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    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. 


     
    How To Keep Your Data Up-to-Date with Elegant Sync Solutions by Matthew Braga on June 3, 2010 5 Comments
    These days, you can start reading an article on your iPad, add a comment from your phone, and then re-tweet the whole thing from your laptop. Everything is connected — and that's damn scary. But it's also kind of cool, and brings a new level of connectivity to all your digital devices. Where syncing was once a two-way operation — between a device and a computer — it's now grown to encompass almost anything with a connection online, pushing data in any number of directions, to any device we choose. 
     


    5 Practical Steps to Instantly Better Mac OS X Performance by Matthew Braga on May 31, 2010 22 Comments
    Mac's just work, or so we're told. People repeat that phrase like it's a mantra, or a chant, as if their unflinching belief is the only thing keeping their computer alive. But OS X is not infallible, and like the worst Windows PC, it comes with its own share of quirks and problems. Poorly written applications, hidden files, and performance degradation are problems not inherent to the PC world, but totally possible on Macs as well.  

    But if there's one failing of OS X, it's that when there's a problem, it's hidden well. You're never told that your disk permissions are hopelessly broken, or that maintenance has never been preformed. Your Mac keeps you in the dark, until that fateful day upon which you simply can't boot. But let's peel back the curtain, shall we? We have a bit of advice that you can use to make OS X run faster, smoother, and problem-free. 



    How To Take Old School Photographs with Pinhole Cameras by Matthew Braga on May 27, 2010 12 Comments
    At first glance, a pinhole camera seems to defy logic. The concept of a minuscule hole on a piece of black cardboard capturing images similar to our digital cameras or SLRs sounds impossible. But there's no magic involved here — pinhole photography is the most basic of all camera designs, and once you understand how light and apertures work, it actually starts to make sense. 

    one of your own.

    How To Tweak Your Movies with Awesome Video Effects by Matthew Braga on May 25, 2010 11 Comments
    If you're not using VLC by now, you're seriously missing out. The versatile media player can handle nearly anything you throw at it, from the most popular codecs to obscure of standards. Not only is it fast, and cross-platform, but VLC also has some of the coolest real-time video effects of any player out there. Some are useless, and some are just plain cool, but we swear you'll never look at your videos the same again. 
     

     
    How To Enable Motion Interpolation on Your Movie Files by Matthew Braga on May 24, 2010 55 Comments
    We here at Tested know that motion smoothing televisions aren't for everyone. In last week's article on frame interpolation, a number of you made it very clear that the technology just didn't look good on the HDTVs you viewed, and often left source material looking fake and unrealistic (the "soap opera" effect). Ouch. But for all the hate, there's bound to be a few fans amongst the Tested community. As it turns out, you don't need a fancy 120Hz television to smooth out your films — any old computer monitor will do. 
     


    5 Fast and Easy BlackBerry Speed Tips to Do Right Now by Matthew Braga on May 21, 2010 12 Comments
    Now is not a good time to be a BlackBerry owner. The OS is dated, the devices unimpressive, and a barrage of iPhone, Android and Windows 7 phones are ready to trounce past RIM within the next few months. But perhaps you're stuck with your BlackBerry; even worse, you could be a Canadian with a three-year contract, so here's to making the best of a bad situation. Your phone might be slow and aging, but we have a few quick tips to jumpstart your BlackBerry's performance, maximizing speed and stability until your next handset upgrade. 



    6 Pieces of Everyday Tech that Put Your Privacy at Risk by Matthew Braga on May 20, 2010 13 Comments
    The common photocopier is a docile creature, stationed faithfully in offices across the world. It scans, it copies and exists to do our bidding — but like all machines, it has something far more sinister planned for us. Hidden deep within its inky bowels are more than just springs and sprockets, but a complete archival history of every document that's ever passed through it's feed. It knows our secrets, and with a little bit of work, everyone else can too.

    CBS News report, photocopiers produced in the past few years have started to rely on hard drives for copying and scanning tasks. Medical records, social security numbers and that Dial-a-Joke bill you racked up aren't just reproduced, but stored indefinitely in the copier's bowels. It's a trivial task to remove that hard drive and extract all the potentially damning info within. It almost makes you wonder, what other sinister technology is storing more information than we care to share?

    3 Important Things You Should Know about Steam for Mac by Matthew Braga on May 20, 2010 22 Comments
    It's always fun to tell die hard console gamers that Halo was almost exclusively released for the Mac. Bungie, the game's developer, had even demoed the game to excited journalists at Macworld 1999, before being bought by Microsoft the following year. Development was shifted to the Xbox, the Mac engine killed, and the rest is history. Considering Halo's popularity, it's always curious to think what would have happened if the original plan stayed intact. After all, Mac gaming is an oxymoron for many, a reoccurring joke in a long-running sitcom. For a very short time, things could have been different. These days, however, Apple is estimated to hold just 10 per cent of the personal computing market share — a demographic hardly large enough to entice most big name developers. 

    The keyword, however, is most, because now we have Valve. Developer of the wildly successful digital distribution platform Steam, Valve has sworn to do what few others would — treat the Mac as a first-tier gaming platform. With a growing library of first and third party games, Steam might just be the answer to the Mac gaming conundrum. 



    Make Sense of Your Router and Local Network Settings by Paul Lilly on May 18, 2010 13 Comments
    Quick, define the following: Default gateway, MAC address, and subnet mask. Didn't get all three right? That's OK. Even for seasoned vets who can build a PC blindfolded, networking often ends up being their Achilles Heel, the one area that manages to perplex and frustrate computer users of all skill levels. Blame it on the quirky terminology (Hint: a MAC address has nothing to do with Apple) or a fear of the unknown, but whatever the reason, today is the day you take that first step towards becoming a networking guru. In the following days and weeks, we'll be posting several networking related guides, but you have to walk before you can run, Johnny.