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    Automate Your Daily Tasks With Easy Mouse Gestures by Matthew Braga on June 19, 2010 9 Comments
    We know you're a little bit lazy. You've not only trained your dog to fetch your slippers in the morning, but make you coffee too. You buy all your music online, not to save money, but to avoid the hassle of ripping CDs. And then there was that one time you didn't eat because the peanut butter jar was too tight to open. Luckily for you, we've got something else that should satisfy your inner sloth, and all you need is a mouse.

    StrokeIt is a small Windows application that serves a very different purpose than the name might have you think. Using mouse gestures you draw on-screen, StrokeIt can control common keystrokes and program functions, bringing full computer control to the tip of your finger. Setting things up is easy enough, and before long you'll be moving through browser tabs with just the swipe of a finger. However, the real story is in some of the more unorthodox you can make StrokeIt do, and how you can turn some of your most frequent tasks hassle-free.
     
    How To Spot Visual Artifacts In Your Digital Photos by Matthew Braga on June 18, 2010 2 Comments
    You've heard it before, and you'll hear it again — no two camera sensors are created equal, especially when it comes to DSLRs and camera phones. Every model captures pixels with its own quirks and problems, and some are more apparent than others. JPEG artifacts, low-light noise and even dust can affect your final image, and turn a beautiful scene into a sub-par facsimile. 



    How To Get Music On Your iPod Without iTunes by Matthew Braga on June 17, 2010 21 Comments
    Despite it's fancy, brushed metal skin and $0.99 downloads, there are some people who simply don't like iTunes. And that's fair. There are literally hundreds of other media players that you can use to satisfy your Genesis obsession, and its nice to have a choice in terms of features form and function. Unless you're an iPod user that is. Apple's popular media player has been locked to iTunes for years, forcing users to stick with the software even if it's not their player of choice. PC users in particular have been disappointed in how resource-intensive iTunes has become. It's crashy and the Apple auto-updater is just annoying (no, we don't want to install Safari).


     
    5 Ways to Save Your CDs and DVDs From Scratches by Matthew Braga on June 17, 2010 14 Comments
    All it takes is the smallest of scratches to ruin that Lord of The Rings marathons you've been planning for weeks. You should've known it was a bad idea to lend the DVDs out to your six-year-old cousin, and now they've got more scratches than that time you fell in the bobcat enclosure at the zoo. And while you could go buy yourself a copy of the fancy new Blu-Ray release, where's the fun in that?



    How To Easily Find Missing Album Art on Windows and Mac by Matthew Braga on June 17, 2010 28 Comments
    Remember when album art actually meant something? When having the limited gatefold edition of The Beatles' Let it Be was a source of envy of amongst your friends? Well, maybe you don't. That's probably before your time. Besides, MP3's have managed to ruin all that anyhow, distilling album art into more of an afterthought, or simply ignoring it entirely.



    4 Elegant Ways to Streamline Your Daily Web News Intake by Matthew Braga on June 14, 2010 8 Comments
    The internet is filled with information — too much information, some might argue. There's news on twitter, on blogs, on RSS feeds and everything in between, and unless you're skilled in the ancient art of multitasking, it can be hard to keep it all straight. The key is filtering out the good from the bad, and finding what warrants our attention most. 



    How To Take Better Photos on Your Android Phone by Ryan Whitwam on June 14, 2010 2 Comments
    It's become common for even mid-range Android phones to come with some impressive cameras. A five megapixel sensor is usually present in most smartphones, and that means you can get some pretty reasonable point-and-shoot type images. A phone's camera may not be replacing your dedicated camera anytime soon, but you have to work with what you have. If all you have with you is a phone, you might as well maximize the image quality. Android has made some strides in the image capture department in the 2.1 and upcoming 2.2 updates. 
     


    Complete Guide to Backing Up Your Android Phone by Ryan Whitwam on June 13, 2010 16 Comments

    Editor's Note: Because Android is moving at a rapid pace, so we've updated this guide with the latest information on more recent versions of Android. You can find the new version here.

    There is a clear difference in how Android and the iPhone handle your personal data. With the iPhone, you connect the phone to a PC with a USB cable, and use iTunes to manage content. It might seem increasingly archaic these days to rely on a PC to use a smartphone, but there is a practical upshot to it. Apple has built in a simple, fast backup solution for the iPhone into iTunes. If you end up getting a new phone for whatever reason, you can just restore the backup to the new handset. On Android, the picture isn't as clear.

    Android takes the cloud-based approach. At first, the platform wasn't really showing off its cloud-connected potential. It really felt unfinished in that way. But it is becoming increasingly clear where Google is going with Android, and how that relates to data backup and security. As it stands right now, you just can't do a complete backup of an Android phone without rooting the device and voiding the warranty.

    Let's go over what you can backup, what you don't need to backup, and what you can look forward to in Android backup.

    How To Give Your Game Screenshots the HDR Treatment by Matthew Braga on June 11, 2010 14 Comments
    So far, we've shown you some pretty rad ways to spice up your in-game screenshots. But while making panoramas and vector art is all well and good, it's time to crank the quality up to 11 and show you a truly awesome technique. Photographer's have been using HDR — or, high-dynamic range — to churn out some pretty dramatic images over the years, but who's to say us gamers can't join in on the fun? The post processing technique maximizes color and luminance in a scene, and can add a level of intensity to an image that's not always possible with regular lenses or filters. 
         
     I know. I cheated. This is artwork from Halo Wars. But it looks so damn cool with HDR.

     
    The Best Way to Organize Your Massive Photo Library by Matthew Braga on June 10, 2010 13 Comments
    Years from now, we'll sit around the campfire, or some sort of digital facsimile, and tell stories. Scary stories. Stories where the protagonist actually stores stuff on hard drives, or takes pictures on a 24-exposure roll of film. Things that will seem practically archaic in our bright, jetpack-filled future.

    That's kind of how things work today with digital photography. We've grown so accustomed to taking pictures with reckless abandon, so used to visually documenting every moment of our lives, that we've forgotten what it's like to be limited by a roll of film. As a result we have a lot of photos — no, really, we have a lot of photos. Those albums are scattered across our hard drives, mismatched, poorly named and utterly disorganized. Just a hunch, but it's probably time you whip those memories into shape.


     
    How To Deal with Grain and Noise in Low-Light Photography by Will Greenwald on June 10, 2010 11 Comments
    Noise is an unfortunate reality of photography. It was a problem for film, and it's a problem for digital cameras. The more sensitive the film or sensor is, the more prone it is to picking up unwanted variations in an image. Bits of film grain, funky pixels, annoying artifacts, they all tend to pop up when you crank up the ISO sensitivity. 


     
    How To Build an Awesome $500 Windows Home Server by on June 9, 2010 94 Comments
    How many gigabytes of movies, music, and photos do you have on your local hard disks, external drives, and random USB keys? We're willing to bet a lot. We'd also wager that the vast majority of this media never gets accessed--what a waste. Worse yet, all your accumulated data is just one inevitable disk failure away from being lost forever. It's time to give your media a safer and smarter home in the form of a Home Server. We'll show you how to build an inexpensive but powerful server to back up, share, and stream your files.
      

    Read on to learn how we decided between Intel and AMD builds (spoiler: we built both), how to set up Windows Home Server, and what third-party programs to add to leverage the power of a dedicated server.

    How To Steal Safari 5's Best Features for Firefox and Chrome by Matthew Braga on June 8, 2010 14 Comments
    Using a web browser is a bit like pledging your allegiance to a sports team — not everyone's going to agree with what you pick, and there's no guarantee your choice will stay on top for long. These days, there's Chrome, Firefox and Safari all grappling for our love and attention, and each brings its own set of features and flare to our desktop space.

    Safari 5 was quietly pushed to the public, introducing a few new tricks to the popular Mac and Windows browser. Some features aren't necessarily new — Safari is only just getting extensions — but others are unique, and not yet available on all browsers. Luckily, Firefox and Chrome have a huge library of extensions, many of which can be used to replicate Safari's best features, and we're going to list a few of them here.
     
    How To Take Awesome Panoramic Game Screenshots by Matthew Braga on June 5, 2010 11 Comments
    Taking screenshots of your video games is as old as the PC itself. You press a button, an image pops out, and that's all there is to it. Sort of. Taking screenshots is easy, but taking good screenshots involves a little more work. Luckily, we've done most of it for you, and this weekend we're going to show you how.


      
    How To Rip All Your Photos and Documents Off the Cloud by Matthew Braga on June 4, 2010 9 Comments
    The cloud is this magical place where files never die. We put our photos, our videos, our entire lives into this digital land in the hopes that they'll live on forever, untouched by fire or folly or other catastrophic acts. It's convenient, and it gives us the peace of mind that our data is safe. But have you ever actually tried to pull your files back down from the cloud? It isn't fun, and in some cases, it's downright impossible.
     
    The cloud, you see, isn't a two way street. It's great for saving, and great for sharing, but sucks at returning what's yours. This doesn't sit well with everyone of course; Flickr, Twitter and even Google Docs are, in essence, keeping your data in digital limbo, and getting it back is no easy feat. Luckily, some enterprising developers know your pain. If you spend as much time as we do uploading your life online, there should be a way to recover that data too. And now there is.