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The fires raging across western U.S. states this summer, at times plowing through residences and other structures, might have gotten you thinking: "What if?" That is, what if one of my buildings were destroyed in the 44-square mile California Pondorosa fire in August, which leveled more than 80 stru...
If you've ever had to give PowerPoint presentations away from home base, you'll know there's a certain amount of gear-related anxiety involved: Is the equipment going to be there? Is it going to work with my memory stick or version of PowerPoint? One way to take control is to use an iPad or certain...
Wiring your home for multimedia? Dreaming about it? Even if you're using an electrician to pull the CAT 5e cable, it's worth getting involved in the design of the termination -- the rack. The rack is the centralized point within the home where the wiring meets switches, router and so on. The rack wi...
For years, satellite communications devices like satphones and data terminals have been out of reach of the average consumer. Access to voice calls and Internet in remote locales, where mobile phone networks are unavailable, have only been possible for military, media, mining, government and other ...
I've written about gadget battery technologies and how to calculate basic battery needs in previous articles like "Juicing Up Your Gadget Battery Power." I've also covered some of the ways to keep yourself charged up on the road with extended battery packs for smaller devices. Continuing this theme ...
Significant advances in LED technology mean it's now possible to create light approaching that of a car headlamp with just a handheld device. If you're in the market for one of these advanced flashlights, you're going to see one word continually appear in the product descriptions. That word is "Cree...
As these dog days ramp up for hurricane season in the east, and wildfire season in the west, it's worth taking a look at ways to gather information that can help you decide when to evacuate, keep tabs on what's going on back at home, and find out when it's safe to return. Half a dozen camera-spout...
The tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 highlighted two phenomena common in disasters: Network communications tower sites were destroyed, and network traffic overwhelmed systems. Power failures cut off the Internet, and in New York, debris raining down onto ground-based i...
I've written about keeping your devices powered while on the road before, and looked at techniques to reduce draw -- like reducing screen brightness and switching off phone radios. I also took a broad-brush look at different technologies, like battery packs and solar. Now I'm going to explain how t...
A cruel fact of life is that mobile operators have a vested interest in building out their networks in areas where there are customers, not where there aren't any. Those towers are expensive, and they want a return. Unfortunately, that means those of us who enjoy puttering around the vast open space...
I've never taken that much notice of my privacy, or lack of, as I've been surfing the Web. However, after recent, obviously targeted advertising directed at me, where the ads blatantly reflected some product research I had just performed, I decided to investigate. Innocuous focused advertising, whic...
Microsoft is involved in a project geared toward self-programming and extending the functionality of the Android smartphone environment. That's surprising, because Microsoft has got its own phone OS that competes. However, on{X} in beta is bringing some unique JavaScript APIs to the table that let y...
If you've been accumulating redundant, carrier-locked communications hardware like phones and data cards and have been stuffing them all into a drawer likely never to be used again, you can repurpose some of it and realize some cost savings. Modem data cards, sometimes called "dongles" or "data stic...
With the apparent clamp-down on formerly liberal U.S. data quotas by mobile operators, public WiFi hotspots -- like cafes -- for daily Web consumption may become an ever more likely Internet environment for many of us. Europeans have been used to limited mobile data quotas under various euphemisms l...
Bombarded by ads for cable and satellite TV packages, or seductive programming bundles offered by Internet service providers and phone companies, it may be easy to forget that it's possible to pick up much of that programming via a sub-hundred dollar indoor antenna reminiscent of the rabbit-ear da...
Unlocking a GSM device allows you to use pay-as-you-go or prepaid SIM cards from other carriers. Prepaid accounts can work out cheaper than postpaid accounts because even though the per-minute charges can be higher, there's no monthly commitment.
If you've been waiting with the patience of biblical figure Job for your handset maker to release a hardware-specific version of Android's latest incarnation, the 4.0 operating system called "Ice Cream Sandwich," or ICS, and it hasn't yet, you can try cloning it. You can achieve this without rooting...
With Verizon's recent announcement that it intends to drop its grandfathered unlimited wireless data plan for existing customers who were around before tiered its pricing came into being, crackdowns are in the air. Both T-Mobile and Sprint continue to offer unlimited data plans, although T-Mobile sl...
If your device is having difficulty completing tasks like file downloading, it's a dead giveaway that it needs some maintenance. We're used to the idea of spending a bit of time running hard disk defragmentation, spyware scans and other tools on our PCs, but we may not be so au fait with what's ne...
There are a lot of photographs out there. Photo sharing and album network Flickr alone reckons it hit the 6 billion image upload mark last year. If you consider Picasa, Facebook, and the current darling known as Instagram, we're talking gazillions of images floating around -- all freely downloadable...
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