What happens when you take a mobile gaming hit and redesign it for a completely different platform? Square Enix answers that question thoroughly with The World Ends with You: Solo Remix. Previously a popular and innovative action role playing game (RPG) on the Nintendo DS, Square opted to reach a whole different audience: That of the iPad.

While Square Enix is no newbie to porting games to iOS, the question of quality in a game with adapted controls and visuals remains vital. So let's have a look...

iOS gamers everywhere are familiar with the genre of infinite forward progress apps - Mega Jump, Canabalt, and a host of other run/jump/fly-until-you-die games all hold a certain addictiveness. Even impatient players are willing to grind (read: gain a great deal through repetitive action) until they can afford those expensive upgrades that give you better stats or make powerups appear more often. Unfortunately, most of them feel two-dimensional, even if they're not necessarily (See: Temple Run).

Here's where Verticus comes in. Developed by Stan Lee's Kapow Entertainment and published by Moon Shark, this infinite title features something unique - falling.

Clear Voyager 4g Hotspot

I've been very happy with the T-Mobile 4G Mobile Hotspot [see: Review: T-Mobile 4G Mobile Hotspot] and at $49.99 refurbished ($124 new) and $35/mo for 3GB of data, it's not a bad deal for us road warriors.

Enter upstart telecom provider Clear and the Clear Spot Voyager 4G wifi hotspot. It's definitely a lovely piece of engineering, but how does it compare?

Whether you're security paranoid, want to keep an eye on the nanny, have a summer or winter home you'd like to peek in on occasionally, or just want to be able to see who comes up to your front door while you're away, wireless web cameras have become digital commodities, with live streams of cameras attached to light poles, traffic lights and rooftops commonplace in metropolitan areas.

But getting them to work and work well, with a high quality image, has been a challenge, and it's only the very recent devices that are small enough you can imagine slipping them behind a book on the bookshelf or in an attic window, pointing at your yard.

Enter the slick, self-contained Dropcam HD. At $149 with everything you need to not only set up a live video streaming surveillance system, but be able to watch it from anywhere in the world and share it with your friends or the public at large, it's a slick solution with just a few design hiccups.

I have the smartest house on the block with a wifi-enabled thermostat and garage door opener, along with a complex web of wireless speakers and even multiple 802.11 hotspots that auto-prioritize traffic to ensure things like streaming video always work great.

Heck, my computer bag is jammed full of wires, cables, flash drives and adapters, so it's smart too. And my cellphone? It's an iPhone so I'd say it's pretty darn smart, and with about a zillion bluetooth devices paired, it's also able to connect and hook in to all sorts of different devices.

In fact, it's about time my car gained a bit more of a brain. It's a Toyota Highlander Hybrid, so it has a lot of on-board computer systems, and the nav system has lots of capabilities, but by comparison with my other devices, it really isn't very smart at all.

Until I plugged in an Audiobox Car Connection device. Now the car has all sorts of interesting data reporting capabilities...

I should start with a candid admission: I'm not a huge television watcher. I catch soccer matches on Fox Soccer Channel, and watch old movies on Turner Classic Movies, but other than that, it's a rare series that catches my attention. I do like Game of Thrones and The Newsroom on HBO and The Walking Dead on AMC, but that's about the extent of my viewing.

Enter Slingbox. The company makes a line of devices that you plug in between your television and your video source and it allows remote viewing and - far more impressive - remote access to the device via a virtual remote control. This means that if you have a DVR, for example, the Slingbox device will let you not only set up future recordings but enjoy previously recorded programming quite literally from anywhere in the world.

What makes the series, and particularly the top-of-the-line Slingbox 500 so darn cool, however, isn't that it lets you view your television and DVR programming while you're on the road, but that it effectively means you can turn any screen in your house into an additional television screen. Want to lay in bed and watch a show? The iPad app works great for that, and iPhones work well too, as you'll see.

I'm wondering if you can step me through the process required to configure one of the new Linksys routers, specifically the AC-1750? I'm excited to get 802.11ac and its huge speed improvement, but am leery that it's going to be a bear to set up. Got one? Can you help?

I review the fancy Fellowes 73Ci jam-free paper shredder and am impressed with what I find, especially the SafeSense technology that ensures little fingers can't get injured if they're busy trying to feed paper into the shredder. I also talk briefly about why everyone should have a shredder to protect their financial records and identity by shredding bills and other documents prior to discarding them.

Key features of the 73Ci:

• 100% Jam Proof
• Energy Saving System
• SafeSense Technology
• Capacitive touch screen controls
• Cross-cut technology

Learn more about the Fellowes 73Ci. It retails for $199.00.

I purchased my iPhone 5 just before the New Year on December 29th. I was so excited and still love my new phone, but after using it for a week or so, I knew I was going to need some help getting through my favorite convention, CES, the Consumer Electronic Show.

It is amazing how Las Vegas runs down any mobile phone. Phones simply die much faster out there. I always practice my ABC's, Always Be Charging, but I knew that was going to be next to impossible during CES. CES is a marathon. I'm on the move for the four days, running from meeting to meeting, checking out new products, talking with developers, manufacturers and listening to speeches. There's just no time to plug in and charge.

Congratulations, you just received a shiny new iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle, iPod Touch or iPod Classic as a present from someone, someone who was willing to pony up the big bucks for a gift. Nothing to complain about. Except, of course, if you're not yet part of the iPod world, someone who has already figured out the basics of getting music on and off the device.

If that's you, we've got ya covered. This tutorial will show you how to get music onto your iPod from your computer using iTunes 11, then it'll also show you how to perform the reverse trick: get music off your iPod and onto your computer.

Why both? Sometimes you just want to grab songs off someone else's iPod, or off an old iPod of your own, and perhaps that device is no longer sync'd to your current computer.

The world's most successful FPS (first-person shooter) franchise returns in its yearly conquest of the gaming market. Call of Duty - Black Ops 2, released on PC, Xbox 360, PS3 and even the brand new Wii U follows in its predecessor's footsteps, struggling to continually introduce creative gameplay into the somewhat exhausted Call of Duty formula. Developed by Treyarch and published by Activision, Blops 2 (or, if you prefer, the somewhat less illustrious "BO2") wrestles with some of the same old problems, but succeeds in introducing new features and a new feel.

Single-player fans of Call of Duty, beware! The campaign in Blops 2 breaks a lot of the rules you've gotten used to over the course of the franchise. A new level of focus on a "cinematic experience" is clearly present in every mission, and the downside to that is
that the player is much more frequently, though briefly, robbed of control. You are unable to act while intermittent scripted animations take place showing you holding a conversation with a fellow soldier, barely leaping out of the way of gunfire, etc.

After years of listening to people complain that iTunes was getting long in the proverbial tooth, that it was gaining too much functionality and was becoming increasingly confusing to work with, Apple finally released its rewrite and - somewhat - rethink of the entire iTunes application as iTunes 11.

Initial reaction has been quite positive by people who have spent the time to learn some of the basic functionality of the program, and negative by people who have learned the existing iTunes interface so well that they don't want any change. That's okay, if you're in the latter category, I encourage you to choose "Show Sidebar" from the "View" menu. There's that missing left side bar!

I'm definitely a fan, and the more I poke around in iTunes 11, the more impressed I am with the attention to detail in the program. The user experience team has done a good job rethinking a tired app and making it far more functional.

To show you what I mean, let's just dig around in the Mini-Player view and see all the many features and functions that have been added!

If you've been to an electronics store in the recent past, you know that "Smart TVs" are all the rage, televisions that have the built-in ability to run apps, display YouTube videos, access your photos, and access slick content like Google Play.

Heck, what if you want to have Netflix on your TV? Or join the world of Hulu and Hulu Plus instead of paying that ever-increasing cable TV bill?

What if you want those features but don't want to buy a new HDTV system?

That's where the slick CTL HDMI gizmo comes in. A tiny box not much bigger than a pack of gum, it plugs in to the HDMI port of your existing TV and gives you all the functionality of those expensive TVs. Without the cost.

Let's have a look!

This is a guest post by Matt Moran...

Google Slides (formerly Google Presentations) has added the ability to embed "Unlisted" YouTube videos into your presentations. This has tremendous implications and usefulness for content publishers. In effect, presentations can be maintained and kept up to date without having to republish all of the content.

Let me explain...

I am a business coach... and a consultant... and an author... and a speaker... Plus I write & perform the occasional song. Content is my domain. Content is King!

One set of tools I use is Google Drive (Google Docs). If you are NOT using Google Drive... Create a Google (Gmail) account and start today!

The big story right now is about how the head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was busted by FBI investigators after they found that he was having an affair with writer Paula Broadwell, principal author of his biography, perhaps ironically called All In: The Education of General David Petraeus. It happens, I suppose, and whether that's the real reason - and only reason -- for his resignation or whether there were other issues that haven't come to light yet, well, we might never know the full story.

What we do know is that the details of the FBI investigation into General Petraeus' communications with Paula Broadwell have spurred much discussion about privacy, security and the wisdom of having a mail service like Google's Gmail -- which they used -- archive your email forever.

So how much does Gmail archive? For how long? And once you delete something, is it really deleted? For that matter, what does "sharing drafts" mean when the investigators explained how David and Paula communicated without actually sending messages to each other?

Microsoft Windows. Whether you use it daily or prefer to live on the Macintosh side of the OS street, it's a huge part of modern computing environments, and the release of the new Windows 8 has proven that the company still has some interesting tricks up its sleeve. The interface is completely new, it boots dramatically faster, runs faster on even slower hardware, and has a ton of new features and capabilities.

If you want to cover all the operating systems, however, you might have already made the switch from Windows to Mac OS X, keeping a toe in the old world by using the powerful VMware Fusion program to run Windows 7 (or any other release of Windows) in a "virtual machine". Works great, actually!

The question is, can you run Windows 8 in VMware Fusion and will it run quickly so it's usable, or will it be such a dog that it'll prove unusably slow?

When I say we have a lot of AirPlay speakers in the office here at AskDaveTaylor, I'm not kidding. It looks more like a test facility for AirPlay than anything else when we point music from an AirPlay friendly device to one of the audio systems. But this means we've also gained a lot of experience with AirPlay and have learned to tolerate the stutters and hiccups of wireless music, along with learning just how hard it can be to do something as basic as changing the unit's wireless name or even connect it to a secure wifi network.

That's why I'm so darn impressed with the Contour 200i Air from Pure, a speaker that has the striking design I expect from an Apple product coupled with both the best sound available in a unit this size and a configuration system that makes the usual administrative hassles ridiculously easy.

If you're a faithful reader of Ask Dave Taylor you already know that we occasionally feature other writers who have contributed guest articles. Not adverts, not advertorials, but solid, valuable content that adds to the overall helpful information on the site. In fact, I like having friends and colleagues contribute because they have specific areas of expertise that add value to the site for you, the reader. A win:win.

But that doesn't mean it's always easy working with a guest blogger, and if you have a blog, you might find these tips and suggestions helpful when you too are evaluating content from others...

Since I purchased my MacBook Air, I have been looking for a bag that could carry my computer, an iPad and a few additional necessities, an extra charger for my phone and computer, and my three way power plug adapter.

Everywhere I looked, I was disappointed! I shopped online, at department stores, luggage stores, you name it. I visited the Apple Store to find the perfect match for my favorite possession, but found that bags were too big, or too small, ugly and/or easily compromised by weather.

I settled for an inferior computer bag and watched it continue to wither away, at times carrying an umbrella with me just to ensure I was prepared for anything, protecting my computer bag at all costs. Then I stumbled upon the Brenthaven's Prostyle 13" Courier bag which is the perfect mix of form and function, stylish, and I'm confident my computer is always protected from the elements.

I had a problem with my Toyota Highlander: The built-in bluetooth system was awful. Every time I tried to use it as a hands-free system the people on the other end complained about how they couldn't hear me or that it was so noisy or distorted they couldn't understand what I was saying. Surprisingly, a call to Toyota revealed that there was no upgrade path at all, no better microphone I could have installed, nothing. Tough luck.

Rather than be defeated, unable to have the safety of a hands-free system I went to the local car audio store, Car Toys, and asked what they recommended. Their hands-down suggestion was the Parrot MKi9200 system.

A few phone calls later, and Parrot had kindly sent us one to review and evaluate, and even sent a pre-paid installation card that covered all the install costs. Installing it was a full-day affair and the pro installers actually broke my Toyota nav system (another story entirely), but a bit of back and forth with Boulder Toyota and we were good to go, everything worked just fine.

That was a few months ago and while I can report that the hands-free phone system works beautifully -- people even express surprise when I tell them I'm driving while we're talking -- the rest of the system is a bit more frustrating...

It never fails. I'm on a deadline and really need to go online, heck, I even buy my token cup of coffee to pay the proprietor for access to their wifi. And it's down. Now what?

Or, just as commonly, I'm at a hotel and not only is the Internet just awful, slower than a 300baud dialup (don't worry if you don't know what that is!), but it's also $14.99/day for the crummy coverage. Yikes.

Enter mobile wifi hotspots. The idea is that the gadget turns a cellular connection into a small wifi network, allowing a few devices to share a single cell Internet connection. Some phones can do this automatically, but in my experience, the results you get are mediocre and the telecom provider charges premium $$ for the experience.

T-Mobile loaned us their new Sonic 4G Mobile Hotspot and I've had a chance to test it out on various trips and locally in Colorado and my conclusion: It's a great addition to any digital nomad / road warrior's kit!

Sure you can use Voice Memos to record audio with your iPhone, but if you've ever tried working with it or plugging in a device like the slick new Mikey Digital external mic [see my review of the mikey digital to learn more] it's quickly apparent that Voice Memos is a rudimentary app with few capabilities and doesn't even support stereo recordings. Just as importantly, getting the recordings off the iPhone requires you to import them into your iTunes library and exporting them afterwards to share with friends or colleagues. Awkward.

Enter the free application Blue FiRe from Blue Microphone. It records in stereo, it has a cool interface, and a really cool way for you to get those audio recordings directly off your iPhone and onto your computer. Via your Web browser. Read on...

This is a guest post by Matt Moran...

Google Slides (formerly Google Presentations) has added the ability to embed "Unlisted" YouTube videos into your presentations. This has tremendous implications and usefulness for content publishers. In effect, presentations can be maintained and kept up to date without having to republish all of the content.

Let me explain...

I am a business coach... and a consultant... and an author... and a speaker... Plus I write & perform the occasional song. Content is my domain. Content is King!

One set of tools I use is Google Drive (Google Docs). If you are NOT using Google Drive... Create a Google (Gmail) account and start today!

The big story right now is about how the head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was busted by FBI investigators after they found that he was having an affair with writer Paula Broadwell, principal author of his biography, perhaps ironically called All In: The Education of General David Petraeus. It happens, I suppose, and whether that's the real reason - and only reason -- for his resignation or whether there were other issues that haven't come to light yet, well, we might never know the full story.

What we do know is that the details of the FBI investigation into General Petraeus' communications with Paula Broadwell have spurred much discussion about privacy, security and the wisdom of having a mail service like Google's Gmail -- which they used -- archive your email forever.

So how much does Gmail archive? For how long? And once you delete something, is it really deleted? For that matter, what does "sharing drafts" mean when the investigators explained how David and Paula communicated without actually sending messages to each other?

Microsoft Windows. Whether you use it daily or prefer to live on the Macintosh side of the OS street, it's a huge part of modern computing environments, and the release of the new Windows 8 has proven that the company still has some interesting tricks up its sleeve. The interface is completely new, it boots dramatically faster, runs faster on even slower hardware, and has a ton of new features and capabilities.

If you want to cover all the operating systems, however, you might have already made the switch from Windows to Mac OS X, keeping a toe in the old world by using the powerful VMware Fusion program to run Windows 7 (or any other release of Windows) in a "virtual machine". Works great, actually!

The question is, can you run Windows 8 in VMware Fusion and will it run quickly so it's usable, or will it be such a dog that it'll prove unusably slow?

When I say we have a lot of AirPlay speakers in the office here at AskDaveTaylor, I'm not kidding. It looks more like a test facility for AirPlay than anything else when we point music from an AirPlay friendly device to one of the audio systems. But this means we've also gained a lot of experience with AirPlay and have learned to tolerate the stutters and hiccups of wireless music, along with learning just how hard it can be to do something as basic as changing the unit's wireless name or even connect it to a secure wifi network.

That's why I'm so darn impressed with the Contour 200i Air from Pure, a speaker that has the striking design I expect from an Apple product coupled with both the best sound available in a unit this size and a configuration system that makes the usual administrative hassles ridiculously easy.

If you're a faithful reader of Ask Dave Taylor you already know that we occasionally feature other writers who have contributed guest articles. Not adverts, not advertorials, but solid, valuable content that adds to the overall helpful information on the site. In fact, I like having friends and colleagues contribute because they have specific areas of expertise that add value to the site for you, the reader. A win:win.

But that doesn't mean it's always easy working with a guest blogger, and if you have a blog, you might find these tips and suggestions helpful when you too are evaluating content from others...

Since I purchased my MacBook Air, I have been looking for a bag that could carry my computer, an iPad and a few additional necessities, an extra charger for my phone and computer, and my three way power plug adapter.

Everywhere I looked, I was disappointed! I shopped online, at department stores, luggage stores, you name it. I visited the Apple Store to find the perfect match for my favorite possession, but found that bags were too big, or too small, ugly and/or easily compromised by weather.

I settled for an inferior computer bag and watched it continue to wither away, at times carrying an umbrella with me just to ensure I was prepared for anything, protecting my computer bag at all costs. Then I stumbled upon the Brenthaven's Prostyle 13" Courier bag which is the perfect mix of form and function, stylish, and I'm confident my computer is always protected from the elements.

I had a problem with my Toyota Highlander: The built-in bluetooth system was awful. Every time I tried to use it as a hands-free system the people on the other end complained about how they couldn't hear me or that it was so noisy or distorted they couldn't understand what I was saying. Surprisingly, a call to Toyota revealed that there was no upgrade path at all, no better microphone I could have installed, nothing. Tough luck.

Rather than be defeated, unable to have the safety of a hands-free system I went to the local car audio store, Car Toys, and asked what they recommended. Their hands-down suggestion was the Parrot MKi9200 system.

A few phone calls later, and Parrot had kindly sent us one to review and evaluate, and even sent a pre-paid installation card that covered all the install costs. Installing it was a full-day affair and the pro installers actually broke my Toyota nav system (another story entirely), but a bit of back and forth with Boulder Toyota and we were good to go, everything worked just fine.

That was a few months ago and while I can report that the hands-free phone system works beautifully -- people even express surprise when I tell them I'm driving while we're talking -- the rest of the system is a bit more frustrating...

It never fails. I'm on a deadline and really need to go online, heck, I even buy my token cup of coffee to pay the proprietor for access to their wifi. And it's down. Now what?

Or, just as commonly, I'm at a hotel and not only is the Internet just awful, slower than a 300baud dialup (don't worry if you don't know what that is!), but it's also $14.99/day for the crummy coverage. Yikes.

Enter mobile wifi hotspots. The idea is that the gadget turns a cellular connection into a small wifi network, allowing a few devices to share a single cell Internet connection. Some phones can do this automatically, but in my experience, the results you get are mediocre and the telecom provider charges premium $$ for the experience.

T-Mobile loaned us their new Sonic 4G Mobile Hotspot and I've had a chance to test it out on various trips and locally in Colorado and my conclusion: It's a great addition to any digital nomad / road warrior's kit!

Sure you can use Voice Memos to record audio with your iPhone, but if you've ever tried working with it or plugging in a device like the slick new Mikey Digital external mic [see my review of the mikey digital to learn more] it's quickly apparent that Voice Memos is a rudimentary app with few capabilities and doesn't even support stereo recordings. Just as importantly, getting the recordings off the iPhone requires you to import them into your iTunes library and exporting them afterwards to share with friends or colleagues. Awkward.

Enter the free application Blue FiRe from Blue Microphone. It records in stereo, it has a cool interface, and a really cool way for you to get those audio recordings directly off your iPhone and onto your computer. Via your Web browser. Read on...

If you've never used the Voice Memos app on your iPhone, you're missing out on one of the more useful hidden capabilities of the device: the ability to be a quite competent audio recorder. It's not like having a sound engineer on site, but if you're in a meeting and want to be able to capture the discussion and study it later, or you're on a Skype call and want to record it, or are at a live performance and want to enjoy it again later, that gadget in your pocket is definitely ready to do double duty.

Problem is, the mic on the iPhone works well if you're talking directly into it, but if you're laying it on a chair to record something that's 10' or further away, not much of the signal seems to get through!

Enter the Blue Microphone Mikey, an external mic that plugs directly into your iPhone and makes those recordings a whole lot better. This is their second external mic for an iOS device, but the first gen was only for early iPods and didn't work with iPhones or iPads. This new gen definitely does and even has a standard 30-pin connector.

It's the stuff of digital nightmares: you boot up your computer and the drive's corrupt, or you plug in an external drive -- or even USB drive -- and it doesn't appear on the desktop at all, or shows up without the files and data you need. Sure you can restart and hope, but a smarter strategy is to try some disk recovery software. You can use Disk Utility that's included with Mac OS X but it's not going to help you recover the lost data, just fix any easy formatting hiccups on the media, commonly producing a functional but blank drive. Yikes.

Enter the awkwardly named Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery Software application. A quick download, it does a good job of scanning broken or corrupt drives and making recovery of the information thereon a breeze...

Dave reviews the slick Kingston Technology 16GB DataTraveler Locker+ G2 encrypted secure USB "thumb" drive and really likes what he finds. If you're worried about the security of the data on your own portable drive, this is a good solution at a very competitive price. Watch it to learn more...

In the age of Google, searching has become one of the main activities and focuses for just about anyone that is connected to the Internet, via a computer, a tablet, or smartphone.

But what about searching for things on your computer system? I've been using Windows 7 (and Vista before that without any glaring problems) on my main graphics workstation/computer systems for years now. The search function built into Windows 7 in particular has been one of the joys and useful tools of my computing experience, something that I recently discovered isn't the norm.

There are apparently plenty of people that haven't had the same positive, material-discovery experience I've had for years! Join me as I detail the things that have continued to make the difference for me in the realm of Search in Windows 7 as a professional graphic designer, cartoonist, blogger and podcast host here via the online showcase of Dave's blog...

Instagram is a great iOS and Android app available to photo enthusiasts. One of the things that make it great is the interaction that one can build through images, with friends and new contacts alike. To build these new connections, hashtags play a very important factor.

Not sure how to get started with Instagram? Check out our earlier article How to get Followers on Instagram before you proceed.

I'm a long-time fan of Blue Microphone and routinely use my Snowflake for conference calls and my big Yeti Pro for more serious audio recordings like voice over work. The company just makes superb microphones for computers and when they shared with me details of the new mini-USB mic that was designed to just plug into the side of a laptop and give you better audio for any application, I was definitely interested.

It's finally shipping and the Tiki looks unlike any USB microphone you've seen and, name withstanding, appears more like a snail than anything else:

What's most important, however, is that it sounds really good, and doubly so for the size.

It sounds like one of those rumors that seem to be created by anti-virus software companies to sell their software, a terrifying warning that in 48 hours all of your programs will stop working and your address book will be sent to some shadowy organization in Eastern Europe to analyze, but in fact the DNSChanger malware is a legitimate problem and is known -- through dissecting and analyzing the code -- to be poised to effectively disable your ability to look up any domain names starting on Monday, July 9, 2012.

Without the ability to look up domains using the Domain Name System (DNS) your computer will indeed be effectively cut off from the Internet, and restarting or unplugging and re-plugging in your modem won't solve a thing.

Not good.

Here's how you can test to see if you've been infected by DNSChanger, and if so, what you can do to remedy the situation...

It's no secret that we at AskDaveTaylor are a bit biased towards Apple products and the Macintosh, though we have a variety of PC gear too, running Windows Vista (yup, really), Windows 7 and even preview releases of Windows 8. There's a lot to like about Windows 7 in particular -- not quite as enamored of Win8 as of yet -- if you're coming from the Mac world, including a rich and impressive developer ecosystem that's produced a wealth of great applications, utilities and freeware programs from both big corporations and developers working out of dorm rooms, basements and apartments throughout the world.

Problem is, since we don't use the PC on a daily basis, we're not as familiar with the best of class freeware apps out there, so when a query came in about the best and most popular freeware applications for Microsoft Windows, well, we were a bit stumped.

Fortunately, there's social media...

A new IP has hacked and slashed its way into the fast-action, combo-thrashing genre. The Gaijin-developed brawler, Blades of Time, is now released on the PC, Mac, PS3, and Xbox 360. With multiple successful franchises already dominating the hack 'n slash scene such as Devil May Cry and Darksiders, how does newcomer Blades stack up?

Valve Software's latest free-to-play project is nearing its completion and PC release. Defense of the Ancients 2, currently in its public beta stage, is no longer under non-disclosure agreement and is set to take a few multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) competitors out of the picture.

Before I delve into quality, you should know what a MOBA is. It plays like a real-time strategy game such as Starcraft or Age of Empires, except you only control one unit for nearly the entire time. This unit is your hero, your champion, whatever you want to call it. Heroes gain experience and gold by destroying enemies. Experience is used to level up and learn new abilities, where gold is used to buy items that have a wide array of effects. It's starting to sound like an MMORPG at this point, so here's the catch: At the beginning of every match, heroes start over at level 1 and with a very small amount of gold. You carry little or nothing over from previous games.

With its combination of a beautiful screen, bluetooth and integrated technology like geolocation and Internet access, the Apple iPhone has spawned a new generation of interesting technology ranging from the very futuristic Sphero to the iRadar (the latter of which we awarded a Best of CES 2012 award). While the IPhone is a handy timer, it never really crossed my mind that it could also be useful when cooking on the grill, but it turns out that the iGrill remote meat thermometer - with accompanying iPhone app - is a great addition to your BBQ efforts, and a perfect gift for any guy who isn't a master of the grill...

It's a problem that few people talk about, but it's real: when you're using a wireless network, most of your data is traveling through the air "in the clear" (that is, unencrypted) and anyone with the right software could easily be tapping into the data stream and stealing your information, email messages, passwords, credit card numbers, and anything else you might be sending, viewing or receiving. Sure some sites now offer a secure connection, but there are a lot more sites that don't, leaving it your responsibility to ensure that your information is safe.

There are a number of ways to solve this problem, some expensive (your own personal encrypted mifi hotspot) and others complicated (only connect online through your own private network), but there's also a slick solution that automatically encrypts every single byte of data you send or receive by creating what's called a virtual private network or "VPN". Put one of these in place and dubious hackers and stalkers will always be stymied trying to "sniff" your data packets and all your information will be safe. Smart.

Problem is, getting a VPN set up can be complex. Enter Hotspot Shield by AnchorFree, Inc. Even better, you can either opt to use it for free -- in return for a small advert popping up -- or for a small fee you can subscribe to the service.

Let's have a look.

I've written before about the problems I've had with the built-in hands-free bluetooth system I have in my 2008 Toyota Highlander. I've given up using it, actually, as I got tired of people complaining that they couldn't hear me. I even called up Toyota asking if there was an upgrade path and their answer was "nope." Not so useful. To compensate, we've been testing out a lot of different bluetooth hands-free systems, both little speaker devices that hook to the visor and headsets.

Problem is, a car is a noisy environment, particularly when I'm zipping down the highway at 70mph, surrounded by traffic.

Enter the amazing VXI BlueParrott Xpress wireless headset that's specifically designed for high noise environments like construction sites and crowded spaces. Should be plenty enough for my car, right? Read on to find out...

My expensive Toyota Highlander has a problem, and it's one that's bugged me for a long time: I paid the extra thousands of dollars for the high-end navigational system and hands-free Bluetooth cell phone speaker system, and while I love the nav system, the cellphone support is pretty awful. No it doesn't display caller ID when a call comes in. No it won't let me copy my phonebook -- or even my ten favorite numbers -- onto the system, but the kicker is that when I use the hands-free system, at least 50% of the time the person on the other end complains about how hard it is to hear and understand what I'm saying.

I called Toyota and asked if there's an upgrade path for the microphone. I'd pay $100-$200 to have a really high quality mic with noise reduction system hanging from my visor, but there's nothing. No upgrade path at all. Tough luck. Even third party solutions - of which there are quite a few - basically involve completely rewiring my dashboard and hooking the unit in as an external audio subsystem. And costs hundreds of dollars just to install.

Enter a category of Bluetooth devices called "in-car speakerphones". The idea is that these are self-contained speaker, mic and Bluetooth devices that let you sidestep the entire car audio system, and since they're generally designed to clip onto your sun visor, they're just inches from your mouth and should be clear when used hands free too.

SuperTooth sent us one of their new Crystal units, remarkably priced at about $70 on Amazon.com, and from everything I can tell, it's a big improvement on my far more expensive Toyota system.

Ever watched a video that's a recording of someone demonstrating something on their PC and narrating what they're doing? There are tons of them on YouTube, and it's a terrific format for tutorials, demonstrating Web services and can even be useful in that big presentation you have with the boss tomorrow. Watching them is easy. But making your own? Seems like a tricky proposition.

The category of software that we're talking about are "screen recorders", and there's no question that The Big Kahuna of screen recording software on the PC platform is Camtasia, from TechSmith. It's terrific -- I use it myself -- but it's also expensive, at $299.

There are other solutions, including some that are web-based, but the challenge isn't to find one that works, it's to find one that's really easy to work with and does just enough of the job to accomplish your goals, not overwhelm you with options and complexity. After all, if your goal is to narrate what you're doing on screen, you don't want to learn something new, you just want a "record" button and the ability to save the output video in a format that YouTube understands.

That's why we had a look at Screen Recording Suite from Apowersoft...

It's just sitting there in the App Store, laughing at you atop its price tag of $6.99. Why in the world would you spend your hard-earned money when there's so much awesome free stuff in the iOS App Store?

Answer: It's bloody well worth it.

Do you like the idea of being a powerful swordsman that shrugs off the attacks of a titan twice his size, only to eviscerate his enemy? Do you dream of towering citadels wrought with danger, seeing them as challenges to overcome? Do you like fighting things by swiping your finger across your screen?

If you said "yes" to any of the above, you should get Infinity Blade II.

It's about ten seconds after you empty the trash on your Mac OS X system that you realize you haven't had a successful backup for two months and that critical report for the boss is no longer on your Desktop. If it went into the Trash and you then emptied the trash, you're out of luck. Time to get some Red Bull and pull an all-nighter recreating the document.

Or is it? With the addition of Time Machine, Apple has a nice built-in file backup system that also helps with version tracking, but if you don't have it set up properly or simply haven't run a backup between when you created and accidentally deleted the file, it's not going to help you out.

That's why I was enthused to install and experiment with Remo Software's popular Recover Mac program (they have a matching app for Windows users too). To test it, I deleted various files and tried to recover them a few minutes, hours, or even days later from the file system.

I attend the Consumer Electronics Show every year, and every year I talk with vendors who have a love/hate relationship with AirPlay technology. They like the idea of wirelessly beaming music to a speaker system from any device that runs iTunes (including iPhones, iPads and both Mac and PC computers) but hate the expensive license fees that Apple charges for the technology license. Indeed, it's not uncommon to see a desk speaker that's $100 more than its non-AirPlay cousin with exactly the same specs.

Some companies release their own technological solution, which I always think is rather doomed for failure, while others bite the proverbial bullet and pay the license fees so that they can include AirPlay on their own device. Well-known Apple peripheral maker iHome is in the latter category, and with the iW2, their second attempt at a portable AirPlay speaker, they've finally got it all right and have created the perfect wireless speaker.

A guest submission by my friend Bruce Sallan.

Learning all the tools available in Social Media can be a challenge. I actually hired a tutor when I began my SoMe journey. It helped me get over my middle-aged resistance to learning new things. Now, I'm addicted to the pleasures, values, and camaraderie of Social Media. I've especially enjoyed participated in Tweet Chats, aka Twitter Parties.

I began with the granddaddy of them all, #blogchat, hosted and created by the wonderful and ever-so-gracious @MackCollier. Doing #blogchat as your first tweet chat is sort of like climbing Mt. Everest when you're in the mood for a nice hike. #Blogchat has had upwards of 5,000 tweets during its Sunday hour from 6:00 - 7:00 p.m., PST. For some perspective, 3,600 tweets would be one per second.

Early this morning I was poking around in the iTunes Store and came across the most surprising iOS app I've ever seen listed: Windows 7 for iOS, direct from Microsoft Corporation. Unfortunately, by the time I clicked on the download button, it had been pulled and I can't find the listing again when I search. Still, what would you pay to get a fully functional copy of Windows 7 on your new iPad?

I get a ton of audio gear here at Ask Dave Taylor and I'm definitely not complaining. From headphones to speakers, we have enough gear that there's a separate audio system in every single room in our office. And we have a lot of rooms. Much of it proves uninteresting once I put it through its paces, like little external speakers that sound tinny and are way too quiet to work in any but the most tomb-like of spaces to headphones that miss all the nuances in good music (our test music is usually classic jazz vocals like Ella Fitzgerald, in case you're curious).

Still, there are areas of audio tech that are new and worth exploring, and both of the products reviewed in this article fit that bill. The first, dblogic earphones, are earbuds designed specifically to max out at a reasonable sound pressure level, helping avoid any hearing loss, particularly in younger music fans like my kids.

The second device seems more magical, though it might be a bit less practical: iFrogz Boost is a near-field audio amplifying speaker which lets you put any audio source on top of it and have that audio play through the device too, louder and usually with better audio fidelity. That's right, put any cellphone on the gizmo and suddenly it sounds way better. Even speaker phone calls.

Read on for my hands-on experience with both...

It seems anachronistic to have a portable radio the size of a hardback book when you can grab an iPhone app or even listen to Internet radio on your laptop, but rather to my surprise I've grown to really like the One Flow radio from Pure.

The device comes from UK-based high-end audio purveyor Pure, and combines digital, FM and Internet radio in a wifi-enabled device that also has an AUX in (in case you want to hook up your iPod or iPhone), a long-life rechargeable battery and even an alarm clock feature.

What really causes me to like the One Flow, however, is that it ties into the company's web-based Lounge service, which makes it a breeze to find your favorite live or Internet-based stations out of the thousands available online, mark them as favorites, then push the updated favorites list directly to the radio.

Let's have a look...

I've been using black and white printers for so long that I see grayscale when I look at color, and have grown accustomed to things being, well, black and white when I print them. But modern printers have more capabilities than just being able to print whatever data you send to them, and when Epson offered us a chance to review their Artisan 837 All-In-One ink-jet printer, I was intrigued by its wide range of capabilities, including high-res color scanning and copying, not to mention its fax capability.

In fact, I consider the printer to have five major functions: scanning, copying, printing, faxing and photo printing. I realize that to Epson the two types of printing are the same, but for us consumers who worry about the cost of materials and supplies, there's a big difference between a cheap sheet of recycled white paper and an expensive piece of photo paper.

After having spent a few months with the Artisan 837, I have to say it's a terrific printer and small office peripheral, easy to configure and maintenance free. I'm now using it with the developer release of Mac OS X 10.8 (aka Mountain Lion) and the new Epson drivers work perfectly with that too.

But there were some definite hiccups and there's one major area of functionality that I still haven't been able to test, even after Epson replaced the first unit with a second device, hoping that would fix the problem...

Given how much energy your home furnace and air conditioner consume, it's rather amazing how little innovation in HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning, a common acronym in construction and architectural circles) we've seen in terms of the controls. Look at the thermostats in any public place, office building or home and you'll probably see a sensor and control device that's essentially unchanged since the 70s.

They work quite simply: the temperature at the thermostat is gauged and if it's hotter than the 'cool' setting, the device closes a circuit and the air conditioner turns on until the temperature drops down into the comfort zone. For heating it's the opposite: if the temperature at the thermostat goes below a preset limit, then the device closes a circuit and the furnace / heater turns on, pushing warm air throughout the space until the thermostat registers a sufficiently warm temperature that it can power things down for a period of time.

The problem is that we aren't always in the space, and that there are certain times of day where even if we are home, the temperature can safely go to a wider band of comfortable without a problem. For example, if you're asleep at 3am, why use the energy required to keep the house (or office) at the same temperature that you'd desire at 3pm, the middle of the day? In an office building, weekends should have a considerably lower "energy footprint" (a green eco-term) because they're quite likely empty.

Some companies, notably thermostat giant Honeywell, have introduced programmable thermostats for home and business, but they're difficult to work with, confusing, and quite often people just ignore the programmability and just set a heating or air conditioning "target" temperature. Super inefficient, but understandable when the programming task requires you pushing the same button a dozen or more times to slowly - painfully - get it set just so.

Enter Nest Labs of Palo Alto, California. With the design team that brought us the music paradigm shifting iPod, they set out to create the first truly smart and user friendly thermostat and having just installed one in my own home, I'll share that it's indeed elegant and fun. But there are some definite problems...

If you have a veritable electronics store worth of gadgets in your computer bag when you travel, you've already learned the hard way that having a mini-USB, micro-USB and iPod cable can save your life. The problem is, all of these cables are too darn long and it ends up being a crazy tangle in your computer bag or a rats nest of tangled wires that end up getting damaged.

That's why I'm such a big fan of CableJive. A little company out of Malden, Mass, they focus on making useful cables and adapters and offer terrific mini-cables that are worth their weight in saffron (which is kind of like being worth their weight in gold, but saffron's actually considerably more valuable by weight).

A picture speaks a thousand words, so here are the three CableJive cables I always have in my computer bag:

Even better, they're about the same price as those typical long cables. Just shorter. These "iStubz" cables run about $8.00 each, but I strongly encourage you to just get all three cable ends, mini, micro and iPod. They're a no brainer.

Which leads to the question: what cables and gadgets do I carry in my computer bag?

Between my work as a film critic and the time I spend working on computers, I really stare at screens a lot. I mean, probably upwards of ten hours each and every day. Then again, I surmise that you also spend a lot of time looking at screens, be they televisions, computer screens, or even a smartphone or other mobile device.

But screens haven't really changed that much in the last ten to fifteen years. Sure, they're bigger, but the core technology and, more importantly, the way that we relate to the display screen hasn't changed much at all. We sit and look at the screen, be it 20-inches from our face while in an office or eight feet from a huge HD screen mounted on a wall. And there's no privacy because there's always a distance between the screen and your face.

Sony's crack engineering team decided to see if they could change that and create an immersive headset that contained its own tiny screen, a screen that was so close to your eyes that it had the appearance of a 150-inch HD television screen. And, while they were at it, they added a second tiny screen (both high def OLED), 5.1 audio and a vivid 3D system.

Enter the Sony HMZ-T1 Personal 3D Viewer, as shown on the model, above. Think of it as high-def goggles for any video content you'd like to enjoy in private. Sony sent us an HMZ-T1 to examine and try for a few weeks, and here's what we found...

I hate seeing people carrying around their computers in a purse or, worse, just in their hand. Modern tech is fairly tough -- witness the amazing Gorilla Glass from Corning that's essentially unscratchable on Apple iPhones and Android smartphones -- but it doesn't take much to break or damage a computer. Drop it even 18" onto the wrong surface and you're in trouble. I know, I dropped my ridiculously expensive MacBook Pro about 30" onto concrete and forever bent the case. And it was in a computer bag at the time, just not a padded one.

As a result, I'm always on the lookout for the best possible protection for my computer, whether it's a simple zip-up sleeve or a full-blown computer bag. As a result, I'm glad to report on one of each, two products that are both great options depending on how you work with your gear.

The smaller case is the eco-friendly GreenSmart Akepa laptop sleeve, and the larger is the incredibly well-designed Powerbag Instant Messenger. At opposite ends of the pricing spectrum, they also are great examples of how vendors in this highly competitive market have learned to differentiate their products.

The garage door opener in my house works perfectly well. It's a craftsman chain drive and it's a bit noisy but every time I push the button on the remote in my car, the door slowly moves upward and I can pull my car into the driveway. No worries, right?

One evening I pulled onto my street, however, and my garage door was sitting open for all to see, with bicycles, tools and an unlocked interior door that offered easy access into my house. It'd been that way for over six hours. Not good. But how do you know if you remembered to close your garage door every single morning? It only takes one forgetful departure to lose hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of household goods.

Enter the Sears Craftsman AssureLink communications system. It's a three piece solution that lets Craftsman sell Internet-aware garage door openers that can not only be accessed via the Web to confirm the door is properly closed, but that have a handy iPhone (or Android) app that lets you control the door too. Fabulous.

I wouldn't describe myself as a "gym rat", but I do go to the gym fairly frequently, and my routine doesn't vary much. Gym clothes on, sneakers tied, iPod Touch charged so I can continue listening to whatever audio book I'm in the middle of -- the current one is the Steve Jobs biography -- and my rather scroungy over-ear headphones so I can keep listening even as I move around and get into "the zone".

Keeping track of my time and performance on the various machines, monitoring my heart rate, and - hopefully! - seeing progress isn't something I've paid much attention to, so when the team at iHome offered to send me a pair of their new Fitness Evolved headphones (developed in cooperation with New Balance), I was intrigued. It'd track my performance and I'd even be able to graph things on my computer. Cool.

In Part 1 of our Smart Grids and Smart Homes series I introduced the concept of the Smart Grid. Governments and utilities are spending a lot of cash on upgrading our power grids to make them smart. Now, how do I leverage this to be greener, save significant amounts of money, and perhaps have a little fun along the way?

Home Energy Management (HEM) is going to be very important to you in the future, whether you like it or not. You see, in just a few years most if not all of us will have variable electricity pricing. The cost of retail electricity per kWh will vary throughout the day and will not be fixed like it currently is for most of us.

Depending on where you live you may have two or more tiers of pricing (eg. high and low rate), or a constantly fluctuating price that more accurately tracks the prices in the electricity wholesale market. Wholesale prices can vary by 300% or more in one day. If you could save three times the cost of running your washing machine during a low-peak period, would you? I don't think my jeans will care at what time they were washed.

You've probably heard of the Smart Grid and are aware that it has an energy conservation element to it. What you may not be aware of is that over the next decade our entire power grid and the way we use power in the home will be transformed. Those who embrace the new Smart Grid technologies stand to pay substantially less for their energy (and produce less CO2) than those who do not. So, what should we be doing now and in the near future to benefit from all this?

In this first article in the series, I'll provide a brief introduction to the Smart Grid. In subsequent articles I'll be explaining how you can get involved and make your home smarter...

While there's a lot to like about Apple's design of iPhones and IPads, there are still a few things that are a pain to accomplish, notably gaining access to data that's on your computer or sharing large files with friends, particularly if their devices aren't sync'd to the same computer as yours.

Sure you can use something like Dropbox, and that's a good solution, but what if you just want more space for more files, more movies, more music, more documents, without reverting to the Cloud or otherwise needing to be online?

Enter the slick, innovative Kingston Technology Wi-Drive, an external hard drive that can be plugged into your computer for data management, then connects wirelessly, via wifi, to your Apple iOS devices for access and perusal.

About the size of an iPod Touch, it's a very interesting gizmo...

My iPhone and MacBook are constantly connected, and with the advent of wireless sync in iOS 5, even when they're not connected, my phone still stays in sync with my computer data, which would be a life saver if I ever -- horrors! -- lost my iPhone.

But most people who have iPhones don't sync very often at all, and a surprising number of iPhone owners have never sync'd their phone to their computer.

That's the old school vision of your cellphone as a standalone device that works or dies, and there's no way for you to interact with it on your computer or in "the cloud", so I completely understand people who go from a Motorola or a Nokia device to an iPhone and use it the same way.

The problem is, what if their phone gets broken or they lose it? What happens to the photos they took on the device? What happens to their contact list and address book?

Enter the simple, ingenious iomega SuperHero Backup & Charger for iPhone.

Google has jumped into the cloud music fray with an interesting, though rather crude, offering of its own called Google Music, and I decided that it'd be darn helpful to have all of my almost 9000 songs available to me anywhere I was online, through just about any Web device.

Here's how I got started with Google Music...

If you have sufficient anxiety or depression that you've tried medications and a parade of alternative treatments, you might be quite interested in the Alpha-Stim CES, cranial electric stimulation device.

I first learned about the Alpha-Stim, CES machine at a medical conference a couple of years ago. Dr. Eric Braverman is a medical physician who specializes in neurotransmitter and brain chemistry functions. Along with diet, exercise and supplement protocols Dr. Braverman prescribes the Alpha-Stim CES (Cranial Electrical Stimulation) to many of his patients and has had some quite impressive results...

A guest review by contributing editor Gary Moskoff...

Being an executive on the go in the Rocky Mountains has presented its challenges. I move around a lot, meeting with partners, prospective clients, long-term clients from Boulder to Denver, Colorado and from Silicon Valley to New York. When the time is right to close a deal, the time is right. It's a sense I have; typically I see it coming. I am able to feel the anxiety and excitement that comes with closing the deals that drive our businesses. That moment when everyone around the table is ready to move forward, I've been there more than once.

It can be hard to navigate closing the deal, and timing is everything.

If you know the moment I'm describing, if there is nothing you enjoy more than closing the BIG deal, don't leave home without your Neat Receipt scanner.

This is a guest post by Klaus Holzapfel of conceptbakery, a social media marketing company with offices in Germany and the United States.

The Facebook Like button is now at the forefront of privacy rights conversations in Germany, following much discussion of Google Analytics and pixelated homes on Google's Streetview and Microsoft's Streetside. A post on Mashable from August 19 mentioned that a German data protection commissioner is planning to ban the Facebook Like button. Since then, commissioners in three other German states have taken the same position.

I'm diligent with my backups. Probably more so than just about anyone who reads this. I have a constant backup to a 500GB network hard disk via Apple's set-and-forget Time Machine and I do manual monthly backups to a different 1TB drive, snapshots of my entire disk. Insurance.

But my backup strategy has the same limitation of most people's approach: if something happens to my house (a thorough break-in and theft, fire, meteor strike, etc) (alright, the last is less likely than the former!) then I'm hosed. Worst case scenario: Someone rips off my laptop while I'm on a business trip and simultaneously there's a fire and my house burns down. No backups. Nothing. Including the literally tens of thousands of irreplaceable photos of my children and our lives together, as well as my travels, manuscripts for my books, and much more.

The solution is something that wasn't an option even five years ago: a backup into the so-called cloud, where the data all lives in a secure data storage facility. I've looked at options, but with almost 400GB of data in my personal document folder, pictures, movies, etc., the cost was prohibitive. Then a friend mentioned she really liked Backblaze and I saw that they offered unlimited backup space on their cloud servers for $5/mo. That's cheap enough. But does it really work?

It's one of the great ironies in modern technology: progress keeps rushing us towards smaller and thinner, lighter and more flexible, but every step in that direction makes our gizmos more fragile. Think about your friends with smartphones. How many live with a cracked or shattered screen because they can't afford to replace it? How many laptops have defects because they've slipped off a desk or someone's put too much weight on it when closed?

The Apple iPad is a beautiful example of this conundrum. The latest iPad 2 is an amazing feat of engineering, so thin and light that it's almost unbelievable that it can be so powerful with that footprint.

But drop it even two feet from a table onto a tile or concrete floor and you'll be heading to the Apple Store for a replacement, grumbling all the way.

Apple makes an iPad case but its Smart Cover is more about protecting the glass surface than protecting the entire device from any sort of fall, which is a problem. As much as I want to tote around my iPad without any protective cover at all, it's a risky business.

With computer technology advancing at a staggering pace it may seem odd, and you may not know, that you may be able to kiss your desktop, laptop and netbook goodbye sooner than you think. You see, as backwards as it seems, the hardware industry is now making big performance gains, using a smaller footprint, less power, thus, higher stability due to a reduction in heat. That being said, it should come as no surprise that Android smartphones are taking over America, and are beginning to rival laptop computers in processing power. Before I go in to depth about the direction I see the computing world going, I figured I would start with answering the questions I get most when I pull out my HTC EVO and people notice that there is little or nothing similar to their Android phone, or their HTC EVO.

First and foremost, it should be understood that what I have done with my phone and about to describe and endorse (albeit incredibly awesome) will void the warranty of your phone. Disclaimer aside, it can all be undone providing you create a backup of the stock "ROM". For whatever reason, the community has been referring to customized operating systems as Roms, or mods, but either way, with the right rom and kernel combination, one can achieve absolutely insane performance and battery life.

Between podcasts, video narration, voice overs, conference calls with Skype and hands-free discussions with Google Talk, I spend a lot of time tapping into the audio capabilities of my Apple MacBook Pro. Problem is, while the built-in microphone on the top edge of my laptop is functional and unquestionably convenient, it's not the best sounding device in the world, a particular problem when I'm recording something for posterity.

I have a variety of different microphones -- and am proud to list Blue Microphone as a sponsor of my podcasts -- so when they introduced the new Yeti Pro that offered the best of the digital computer microphone capabilities of the original Yeti with the connectivity and flexibility of an XLR microphone, I was psyched to get my hands on one.

What podcasts, you ask? Thanks for being curious! My friend Michael Sitarzewski and I have a weekly podcast called Boulder Open Podcast [iTunes link], and the two of us add Doyle Albee to the mix for our Three Insight podcasts [iTunes link], also recorded weekly.

But back to my Yeti Pro review...

I'm frequently asked by people for recommendations on computers and while I generally encourage people to always go for the fastest, newest they can afford, I've also started to appreciate the amazing deals you can find with factory refurbished gear. Whether you're an Apple fanboy or a PC person, all the big manufacturers find that they have excess stock when they roll out new models, and those 12-18 month old models can be great deals!

The biggest limitation for modern computing, however, and this is true whether you're running Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows or even Linux, is the amount of memory you have in the system. Known as "RAM" or random access memory, it's what all the running applications use to manage and process data. Have too little and you'll find that you can only run one app without things slowing down, but have a lot and every application you use will run faster, often noticeably faster.

That's why even though I had 4GB of RAM in my mid-2010 Apple MacBook Pro, I was very interested in an upgrade to 8GB from Otherworld Computing, a company that's long been a friend of AskDaveTaylor. My concern was how difficult it would be to disassemble my tightly integrated MacBook, pop out the old memory cards and insert new ones without messing up the rest of the system.

This is a guest post from Adarsh Thampy.

Not many business owners are directly involved in marketing their business. Why? Probably because they have an employee or entire department handling marketing and sales.

Most entrepreneurs and small business owners aren't entitled to such luxuries. Many are just starting out. So I get questions from them about how to market their business with minimum cost and maximum effectiveness. Here's what I suggest...

It's not the first time that malware of some sort has reared its ugly head in the Mac OS X world, but MacDefender -- and its variants MacGuard, MacProtector and "Apple Security Center" -- are particularly onerous because the programmers have figured out how to install the software on your computer without you having to enter your admin password. There's a simple tweak you can make to your Web browser that makes you far, far less likely to get into the digital blackmail of a program that requires an expensive upgrade to remove unnamed viruses from your computer though...

Beyerdynamic T50p Headphones

Seems like there isn't much evolution in the headphone space, though. I mean, how much electronics, how much music reproduction capability can you jam into an oval space that's not much bigger than your ear?

Still, every year our team attends the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and scopes out everything fun and interesting coming out, trying to figure out what's going to be of most interest to you, our fabulous readers. It was at CES that I bumped into the team from beyerdynamic and had a chance to hear their "tesla technology" headphones for the first time. And was darn impressed!

I love my iPad 2, it's a solid update to the revolutionary iPad that I bought when it first hit the market, and not only do I like the iPad 2, but I also bought - and like - the "Smart Case" that Apple introduced with it. With its magnets and ability to turn the iPad 2 on and off simply by opening the case, it's a simple, elegant addition to the device.

Problem is, the Smart Cover is great for covering the screen, but the back of the iPad 2 is left unprotected, just waiting to get scratched, dinged or damaged. Not so good.

But I didn't want to get a full case because part of what I like about the iPad 2 is its slimness: putting it in a case just makes it thick again. Instead? A thick, protective skin. Like the ZAGGskin...

Just bought a new Apple iPad 2 and want to prep your old iPad 1 for resale? You might be lucky and sell it to a relative (or be really nice and give it to them, for that matter), in which case it isn't a crisis if some of your information remains on the device, but if you're tapping into Craigslist or eBay, you'll want to know exactly how to reformat the iPad back to its out-of-the-box state for the new user.

When we moved into new offices it became clear that it was also time to move beyond wires for our audio setup. Having things hanging down from the walls, having to plug devices in, having to worry about compatible charging docks, it all seemed so darn 20th Century. The quest was on for a really good wireless audio solution, so that's what we had on our minds when we attended the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show.

While Apple's AirPlay was getting good visibility at CES this year, the problem was that the gear we could find was more aimed at bedside tables and desks than audiophile-level multi-speaker devices that could be wall mounted and enjoyed by everyone.

When we bumped into audioengine, however, things became interesting. They sell audiophile-level bookshelf speakers and a small amplifier that makes the tiniest of iPods sound like a fancy hi-fi system, while still having a remarkably small footprint: the P4 speakers are only 9" high by 5" wide and 6" deep, and the N22 amplifier is 7" x 3" x 5" deep. Tiny. With sound far beyond what you would expect.

And it's pretty darn sweet.

I spend a lot of time using my laptop, an Apple MacBook Pro, and for years I have had various stickers on the cover, a montage of brands and vendors. After a while, though, that become a bit tiring and when I saw more and more other people with the same sort of random pastiche of stickers, well, it was time to do something else.

Enter GelaSkins. After checking out their cool, super colorful "skins" for various devices at trade shows, I decided it'd be fun to get one for my MacBook and try a single full size sticker instead of a lot of little stickers. Their PR team was quite forthcoming in sending a discount code so I took the leap.

The biggest challenge? Figuring out which of the hundreds of different designs I wanted to have emblazoned on my laptop.

This is a guest review by photographer Paul M. Bowers.

There are a many reasons you should buy Create Great iPhone Photos by Allan Hoffman, but only one can be the Number One.

I've been a commercial photographer for about 30 years, brung up in the briar patch of large-format transparency photography. You've seen my studios similar to mine in movies and TV- hardwood floors, industrial building, big windows and people running around everywhere. And then there was the darkroom, brimming with hazardous chemicals in which we splashed and played. But I've always had an affinity for small-form factor cameras, beginning with the Canon AF35M (the first real point-and-shoot) and the famous Olympus XA. I've carried these small cameras around the world, and have created some of my favorite images on these. My latest site, JustTheCoolStuff.com is based entirely on small form factor cameras and the iPhone.

Then I got an iPhone [cue chorale] . It became immediately obvious the power this small camera has, especially when combined with the large number of apps available for post (or pre) production. Controls and effects photographers used to drink, drug and teeth-gnash to perfect are available in real-time and in very controllable (and uncontrollable) ways.

It's a problem common to all laptop users, whether you're running a Mac or a PC: how do you get the maximum battery life out of your computer so that you can minimize the hunt for a power plug and the need to tote along a power cable? In this article, I'm going to focus on best practices for people running Windows since there are so darn many of 'em.

This review compares the Arkon GPS Car Kit RWIPC and the Arkon SLIM-Grip Mount IMP-514, and I want to start by saying that Akron Resources really makes quality products of sturdy construction, built for optimal utility and unobtrusiveness. Their GPS Car Kit and SLIM-Grip Mount both fit well within that description, to be used with the iPhone or the iPod Touch.

"Versus" reviews probably should most often compare apples-to-apples and furthermore compare competing companies' products... however this review will compare two different products, both made by the same company.

This comparison is more of an apples-to-oranges comparison, as the SLIM-Grip Mount has no GPS features, and is simply a mobile mount for holding your iPhone for you, while you drive. The GPS Car Kit is not only a mount for your iPhone, but it does so much more, which I'll describe in detail. Please note that this review will in no way encourage you to use your iPhone (nor any phone, for that matter) while you drive. Distracted driving is an ever-growing concern and strict laws are now in place, in most all states. Please drive responsibly, at all times.

Are you one of the lucky ones who got a new mobile phone or smart phone for Christmas? So let me ask you this: Have you ever left your mobile phone behind? Say, in a restaurant, a coffee shop, or at work? Don't you just hate that feeling when you finally realize it? I know I do, and it has happened to me more than once, before, but never again.

Zomm is the first ever Wireless Leash™ for your smartphone! Alright, I know what you are thinking. Another device I have to carry? Steeeeve, I'm trying to carry less devices, not more! Well wipe that look of skepticism off your face, you cynical sort. The short answer is yes, it is an additional small device to carry, but a worthwhile one, about which I feel strongly to be a very useful tool.

This is a guest review...

When a developer sets out to design an app, it's my firm belief that they should concentrate on fleshing out the features that exist *first*. Only when those features are complete should new ones be considered. PolyTune is a great example of this. Unfortunately, it's a great example of what *not* to do.

That's not to say that PolyTune is all bad. In fact, it does exactly what it advertises, and quite smoothly. A single strum of your guitar, and the app shows six different indicators. One for each string, each displaying real time like a standard monotuner would. That alone is quite impressive. But I don't think that minor convenience alone is enough reason to buy this app. Especially with all the monotuner apps out there with a plethora of bells and whistles. And especially not with its $5 price tag.

That about sums up what's good about the app. And it pales in comparison to what's glaringly absent. PolyTuner does have some minor configuration options. Just, not many.

Most photos we take are subjective to our own tastes - what we like, and what we think other people will like. There's nothing wrong with this, but if we are shooting for our viewers, editors or stock photography purposes, then we need to plan shooting photos differently. We need to shoot to get attention.  This means learning how to shoot conceptually, to incorporate concepts as a foundation to our photos.  Pretty pictures on their own are are just, well, pretty pictures.

Conceptualize the image and it grabs attention; it illustrates, and it sells.



The first step is...

If you ever wondered what techies did BEB -- Before eBay -- to find the coolest "used" technologies, widgets and gizmos, they simply traveled to a local Hamfest. A Hamfest, for everyone who missed this rare sub-culture gathering of the Ham amateur radio generation[s], it is a massive second hand technology fair, occurring nearly every weekend during warm weather. My father would travel for miles to attend; anything to be surrounded by the old "junk" that was sold to other hams, engineers, hobbyists, anyone who sought out motherboard key chains or electronics equipment that seemed 100's of years old to me. But to my Dad, this was nirvana. Someone else's adventure and inventions became my Dad's treasures.

To "appease" him I would tag along, but I never knew how much of an impact those fairs and that time with my Dad would have on my life until recently. I can trace back my love for technologies and gizmos to those Sunday mornings basking in the hot sun, hanging out with my Dad and rummaging through the broadcast isles and WWII surplus. I expanded my knowledge of old equipment, hardware, inventing, and my father. Now I truly understand the old adage, one mans junk is another's treasure. When my father found something interesting, perhaps something like a $40,000 spectrum analyzer that needed a bit of work that he could buy for pennies on the dollar, he'd tell everyone about his find, why it was so great and why we lugged it home.

Years later, when I find a product that impresses me I spend all my time in a similar fashion trying to share the good word with all who are interested. For instance, although I LOVE my iPhone, the battery life causes some problems for the executive on the go. As I travel from client to client, appointment to appointment, I am on the move and the last thing I need to go wrong is to loose touch with the world. Therefore, I depend on my iPhone to keep me in touch with work and my family.

I've written in the past [see My Favorite iPhone Games] about Plants vs. Zombies, an entertaining puzzle game where you have an ever-increasing variety of plants, pea shooters, etc., that are your only defense against swarms of staggering zombies. It could have been potentially gory, but fortunately it's all cartoon images and there's a sense of zany fun to the game that makes it compelling.

It's also widely available, on Mac, PC, iPhones, iPads, etc. In fact, it's the iPad version that was sufficiently compelling that I actually played through the entire game and finished it up, then went back and tried to optimize my approach on some of the hardest levels.

Just in time for the holidays, PopCap has released a new "Game of the Year" edition of Plants vs. Zombies. Is it worth buying if you already have PvZ?

Here's an interesting mystery for you: I wrote an article with this title back in 2005, with the original question thusly:

"Dave, I was hoping you could help on this really security alert that keeps on coming up every time I go on the Internet. The alert states the following:

Information you exchange with this site cannot be viewed or changed by others. However, there is a problem with the site's security certificate. The security certificate was issued by a company you have chosen not to trust. View the certificate to determine whether you want to trust the certifying authority. The certificate is valid and the security certificate has a valid name matching the name of the page you are trying to view.

I would be very grateful if you could help stop this security alert from appearing in future."

If you travel as much as I do, you'd appreciate that being able to pack a small external speaker in your luggage is a great benefit: between my iPhone, MacBook Pro and iPad, there are lots of devices that can produce good audio, I just need something to plug into 'em.

Ideal travel speakers are tiny but somehow have great sound and good bass response and don't require any wires at all, since space is at a premium when I'm packing. Oh, and they should weight next to nothing and look cool. I know, dream on, there are indeed some sort of compromises that I have to make.

YUBZ Magnum Bluetooth Portable Speaker

YUBZ (which is pronounced "why you busy?") has an interesting entrant in this market with its rather pricey Magnum bluetooth speaker because it's also a fully functional hands-free speakerphone device for iPhones and other bluetooth cell phones.

It's interesting. But is it worth $90? Read on...

So you want to know how to be good in Runescape? How to train your account after you just started? Well this is the perfect guide for you. Today I will tell you how to make money as a level 3 player, how to train for certain skills etc. So let's get on with it!

Getting a weapon and training combat

When you come out of Explorer Jack's house you should be able to see a building with dummies in it which you can hit for combat training. Talk to the melee instructor and get a free training sword and shield. Go to the nearby general store and get all the free stuff there including the bronze dagger.

Go the fishing and axe shop which are in Lumbridge too and get the free tools there. It will all come in handy. Now for combat training, cross the bridge near the furnace and you should see a paddock with cows in it. Go in there and start killing the cows for combat training. Don't pick up their bones which you could of course sell but I'll tell you how to make money with those later.

Now you know how to train combat I'll tell you how to make money...

I've been looking for a nice sounding clock radio that would let me dock and charge my iPods or iPhone 4, without having to break the bank. The Apple Store has some really nice ones, but at a premium price, like the terrific $399 Bose SoundDock that sounds great but requires a second mortgage.

Here's the funny thing about almost all of these iPod docks, however: they don't have clocks. Those were my two must-have items, actually. I wanted a clock so I could see the time at night, and I wanted a nice-sounding dock speaker system compatible with the range of iOS devices I own.

iHome iP90 ipod / iphone clock radio

Enter the iHome iP90 Am/Fm clock radio for iPod and iPhone. With a street price as low as $70 (see Google Products for your options), it's not breaking the bank, but it has nice sound and a lot of thoughtful features that made me glad I had it on my dresser...

If you're running an online business like I am, there are times when you need to connect and log in to the server to tweak or check things. It can't be helped and while the Cpanel solution and related are often splendid, sometimes I just like to get bits all over my hands as I "go old school" on my server and use a command line.

In those instances there's a nice solution on the Mac called "Terminal", included with Mac OS X, and there's a rudimentary terminal window app for Windows too, but once you move onto mobile devices of any nature, nothing's available.

That's why I was so interested in iSSH [iTunes link], a low-cost iPad application that lets me connect directly to my Web server via a secure, encrypted connection (SSH = secure shell, it's the secure alternative to "telnet') from my iPad and, in case of a crisis, even my iPhone.

I'll admit it, I'm a fairly hardcore casual gamer. Wait, is that an oxymoron? Maybe. Anyway, I find that I often fill very short time periods during the day with a casual puzzle game on my iPhone. Nothing where I'm caught up for 20 minutes or longer, but literally just a few minutes at a time.

I've gone through - and finished or burned out on - a number of games in this category, notably Peggle [iTunes link] and Plants vs. Zombies [iTunes link], but a new game has hit my phone and, well, I'm very caught up in its play right now. The game is yet another variation on the popular puzzle matching style of Bejeweled [iTunes link], but somehow Gyrotate is way more fun and interesting...

Oh, and it's free. :-)

I've been working with windowing systems on computers, graphical user interfaces, for over twenty-five years. My first taste was the MIT X Window System back when Apple was selling the Lisa and Microsoft was trying to get people interested in something called Windows 3.1.

One of the very best features of the X Window Systems (or "X Windows") was its virtual workspaces, where you could "virtually" have as many monitors as you wanted, and could use simple keystrokes to switch between them.

This feature is included in Mac OS X and has been for a long time, and it's called "Spaces". If you don't already use it, you're really missing out on one of the gems of the Mac system, a feature that's pure gold for productivity in my opinion...

A lot of noise-reducing devices have passed through our offices, and I've had many in-flight opportunities to test things and see how they work, but even with that, I have to say I am astonished at how extraordinarily well the Nokia BH-905 bluetooth headphones work when the automatic noise reduction is enabled.

Nokia BH-905 bluetooth stereo headphones

Which isn't to say that these are perfect, because they're not. In fact, there's a design flaw that I found incredibly frustrating and which caused me to more than once pull them out of my bag just to find them dead...

The idea of being able to access all my files and data from anywhere on the Internet is darn tempting. Imagine having a multi-terrabyte file server that only you - and people you invite - can share, and imagine it's fast, easy to set up, and surprisingly inexpensive. Enter the oddly-named Pogoplug. For under $100 (at Buy.com) it does a great job of creating your own personal Internet file server.

CloudEngines has a pleasantly modern sensibility and the documentation that they included with the review unit had a "popcorn test": betting that you could configure it and get going faster than you could microwave a bag of popcorn. Confident, but they would have lost the bet with me...

Buying any sort of modern electronics device typically includes buying a case or holder for it, and while laptops can easily go into a computer bag you might already own, just about everyone I've seen with an Apple iPad has opted for an iPad case too, whether it's the black Apple case or from one of the increasing number of third parties offering a solution.

I've had a chance to try out a number of different iPad cases and compare them. Generally, I have my iPad in a case for protection, then mostly carry the entire unit in my computer bag or otherwise protected from the elements.

I started out with the Apple iPad Case, then switched to a Newer Technology iFolio and a Waterfield Designs iPad Smart Case, then a Macally Bookstand case and an Incase Nylon Sleeve, and have now settled on... well, read on to find the answer!

If you follow my Twitter stream (I'm @DaveTaylor on Twitter) you already know that I'm a bit of a fanatic about the FIFA World Cup and this year it's the first time I can actually bring the World Cup with me thanks to my Apple iPhone. It's every four years and the iPhone was introduced in 2007, so I think I had a Motorola RAZR during the last Cup (e.g., a phone that was dead useless in terms of helping me enjoy the matches).

The World Cup is the single most popular sporting event in the world, but oddly is unpopular here in the United States. That's the subject of a different article, however. Suffice to say, I find it odd that only one or two of my friends even watch matches, let alone pay attention to the entire Cup.

Fortunately, there's lots of commercial interest in the World Cup with useful apps from both ESPN [iTunes link] and Fox Soccer Channel [iTunes link]. What I really wanted was to watch the matches live on my iPhone -- now my iPhone 4 -- and that's where MobiTV comes in...

Did you ever notice how when you do certain types of searches on Google that the results include cool and useful things above and beyond just pages that match? The one I use a lot is math equations. Try it by searching for "(300*0.75)/2" or similar. Neat, eh?

Turns out that not only does Google have quite a few of those tricks up its proverbial sleeve (try searching for a FedEx tracking number or movie title) but it turns out that those customized search results are part of a program Google calls "Subscribed Links"...

[This is a guest submission...]

Perhaps the biggest compliment a blogger can receive is more traffic (an increase in the number of visitors) to their site. It creates a feeling of accomplishment and high credibility. Any blogger would enjoy the reputation of having their opinions and information spread across the Internet, reaching thousands, if not millions of people.

This question (more like a desire) consumes the minds of most bloggers and it's quite legit. In fact, every time I talk to someone who blogs, the first thing they ask me is "How can I improve my SEO" once they find out I'm an SEO guy.

This is a guest submission...

For the past 4 years I have patiently waited for a tablet that satisfies my need for portability and my regular computing needs. As a teacher, I actually use the touch interface to communicate with my students. Without a touch screen, I have to plug in my trusty bamboo tablet and I loathe carrying extra stuff while on the road. Predictions that 2010 is the year of the tablet inspire me to watch the chatter of best new tablet. And I can't thank Apple enough for releasing the first (and probably second) generation of the iPad if for no other reason than the also-rans will push a product to market just to capture the iPad spillover. Yet, none of the tablets on the market now, nor those immediately in production can beat my 4 year-old Samsung Q1.

Which is ridiculous. Seriously. As much as I love it, this thing is 4 years old.

A light illuminates on your dashboard. "Oh, I recognize that one", you think. Maybe you choose to ignore it, or maybe it is an easy fix, it goes away momentarily, days later it happens again. Is it a wiring mishap or is something seriously wrong? Your mechanic might charge you $100's to figure it out, or you can do it yourself with CarMD, a handheld device that works with cars newer than 1996. Coupled with an online database, the device provides you with information only your mechanic had; until now for only $98.99.

When the team at CarMD gave me a sample device at Macworld 2010 I had planned to check it out the next time my car acted up. As I just "invested" over $5,000 into it, I had hoped that was not going to happen for a while; a few weeks at least. Unfortunately, a few days later, my check engine light turned on, so I figured it was time for my review...

If you're reading this, odds are you are under attack. Your Web server is being crushed under the extraordinary load of thousands or even millions of bogus requests. How do you deal with it?

Before we jump into that, a quick definition, courtesy of Wikipedia:

A distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) occurs when multiple systems flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system, usually one or more web servers. These systems are compromised by attackers using a variety of methods, though most commonly it's due to malware or trojan attacks, either pre-scheduled or triggered by an external event.

One of my favorite features of Mac OS X is how PDF (portable document format) tools are tightly integrated into the operating system. Want to save something as a PDF document? Any app that can send a document to the printer, be it a Web page, a screen capture, or a nicely formatted report, can just as easily do a "Save As PDF", and even specify what image quality should be used. Sure, Adobe sells its Distiller program, but on a Mac I would estimate that 95%+ of your document to PDF requirements are already included in the operating system.

This capability is completely missing from the Windows world, whether you're running Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7. It's just not the same. This means that if you want to work with PDF files, you're going to need to spend some money getting a commercial application that adds this set of features to your PC.

That's why I was interested in learning more about Smart PDF Converter Pro when the company contacted me. I switch back and forth and quite often find that it's very useful to send an unmodifiable document to a client or customer, a PDF rather than a Word file or HTML page. Testing Smart PDF Converter Pro? Sure!

On the surface, affiliate marketing one of the best start-up businesses around, as it requires very little in the way of capital investment and all you really need to get started are a computer, electricity, and an Internet connection (all of which most of us already have). Plus a lot of elbow grease and creativity, especially in the early days.

More and more, people are finding that Skype is a great alternative to picking up the phone and calling a friend or colleague, whether they're just a few miles away or halfway around the globe. I use the service to collaborate with people from around the United States and since we both run the free app (get it at skype.com) it's completely free for all parties involved. With a bit of fiddling, you can even set up three way conference calls.

Or you can do what I do: use Skype as a way to record podcasts (I'm involved with two: Boulder Open Podcast and Three In Sight) even when everyone can't sit down in the same room in front of the same microphone. But how do you record Skype calls? That's not a feature built into the application.

That's where Call Recorder for Skype from Ecamm Network came in: I downloaded a copy of this commercial application ($19.95) and installed it on my Mac.

Ok, I get you like small form-factor cameras because having one with you is better than having a pro rig that's in the closet at home, but which camera do you suggest for an advanced amateur photographer? I take a lot of pictures of our [dog, cat, ferret, parakeet, hamster, kids] to send to grandparents and post on Facebook, but want to be able to shoot really good quality pictures too, not just snapshots. What do you recommend?

Every time you hook up your iPhone to your PC the iTunes app immediately starts by doing a backup of everything that's on the phone. But what is it actually backing up and is there any way to get to the information that's there if you were to lose your phone or if you just want to poke around?

That's the purpose of iBackupBot (formerly known as iPodRobot), a slick little Windows app that makes access the contents of your backups a breeze, whether it's photos, videos, notes, SMS chats or your address book. Some of 'em are already accessible via iTunes, but if you wanted to grab a Note or save a particularly amusing (or incriminating!!) text message, Apple leaves you out to dry....

To set the scene, VOWSoft, Ltd. contacted me and asked if I'd review the application. Since I sync my iPhone on a Mac, not a PC, I had to copy my backup data files across to my Windows 7 system, but I did and it worked great right out of the [virtual] box.

Ever since adhesive companies like 3M came up with high-quality sticker materials, companies have slowly but surely been licensing brands, logos and artwork to help us personalize our laptops, car windows and personal electronics. The first generation were a pain to work with because the stickers were often too sticky: put them on slightly wrong and you were quite literally "stuck" and lifting corners to erase stray bubbles or seams could end up ruining the skin and leave it unstuck on one side.

The latest generation are a huge improvement with their increased thickness and extraordinary vivid color retention. They can be cut into extremely accurate forms and custom fit whatever device you have. With iPhones, they wrap around the back of the phone and include cut-outs for the camera lens and an irregular edge that neatly extends the sticker without covering up any of the controls.

But are they worth it? Should you rush out and drop $15-20 to emblazon your favorite band, artist or comic book hero on the back of your iPhone?

To find out, I was given sample skins from the two main players in this market: GelaSkins and MusicSkins. Both use the exact same 3M film, and both seem to use the same die to cut their stickers to fit the iPhone, so the difference is primarily in the graphic itself. But there's more to it than that, as you'll see...

As I have moved more into conference calls via Skype and am now involved in two podcasts on a weekly basis (Boulder Open Podcast (or in iTunes) and Three Insight (or in iTunes), you are listening to them, right? I hope so!) I'm finding that the built-in microphone on my MacBook Pro isn't the optimal audio quality. Worse, there's also a frequent feedback loop of it picking up the audio coming out of the speakers which leads to a sort of weird echo/reverb loop.

As a result, I've been on the hunt for a good, small, portable microphone that will offer better audio quality and still be compact enough that I can have it in my computer bag without adding weight and bulk. My ideal is a tiny lavalier microphone that can be clipped onto my shirt and plug into the "mic" input on my MacBook Pro, but so far I haven't found a single manufacturer offering such a thing. Oddly, but maybe it's a tough problem.

When my colleagues and I have all been in the same room, we've been recording our podcasts using the Blue Microphone Snowball, which is a nice microphone but pretty big and bulky. When Blue Microphone contacted me and asked me if I wanted to evaluate the Snowflake, what they call their "portable professional USB mic", I was most interested...

Another game for the iPhone? I already have over a hundred games on my iPhone (one reason my kids are always stealing my phone!) so when my friend Gary dropped me a note to let me know that his long-time hit Gold Strike [iTunes link] was now available through the iPhone App Store, I was skeptical. He writes great games but still, another game? Fortunately, I sprang for the $0.99, dropped it onto my phone and am impressed!

This is a guest article written by freelance programmer Ville-Matti Hakanpää

In this brief introductory tutorial I will go through some basic aspects of Facebook application development. The work itself is basic app programming, but it's a whole new world and environment. If you have a wonderful idea, Facebook can work as a great distribution channel for you. Heck, even a bad idea can get some attention fast!

Start out with the most basic of questions, though: what makes a good app?

That's the first and most common question people are asking or they should be asking. The best way to start when you're trying to decide what to develop is to look through all the other applications what are inside Facebook already. Facebook applications are listed and rated by users, so there's a feedback loop there too that tells you the kind of things people find useful and engaging.

If you're big into movies, TV or other media, you already know that more and more shows and productions are getting short movies to advertise them, "trailers" that you can now even find for books and video games (though you're not likely to see those in a movie theater). I write a film blog too, so I pay close attention to trailers for upcoming movies, which is why the Apple iPhone app TrailerSpy Mobile [iTunes link] caught my interest. Here's what I found...

I'm a fan of Audio-Technica consumer electronics gear and have been for many years. Decades ago, I'm pretty sure I had an Audio-Technica turntable and my earbuds of preference are Audio-Technica Quietpoint ATH-ANC3 (see my review: Audio-Technica ATH-ANC3 noise-reducing earbuds).

When I received a press release from the company about new foldable noise reducing headphones, it caught my interest, because my mainstay noise reducing headphones are the terrific Sennheiser PXC-300 headphones, but they have two issues: first, they're expensive at $150 (they were $300 when I got them two years ago!) and secondly the noise-reducing microphone electronics are big and unwieldy, the size of a small flashlight. A bit awkward.

So I asked Audio-Technica to send us a pair of the new ATH-ANC1 headphones to give a test run and so far, with one glitch, they've been great.

[This article is written by Contributing Editor Gary Moskoff]

A lot of companies are realizing that they can advertise and promote their brands through utilities, games and other applications for the Apple iPhone, including Walmart, Starbucks, REI, Sears, Audi, Target, Nikon, Toyota, Honda, Ikea and Nike, to name just a few.

Most of these, however, come across as me-too applications that aren't particularly creative, games that aren't very fun or as applications that just don't have much cool factor or completely miss their target audience of iPhone users anyway.

So who do I think is doing it best? You might be surprised...

I've written a lot about iPhones, and traveled down many different routes in terms of how to use them efficiently, how to have fun, and how to solve a wide variety of problems or glitches. If you've watched closely, you'll have also see in the screenshots that I have a lot of iPhone apps on my phone, in fact I think I've maxed out the number of screens I can create on the 3GS device.

Most of those apps? Games. I have a lot of games for my iPhone and while many of them are intended to keep my kids entertained (their favorites currently are Surviving High School, Cooking Mama, Oregon Trail, Sally's Spa and Pocket God) there are definitely some that I have added for my own enjoyment.

Peggle has you shooting a ball to bounce off, and thereby eliminate, red pegs on screen

Enter iPhone and computer game developer Popcap. I started out downloading Peggle and then finishing the game -- three times through! -- and asking them to release a new version so I could continue to play. Instead, they told me that they'd released a new game and wanted me to try it: Chuzzle.

[This review is written by contributing editors Deb and Thomas Frey]

Most product review are written shortly after the product is announced, but we thought it would be interesting to give our assessment of the Kindle 2 after using it for a year, and talk about how it has changed our lifestyle and the way we do business.

The Kindle 2 was first announced on February 24, 2009. We placed our order soon after it was announced, but had to wait a couple weeks for it to ship because of the intense demand. Our home looks like a library with books scattered from one end to the next, so we felt this would a good investment. The price we paid was $359 plus extra for incidentals, bringing the total outlay to over $400. Other than missing out on the major price reduction to $259 base price in October, we have not been disappointed.

On a personal note, once we received the Kindle 2, Deb instantly laid claim to the device, and Tom was only granted occasional visitation rights. Deb has since logged several hundred hours of intimate one-on-one time with "Johann," the name she has given to her Kindle, and the following are thoughts and observations from this extended road test.

If you are still clinging to your love for the printed word, there are several features on the Kindle that make it worth giving up the ink-on-paper version of books.

In April 2009 Stanford University announced that its iPhone Application Programming course had broken the 1 million download mark from the Apple iTunes site. And it did it in record time - less than seven weeks.

The course is nothing more than a series of classroom videos being taught by a team of Apple engineers. But the price was set at that very attractive price point of "free." One catch though, only people who were enrolled at Stanford University received credits for the course.

With over 200,000 courses from over 200 different institutions to pick from on iTunes U, and all of them free to anyone who wants to take them, Apple is quickly becoming the world leader in courseware aggregation. The obvious question to ask is "what is Apple's motivation for doing this?" and "how do they intend to make money?"

History of iTunes U

Shortly after Apple opened its iTunes Store in April 2003, the company started receiving requests from colleges to post courses on the site. Initially the requests were directed to the podcast section, but as the numbers grew, Apple devised a strategy for adding an entirely new division.

iTunes U was formally in May 2007. The service was created to manage, distribute, and control access to educational audio and video content for students within a college or university as well as the broader Internet.

[This is a guest article written by entrepreneur Zack Shapiro of the University of Colorado, Boulder]

I live in Boulder, Colorado, home of TechStars, a slew of bloggers and start-ups galore. Everyone seems to have their own great idea for the next big thing. Start-ups come in all shapes and sizes; they aren't all websites either. A start-up can be anything from a new city service to a catering company to an iPhone app.

When someone has a great idea they usually need money to make their idea a reality. But how do they get the money they need to take their dream from a prototype or a piece of paper, to a product that others can use, buy or otherwise interact with?

There are three major types of funding that entrepreneurs often seek out. Those three types are available in the forms of Friends and Family (commonly called F&F), Angel Investors and Venture Capital. Each require those interested to present or pitch their ideas in hopes that the particular investor will be interested in funding a project that aims, down the road, to be a self-sustaining business. Investors exist to make dreams come true for those that would otherwise not be able to fund, say, a 20 person staff over four years as their product evolves and matures.

I've been a mostly casual photographer for more years than I can count, starting with cheesy little cameras and working my way up through Konica gear to Nikon, the gold standard in the world of professional photographers. Today I take photos, sometimes paid, mostly just for fun, with a Nikon D90 tricked out with a full set of additional Nikon gear, about $2500 worth, plus or minus a few hundred dollars.

The results are quite pleasing and I have photos all over the walls of my home, photos that I took, mostly of my children. When I upgraded from the D80 (which was itself an upgrade from my D100), I had shot about 18,000 pictures on it. The D90 is newer, so I think I'm still below 5,000 shots taken.

Nikon Coolpix P90 Digital SLR

When Nikon contacted me to try out one of their Coolpix cameras, the P90, I was quite intrigued. After all, in addition to my big Nikon DSLR setup, my other cameras are a Sony DSC-W90, about the size of a deck of playing cards, and my Apple iPhone. The P90 fits neatly in the middle, less complicated (and expensive) than the D90, and far more capable than the frankly crappy Sony, where 90% of the pics are too grainy to print.

What most attracted me to the P90 was its 24x digital zoom, effectively giving you a staggering focal range of 26-624mm. That's quite a zoom factor in a small camera that can easily nestle in a backpack or computer bag. But since most every feature of a modern digital camera has been commoditized and then end up identical on every camera in a specific price range, regardless of vendor, the only real question to me was: how do the pictures look?

Imagine a device that's about the size of three credit cards and can let you and four of your friends (or multiple of your devices) connect to the Internet at decent 3G speeds, all while sitting in your briefcase / computer bag / coat pocket. The up-and-coming "mifi" (mobile wifi) devices are a fascinating hybrid gizmo that offers the smallest wifi base station you can imagine, tapping into either the Verizon or Sprint data networks.

Verizon loaned me one of their mifi-2200 units and I have to say this is a fabulous gizmo, one that I'll find out about buying when my loaner period is over. It's that good.

As I said, the device is tiny: even in its little cloth pouch, it's less than half the size of my Apple iPhone, and considerably lighter. It uses a micro-USB connector for both charging and direct connectivity (if you prefer to use it as a tethered cellular data network modem), so it's also extremely portable. I know I've gotten into having it in my computer bag 24x7.

It's a puzzle: is a Microsoft Windows Vista laptop with a crystal-clear 12.1-inch screen, 320GB hard drive, 4GB of RAM and a carrying weight - without the external Blu-Ray drive - of about four pounds a netbook? An ultralight notebook? A laptop? HP calls it an "Entertainment Notebook" and refers to it in press materials as "one of the thinnest, lightest notebooks in the market".

Whatever we call it, I was delighted to get my hands on one of these shiny, well-built DV2 computers that offered a very different PC experience than the usual low-budget, poorly assembled PC gear. Focused on multimedia capabilities and highly portable, the DV2 is a fast device with a terrific screen -- plenty crisp and bright enough to let you enjoy movies, even Blu-Ray disks via the external drive -- and a comfortable, solid feeling keyboard.

At $669 (with a $30 rebate that HP's currently offering as I write this review) the DV2 is not the least expensive notebook on the market and it's not even close to the cheapest notebook that HP offers, for that matter. But it's not price, it's value that counts, and that's where we get into another dilemma: would you be happy paying $700 for a multimedia laptop computer that only had a 12" screen?

I think the answer is "yes", because from my own testing, the attractive DV2 fits in quite well between cheaper, small-screen netbooks and more expensive, bigger-screen, heavier notebooks...

If you've owned an Apple iPhone 3GS, 3G or still have an original iPhone, I don't need to tell you that one of the constant hassles with the phone is battery life. It's better in the newest phone, but everyone who has an iPhone seems to have their own strategy for minimizing battery usage, ranging from "don't use the 3G network" to "disable wifi" to "turn off everything, especially bluetooth".

I leave everything enabled on my phone except Bluetooth and my adaptation strategy has been to have lots of power cords with me: two in my house, one in my car, and one in my computer bag so I can sip at USB power whenever I'm using my computer on the go. It's a hassle, but it's manageable.

Where this breaks down is when you're at a trade show or out for the day, without the chance of getting near a power plug, computer or vehicle. You've seen it at parties, i bet: people making BFF's because they have the ability to quick charge iPhones, huddled by the wall outlet like it's the illicit drug of choice.

It's no surprise that add-on and extension batteries are a popular accessory for Apple iPhones, and six months ago, the major contenders were awkward battery devices with universal plugs that acted like an external gas tank: useful if needed, but clunky as heck.

The newest generation of these devices are sleek and double as iPhone cases, and two of the best are from Tekkeon and Mophie.

Do they work, though, and how do they compare? Read on...

I've lost count of how many iPods I have here in the office, but it's at least a dozen of various sizes, shapes, and technologies, ranging from a first generation mini-hard drive unit with a firewire connector to the very latest Classic (that's an odd expression, isn't it?)

In addition, I'm a big fan of my Apple iPhone, which among many other great features, is a splendid iPod in its own right and currently stores 1716 of my favorite CD tracks quite neatly (49 artists, 146 CDs), along with tons of apps, my phone book, and enough games to even keep my kids quiet for ten minutes.

The problem with all of these devices is that when you're ready to skip to the next track because you just don't want to hear the one that came up in shuffle mode, or even just prefer to jump past certain songs, it's a pain in the booty to pull your iPod or iPhone out of your pack, bag or pocket, unlock it, and tap the right button to get to the next track.

Apple's addressed that with the slick new iPod shuffle's smart controller headphone cord (a double-tap advances to the next track) but for the millions of other iPods in the market, what's the smart solution?

Enter the Griffin Technology Navigate device...

I can still remember the first Mac I used: it was a 512K unit that the fine folk at the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link loaned me when they hired me to hack their discussion system and make it faster. At the time I'd just left my job at Hewlett-Packard and had no computer of my own (back then people didn't have computers unless they were hardware hobbyists or could handle cassette backups).

To the proffered loaner Macintosh I can recall saying "uh, no thanks, I don't really need a toy computer. I'll figure out another way to connect to your computer network." At the time, I was living in Los Altos, basically southwest of Palo Alto and due north of Apple headquarters in Cupertino, and the WELL was located north of the Golden Gate bridge in beautiful Sausalito. Way too far to drive for the work. So I had to get a computer of some sort.

I reluctantly accepted the dorky little fishbowl unit that was reminiscent of the Osborne my Dad had won in a sweepstakes a year or two earlier, and...

This is a guest article, written by Tim Beyers.

Rarely do I need access to Windows programs. For the times when I do, I've switched from a Parallels virtual machine running XP to CodeWeavers' CrossOver for Mac, a virtual environment that simulates the Win32 API, one program at a time.

What CrossOver for Mac is

CrossOver is built on the open source Wine project, which proposes to re-implement the Windows architecture for Unix. Thus, systems that draw from a Unix kernel -- Mac OS X and Linux, notably -- can use Wine to run Windows programs as if they were native to the underlying architecture.

I'm perpetually running out of disk space on my computers. If you follow me on Twitter (I'm @DaveTaylor), you've probably seen me every so often send out a message asking about this, that or the other upgrade path for one of my computers because things are filling up.

That's why when I saw that TechRestore was offering a 500GB internal drive upgrade path for my trusty MacBook Pro, I was quite interested. My existing drive at the time was only 149GB in size (that's actual usable size) and it was about 90% full, and that was with me sporadically pruning everything.

I contacted Shannon Jean at TechRestore and asked if they'd run an upgrade for me so I could see how the process worked, in return for me sharing the experience with you, my readers, and they agreed.

Here's how it went...

As a contributing author to a weblog about South Africa's upcoming World Cup 2010 (see The South Africa Project) I was rather surprised the other day when I went to log in to our Wordpress blog, just to see the following warning in my Web browser:

What does it mean? How can we get this sort of warning from our own site, without ever opening up anything or getting any indication that we'd be hacked or compromised?

Google is one of many companies that's been pushing the various capabilities of mobile devices and exploring how to make its vast storehouse of search data accessible in novel and interesting ways to people with the G-1 (the so-called Google Phone) and the Apple iPhone.

The latest example is Google's introduction of its mobile shopping interface, officially called Google Product Search for Mobile. If you never search for products for sale - probaly to do some comparison shopping - you might never bump into it, but it's pretty cool.

Let me show you...

In previous blog entries (see How do I sponsor searches on Google? and Advertising cannot be your only online marketing channel), I've talked about how to use paid services to promote your business online, focusing specifically on Google Adwords and how it lets your company appear as "sponsored" results on a search page. Then we talked last week about the distressingly ephemeral nature of paid advertising and explored examples of how mindshare rapidly declines once you stop paying.

The solution to the dilemma, the path to sustained visibility in the online world, is to understand the gestalt of Google, if you will, the core concept behind modern Internet search engines. Once you understand how they work, you'll see how you can rethink your online presence to maximize results without paying the proverbial arm and a leg.

In a word: content.

[This is a contributed article...]

We all know that almost all the countries have been hit by the economic slowdown. Actually recession has not been set into action as yet while I write this article. When you read this it may have but it is predicted that recession will set in my mid June or July 2009. Most people confuse recession and economic slowdown. Job cuts have been on the rise. People are seeing lesser incentives and the whole world is experiencing a financial crisis. Anyway I will use the word recession throughout this article to avoid confusion. Is it so bad that we cannot recover from it in any way? I don't think so. The main reason I believe that grows this recession is that most of us just sit and think about it alone.

I say think different!!!

Think about what you want always. Here are 28 tips to recover from recession and cut down on your costs, improve your conversions and more. What I am going to say now maybe just opposite to what you may have believed to be true or what your business consultant may have told you. Trust me on this, this is the truth.

In an earlier blog entry (see How to sponsor a search result), I talked about how to use Google AdWords to promote your business and how to get "sponsored" results in search engines like Google and Yahoo. I continue the conversation by talking about low cost grassroots ways that you can promote your business online through having a great content-based Web site, social networking and other avenues.

But first, I want to talk about why it's important to not just rely on paid advertising when you want to promote your business online.

The purpose of cases are to protect and so it should be no surprise to find out that plastic protective cases for laptops and phones get dinged up and scratched. The advancement in plastic materials, however, and ability to pour just about any color or finish seems to have let manufacturers leap too far ahead and produce products that are remarkable both in their attractive appearance and their fragility.

In this piece I'll talk about two that I've been using for the last month or two: A Speck Products See Thru Macbook Air case and an iFrogz 3G Luxe iPhone case

Whether you realize it or not, an enemy of your computer's performance is dust. Over time, your fans will pick up dust which collects on the components, the heat sink and on the fan blades themselves. Eventually, this impedes cooling and can cause your machine to run hot, reducing efficiency. It can also gum up the working mechanism of the fans, causing them to overheat or seize.

The issue? One you probably think about every day: how do I speed up my PC?

I find myself in hotel rooms more often than the average person and it never fails that the music I want to listen to, the music on my computer or iPhone, is available if I want to use headphones or the cheesy little speakers on the devices, but if I want to have it sound good and fill the room? I'm outta luck.

If you work in an office - especially after hours - you might well have a similar desire for a nice little speaker system that you can keep neatly tucked in your desk drawer when everyone's around but pull out and enjoy when the coast is clear.

That's why I was glad to receive a review iLuv iSP100 portable speaker device. I've looked at others in this category, but the iLuv is advertised as having a different speaker technology that gives it better bass response and volume.

The results?

If you're highly mobile, if you travel to trade shows or just walk around campus all day, or perhaps if you take long plane flights, you already know that for all the great features of the Apple iPhone, extended battery life ain't one of them.

Indeed, when we recently attended the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show it was by the end of the first day when it became apparent that the iPhone just didn't have the battery longevity we needed.

That's why we decided to test out extended iPhone compatible batteries at the show, seeking out vendors and asking them for samples and demo units. Most of them were not very good and I'll note that when I tried one that was powered by a pair of AA batteries it died before even completing a single charge. Useless.

Fortunately, I did find one that I was very impressed with, the Power Air Zpowerpac13 and have subsequently been sent a second that's also very good, the morphie juice pack.

I've gone through an amazing number of iPhone cases in the last year or so, between the ten or so I reviewed for the first gen iPhone and the cases I've been sent for the newer 3G phone. At first, my iPhone cases of choice were the rubberized ones like those from InCase Designs. (they call it a "form-fitting, injection molded material", of course, but to me it's just a fancy sort of rubber)

Then I realized that since I like to slip my iPhone into the front pocket of my pants, I'd often end up with the case collecting lint. Not so good, so I moved to harder plastic shells, but didn't really find any that I loved. Well, I like the Griffin Wave for its mix and match capabilities, but not enough that I haven't kept looking.

Until iFrogz generously gave me a couple of their 3G Luxe cases. What can I say, these just ROCK!

One of the many different gizmos we were given at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show was a slick little portable speaker system from long-time audio component firm Altec Lansing.

Imagine a device not much bigger than a 2-inch tall Coke can that you can plug into your iPod or laptop and you've got an idea of what the orbit M speaker looks like.

Cloud computing. What the heck does it mean, anyway? If you're confused by the phrase, you're not alone, because it's as prevalent now as the air we breathe. Without knowing it, you use cloud computing-based services everyday! Still, many aren't aware of just what cloud computing is and why it even matters. The basics of cloud computing is nothing new -- It's similar to the days of mainframe timesharing, where companies shared resources to process data for their needs. The difference today is that many cloud computing-based services and solutions run on thousands of low-cost PCs which are glued together by sophisticated software and networks.

So, here's a crash-course on cloud computing in three, two, one ...

I've gone to the Consumer Electronics Show for years, and generally the innovations there are because something is bigger, faster or brighter (think TVs and audio gear). Occasionally you'll find a company that's rethought a common object -- like, say, an iPod dock -- and done good things with it, but mostly it's the same stuff you saw the previous year, just refined and reengineered.

For 2009 the commodity item at the show seems to have been headphones, ear buds and other personal listening devices to improve your iPod, cell phone, Gameboy, PSP, laptop and other handheld device listening experience. I came home with a half-dozen different ones!

The one that I found brilliant, however, wasn't the one with skulls on the ends (though that was cool), or the one with personalizable earbud ends (again, cool idea) or even the lower priced noise-reducing units. The winner in my book was the listening devices from iHearSafe that limit the max volume of what you're hearing...

I was trying to sell an old laptop on Craigslist and got so confused trying to differentiate between legitimate and scam offers. For example, one guy from France offered to send me a money order and let me cash it before I sent out the computer, and was willing to pay more than I was asking. Another said he was happy to pay via Paypal if I just sent him my Paypal account ID. Were either of those legit? If not, how do the scams work?

Ever wonder where your kids go during the day? Or perhaps you're curious how many miles you travel, point to point, in a typical week? Heck, maybe you're the suspicious type and want to know where your spouse drives the car while you're working?

All of these questions can now be answered by devices called GPS tracking systems that combine the geolocation capabilities of a GPS with a rudimentary recording system and a simple computer interface, typically all packaged as a chunky USB memory stick.

The Telespial Systems' Trackstick II is one of the more interesting GPS tracking systems on the market and I was pleased to get one from the company for review. It's clunky, but performs as advertised, offering a wealth of interesting data and answers to all of the questions I posed above.

Is Santa Claus real, or just something us grownups invented to keep kids guessing about the presents they receive on Christmas morning? It's a question that I wrote about on my blog a few years ago (see Is Santa Claus Real?) and since then have been delighted to receive literally hundreds of comments, almost all from children, talking about their own beliefs and their "proof" that Santa is or isn't real.

I thought that in the spirit of Christmas it would be fun to just share some of the more amusing and poignant comments that have been added over the years.

I recently had an opportunity to interview well-known video game expert and celebrity Fatal1ty, mostly asking him about the current state of the art with computer gaming and what he sees coming in the future. Oh, and why he's called "Fatal1ty", for that matter. I hope you enjoy this interview, which - as you'll see - is, uh, powered by Creative Labs, makers of the Fatal1ty line of computer gaming gear...

Q: What do you think is the best all-around PC game of 2008?

Call of Duty: World at War.

Q: Are games getting better, or has the industry passed its prime, just coming out with sequels and such?

This is a contributed article written by my friends and pro photographers Brad & Jeanine Crooks.

Have you ever wondered why some "people" pictures grab your attention a little more than others? It's probably because the image is conceptual - it tells a story.

BPSI - these are 4 simple letters to keep in mind while photographing people. These letters are an acronym for Background, People (or Person), Symbol, and Involvement. Keeping this formula in mind will help you to conceptualize your people pictures, making them much more interesting and definitely more saleable. This formula was taught to me years ago by Rohn Engh, author of "Sell and Re-Sell Your Photos"?

Social Media Networks like Facebook and LinkedIn offer businesses new channels through which to conduct marketing and advertising. But how effective are these, really? Ask any SEO or online marketing expert and they will tell you that it's an organic process and it takes time to develop real results. The key is to have good content that turns people into repeat visitors to your website - eventually they will buy.

Really? "If you build it they will come?"

"The Great Depression." "The Worst Recession in our Lifetime!" It's hopeless - what can you do?

As a business owner or manager, it really depends on where you place your focus, because it turns out there is a lot you can do. Here are five things you can do right now to start to change things for your company.

#1 - "Give better Service - and remember the 'little things'."

The little things aren't so little - especially when customers are looking for reasons to cut back on doing business with you. What can you do to distinguish your business from your competition? Start with the easiest ones - get creative!

One restaurant owner changed how she presented receipts to her customers. Instead of those old, dirty black plastic folders or trays, she gave presented the bill in an ornamental box, or sometimes in a music box. This set her apart in her customers' eyes and made them feel special.

Only a few years ago this question might have not been so clear. But here we are today wondering where this is going to go. Lots of questions to ponder. Is television turning into the Web?

Will we be watching former television shows online in the future? If so, how soon? Will our televisions become obsolete eventually because everyone will be focused on their computer screens? Do we even want to watch television programming online?

And… will the government stand in our way or not?

It's a known fact that fresh, unique content is the lifeblood of any website.

But here comes the problem.

It's not easy to crank out unique content on a consistent basis especially if you are not a good writer. Well, even if you are an excellent writer, you'll have to have time to write.

Anyway, I have a better solution for you.

Why not you get someone else to create content for you - through interviews?

November 5 every year the English (and some other Commonwealth nations) celebrate Guy Fawkes Night with fireworks, parties and other festivities. But who was Guy Fawkes and what exactly are we celebrating when we commemorate the Gunpowder Plot?

I'm going back and forth on whether to spend the money and buy myself an Apple iPhone. In a lot of ways it seems like a very cool phone, and certainly it has far more features than my clunky old LG. I know about the core functions, but my first glance at the iPhone Application Store was totally overwhelming. I mean, there are HUNDREDS of applications. Tell me, what are your favorites and do you stick just to free apps, or have you bought some too?

If you've been on a plane flight in the last decade, you've doubtless seen people with huge headphones on their ears from Bose, headphones that would cut out most of the background noise even if they weren't using noise-canceling technology. It's not rocket science, big headphones can reduce background noise. But can little in-ear "ear bud" headphones prove effective in noisy environments too?

To find out, I review the Audio-Technica active noise-canceling QuietPoint ATH-ANC3 headphones.

For new players, World of Warcraft can prove to be somewhat overwhelming. After you've chosen your race and customized your character you are instantly transported into a massive 'virtual world'; it's understandable that this might cause some confusion.

Here are some basic survival tips for those new to the World of Warcraft...

Rock Band quickly became a hit game among recreational and hardcore gamers alike. Rock Band 2 has already been released so if you've been dazzled by the quick fret play of expert mode and yearn to be able to shred up a Rock Band guitar then you are in luck!

EVE Online is an involved science fiction MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game). As such, even something as simple as creating your character can take a ton of thought and strategy. Even if you already have a character created, you may want to rethink your choices... the character customization process is much more complex than it seems, and if you don't take into account certain points you may deviate or steer the entirely opposite direction from your ideal in-game persona.

Team Deathmatch is one of the more populated modes on Call of Duty 4 multi-player and also the first mode available to play. The object of this mode is relatively simple, to stay alive and kill enough players on the opposing side to attain the 750 point goal.

It's that staying alive part that can be tricky, though, so if you are one of those players finding that most of their session is spent watching the 'Kill Cam' maybe its time for you to change your tactics...

The coolest thing about playing Pirates of the Caribbean Online is the ability to procure your own pirate ship. Being the captain of the ship comes with its advantages, but it comes with its duties and responsibilities as well; the seas of Pirates Online can prove quite treacherous to those who know nothing of ships and sailing. Use these tips to gain the edge on your competition and leave your enemies with a message, 'Beware, all those that challenge you'.

Welcome to Jack Sparrow's world! The life of a pirate can be defined in one word: dangerous, and so you can't afford to waste time in building your notoriety. Here are some tips on how to become the most hated scalawag of the online seas.

I'm just getting into the amazing war simulation game Call of Duty 4 and want to know if there are any cool tips or tricks you can share so I can learn how to gain levels or level up quickly in the game?

I played hooky today and came to the Custom Electronics Design and Installation Association (CEDIA) trade show and exposition in Denver, Colorado to see what's new. Sadly, not much. If you're a wirehead this is a cool place to visit, since much of the action is about flexible HDMI cables, very high quality speaker cables for recessed and invisible speaker systems, and lots of subwoofers for high-end home theater systems.

Nonetheless, I did see a few cool gadgets and gizmos that are worth writing about...

I recently purchased a new iPod; the Apple Nano 8GB, in silver. I don't use my iPod very often. But when I do...I do!! It is billed as the most popular music player in the world. I can understand why...

Wondering what to do with that Time Machine application that comes with the new Mac OS X Leopard? Have you thought about plunking $300 on Apple's Time Capsule?
Don't do it: wait until you read this review...

The LaCie Corporation have made hard disks for Macs since the beginning of time. They have a new external disk offering called the Big Disk Extreme 1TB. Let me first say yes, that's 1000 gigabytes of storage! Doubling the offering of Apple's Time Capsule device. At the time of writing this the disk was being sold for $224. That's more than $80 in savings over the Time Capsule and twice the storage too. But is it worth it?

So, what is the first thing you do when you get a dead simple video camera? You take a video of your recent dental implant to send to your cousins in the UK! Imagine how happy my Doctor cousin was upon receiving such a wonderful surprise in their email.

What device am I talking about? The Flip Ultra video camera.

I'm a big fan of Bluetooth, but not Bluetooth headsets. I know, it's probably a bit goofy, but I can't help think that it's a bad idea to have a wireless electronic device hooked over your ear and beaming random electrical waves into your skull.

Some modern phones have no options - either you use Bluetooth for a headset or you hold the phone itself up to your head - but fortunately the Apple iPhone has a very sophisticated headphone jack that actually lets you plug in a wired headset.

If you travel as frequently as I do, you've probably learned a few things about life on the road, tips that help you avoid problems and ensure that fluffy pillows are the biggest complaint you have, not lost data or crashed laptops.

One of my favorite tips, one that I have seen people ignore with really terrible results more than once, is to never apply a security update, patch or other system change when you're away from your office. If it goes wrong, you're in big trouble and you don't have your local geeks around to help recover things.

The second rule of thumb is: back up your critical files before you leave on your trip and again at least once while on the road. Just in case.

That's why I was glad to have an extended trip to Hawaii as an excuse to try out a few different approaches to data backup. The candidates: A Corsair 32GB flash drive, a Western Digital 160GB Passport drive and Memeo's LifeAgent Internet backup system, all connected to my trusty MacBook Pro.

My brother recently got a call telling him that he could get his tax refund that's part of the economic stimulus package early - and not have to wait until May or later. He almost gave his savings account number, but then he got suspicious. Now he wonders. Is this a scam?

Yes, it's a scam. Even before Congress passed the $170 billion stimulus package to boost the economy, scammers started calling people to get their bank account and credit card information, so they could steal money, identities, or both.

Some scammers even claimed that you would lose your refund if you didn't give them your personal and financial information immediately.

This is just one of over 1,000 IRS scams that is currently circulating. With the tax season upon us, scammers are now pulling out all the stops to fool their victims.

Here are some of the most popular IRS scams that are currently making the rounds...

Searched for a few things on your site and I hit pay dirt! Thank you. I'm am nonetheless uncertain on how to pick a MP3 player. I don't know what factors to take into consideration in order to guide my choice. What do you suggest? I'll use it mostly to listen to music on the train as I commute to work. I'm no tech wiz and one of the first things I'll need to master is how to download, so a complicated gizmo won't work out for me. So what should I consider : memory (how much is good?), size, weight, crash proof, compatibility with other technology that might be coming up, keys? As you can read, I have no clue!

I'm somewhat of an audiophile and have owned several pairs of high-end headphones. Trouble is, the thing that always breaks first on these headphones is the cord. I always get the cord caught in something or it gets broken somehow. Do you know of any solution to this?

This is part of a multi-part series on custom stickers. Part one is Custom Stickers For Your Business, part two is A Guide to Buying Custom Stickers and part three is Types of Sticker Printing.

If you're like most small businesses, or even if your business is a large one, you most likely need to advertise without going over a marketing budget. When you're marketing budget is pretty limited, you may not want to spend it all on radio and television advertising and print advertising is expensive as well. So, it goes without saying, that stickers are relatively inexpensive to print and they can be a great way to advertise.

Stickers incorporate one of the best forms of advertising there is – word of mouth. When placed in strategic places, or even in the most common of places, stickers are able to generate great interest. Historically, stickers have been well suited on car bumpers, but today you'll find them literally everywhere. From laptops to backpacks to windshields to storefront doors and windows, stickers can be stuck anywhere and everywhere. No matter where they are stuck, someone is bound to see them and your business will be recognized.

Stickers can be likened to miniature moving billboards...

This is part of a multi-part series on custom stickers. Part one is Custom Stickers For Your Business and part two is A Guide to Buying Custom Stickers.

Sticker printing has evolved greatly over the past several decades. While a black marker and white paper were once the tools of the trade, today's stickers are available in wide variety of stocks as well as a wide variety of color options.

Screen-printing is the oldest, but the most common technique of sticker printing. As the name implies, the process utilized silk, although today synthetic screens are now used. Screen-printing is the most basic form of printing stickers and is typically limited to very small amounts.

For screen-printing, ultra-violet cured pigment colors are used and the desired image is cut out onto a stencil. The stencil is then placed on the sticker stock. The screen is then laid over the top and ink poured on to the screen and pressed into place using a squeegee. If more than one color is required, the process must be done for each color and only after the last has dried. The process must only be completed once for one-color items.

I just got a MacBook Air and have been enjoying having the world's lightest laptop. It's an amazing piece of engineering and while it appears to have some critical features missing (like a DVD drive or Ethernet port) the fact is that I never used those features on my older MacBook Pro laptop either so it's not anything I miss.

Frankly, with my Corsair 8GB flash drive, it's just a super-modern version of "sneakernet" and was a breeze to jump onto the new device and use it full-time.

Even better, it gave me an opportunity to really pay attention to what I change on a stock Mac laptop to make it work for me. And that's what this article is about. Let's call it Dave's Guide to Critical Mac Software...

This is part of a multi-part series on custom stickers. Part one is Custom Stickers For Your Business...

If you have decided to purchase custom stickers for your business, you need to do a bit of planning. A little bit of knowledge can go a long way in saving you money and time. Taking the time to learn a bit about the process can help you navigate this process with no hassle.

First thing that all custom sticker buyers need to consider is how these stickers are going to be used. If your sticker is intended to be stuck on things that will last and that are outside, the sticker needs to be a vinyl sticker of some sort. If your sticker is temporary, for packaging, nametags, correspondence, or presentations, you can opt for a paper sticker.

Vinyl stickers cost slightly more than paper stickers but are much more durable. When they are laminated with a thin film over the ink, they are even more durable. This stock is called "Laminated White Vinyl." Vinyl comes in gloss white, a frosty clear, a clear static cling and a yellow stock. Laminated white vinyl is the most common material for stickers that are meant to last.

Paper stickers can be very inexpensive, yet are really meant for indoor or temporary use. The selection of paper stocks is much larger than vinyl. Gloss, Matte and smudge-proof paper stocks are the three most popular paper stocks. Fluorescent stocks are available in many colors and are popular for packaging and attention grabbing applications. Metallically coated stocks come in gold and silver and can serve as a classy touch to correspondence and packaging...

In the town where I live there are many businesses that use stickers to promote their presence in the community. Oskar Blues is a restaurant, music club and brewery about ten miles from my house and it is one of my family's favorite destinations. Oskar Blues gives away black and white oval stickers that have the letters OB and a website address at the bottom. These stickers are everywhere, mostly on the vehicles of my friends and neighbors. A trip to the local ski area is further evidence that the OB stickers have become a part of the local visual experience.

The question is: how do they create those stickers? That's what this series will address...

One of the features added to the latest revision of the Apple iPhone operating system that's garnered quite a bit of attention is the ability to save Web page bookmark icons directly on the main screen of the phone. Experimentation reveals that some sites have cool icons while most are just miniature representations of the Web site. What's the difference? Read on and find out, including step-by-step directions on how you can easily ensure your own site (or blog!) has a custom iPhone icon too.

I inherited an older Sony color TV from my folks, a really good Trinitron, and it works pretty well with the rabbit ears I've hooked up, but I'm anxious that it's going to become obsolete when TV signals go all-digital. Legitimate worry, or will my TV work just fine over the next few years until it dies?

As you might well know, I'm happy to be a faculty member at Stompernet, a completely new idea in the world of Internet Marketing, a consortium of top marketers pooling their knowledge and expertise to create a single place where you can learn about search engine optimization, search engine marketing, ecommerce, keyword research, proven techniques to improve your PPC campaigns and close rates on your sales pages, leveraging blogs and podcasts for marketing, and even discuss and compare notes about such mundane topics as shopping carts, web hosting companies, designers, and copywriters...

Are you paranoid about the security of your data, and finding that the software-based solutions out there really aren't as seamless and transparent as you'd hope? Whether you're working for the Department of Homeland Security or lead programmer for a hot startup, there are good reasons for you to be aware of - and perhaps even paranoid - about your data security.

Add the complication of a laptop and now things get even more tricky, because if you are aware of the incidence of laptop theft at airports and on the road, now you have to think about all your email, all your documents, business memos, letters, spreadsheets, presentations, and related material all being delivered directly to your competitors, foreign nationals, or worse.

Fortunately, there are hardware-level encryption solutions available that, if you're ready to absolutely trust them with your digital life, can ensure that your system and/or laptop are completely secure and unbreakable.

A few weeks ago I had a chance to talk with some of the engineers at High Density Devices, makers of SecureD, a system that, as they describe, is characterized by "all data being encrypted in real-time: SecureD utilizes the strongest real-time encryption algorithms available and does not require user interaction or maintenance."

Please read on for our discussion...

Dave, I know that identity theft is a problem, but someone told me the other day that there are five major kinds of Identity theft. Then they got busy with something, and it left me confused. Isn't identity theft just identity theft?

Hey Dave. When it comes to tech stuff, even in the names that I read in product reviews on your blog, there are all of these companies I've never heard of. How do I know if what they're making is any good?

With the rise of higher speed wireless networking technologies, from 802.11g high-speed wifi to the pervasiveness of bluetooth and its kin with short-range wireless communications, it's becoming more and more difficult to determine whether it makes any sense to pay to have Ethernet "cat 5" wire installed in a home or office. There are more considerations than just cost, however, including security and future flexibility. Making this decision yourself? Then read on...

It was about four months ago that my 4GB Apple iPhone showed up and, after an initial scare that it was broken from dropping it - screen down - on a hard tile floor, connected to the network, replacing my Blackberry Pearl. I got the $100 credit for the Apple store after having watched the price drop $200 a month after I bought it, and I've gone through a number of cases already (!) and have a stack of different ones from the folks at Marware that I'm using now.

But after months of having it in my pocket, plugged into my car, on lunch tables with colleagues, and in various cities and states throughout the United States, what's my opinion of the phone now? What do I really love about it, and what drives me batty?

Read on...

Somewhat inadvertantly, I have been thrust into the world of the latest Mac OS X system, Leopard. Some months ago, I bought a top-of-the-line Apple MacBook Pro from my friend and colleague Jeff Walker (thanks Jeff!) and have subsequently had a variety of hardware problems with the unit. The first problem was the power switch, which ended up slightly akilter inside the unit and would stick. Not good. But quickly fixed.

This time, however, the power switch went a bit wonky again and the latch switch also became sticky. To top it off, a few keys on my two month old keyboard were already losing their letters / details, so when I took the unit in this time, I asked them to fix everything. They did. I have a new keyboard, new lower chassis, new power switch assembly and, yes, a new latch switch. Very cool.

Unfortunately the Apple techs went above and beyond and did one more thing while they had my laptop, something that caused me to lose 130GB of data...

It was less than a year ago that I bought a 256MB thumb drive and thought "man, lots of space, that'll be handy". In fact, I added my keys and made it my keychain. Then I decided it was too small and upgraded to a Lexar "Jump Drive" with an impressive 512MB of space coupled with some encryption software that would ensure that if I lost the drive, I wouldn't be out of luck.

Problem is, unless you have incredible personal discipline, it becomes quickly obvious that it's useful to have more space, not less, and just like modern housebuying, while it's impossible to have too much space, it certainly is possible to have too little.

When I bought a new television (a splendid Sony Bravia KDL-40V3000 40" LCD) I decided that it was time to update the sound system hooked up to the TV too, and after much research, I decided not to get a five speaker surround sound and clutter up the room with wires. Instead, I read lots of reviews and opted to buy the Philips Ambisound HTS8100 Home Theater Surround Bar.

The specs are awesome for this all-in-one stereo system, iPod dock, and DVD player that can upscale the movie being played to 1080p, the reference scanrate of high def video (1080 scan lines, progressive). Heck, the sound of the unit is terrific too.

Except for one problem: less than a month after I purchased it I have had to take it in for service, and it's been there for ten days now, with no resolution in sight...

It's impossible not to have heard about the many different social networks online nowadays. Seems like a new one pops up every week and indeed the single most popular site on the Internet is a social network (MySpace). I know because I am part of at least a dozen different social networks, ranging from focused professional venues to chaotic amalgamations of various ideas without any rhyme or reason. You can figure out which is which. :-)

One of my favorites has always remained LinkedIn and since I just this morning needed to track down one of the executives at web hosting company Dreamhost, I thought it would be useful to demonstrate exactly how I used LinkedIn for this task.

I spent a fair amount of time on the phone with Leslie Brooks Suzukamo, Telecom, Technology and Energy Reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press earlier this week. Our topic of discussion? Whether the new Apple iPhone is going to be a good business phone or not. He quoted various industry sources and so-called pundits who predicted that it wouldn't and that it's designed exclusively for consumers. But he -- and they -- are so terribly wrong...

In the early days of the Internet, back when we called it a "dirt road" and were delighted when email bounced from UUCP connection to UUCP connection as is slowly wound its way from one end of the topological jungle to the other, email mailing lists were quite the cool thing.

Years have passed and we now have sophisticated web-based discussion boards, blogs and many other venues for interpersonal interaction, but email remains, to me, the killer application, and it's on my mailing lists that I encounter the freshest thinking and most valuable information.

I can remember when there were two main places to find mailing lists too (other than the List of Lists and other short-lived directories), Topica and Yahoo Groups. Google's added its own collection -- of course -- with Google Groups too, but in many ways, Yahoo Groups was always my favorite place to look for people with similar interests.

Which is why it's so distressing to see that it's become an absolute safe haven for porn and spammers in ways that were unanticipated when Web-based lists were first envisioned...

This is a user-contributed article.

TV has evolved in the last 5 years and can be difficult to understand. There are many technologies out there in the marketplace that are worth being conscious of as you go and buy an HDTV. Today's HDTV's also come with a variety of resolutions. You may see 720p, 1080p, 1080i etc. We are going through a changing of the guard, and it's all gotten rather complicated when you want to purchase a replacement set!

The first generation of HDTV's had maximum resolution or lines of 1080i/720p but today's TVs have a maximum resolution of 1080p. When buying a TV you'll find these 1080p sets to be more expensive than those that have a maximum resolution of 1080i/720p. This is because these 'true' HD TV sets are not only newer but they can accommodate optimal resolution on blu-ray and HD-DVD players without having to scale the image. The i/p behind the number indicates whether the resolution is interlaced (an older method of scaling images that results in the image having to be put back together and the signal to degrade) or progressive scan (a newer, superior method that results in no signal degradation).

Can you learn how to relax, achieve a meditative state and control your own brain waves with a computer game? That was the premise of the biofeedback-based series of games from the Wild Divine Project, and when the company gave me a copy of their flagship title The Journey to Wild Divine: The Passage, I was eager to check it out.

And y'know what? It's extraordinarily cool. It's unlike any computer game you've ever played and even though I am not a fan of children playing computer games, I was happy to watch my children learn how to explore the lush interactive world of Wild Divine and overcome the various challenges and obstacles that are the heart of the game.

It's one of the most common questions that I hear as a writer, and just about every group of writers endlessly debates the topic: what's the purpose of an agent? Different agents have different views of what they do, and certainly authors vary in their ability to work with an agent or agency, but fundamentally, it can be a tricky business to pin down exactly how an agent should be helping a writer succeed.

This debate came up again on a popular writer's mailing list and with the permission of all parties involved, I am reproducing the original question and the thoughtful and informative answers. The discussion took place on a list sponsored by an agency, but I believe that these are candid answers and comments, not influenced by the sponsor in any way. I have also deliberately not associated individual authors with their comments to protect their views.

Already installed Apple's slick Boot Camp system so you can dual boot your Intel-based Mac into Microsoft Windows in addition to Mac OS X? Perhaps you even used my popular tutorial on How to install Windows XP in Apple Boot Camp to get it all working? Either way, you should be aware that Apple just released an update to Boot Camp that, among other things, will let you install the new Windows Vista in the Boot Camp partition.

Other features of this new 1.2 beta release include:

• Updated drivers, including the trackpad, AppleTime (sync), audio, graphics, modem, and the iSight camera
• Support for the Apple Remote
• Windows system tray icon for easy access to Boot Camp
• Improved keyboard support for Korean, Chinese, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, and French Canadian
• Improved Windows driver installation experience
• Updated documentation and Boot Camp on-line help in Windows
• Apple Software Update (for Windows XP and Vista)

Buying a television has never been more complicated than today, with four primary television technologies -- plasma, projection, LCD or CRT -- and a variety of different scan rates and resolutions, including HD, which has different meanings for different vendors.

More televised and DVD content is becoming available in High Definition (HD), digital broadcasting is becoming a requirement for terrestrial broadcasters, and more TVs are coming on the market to take advantage of these technologies. The result? It's getting more difficult to stick with your old CRT TV, but hard to know which new technology will work best.

In which we get the hottest video game system from Christmas 2006 and turn it into a Linux box? You bet!

If you're still thinking about video game systems as being just a wee bit more technologically advanced than an old Coleco or Atari 800, you've got quite a surprise coming the first time you crack open the proverbial hood. While the new Nintendo Wii (pronounced "wee", oddly enough) has some slick hardware, as does the Microsoft Xbox 360 device, the real winner in the technology race is the rather amazing Sony Playstation 3 system.

Built around an IBM Cell Broadband Engine processor, the PS3 includes a high def Blu-ray drive, four USB 2.0 ports, an Nvidia graphics processor with 256MB of separate video RAM, support for Compact Flash, SD and Memory Stick devices, Ethernet, built-in 802.11b and g, Bluetooth, an HDMI port and support for all the video resolutions you can imagine, including 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i and the holy grail, 1080p. Sounds like a computer, not a video game system, doesn't it?

[This is a reader-contributed article]

For the longest time my wife has wanted a hands free system in her car so that she did not have to use a headset or handle the phone while driving. Her description always included a cradle setup, but she did not know where to put the cradle in the car (a 2002 Audi A6).

For her birthday this year I finally took the initiative and did some research. I found that there are some very good bluetooth solutions out there. My wife's Treo 700p is -- mostly -- bluetooth capable, but more on that later.

For various reasons, including good reviews, reputation (Motorola seems to know a thing or two about voice communications), features and price I went with the Motorola IHF1000 Car Kit.

There really didn't seem to be much to the kit when it came in the mail, though: an interface (they call it a UIM for "User Interface Module"), a control module (a rectangular black box), a 5W speaker, a microphone and a wiring harness. I thought the speaker was redundant since I had planned to use the car's audio system for receiving calls, but that plan changed as installation progressed...

Technology has changed dramatically in the last decade, but perhaps nowhere more than with cellular phone technology. From being a device for dialing numbers cellphones have evolved to where they're a portable entertainment and media device, with music players, Web access, and even the ability to play videos and television content.

Some companies are pushing this set of capabilities further, and I was intriguied when Cellfire sent me a Sony-Ericsson phone with its coupon system pre-installed. I tested it out and was surprised by what I found...

Just before Christmas, Polk Audio sent me one of their new I-Sonic all-in-one entertainment system to review, and it has been in my office ever since, giving me a chance to experience XM Radio and HD Radio, among other things. Does it sound nice? Most definitely. Is it worth $599? Well... let's talk about the pro's and con's of the unit before I answer that question.

After having spent the last year learning everything about the Sony Playstation Portable (PSP), is there really a better device for watching movies away from your television? To find out, we bought a Creative Labs Zen Vision:W video player and were surprised and pleased to find out that it's a far, far superior portable media player than the PSP in just about every way.

I was recently interviewed by a magazine about search engine marketing and search engine optimization, specifically whether big companies are missing the boat and whether smaller companies are paying too much attention to SEO or not. Their questions and my answers follow.

It's something that companies have been trying to perfect for years now, a digital book. A device that has all the physical characteristics and benefits of a book while also having the benefits of a digital device, including vast storage, annotation capabilities, networking, animations, and much more. So far, every launch has failed, but in the last few months Sony has come out with its Sony Reader, the PRS-500, and this might just have what it takes...

If you hop from PC to PC, do you really trust that they don't have spyware, malware or viruses installed, hiding in the operating system? What if you could carry a cheap little keychain pendant that not only offered you storage, but also included effective, easy-to-use anti-virus and anti-spyware applications with which you can quickly scan that suspicious PC and make sure it really is safe for you to use? These devices are just coming out and I had a chance to put one through its paces...

I'm pleased to announce that Ask Dave Taylor has made it into the finals of the 2006 Weblog Awards! I have some tough competition though, including slashdot, Engadget, Gizmodo and TechCrunch.

But you can help! Click and vote for AskDaveTaylor:

Here's what's a bit weird about how it's structured, though: you can vote once every 25 hours, so if you really want to hep me stand a chance against these excellent competitors, I ask that you vote for me as many times as you can until the voting period ends on the 17th.

Kinda like classic Chicago polls, vote early, vote often!

And, thanks!!

[This is the second part of a series of high tech buyer's guides we're releasing here at Ask Dave Taylor to help address many of the questions that we receive about confusing new technologies and gadgets. The first article addressed a core HD question: HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. This second article looks at the rapidly evolving world of personal media players and other ways you can enjoy video on the go. We hope you find this valuable!]

Much the same way the iPod changed the landscape in portable audio, videos frontier has forever been expanded thanks to these tiny devices.

It seems everything in technology is about getting smaller, however some industry expects didn't believe there was a future for a mini-video player. Boy they were wrong. Portable Video has exploded in a big way in the last year, apparently small is just right.

Sony's Playstation Portable (PSP) was the first video capable device to hit the market in Japan in December of 2004. While its primary function was a gaming medium, the PSP set the market as far as movies on mini go. Sony's UMD format was, and still is a big hit with consumers.

This is the first part of a series of high tech buyer's guides we're releasing here at Ask Dave Taylor to help address many of the questions that we receive about confusing new technologies and gadgets. This first article addresses a core HD question: HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Both are amazing, but pick the wrong one, and you can pour thousands down a hole. I hope this is helpful, and encourage you to add comments at the end with your own experiences buying HD consumer electronics, whether they're Playstation 3 / Nintendo Wii / Xbox 360 video systems, DVD players, or televisions.

The battle for your entertainment dollar took a big turn towards your living room in the early 1990s with the debut of the DVD. Replacing an obsolete analog tape format (VHS) with a crystal clear digital picture gave you a far better viewing experience and also allowed the movie studios another way to get your dollars in their pockets.

Today we are on the verge of another revolution in home movie viewing experience. High Definition is here and boy it sure looks good!

Of course, what would a new technology be without a format war, leaving us consumers confused and angry? The contenders in this battle are the two major High Definition DVD formats: Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

While both formats are very similar, there are a few subtle differences that are critically important to understand before you spend a dollar on your next consumer electronics device.

Giving a loved one a laptop can be a great experience. As with any gift, the impulse comes from generosity and a wish to improve someone's life; but unfortunately, there are times when any well-intentioned gift can go badly wrong. With laptops, in particular, it is easy to make a small mistake that can be remedied only by outright exchanging the laptop; and that can mean some hassles at best, and at worst it might cost you a big restocking fee. Frankly, as with any Father's day gift -- or any other gift -- sometimes the intention can produce a result that's, well, less than optimal.

Follow these ten tips and you can be sure that your gift will be the hit of the Holidays this year!

What's the history of the alcoholic spirit gin? Is it really a medicinal drink, and is this a good reason to have a gin martini every afternoon?