3D by focusing your eyes on 2D patterns. Given a cursory glance, the images may look insignificant, but a closer look will reveal a simple 3D image beneath.
What you're looking at below is the XFX HD 5970 Black Edition, a third-party Radeon card with two 5870 GPUs welded directly to the board. There's no questioning this card is fast, but for consumers, this is where confusion sets in. While AMD and NVIDIA will design and manufacture their own GPUs, those reference builds are licensed out to other manufactures too, who then modify them as they see fit. That means buying the latest Radeon or GeForce isn't as simple as walking into the store — you need to know which flavor you want.
How To Choose the Right Microfiber Cloths for Cleaning Your DevicesbyWill GreenwaldonAug. 30, 20109 Comments
Microfiber has quickly become one of the most popular materials in cleaning electronics. When your iPhone gets smudged or your monitor gets dusty, you're likely to reach for the soft, synthetic cloth to make the displays pristine again. While it's seen use in various applications over the last few decades, it's become particularly popular among consumers in the last few years.
Technically speaking, microfiber is any stranded material with a strand weight of less than one denier (a denier is a unit of measurement defined as the number of grams 9,000 meters of a strand of material weighs). In terms of consumer use, microfiber is any woven material made of microfibers (smaller than 1 denier), generally made from 80/20 blend of polyester and polyamide. Natural silk is 1 denier, and it's extremely difficult to find any natural fiber suitable for commercial use smaller than that.
he combined his two options into one. By simply splicing the wires of Apple's microphone and remote with a superior style of earphone, Tsutano was able to get the best of both worlds — and we'll show you how to do the same.
Three Essential Things to Do to Every New USB KeybyWill GreenwaldonAug. 27, 201020 Comments
If you're using a USB drive, it's probably to shlep files from computer to computer. It's so easy to just rip open the packaging, plug in the drive, and start filling it with data. However, you can do a few neat things with your brand new drive before you load it down to make it more secure, more flexible, and more powerful.
How To Properly Benchmark Your Android Phone's BatterybyRyan WhitwamonAug. 27, 20105 Comments
It's common that whenever a new technology finds its way into mobile phones, a company feeds us a line about how much better it will be for battery life. They know how to get us like that. The Achilles Heel of many smart phones is the battery life. If a phone can't make it through a day under your unique usage pattern, it is of little use. When AMOLED displays started making their debut on phones, the battery life was supposed to be much improved.
analysis from Laptop Magazine shows that, in fact, many AMOLED Android phones perform worse than their LCD-using cousins. The Droid X with its large LCD display bested the smaller AMOLED handsets. Informative as this is, it was an artificial benchmark. If you really want to know how your battery performs, the best way is to just use the phone, and track your battery usage. Read on as we show you how to do just that.
How To Get One Great Photo By Taking Many ShotsbyWill GreenwaldonAug. 26, 20104 Comments
When you get right down to it, photography is the art and science of capturing a single moment in time. While there are exceptions (artistic long exposures to show motion, high dynamic range shooting that combines exposures), you're basically trying to take a single photo that captures exactly what you want. Unfortunately, it's almost never that simple. If you want one good shot, you're probably going to have to take two dozen bad shots.
How To Diagnose Your Network Connection's HealthbyMatthew BragaonAug. 25, 201012 Comments
In the world of first-person shooters, there's no better scapegoat for your poor sniping skills than a shoddy internet connection. Dropped packets, slow connections and poor latency are just some of the excuses you've might have used in the past — all serious problems preventing your "mad skillz" from being what they could. Thus, we're going to help you out; we want to see you knock SexyWill23 off the top of the Modern Warfare leader boards just as much as you do.
