June 6, 2011, 6:17 am
By J.D. BIERSDORFER
Q.
Ever since I upgraded to Internet Explorer 9, I have been having trouble printing Web pages, which come out looking different than what’s on screen. What’s wrong?
A.
To speed up its handling of Web pages, Internet Explorer 9 shifts the workload from the computer’s main processor to the graphics processor. If your computer’s video card does not support this type of hardware acceleration, your Web pages may print incorrectly.
Update your printer’s driver software to make sure outdated software is not the culprit. You can download the latest files for your printer model from the Support area of the manufacturer’s Web site. Read more…
June 6, 2011, 6:12 am
By PAUL BOUTIN
Google’s Music: Beta cloud-based music service.On Monday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is expected to announce a new product that allows iPhone owners to stream music from their personal iTunes collections to their phones.
Rumormongers say the music will be stored “in the cloud” — tech jargon for “on Apple’s servers” – although the CultOfMac blog claims inside knowledge that Jobs will instead sell customers a personal storage drive that holds the music and does the streaming from home.
Whatever Apple announces, it follows recent offerings from Google and Amazon that offer cloud-based personal music streaming for Android phone users. Both work similarly: You sign up, then download an application to your Mac or PC that uploads your music collection to Google or Amazon’s servers, and keeps it in sync. To play your music on your phone, you install an Android app that’s a music player which connects to your cloud-stored collection to stream it to your phone.
Google Music is the more impressive of the two: Read more…
June 5, 2011, 7:40 am
By SAM GROBART
The Samsung Series 5 Chromebook (starting at $429), on sale June 15.Update Sunday, June 5 7:52 p.m.: Clarified that, while Chromebooks do have a hard drive, that drive is used by the OS, not for a user’s data storage. Also changed wording to indicate that data is not in Google’s possession, necessarily, but whichever cloud-based service a user is using.
So Google’s made a new laptop?
Not exactly. Samsung and Acer have made new laptops called Chromebooks that run on Google’s Chrome OS. They’ll be available starting June 15 at Amazon.com and Best Buy.
Chrome OS? So, not Windows or Mac.
Not Windows or Mac. Chrome OS is a new operating system.
How does Chrome OS work? Is it majorly different from the other major operating systems?
Chrome OS is actually pretty different. It is basically a browser — and nothing more than a browser. Everything happens in the browser. There’s no “desktop,” and there’s no hard drive for you to use.
This makes no sense to me.
It is pretty radical. Try thinking of it this way: If you use the Web not just for browsing sites but also for your e-mail, and your word processor (think Google Docs), and your photos, and your banking and a whole host of other things, then do you really need all the extra stuff that an OS like Windows and Mac has?
O.K. I mean, I’m sort of with you here, but walk me through this. What happens when I turn on a Chromebook? And what happens after that?
When you turn on a Chromebook, it very quickly (more so than traditional-OS-based PCs) brings you to a login screen. From there, you can enter your username and password for your Google account (if you have Gmail, it is the same account). If you do not have a Google account, you can log in as a guest.
Once you do that, you’ll see a browser. The browser is Google’s own Chrome browser, which Windows and Mac users have been able to use for about two and a half years. There are no other programs or applications to use. The browser is it. Read more…
June 5, 2011, 6:14 am
By ROY FURCHGOTT
Jim ReedA thunderstorm at sunset.Not many of us will risk our lives racing into the path of a tornado to photograph the funnel, like cameraman Jim Reed, but many of us will risk our cameras in the rain trying to get a shot of a kids’ soccer game or an impressive cloud formation.
Mr. Reed offered some tips to help snap shooters operate in inclement weather. While some of these tips are for shooting video, they apply to still photography as well.
1) Shoot Quickly. When photographing tornadoes, Mr. Reed doesn’t have the luxury of standing in one place long. “My average shoot time is 90 seconds once my feet are out of that vehicle,” he said. Even in driving rain, that means the camera doesn’t get too wet. But to get the quick shots, he sets everything on the camera except focus before stepping into the damp. When not actively shooting, “I just tuck my camera under my rain jacket.”
2) Towel Off. “One of my favorite tools is a lot of towels,” he said. He buys packs of them at discount stores. “I have them in every pocket of my vehicle so I can dry my gear if it gets wet” he said. “Just be sure to wash them first because of lint.” Or you can go with a lint-free microfiber chamois, which can be rung out and used over and over. Read more…
June 3, 2011, 4:08 pm
By SONIA ZJAWINSKI
Instaprint creates printed photos from Instagram images tied to a specific location.You can always tell the good parties from the bad ones based on the number of photos taken.
These days, though, the only way to look back at last night’s good time is to sit yourself in front of a computer and flip through the digital snapshots your friends uploaded on social networks and photo sharing sites like Flickr.
What happened to the good old days, when you’d stumble out of your room to find a stack of embarrassing Polaroids on your coffee table?
Instaprint may be able to give you the best of both worlds. A modern-day photo booth, which can be rented for events, teams up with the popular iPhone app Instagram to print out party favors. Each Instaprint device, roughly the size of a first-gen Mac Mini, can be set with a location name or specific hashtag. Using a Web connection, the box scans for Instagrams tagged with that location or hashtag, and then automatically prints them (photo comments included). Read more…
June 3, 2011, 3:56 pm
By JOHN BIGGS
G-Form’s iPad Extreme Sleeve, $70, can survive a 10-foot drop.I’ve been churning through tablet — namely iPad — cases for the last few weeks in a mad search to find one that fits my mood and style. Along the way, I believe I have come up with a taxonomy of cases for various users. What follows is a short description of each type and an assessment of the ideal purchaser.
Belkin’s Merge Sleeve, $25, is Amish in its simplicity.The Sleeve – The sleeve, characterized by a simple pouch made of synthetic material, is the least technically impressive case, but it works well with smaller tablets. For example, the Blackberry Playbook comes with a free sleeve in the box. It is made of rubbery neoprene and offers all-encompassing (if slightly clunky) protection.
See Also: Griffin Jumper Neoprene ($34) or Belkin Merge Sleeve (shown, $25)
Best For: People who still keep their credit cards in plastic sleeves.
Targus’s Versavu, $60, rotates into various positions.The Transformer – These cases have the added benefit of allowing you to position them at various angles for better viewing or typing. For example, the Targus Versavu ($60) allows you to stand up your iPad 2 in order to watch a movie and a special 360-degree hinge lets you turn the screen in a full circle.
See Also: The iChair ($49)
Best For: Viewers of feature films on long flights; parents. Read more…
June 3, 2011, 6:19 am
By J.D. BIERSDORFER
Need to find a certain open window on your desktop — but you cannot fully see it in the clutter of other open windows on the screen? Both Windows 7 and Mac OS X include features that help you focus quickly on the one window you need to find.
In Windows 7, just click on part of the title bar at the top of the one window you want to see and give it a “shake” by holding down the mouse button and dragging the cursor back and forth quickly. This action minimizes all other open windows on the screen and sends them to the Taskbar so you can concentrate on the selected window. Read more…
June 2, 2011, 5:46 pm
By BOB TEDESCHI
CarBuzz is a free auto-enthusiast magazine for iOS and Android users.Car buyers can get real-time advice from a few good mobile apps, as today’s App Smart column points out.
But if you just love cars, CarBuzz is much more your speed.
CarBuzz, which is free on Android and Apple, is an auto magazine that’s exclusively for mobile devices. It’s updated daily with automotive short articles and glossy photos of good quality.
YouTube videos appear when appropriate, as with a Porsche-produced piece on the new 911. And if you’re so moved, you can submit comments on an article or read through those from other readers. Read more…
June 2, 2011, 5:29 pm
By J.D. BIERSDORFER
Q.
Is there any way to make Windows 7 remember which folders I had open before I shut down the computer, so the same ones are waiting for me the next time I start up?
A.
Windows includes settings that let it reopen the same folders that were open before you shut down the computer; the system can also remember the preferred view of open folders. One way to get to these settings is to press the Windows key and the E key on the keyboard to open Windows Explorer. Read more…
June 2, 2011, 5:12 pm
By JOSHUA BRUSTEIN
A new tablet by Toshiba, the Toshiba Thrive, will be available for pre-sale on June 13, and in stores by July 10, the company said Thursday.
Faced with the challenge of making its thin slab of plastic and glass seem different from other thin slabs of plastic and glass, Toshiba is pitching the Thrive as the shortest step down from a laptop.
“There are a couple of ways you can approach this market,” said Jeff Barney, Toshiba’s vice president and general manager. “One is building on familiarity from smartphones. Since we’re laptop people, we’re a little bit different, and we looked at a device that had continuity from laptop computing.”
To do this, Toshiba sacrificed sleekness in exchange for features more common on laptops than tablets. Read more…
June 1, 2011, 7:32 pm
By SAM GROBART
nullA picture taken using Hidden, an app that can locate missing laptops and use a laptop’s webcam to take pictures of the person using it, as is the case with this man arrested in the theft of Joshua Kaufman’s MacBook. Private eyes (clap), they’re watching you (clapclap)…
On March 21, Oakland, Calif., resident Joshua Kaufman’s MacBook was stolen from his home in a burglary.
But because Mr. Kaufman had installed an app called Hidden on his laptop, he was able to pinpoint his MacBook’s location, send himself screenshots of what its new user was doing and even use the MacBook’s built-in webcam to take and send pictures of the computer’s new possessor. Read more…
June 1, 2011, 7:16 pm
By ROY FURCHGOTT
Now that the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer has declared cellphones “possibly carcinogenic,” that is, apt to cause brain cancer, it’s worth reviewing ways to limit your exposure without resorting to a lead fedora.
Let’s start with the easiest first. Your brain won’t be exposed to electromagnetic fields if you don’t hold the phone to your ear. Get a wired (not Bluetooth because of the radio waves) headset, and the problem is solved.
You can do more, though. You can monitor your exposure using an app called Tawkon, available for some Android and Blackberry phones in their respective app stores. You can get the app for the iPhone, but because the iTunes store doesn’t carry it, the app is only available by “jail breaking” your phone, which can void the warranty. Read more…
June 1, 2011, 7:03 pm
By RIVA RICHMOND
Apple issued a security update on Tuesday to address persistent attacks that are taking aim at Mac users with a fake antivirus program.
The update removes known versions of the “scareware” program, which is known as MacDefender. The update also adds detection capabilities to Apple’ s built-in malware monitoring feature to try to stop users from downloading the fake program in the first place. If the updated software sees an attack, it will cause a pop-up warning with a big red stop sign and white exclamation point.
The update is available for only the most recent 10.6 versions of the Mac OS X computer and server operating systems. Users can get the update immediately by clicking on the Apple icon on the top left of their screen and selecting “Software Update.”
Apple said in an advisory that its removal and blocking tools will be updated daily to catch any new versions of the scareware. Read more…
June 1, 2011, 12:50 pm
By J.D. BIERSDORFER
Q.
Why is my camera giving me a message about the memory card being “locked”?
A.
The Secure Digital memory cards used by many digital cameras have a small plastic switch on the side that can be used to “lock” the card and prevent you from accidentally erasing the photos and videos already stored on it. (This is a similar concept to the small plastic tabs that could be punched out of old audiocassettes to prevent the perfect mix tape from getting destroyed.)
Odds are, the switch got nudged into the “lock” position when the card was being inserted into the camera. To unlock the memory card so that you can record new pictures and videos onto it, open the card door on the camera and eject the card. On the left edge of the SD card, slide the small tab up to the unlocked position. Return the card into the camera and check the camera display to make sure the lock message has gone away. Read more…
May 31, 2011, 6:40 pm
By SAM GROBART
TuneUp’s DeDuper finds duplicate tracks in iTunes and puts them in a separate folder.Those who derive pleasure from meticulously organizing things — in this case, an iTunes music collection — will be pleased to know that TuneUp, a provider of add-ons for Apple’s music-management software, has added “DeDuper” to its suite of wares.
Say you own a copy of “Hot on the Tracks,” the 1976 release by the funk and soul band the Commodores. That would mean that you own “Just to Be Close to You,” a track on that album. But let’s say you also own 1977’s “Commodores Live!,” as well as the Commodores’ 1979 release, “Greatest Hits,” and 1984’s Commodores compilation, “All the Great Love Songs.”
Because of this, you own four copies of “Just to Be Close to You,” as it appears on all four albums. This can cause problems. For starters, it can offend some people’s sense of order and efficiency to have more than one of the same thing. Furthermore, the song may show up more times than desired in mixes, since there are four of them in your inventory. Read more…
