- Welcome Guest
- Sign In
- Welcome Guest
- Sign In
If you've been involved in a project that has been documented on Wikipedia and has earned its own Wikipedia page, it can be disconcerting to visit one day and see the page vandalized, as happened to an associate of mine recently. This incident led to a frantic email exchange. One consideration was h...
Have you ever wondered what the differences are among the scores of digital image formats out there? Some of the more common ones we see are GIF and JPEG but what does it all mean, and why are there so many? Plus, how do you know which one to use for the Web, and how can you take advantage of the di...
If you've been anywhere near a consumer electronics retailer lately or have leafed through the consumer electronics circulars and ads that supplement Sunday newspapers, you've no doubt noticed the words "Smart TV" shouting out at you. And if you've been wondering what a Smart TV is, or whether whate...
One of the simplest ways to improve performance on a laptop is to add more RAM, or random access memory. RAM prices have been steadily dropping over the years, and it's now possible to see a significant performance boost with an investment of twenty or thirty dollars. If your machine is sluggish, yo...
Have you ever accessed your home or small office router configuration settings and been bombarded with a mass of incomprehensible, cryptic computer-eze and senseless acronyms and abbreviations? Never fear -- you can quickly come up to speed on the basics. The router is a computer networking device t...
The tumultuous convergence of entertainment devices, greater interaction with the television-viewing experience, and increased involvement of social networks were all in the Klieg lights at the IP&TV World Forum, the Internet television show I attended recently in London. I was immersed in the f...
Historically, freelancers have carried their software tools as compact discs, or as copies of the discs on a portable hard drive. Both have needed to be installed on the library, or client's computer. This has been time-consuming additional work. Security has also been an issue, with temporary docum...
The more devices that I accumulate, the more I'd like to move seamlessly from one to another. I'm finding more and more that I'm hopping from one device to another, and one Web browser to another. I've got a mini-laptop hooked up to my TV, a larger laptop on my desk, a 7-inch tablet in my back pocke...
Overclocking a CPU sounds seductive, right? Adjust a few settings on your phone or tablet, and the device goes faster. Games play without laborious, stuttering, forced slow-motion effects, and everything loads quicker. Well, like everything in life, these adjustments involve a tradeoff. Just as ther...
I'm surrounded by screens here at the Olympia exhibition hall -- tablet-sized, big screens, you name it -- and they all connect with each other. It's day three at the IP&TV World Forum. The lowly remote control can soon be buried under the sofa cushions for good, judging by the offerings from se...
I'm attending the IP&TV World Forum, aka the Internet Protocol Television Show, at the Olympia exhibition hall in sunny London. I have been checking out technologies being deployed in Europe that we may be seeing state-side very soon. HbbTV is a hybrid television delivery system available now in...
New home construction and remodeling projects, from a multimedia wiring angle, have the advantage of incorporating cable management at the design stage. That design is structured into the build. Unfortunately, existing homes don't have this luxury -- tearing into walls is disruptive and expensive....
Internet-delivered television was once thought of "disruptive," but it looks like it's about to be firmly adopted by common television programming suppliers worldwide and incorporated into their delivery systems. Looking around at the IP&TV World Forum, I'm seeing a whole bunch of monkey wrenche...
Microsoft has made available a consumer preview version of its upcoming Windows 8 operating system that you can try out. The OS caught my eye because the tile-like user interface appears radically different from the boring old reiterations of Windows 3.1 -- with minor tweaks that irritatingly requir...
If you were looking at television weather maps during last week's U.S. tornado activity, you were looking at a GIS, or Geographic Information System. Those red and purple splotches racing across the screen represented intensity levels of rotating storm cells. The map itself, the county lines, and t...
With cable-and-wire spaghetti proliferating in and around our homes and offices, threatening to consume our devices and us in the end, it may be time to take a look at Bluetooth wireless technology, which is great if you can get it to work. Wire management in the financial trading floor school of th...
If you think of some of the more recent significant developments in television viewing, you'll probably come up with a list that includes the digital video recorder, which provides easy time-shifting without lossy tape; the flat-screen, high-definition television, which provides high-quality images ...
If you've followed the advice in my article, "How to Improve Your Video-Streaming Clarity," and can't use a Cat 5e or greater specification wired-solution for your network, you may be running into straightforward environmental limitations. The microwave just isn't getting from point A to point B and...
Factory-supplied satellite navigation and entertainment systems can add thousands to the cost of a new vehicle. Plus, the speed at which consumer electronics come to market is significantly faster than a car's development cycle, so your in-vehicle equipment is outdated before the car leaves the new ...
Twilio's cloud-based communications platform allows anyone with rudimentary Web-development knowledge to build a voice and SMS text application. An API, client, and various XML and other helper code is available that lets you build in PHP, C# and more. The basic concept behind all Twilio cloud telep...
Loading ...
