Although it’s easy to head to the electronics store to buy network cables, making do with cables of predetermined lengths can be a problem. More often than not, premade cables are either too short (and require coupling) or too long (in which case, you have to tie up excess cabling and tuck it away somewhere). The end result is usually a mess of extra network cable, wrapped and bundled up alongside your devices and network switches. It works, but it isn't ideal, and it looks horrible.
Running benchmarks on a PC enables users to evaluate performance, to identify potential bottlenecks, and to choose effective system upgrades. Unfortunately, many users imagine that system performance is simply a matter of CPU frequency or memory capacity, which leads them to think that dropping in a faster CPU or more memory will automatically and immediately yield noticeable performance improvements. In reality, however, that is not always the case.
You love taking photos. You carry your DSLR or mirrorless camera along wherever you go. You’re always checking out new Photoshop filters or interesting editing applications. You have a Flickr Pro or Smugmug account, and you upload hundreds of photos a year. Now you want a PC that can be responsive and fast when you're editing and tweaking your pictures.
I've already discussed how you can learn to code for free using languages such as Ruby and JavaScript, but this time we'll explore an even more basic language that can help to make your websites pop. Cascading Style Sheets is like HTML's cooler, more artistic sibling: While HTML handles the structure and content of your website, CSS allows you to add cutting-edge design to it. This guide tells you everything you need to know to get started making better-looking websites fast.
Many people just getting to know CSS think of it as a fancy way of handling HTML properties such as text formatting and background images--and for small-scale examples on simple pages, that's largely true. You can manipulate many of the properties that CSS affects through pure HTML instead (though not as well), and if you're just looking to change the font size on your page, CSS is actually more difficult to use than HTML.
Compared with other Kindle models, Amazon's Kindle DX is gargantuan. Its 9.7-inch E Ink screen provides ample space for reading books and viewing graphs and images. But what if you could use all of those E Ink pixels for something more creative, such as displaying your Windows desktop? As it turns out, with a few simple tricks you can use the Kindle DX as a computer display that can show anything your usual monitor can show. (Granted, E Ink's grayscale display can't perform or refresh as quickly as a color LCD can, so you're best off using this screen for static content such as documents or Web pages.)
Admit it: Your carry-on bag is stuffed full of digital gear you can’t bear to leave at home. Not only will your iPhone, iPad, or MacBook keep you entertained while en route, they’ll make great navigation, research, and photo tools once you’ve reached your destination. But keeping these devices charged up when you’re constantly on-the-go or stuck in the air can be a challenge. But there are a few things you can do to extend battery life and save power.
Battery cases
Mophie Juice Pack for iPhone
When Google launched Google Play (originally called Google Music) last year, a lot of hype surrounded the service, since it represented the search giant's entry into the world of music streaming. But now the hype has largely died down, and many Google users remain confused about what the service allows them to do, and how Google’s music locker works. We have the info you need to start uploading and streaming your music with Google Play as efficiently as possible.
Installing Google PlayGoogle Play’s primary purpose is to let you upload your existing music (up to 20,000 songs as of this writing; sorry, music aficionados) to Google’s servers so that you can store them, stream them, and redownload them to any computer connected to the Web.
Writing requires focus: You need to sit down with your thoughts and just plow through your work. Regrettably, a modern computer isn't that great for focusing on something as mundane as text. A word processor surrounds your text with so many flashy buttons and toolbars that you might sometimes feel as if the words you're trying to write belong in the backseat. Then there's the matter of chat pop-ups, email dings, Twitter chirps, and the entire panoply of modern distractions that conspire to steal your focus.
It seemed like a simple, relatively safe task: I needed to undo the RAID array on my PC.
As its primary boot drive, my production system used a RAID 0 array consisting of a pair of Corsair Force GT 240GB drives paired to create a single 480GB volume. All of the valuable data lived on a single 2TB, 7200RPM Western Digital RE drive. The system is based on a Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 motherboard running a Core i7 3930K CPU. Intel's RapidStore storage software manages the array in Windows.
Sick of your current music-management software? Invest in a Spotify membership and declare independence from iTunes, Google Music, or any other music app you're fed up with. iTunes in particular is becoming pretty bloated, especially for Windows users--but I’ve barely seen it over the past few months thanks to Spotify and the new ability to upgrade my iOS software on my iPhone itself.
Groupon is known for its popular daily local business coupon deals. What many online retailers don't know is that the Chicago-based company goes beyond these types of local deals and provides ecommerce business owners with tools and services to cash in on the Groupon craze.
For years, you've heard that shooting in RAW is better than shooting JPEGs. Your camera's RAW mode packs significantly more visual information, so it offers the potential to capture better photos. That comes at a cost, however, since you need to do extra work to coax better photos out of your camera. To help you do that, most photo editors come with some sort of mini photo editor that you can use to tweak RAW images. Photoshop Elements calls it Camera Raw; Corel PaintShop Pro calls it Camera RAW Lab. If you've always ignored such programs, give them a second look.
Why Use a RAW Editor?In a word, convenience.
This is the same reason that I recommend programs such as Lightroom or AfterShot Pro--they dispense with all the graphical-design baggage packed into a full-featured image editor like Adobe Photoshop, and include only the stuff that's important to photographers editing photos. In the same way, a RAW editor is a photo editor stripped to the bone, sporting just the features you need to correct color and exposure. A lot of the time, you could make a few tweaks in the RAW editor and be done, never needing to mess with the bigger Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or PaintShop Pro.
Every day here at GeekTech, we feature all sorts of inventive projects--everything from cardboard robots to music made by scanning barcodes (and that's just in the last week!). The imagination and ingenuity of the people who make these sorts of creations is incredible... but it's also enough to make you feel a little jealous.
But just because you don't know everything about coding or engineering shouldn't stop you making something cool, because doing your own hacks is a great way to teach yourself a few new skills.
Building a desktop computer that's amazing is easy, if a little time-consuming. But even after you’ve stuffed your new system with all the latest hardware, hooked up your cabling, and cleaned off your desk for a giant monitor, you’re not quite done.
Your new desktop masterpiece is going to do you little good if you can use it for only a few hours each day. And you have the failure of your own biology to thank for that: Humans were made to be hunters, gatherers, and thinkers, not desk jockeys.
Like many users, I have several e-mail accounts. In fact, I have three with Gmail alone.
A couple days ago, I noticed that one of the accounts hadn't received any new mail for about 24 hours. That seemed very strange, as the flow of messages to that address had always been strong and steady.
I figured it was probably a temporary glitch at Google's end (there was a Gmail outage just a couple months ago), so I waited another day to see if it would clear up on its own.
Needless to say, it didn't. I checked Google's App Status Dashboard for any known issues, but it was green across the board. I also Googled "Gmail outage" (and narrowed the search to the last 24 hours) and came up empty. Clearly, the problem was at my end.
But what was the problem? My two other Gmail accounts were chugging along just fine. But this one inbox sat empty, as though someone had simply turned off the mail spigot.
As it turned out, the flow wasn't turned off, but rather redirected. See, when I checked Gmail's Spam filter, I discovered that junk mail was still arriving. It stood to reason that "good" mail was still arriving as well, just not landing in my inbox.
Filters!
A quick visit to Gmail's Settings, Filters proved my theory: a filter was rerouting all new mail to Gmail's All Mail "folder" (sometimes known as the Archive), effectively bypassing the Inbox.
In fact, there were two identical filters doing this. How did they get there? I have no idea. I certainly didn't create them. But there they were. I quickly deleted both, and presto: problem solved. (I did have to visit All Mail, select my "missing" messages, and move them to my Inbox so I could process them normally.)
If you want to learn more about problems like this and potential resolutions, Google has a help page devoted to incoming Gmail messages that don't arrive.
In the meantime, if you ever encounter a similar inbox interruption, check Gmail's filters. You might just find the mysterious culprit.
If your laptop keys are sticky, or some of them are missing, or the keyboard isn't working at all, you can usually replace the entire keyboard yourself for between $20 and $60. The operation isn't as hard as you might think, and performing it has the advantage that you don't have to remove and replace each key individually. Though every laptop is different, removing your laptop's keyboard usually involves simply unsnapping a cover, removing a few screws, and disconnecting a cable.
If you're up to the challenge, you can tackle this project in the comfort of your own home. Take care, though: A working laptop is a terrible thing to waste, and PCWorld accepts no responsibility for any damage to your machine that might occur if you try to take it apart. Furthermore, if duplicating our process requires actually opening your entire laptop--if, say, you have to remove anything more than a handful of screws--you should call a professional. And finally, before you do anything else, check to see whether the laptop is still under warranty. If it is, you may be able to get it replaced for free.
Like Craigslist? Me, too. I've scored many a great deal on the classified-ad site.
Just one problem: For every single listing that says it has an accompanying "pic," you have to click through to actually see that picture. To me that's the very definition of "hassle."
In the past I've written about browser add-ons for previewing Craiglist images, but recently I discovered something interesting: Craigslist now has its own tool for previewing images.
I'm honestly not sure when it debuted. Could have been last week, could have been six months ago. All I know is, I didn't notice it until now. Maybe you didn't, either.
Your Android phone is a powerful computer. But like any other computer, it won't run at its best without proper care and maintenance. If you've ever owned an Android phone, you probably noticed that it became slower after a few months of use than it was when you first brought it home from the store. There are several reasons for this phenomenon, and in this article I'll explain how to get your Android smartphone back into tip-top shape. You can accomplish a lot of what I'll be recommending here by performing a simple factory reset; but if you take that approach, you'll lose your data and have to reconfigure your phone. So instead, grab your Android phone and follow these steps to get it running like new again.
Diablo III PC gaming is big again. According to market research firm NPD, the release of Diablo III drove PC game sales up 230 percent in May. That was in a month where overall sales of games dropped by 28 percent. The Gods and Kings expansion to Sid Meier’s Civilization V did well in its recent release, too. Even smaller companies, such as Ironclad Games, with its Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, are shipping PC games that garner great reviews and attract new players.
Two months ago I advised all fans of Windows Media Center to avoid upgrading to Windows 8, for the simple reason that Microsoft would not be bundling the beloved software with the new OS -- and instead charging extra for it after the fact.
Judging by the number of comments and recommendations that post received, readers shared my outrage.
I'm happy to report that Microsoft has apparently shifted gears, giving the people what they want (kind of) and dialing back the greed.
Coastie65 is nowhere near Malaysia, but friends are getting email claiming that he's stranded in Kuala Lumpur. He asked the Web Browsing and Email forum for help.
This happens far too often. Someone gained access to your email password and sent spam in hopes of tricking friends and family.
To stop this plague, try to log on and change your password. And make that new password a strong password.
Rohkai asked the Answer Line forum if a PC's BIOS, like an operating system or an antivirus, should be kept up to date.
Building a desktop computer that's amazing is easy, if a little time-consuming. But even after you’ve stuffed your new system with all the latest hardware, hooked up your cabling, and cleaned off your desk for a giant monitor, you’re not quite done.
Your new desktop masterpiece is going to do you little good if you can use it for only a few hours each day. And you have the failure of your own biology to thank for that: Humans were made to be hunters, gatherers, and thinkers, not desk jockeys.
Spend too much time in front of your screen, and you’re going to wreck your eyes -- and no, we’re not just channeling our worried mothers. Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) is a real condition with real symptoms that you’ve likely already noticed at some point in your tech-centric life: bloodshot peepers staring at you in the mirror after a long day of gaming; the tired, dry feelings that you attempt to relieve by rubbing your eyes; or perhaps a bit of burning, itching, or increased sensitivity to light.
There are plenty of ways to keep your eyes from rioting every time you fire up your favorite Web browser. Most of them are super-easy to set up and require more time than money, although fancier (and pricier) solutions can give you a beautiful desktop setup and happier eyeballs all at once. In any case, your eyes will forever thank you for your investment.
Basic LightingWhile you might think that you’re looking at a crisper, more pleasing picture in a dim or otherwise darker environment, you’re just forcing your eyes to work that much harder to process extreme differences in contrast. And a similar situation happens when you set up your screen in a location that creates a ton of glare: not only does your picture look horrible, but all that light mucks up the quality of your picture and forces your eyes to do a lot more refocusing to achieve better clarity.
So if you’re sitting at a computer under fluorescent lights and you aren’t at work, just stop: This kind of overhead lighting is one of the harshest environments for your eyes to deal with.
The best setup? Plain ol’ natural light, best deployed in the form of a window angled perpendicular to your computer screen. You might be tempted to slap your monitor or laptop in front of a huge window to enjoy some scenery while you work, but the brightness of your exterior view could stress your eyes out. You could always use blinds or curtains to limit the amount of light coming in when it’s especially bothersome, but that kind of defeats the point of the view, doesn’t it?
When placing your screen perpendicular to your natural light source, you want to make sure that you’re balancing ambience with glare reduction: Angle your display so that extra light isn’t bouncing off your screen. And take some time to play around with your PC setup; a few minutes now will save you countless hours of agony later. Again, blinds or curtains can be an eye-saving device if the sun is really giving you trouble during certain hours of the day.
You’ll want to supplement this natural light (or lack thereof, as the day turns to evening) with artificial lighting. And overhead lighting—even incandescent—still isn’t the best option due to its potential for glare. But you shouldn’t go to the other extreme, either. Resist the urge to purchase the classic “spotlight” desk lamp and slap its narrow cone of light somewhere on your desktop. Remember, you’re also trying to avoid sharp differences in contrast.
You don’t need that much light around a monitor or laptop screen, and what you pick needs only to supply indirect light in a general area around your desk and display. A small lamp on a desk that creates a pleasant diffusion of light behind your display and prevents glare is great; a full-sized floor lamp can also work wonders, provided it physically fits into your particular desk setup. As for bulbs, consider those of the natural light (and low wattage) variety: If you need more brightness, switch to higher wattages or add another light source.
Advanced LightingIf you’re looking for a setup that looks a little bit cooler than a tiny lamp on your desk—or if your particular desktop setup has no room for any bulkier lighting equipment -- you might want to consider trying out some bias lighting.
You’ve probably seen the concept before, likely on a Philips HDTV with ambient lighting (or as Philips brands it, “Ambilight”). The gist is simple: LED lights attached to the rear of your monitor blast the background with colored light (desktop systems only—unless you really want to silly up your laptop), helping to reduce glare in dimly lit environments, to make your picture appear sharper, and to transform your boring ol’ monitor into a glowing beacon of cool.
As Sound and Vision’s Timothy Seppala describes the benefits of bias lighting, in an interview with Ars Technica, “It works because it provides enough ambient light in the viewing area that your pupils don't have to dilate as far. This makes for less eyestrain when a flashbang gets thrown your way or a bolt of lightning streams across the screen.” Tim actually wrote a great guide to getting the most out of your HDTV for PCWorld that includes some tips on lighting your home theater for optimal movie watching, and you should definitely check it out if you're a serious PC enthusiast seeking to optimize your display.
When it comes to PC building, though, the problem with bias lighting is that few devices and software combinations exist that will allow you to achieve the perfect setup: ambient lighting that changes to match the colors appearing on your screen. We’ve had a lot of luck with Mad Catz’s Cyborg Gaming Lights. They’re a bit pricey at $100, but you get two little lighting modules that contain three LEDs (red, green, and blue) for creating any color you’re looking at.
You just need to plug the lights into two of your system’s free USB ports (after plugging the lights’ power adapter into the wall), stash them behind your monitor, angle the lights up toward the wall, and fire up a software utility. You can then pick the color that you want to live behind your screen or set your lights to slowly rotate through a series of colors. You can also have the lights dynamically switch their appearance based on whatever happens to be on your screen—be it a game, a movie, or a picture.
If you’re looking for a more inexpensive way to build bias lighting into your desktop monitor, you can always pick up Antec’s Halo 6 LED Bias Lighting Kit. For a mere $13, you can slap a strip of six white LEDs to the rear of your display. These lights—or a similar style that you can pick up at your local IKEA (Ledberg or Dioder)—aren’t going to modulate to fit whatever’s on your screen. But at least you’ll be able to reap the benefits of bias lighting without breaking your bank account.
A bias lighting strip that you would attach to the rear of your display.
Other tricks you can employ to reduce the harmful effects of extended computer use on your eyeballs include installing little apps to remind yourself to take a much-needed eye break. Chrome users can grab the extension Gimme a Break! and Firefox fans can hit up the simple Auto Timer extension to schedule some rest time for tired eyeballs. For every 20 minutes you spend staring at a screen, you need only to focus your eyes on something else for 20 seconds -- that’s not so hard, is it?
The software fun doesn’t end there. Odds are good that you’re running your display at fairly high brightness and contrast levels, as monitors are sometimes shipped with factory-default settings that use inordinate amounts of brightness to convince you that the picture is awesome. Not good. You’ll want to fire up the Lagom LCD monitor test pages and use their instructions (or our helpful guide) to set your monitor’s settings to their correct levels. Why blast your eyes with excessively bright light if you don’t have to?
Your monitor’s color temperature can also adversely affect your eyes after prolonged periods of staring. An app like F.Lux (click on the Download link at the top of the site) will automatically adjust your monitor’s temperature to match the time: Cooler lighting during the day, mimicking the temperature of common daylight, and warmer lighting in the evening, when “you probably shouldn't be looking at the sun,” says F.Lux.
Finally, you can also opt for a pair of geektastic computer glasses to help you handle your display temperature situation and reduce screen glare—we’re speaking specifically of Gunnar Optiks’ line of Advanced Computer Eyeware (the company's term, not ours).
Gunnar Optiks claims that its glasses also help increase the moisture within your eyes—a function commonly performed by blinking, which one tends to do much less when focusing on a computer screen. We can’t say whether Gunnar’s glasses turn eyeballs into swimming pools, but we did tend to notice less eye fatigue (and didn’t seem to have the same headaches as before) after a few marathon computing sessions when equipped with its glasses. Their yellow tint does take some getting used to, however!
I've already discussed how you can learn to code for free using languages such as Ruby and JavaScript, but this time we'll explore an even more basic language that can help to make your websites pop. Cascading Style Sheets is like HTML's cooler, more artistic sibling: While HTML handles the structure and content of your website, CSS allows you to add cutting-edge design to it. This guide tells you everything you need to know to get started making better-looking websites fast.
Many people just getting to know CSS think of it as a fancy way of handling HTML properties such as text formatting and background images--and for small-scale examples on simple pages, that's largely true. You can manipulate many of the properties that CSS affects through pure HTML instead (though not as well), and if you're just looking to change the font size on your page, CSS is actually more difficult to use than HTML.
What makes CSS worthwhile is the number of design options it opens up for you that are difficult--or impossible--to accomplish with HTML alone. HTML gives you just a handful of text properties to manipulate; CSS gives you properties such as color, direction, letter-spacing, line-height, text-align, text-decoration, text-indent, text-shadow, text-transform, vertical-align, white-space, and word-spacing. And I haven't even gotten to the nontext options.
DocHub is an excellent reference tool for learning new CSS commands.
For a full list of CSS properties, you can check out a handy glossary on Dochub, but for now let's look at just two of the more interesting ones. Since we couldn't actually write HTML and CSS code in a Web page without causing trouble for the PCWorld CMS, we've taken the liberty of providing images of some example code and what it looks like on a live page.
For starters, CSS allows you to add and modify a border for any element on a page. The following code produces a solid, 5-pixel-wide red border around the whole paragraph.
CSS experts will note that there is a much shorter way to write this code (they'll also frown on writing the code inline at all), but it provides a good example of CSS formatting.
You write inline CSS in the tag itself, using the style attribute. Basically you write your HTML tags as usual, and then add CSS in the format "css-property: property-value;" right inside. Any arbitrary CSS can go inside the style attribute. For instance, if we wanted to add a drop shadow to that paragraph in addition to the border, we'd change the code to the following line.
You may have noticed that the box-shadow attribute we added has more than one value. That's because the box-shadow attribute allows for shorthand formatting, another timesaving feature of CSS. In shorthand formatting, instead of specifying each related value of a property individually, you can specify the values in a standardized order to save time and characters. In the example above, we specify the height of the drop shadow, its width, and its color.
The border attribute has a similar shorthand, and we could save a lot of space by writing our code in the following format, which would produce the same results.
These cool visual tricks are really just the window dressing of CSS. The language's true strength comes from its ability to quickly and effectively target style effects to any part of your website thanks to powerful selectors. Learning CSS also allows you to standardize your design across multiple pages on your site using a single, easily modifiable external style sheet. Both of these features take months or years to fully master, but I can quickly demonstrate how and why you'd use CSS with a few simple examples.
Next Page: External Styling and Selectors