I'm loathe the side against robots, given their proven professional wrestling superiority. But this cat... this cat's got strategy. Step one: ignore. Step two: avoid. Step three:
THWAP. Hellloooooo, kitty. [DVice via BotJunkie]
Last Wednesday I married the love of my life. This is the short story of some of the things I did before I met her, a guide on flirting using Twitter, Facebook, texting, and sexting face-to-face, in the real world.
Since I came to New York, my romantic life has been a rollercoaster. A very fast one, with 9G turns. If there is a city in the world to flirt and date anywhere and anytime, it's NYC. You don't need the web to meet people. Every cafe, every bar, every party seems like a huge playground for singles to engage in conversations and start love affairs. However, the web can help while you are meeting people and after, all in real time, and face to face.
If you have enough confidence and you are fearless—remember: you have nothing to lose, since you will always have the "no"—any city in the world should be open for the same games. Here are some tips to use technology while meeting people in the real world.
Technology hasn't changed real world flirting. Much. At the end of the day, it all depends on you, how charming you can be, and how much the other person likes you (tip: not everyone has to like you). However, web-based social services like Facebook and Twitter open a door that didn't exist before. They are an opportunity to take the flirting to a new level when you first meet someone in the flesh, all without getting too personal. For some reason, exchanging Twitter or Facebook usernames doesn't seem to be perceived as threatening or serious as exchanging phone numbers or email addresses. After all, Twitter is open and Facebook's friend requests can be denied—or accepted and then canceled.
The web-based flirting can happen right at the moment you meet the other person or later. I remember my first party in the city, hosted by Gawker.tv's Richard Blakeley, a couple of weeks after my arrival. A girl with the most hypnotic cleavage I've ever seen approached me and started to talk. Within a few minutes things started to get fun. A few minutes later, we moved into more suggestive terrain. While this was happening, I saw her Blackberry in her hand. She had her Facebook page open. Without her noticing, I looked her name up in my iPhone's Facebook app as we were talking, and sent her a friend request on the spot. We kept talking and minutes later, when she checked her Facebook again, she found the request, smiled maliciously, and clicked yes saying "I guess we are now friends."
That night was fun.
But it's not always that easy. The key in that example is that it happened naturally, and the move matched the rhythm of the conversation. Taking the step to add someone to Facebook in real time is a risky one, so you have to measure yourself and be ready to gamble. That is the basic rule: Never force things, and learn to read the signs that the other person is giving you. If the conversation is playful, wait until you think is appropriate to incorporate something like Facebook into it.
Asking for a Twitter name during the conversation is a lot easier than making that Facebook move. After all, Twitter is open to everyone, and direct messaging is a perfect way to flirt—at least for me: I find its 140-character limitation challenging and exciting, and I love when people can be concise and clever in just one single phrase.
Once again, the medium is not important except as a way to reach your counterpart, allowing you to snip casually, responding to the other person's comments. Doing it publicly is a very fine art, which can easily end in disaster, especially if the other person already has a lover. If you have enough wit and you are sensitive to the other person's needs and circumstances, chances are that he or she will be interested in you, and something may happen down the line, as the play factor increases in your exchanges. Sometimes, this game also happens in real time.
One night I met a very pretty—and delightfully nerdy—girl at Delmano, one of my favorite bars here in Williamsburg. She knew Gizmodo and recognized me, so the conversation quickly got into technology. She confessed that she followed me on Twitter, so I asked what her nickname was to add her later. Minutes later, in fact: When she excused herself to the bathroom I sent her the first direct message. After that, we spent the whole night having two conversations, one actually speaking out loud, and the other taunting each with secret tweets. That night was fun too.
For sure, that's also an exception, but it's an example on how Twitter can be a nice way to flirt in real time, as long as you keep it natural and in context, just like you would in a real world conversation.
Once you have established a Twitter or Facebook beachhead it's time to move it to the next level. You may decide to keep it in the online world, flirting until you feel comfortable to ask for a date. The alternative is to be a little bit more daring, and use Twitter or Facebook to interact with someone you met before, like you may be doing now using text messages. The difference is that Twitter and Facebook are a lot more useful than text messages, because they give you context. For example, you can learn what the other person is doing without asking for it or without the other person explicitly telling you about it.
I used to do that when I was going through my worse digital exhibitionist phase. A couple of times I tweeted or changed my Facebook status saying where I was, and the girl I was flirting with—the nerdy pretty one—sent me messages saying that she was around, wondering if we could hook up for a drink in the most casual way. Likewise, I did the same thing with other people. Of course, this doesn't always work. You or the other person may have other plans in mind. Again, the key here is not to force things, and be as playful and natural as you can.
If you pass the initial filters, and your flirting turns into something a bit more serious, you may get an instant messaging nickname or a telephone number. Instant messaging is not very useful for real time flirting situations. Unlike Twitter or texting which allow you to be cute and playful in a parallel line to the actual conversation, instant messaging runs at a faster pace and requires more attention.
It's only good in two situations. One may be when you are instant messaging with someone else (cue in lots of trips to the bathroom, stress, and a lot of guilt). Two—which is the only one I've practiced—having a sexual conversations in public, in a crowded place in which you can talk into the ear of your lover. This may also happen with Twitter or text messages, but instant messaging—using your favorite program for your smartphone—is my favorite way to do it. But then again, I am really fast typist.
The time it happened it was by chance. She and I started to talk dirty, casually while having dinner in a crowded restaurant, the typical romantic place illuminated only by candlelight and which shall remain nameless because I want to go there again. As our conversation started to get naughtier, we noticed that some people were listening to us, but instead of shutting up, I took out my iPhone and sent her an even racier message using BeejiveIM. Her iPhone vibrated thanks to Beejive's push, she took it out, smiled, and replied back. We kept on talking about other things, with increasing difficulty as the IM conversation got completely explicit and we had a harder time concentrating on actually making sense in our audible conversation. At one point I asked her for something which made her open her eyes wide, giving me that "are you out of your fucking mind?" look of pure disbelief. I grinned and sent her another message. Surprised, she stood up, turned around, and left.
The next time my iPhone buzzed—about a minute later—it didn't have any text. I clicked on the incoming file and a photo of her bare breasts appeared. A few seconds later, another one of her black lace knickers downloaded completely, as she was returning to the table from the bathroom. It ended being another fun night.
That, sexting, could be considered the top level of all these games, but it's not usual to find someone who may want to do it outside a relationship, much less in a real time, face-to-face situations. When it happens, like it did as part of a larger context and conversation, it can be really fun,
Of course, things don't always happen in this way. The above is not the norm, but it's not the exception. The fact is that, if the opportunity arises, Twitter, Facebook, IM, or texting could be used as part of the flirting and sexual game not only in the privacy of your home, looking at your computer screen, but anywhere in the "real" world. And I have to say that it's a lot more fun that way.
The irony of all this is that, even while I met my amazing wife through the internet, we never used Facebook or Twitter to flirt. We exchanged a couple of emails, she invited me out for coffee, and the most technology-related thing I did after that was to send her a text message, written as I was running to take the subway:
"It was lovely to meet you. I'm sorry I had to run out so earlier, but I really enjoyed talking to you. Would you like to have a proper date next week?"
She asked me to marry her two months later. And we will live happily ever after.
Apologies to all the other brilliant Valentine's e-greetings at someecards, but this is the only one you should need to truly prove your love. [someecards]
We knew it would come and we've seen demos, but at this year's TED conference Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson confirmed that the publication would hit the iPad this summer. Unfortunately there aren't details regarding digital subscription costs yet.[Wired]
I'm more excited about Final Fantasy 1 + 2 coming to the iPhone than just about any upcoming iPhone game. It's Final Fantasy! For iPhone!
This is what it looks like in motion. You still have to use the traditional iPhone control scheme of putting your left thumb over 1/6 of the screen, and your right thumb over another 1/6. But still, it's not like this is an action game where you need to see everything on the screen at once. And that's why it'll theoretically transition well to the iPhone, letting you pick up the action whenever you've got a free second, but being able to save/pause when it's your turn at the post office. [Crunchgear]
In today's Remainders: the unfun. Wait! Don't go. The items themselves are fun! They just involve unfun. We have a no fun WiFi school bus; a no fun eBook from the White House, an unspectacular Samsung smartphone reveal, and more.
Boring Bus
I recently took my first trip on a WiFi-enabled airplane. At first I thought, "How cool! I'll never be bored on a flight again!" But I quickly realized that in-flight WiFi, in some perverse way, made me MORE bored. That special in-the-air-with-nothing-to-do time had been invaded by the regular old routine of checking e-mail and reading through my RSS feeds. So it is with a heavy heart that I read this story about a school district in Arizona that plopped a mobile WiFi router on top of a school bus, effectively turning it into a mobile study hall. And the worst part is the kids are just going along with it. Apparently all of the regular back of the bus mischief has subsided and now the kids just sit and do homework. That's no fun! I remember one time when I was on a school bus a weird kid put SIX FRUIT ROLL UPS in his mouth at one time and nearly suffocated himself in the process. If we're entering an age in which WiFi is the replacement for adolescent fruit roll up shenanigans, count me out. [CrunchGear]
Boring eBook
For the first time, this year's Economic Report of the President will be made available as a free eBook. They have versions prepared for Nooks and Kindles and will offer an ePub version for the Sony Reader and other devices that get down with ePub. I applaud the effort, but I imagine that I'd have such a hard time concentrating on this to begin with that it would take approximately one E-Ink page refresh for me to give up completely. [Engadget]
Boring Reveal
Oh Samsung. You tried to keep your new Bada smartphone under wraps until MWC. You were so close. But then you went ahead and put up this gigantic billboard mere days before the event. Sure, the ad doesn't reveal much about the Wave's specs—just that it has a camera and a full touchscreen—but talk about fudging your big unveiling. [Unwired View]
Boring Sergey
TED curator Chris Anderson brought Google's Sergey Brin on stage for an unplanned Q&A about his company's recent cyber-beef with China. Wired made note of Brin's statement that he was remained "optimistic" that Google and China could work something out, and quoted him as saying he thought Google could "really work within the Chinese system." On the whole, it seemed like Sergey might've been backing down from the no-censorship ultimatum his company announced earlier this year. But a quick read through a transcript of the question and answer session reveals that he addressed the ultimatum explicitly—it's still there, just sugarcoated a little bit:
Yes, we've made a statement of intent. That we intend to stop censoring, and you know, if we can do that, within the confines of Chinese policy, we'd love to continue Google.cn and our operations there. And if we cannot, then we'll do as much as we can but we don't want to run a service that's politically censored. I'm not talking about things like porn and gambling and things like that. Political censorship.
So, no, Google's not backing down. Just being diplomatic. [Wired]
It's not hard to find a neoprene laptop sleeve, but few are made from the discarded remnants of an actual wetsuit factory like LooptWorks' cases (starting at $30). Authentic shark bites and pee stains not included. [LooptWorks via Treehugger]
Someone in our virtual bullpen said: "It's a cockpit erection." The truth is harder than that.
The roof of one of the small jets hangars at Dulles International Airport collapsed, pushing the tails of the airplanes down and the cockpits up. Apparently because the structure wasn't able to hold under the massive pressure of the snow accumulated during the storm that took over Washington a few days ago. [Flyer Forums]
Not even Bono can pull off wearing huge glasses to use a HUD through life. But ski goggles? They're practically designed to look ludicrous. These Zeal Recon Transcend Ski Goggles display GPS, speed, altitude and more in real time.
Available this fall for between $350 and $450, Transcend goggles are a partnership between two companies: Zeal Optics and Recon Instruments. The result is a pair of goggles that contain hardware to measure speed, altitude, time, temperature and GPS coordinates—a slew of information that's displayed through a HUD. Charging and data transfer occurs over USB.
Buttons on the side of the goggles will allow you to scan through information on the ski lift, which will be especially useful as Transcend gains additional promised functions, including trail maps, cellphone display integration and video recording.
There's no doubt about it—the Transcend goggles sound a bit too good to be true. But we're childishly refusing to temper expectations while waiting impatiently for fall. If these things actually worked, I'd wear them just, like, on the street. No snowboard required. [Transcend and Zeal Optics via RedFerret via CrunchGear]
A mobile analytics firm named Flurry assembled this chart, plotting the percentage of newly registered iPhone and Android app projects over time. The relationship? Frighteningly inverse.
While stats like this can certainly be misleading, it almost appears as if a small pocket of developers are jumping ship with every tempting Android or Apple-related project that comes up.
The January Apple app development boost, for instance, is attributed to the iPad (despite it being announced in the waning days of the month). While, it would probably be safe to attribute Android's strong December to the Droid and maybe even teases of the Nexus One. Android's July spike gets a bit more tricky, but the European release of the HTC Hero may have something to do with it.
Even though the public wasn't wooed by the iPad, developers certainly were. Of course, some of that love may be fleeting, depending on what Android devices pop up next. Oh, and it should be noted, despite how this graph may look, both Android and iPhone/iPad app development grew in January. [MacRumors]
The NYT published an interesting piece on display technologies, allowing doctors and professors to attack the age old question, are LCDs worse for your eyes than eReaders. The answer? It depends.
As Michael Bove, director of the Consumer Electronics Laboratory at the MIT Media Lab, puts it:
"It depends on the viewing circumstances, including the software and typography on the screen...Right now E Ink is great in sunlight, but in certain situations, a piece of paper can be a better display than E Ink, and in dim light, an LCD display can be better than all of these technologies."
Apparently, the high refresh rates of modern LCDs make it as easy on the eyes as any e-paper/e-ink technology, when ignoring environmental factors like light and ergonomics. Problems seem to arise from eye fatigue, which is more a product of the lighting situation and the user's practice of taking proper breaks (let your eyes rest every 20 minutes).
Also, Stephenie Meyer novels have been known to cause brain damage when read on any screen technology. [NYT]
Fixing a typo is handy, sure, but something tells me that the less morally scrupulous among us will have a field day with Google Buzz's edit button—namely, this comic. [DogHouseDiaries via reddit]
You go out, you like each other, then you blow it by attempting to change your relationship status too soon. Our resident love doctor explains how soon is too soon, and what other freaky behavior might ruin your good thing.
One week is way too soon to add the "in a relationship with" phrase that is simultaneously coveted and feared by Facebook users everywhere. So is one month unless you're already uber-committed in some love story kind of way. But that doesn't mean you have to play it so cool that you look like you're out on the Facebook prowl while spending your nights on date after date (or video chat after video chat).
If you find someone you can't resist, why not remove your "single" status? Or remove the Interested in men/women/men&women listing so that it doesn't appear to others that you're interested and available. And definitely switch out "what you're looking for" away from "random play" or "whatever you can get" to something like "friendship." Just please don't put "networking." (Does anyone else think that's kind of douchey? Or is only me?)
There are plenty of ways to use Facebook to signal that you're done looking—at least for now—while you give the relationship a chance. Just do not change your profile picture to a lovey dovey photo of you two. At least not until you know the other person is on board, too. Otherwise it's like the virtual equivalent of putting a framed photo of you two on your desk, even though you've only been out a few times. (This actually happened to me once, years ago, and I still haven't recovered.)
If you're absolutely itching to become an official Facebook couple, talk to your like/love/lust interest about it first. Thank goodness the "in a relationship with" tool requires the other person to approve you first, but there's nothing to stop an over eager, OK creepy, person from uploading photos or writing elaborate notes about their dates. Heck, I even wound up recently with my profile photo on some dude's calendar of birthdays, even though we have never met or talked! Not cool.
If it's a relationship you hope will have any chance of working out, please tread carefully. Facebook is here to help not hurt, but it does take some pacing—and a little self-control.
Read more of Dr. Debby's love advice here during Gizmodo's Bad Valentine celebration.
Debby Herbenick, PhD is a Research Scientist and Associate Director of The Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University, a sexual health educator at The Kinsey Institute and author of Because It Feels Good: A Woman's Guide to Sexual Pleasure and Satisfaction. She blogs at MySexProfessor.com.
Groom changing relationship status screengrabbed from YouTube, via Mashable
Bad Valentine is our own special take on the beauty—and awkwardness—of geek love.
This is even cooler than it looks: Fav4.org starts your browsing off with your four favorite website's icons already queued up. You can customize from among the 34 current offerings, and it looks as though they'll be adding more soon.
That's right: finally all you AOL/ffffound/MySpace/Linked In junkies will have a one-stop start page of your very own.
Let the write-in campaign for a Gizmodo icon begin! [Fav4 via NYTimes Bits Twitter]
I can't imagine the $30,000 Superplexus puzzle as a real product. All I see is a boy who's trapped some sort of ligneous, sapient life form in a sphere. And he's spinning it, slowly. [HammacherSchlemmer via TheGreenHead via OhGizmo!]
Have you ever woken up one morning, rolled over to an empty bed and wondered what went wrong? Well, maybe you should ask your phone.
Happy Valentine's Day, Gizmodo!
Bad Valentine is our own special take on the beauty—and awkwardness—of geek love.
Without wishing to compare Microsoft's Bing Sky to Google Sky, and its Bing Maps with photos and live video to Street View, they do sound pretty bandwagon-jumping-like, especially with Google Maps today adding some new Labs features.
Microsoft's said to "stay tuned" for release details, but has demoed the live video, which could prove really valuable when going on holiday for example—you can check places out before you bother going. The Streetside Photos feature isn't exactly revolutionary now that every man and his dog has used Street View, but by using people's uploaded Flickr photos (geo-tagged, naturally) they'll be in a higher-res and offer more color and life than Google's own Street View cars can snap.
The new features were shown off at the TED conference, and then later blogged on Bing's site:
"This tech preview mines geo-tagged photos from Flickr, and relates them to our Streetside imagery to show images matched to its original spatial context. Why is this cool? You're now able to see what that club looks like at night (is it really THAT scary?), see if you're really going to get a good sunset at that B&B you're looking to book, or check out the crowds on a Saturday morning at Pike Place Market in Seattle or get a view of the same market from decades prior. As more people share imagery, our challenge is to reunite those photos with where they were taken – again, provide context to the data in the ether."
Bing Sky meanwhile has been created using WolrdWide Telescope from the Microsoft Research division, and will let you:
"be able to walk outside in Streetside mode, look up, and see what's above – way above – right now where you're standing. Constellations come to life as you pan – you can even set the time of day so you can see what you'll see at 9pm – great for exploring with your daughter to get her ready for what she'll see when the sun goes down."
It does seem like unfortunate timing for them, when Google's put its Maps service into the Labs box, adding some new early features like the ability to see high-res aerial pictures of select locations; rotate a map the way you want it to appear, and a 'where in the world' game for quizzing yourself on countries (amongst others).
I still think Microsoft's got a hard game to play if it wants to properly catch up to Google, and while live video is impressive, there's just too many people out there doing Google Maps mash-ups and developing outside of the Microsoft box. [Bing via Search Engine Land via Blogoscoped]
There's only so much a processor can handle at once. That's why we keep our home PC powered on while we're at sleep or at the office. Forget about energy savings—a powerful PC is meant to be utilized!
Some processes, like games, monopolize CPU clock cycles, making it inconvenient to run other processor-intensive utilities in the background. From scheduled FTP downloads to converting digital photos and more, here are the ten best ways to keep your PC busy so it won't miss you when you're gone. Downtime be damned!
Sure, you can record TV shows and movies while you use your PC, but what do you do if you have two or three programs all battling for your attention? If you can't catch your favorites on Hulu or Boxee, or if you don't have a TV tuner than can handle multiple programs, take advantage of repeat broadcasts of many programs; catch the game live, and record your favorite news programs or movies later.
If your favorite movie station insists on having a marathon of your favorite movie, you might as well record the 2AM showing and watch something else in prime time. If you use Windows Media Center, you can use either the program guide or the movies guide to record movies.
Windows Update enables you to decide when to download and install updates for Windows and for Microsoft Office and other programs supported by Windows Update/Microsoft Update. The default setting is in the middle of the night, but if your PC is busy with other tasks then, consider a time like Wednesday morning after you head off to work (Wednesday morning is also a perfect time to catch Microsoft's Patch Tuesday updates). Need a reminder on how to adjust your settings? Here's how to do it with Windows XP and with Windows Vista (and Windows 7).
Although most current anti-virus and anti-malware programs can run while you use your computer for other tasks, you're still better off to check your machine for problems when you're not using it. Depending upon your favorite software, you might be able to schedule scans from within the software, or in some cases, you might need to run Windows Task Schedule/Scheduled Tasks service separately.
To find out if your favorite programs have built-in scheduling, you might need to switch to the program's advanced mode or advanced menus. For example, to schedule scans with Spybot S&D, you must switch to the Advanced mode and open the Settings tag to locate the scheduler. However, you might need to update to the paid versions of some scan programs to have access to scheduling functions.
Depending upon the speed of your anti-virus and anti-malware scanners, you might be able to schedule them on the same day or night. If possible, schedule the scanner's update process to run before the scan program itself.
While malware and spyware can deep-six your computer's performance, so can problems with your hard disk's structure. Use the dynamic duo of chkdsk and defrag to check your hard disks for errors and defragment files to keep your storage in good shape.
Chkdsk can be run from the command prompt, and by using command-prompt switches when you schedule chkdsk to run, you have a great deal of control over how chkdsk works. If you want to repair disk errors on the C: (system) drive, you'll need to schedule chkdsk to run at startup.
You can shut down and restart Windows automatically using Task Scheduler, enabling you to run Chkdsk on the system drive at startup. You should run Chkdsk before you run Defrag on a given drive to assure that files are not being moved to corrupt portions of the disk.
In Windows 7, you can select multiple drives for defragmenting, which realigns small file fragments into larger contiguous blocks. This enables faster file reads and writes, especially on drives with frequent changes, such as the drive you use for temporary or swap files or drives with frequent modifications to data files.
You can configure most commercial backup programs as well as Windows's own backup programs to run on a schedule. To make scheduled backups work properly, keep the following in mind:
• Use an external hard disk or network location that's big enough for the backup (you won't be around to flip DVDs or removable media in and out of a backup drive). Use the default compression setting for the best combination of backup performance and backup size.
• Use the backup scheduler included in the backup software.
• Make sure your backup location is ready to receive the backup. With an external hard disk, make sure it's turned on and connected to your PC. With a network backup, make sure the remote drive or server is connected to the network – preferably, to a wired rather than a wireless connection.
• If you have time, verify the backup.
• For best performance, use gigabit Ethernet for network backups and eSATA or USB 3.0 for local drive backups.
To learn more about using Windows 7 backup, see our Windows 7 feature focus article.
If you're a serious digital photographer, you already know that shooting in RAW mode provides much more control over exposure, white balance, and other factors than shooting in JPEG. However, when it comes to sharing or printing your photos, JPEG rules. Cut out the tedium of converting your photos manually by using automation features in your photo editing software.
With Photoshop Elements and Adobe Camera RAW, you can use Process Multiple Files to convert RAW files into virtually any other format supported by Photoshop Elements, apply quick fixes, resize images, rename files, and add labels.
With Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Adobe Camera RAW, you can use the Image Processor to automate the conversion process and run actions. If you still use Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Camera RAW, you can also use Image Processor.
Depending upon what type of video you're encoding or transcoding, there are many choices, all of which take time better spent when you're away from your PC. Here are some of our tutorials and product guides:
How To: Download, Save and Convert Flash Video to Play on your iPod or DVD Player
Ultimate Guide to Playing and Transcoding Downloaded Videos
The Last DVD and Blu-Ray Ripping Guide You'll Ever Need
The Power User's Guide to Video Encoding with Handbrake
The Top Transcoding Apps for Watching Content on Consoles
Whether you use FTP or Bittorrent to transfer files or play games delivered via Steam, you're pushing a lot of information through your home network to the Internet (and vice-versa). Here's how you can take advantage of away from your PC time to handle heavy bit-pushing.
If you use file transfer protocol (FTP) to shuffle files around, you know there are plenty of freeware versions to choose from. Unfortunately, just about all of those that include a scheduler feature will cost you a few bucks. One that won't cost you anything is WinSCP. Use its scripting feature to schedule file transfers. For a low-cost FTP program that doesn't require scripting to schedule transfers, consider ProSoft FTP Scheduler Standard Edition (about $25, 15 day trial).
Want to schedule Bittorrent transfers? Check out the Scheduler feature built into uTorrent. Scheduler allows you to adjust transfer speeds, go idle, or upload only at the times you select. For a tutorial, see page 7 of our own Paul Lilly's 20 Essential Tricks and Skills Every BitTorrent User Should Know. Be sure to see the comments for tips on using Dropbox and PeerBlock to improve uTorrent performance.
While Steam doesn't provide a way to schedule your downloads, you can pause and restart a game download whenever you want.
There's no need to drag your music collection between home and office. Give your iPod or Zune a rest and use our own Norm Chan's How To: Stream Your Music Library to Any Computer tutorial to bring your music to your office. The most time-consuming step (page 2) is importing your music into Netjukebox, so it's a perfect candidate for running it before you hit the hay or head to the office.
Compiling code and rendering graphics are among the most time-consuming tasks you can perform, so you shouldn't waste precious playtime by watching your computer munch program and video bits.
Start these processes before you clock out for the evening or as you start off to work. To make sure they run as quickly as possible, set your computer's power management for high performance and turn off other tasks that might interfere, such as Windows and application updates and other processes (such as the ones listed in this guide). If you're rendering graphics to an external drive or building a DVD or Blu-Ray disc, make sure your external drive is ready to roll and that you have a suitable blank disc in your drive.
You can "give something back" to the world by devoting unused computer cycles to a cause you support. You can help make scientific discoveries or fight deadly diseases, and there's no shortage of causes looking for your help. For a list of projects, see these Maximum PC stories: Facebook and Intel want You to Donate Your Spare Cycles, Freeware Files: Five Free Distributed Computing Projects for your Idle PC!, and New Distributed Computing Initiative Wants to Create Artificial Life. Need more options? See Wikipedia's list of distributed computing projects and Distributed Computing Info's list of projects.
Whether you're running apps that include built-in schedulers or need to start them yourself, you're going to want a way to log into your home PC from the office and keep an eye on what's going on. You could use commercial services like GotoMyPC, but if you're looking for a powerful freebie, check out the remote connection apps in our story The Ultimate Free Network Applications, Period. During your coffee breaks or lunch, you can stay in complete control of your PC at home.
Maximum PC brings you the latest in PC news, reviews, and how-tos.
Not only the 10.1-inch HP Compaq Airlife 100 looks like an scaled-down MacBook Pro, but it runs Android and has a touchscreen and a webcam and an SD slot. In other words, an iPad for the Apple haters.
HP Spain—the only country when it would be released for now—says that it will last 12 hours per charge, with a 10-day standby time. It comes with a 16GB SSD, Wi-Fi, and 3G connection, which will be tied to the Telefónica network. [Slashgear]
All it takes is a display of repetitive stupidity to make an animal endearing. See: Dogs chasing laser pointers; cats swatting at bugs through glass; and this here praying mantis, misunderstanding the modern cursor metaphor. Stupid mantis! (I love you.)
A very special pun thanks to Slyd3z
