Tech

Like most electronic devices, cell phones are remarkably fragile. Your cellular phone needs to be protected from water, extreme temperatures, scratches, and unnecessary falls. Luckily, a wide selection of cellular accessories is available to help you keep your cell phone looking and acting like new.

The first line of defense against cell phone damage is a protective case. Protective cases are useful cellular accessories because they protect your phone from dust and damage while maintaining all of its functionality. If you frequently carry your phone in your purse or pockets, it can be easily damaged by keys or other sharp objects. For the somewhat clumsy cell phone user, protective cases are valuable cellular accessories that offer an extra layer of cushioning if your phone is accidentally dropped. Protective cases are normally made of leather, although cases made from neoprene offer better protection against water damage. Cases come in many different colors and styles to suit your personal tastes. Prices for these cellular accessories usually range from $10 to $25. Like most cellular accessories, protective cases are designed for specific models of cell phones.

Are you tired of laying wires through your house, creeping through small places just to get the right sound effect? Wireless speakers are the answer to your headaches. With wireless speakers you gain the freedom to move your music to where you want it to be without the hassles of cables. Planning to have a party outside? Don’t move your whole entertainment system outside while you can make use of outdoor wireless speakers which can move right along with the party.

Want to have hi-fi quality sound through your laptop computer? Why should you be tied to wires while using a portable computer? Make use of wireless speakers to give you the freedom to work or play on your computer where you want to, while having the high fidelity sound you deserve. Here are a few examples of how you can use wireless speakers to improve your way of living.

? Listen to your favorite music collection while taking a bath.

? Have a BBQ or party outside without having to move your whole stereo system.

? You can store all your favorite music on your computer and listen to it anywhere in your home.

Since the DOS days, batch files have been one of the most convenient and immediate ways to accomplish certain tasks. Even today it’s possible to find some remarkably sophisticated utilities written as command-line batch files.

On the downside, batch files are easily hacked, edited, and reverse-engineered, making them problematic to rely on in certain situations.

I’ve written before about some ways around this, such as using elevated or deprecated privileges, but one of the more interesting tools I’ve seen for working with batch files is a program called Quick Batch File Compiler (QBFC).

QBFC takes any command-line batch program and compiles it into an encrypted executable or .EXE file. An .EXE file is much harder to casually reverse-engineer, so this could be a way to conceal a particular batch file’s operations from an end user. For instance, if you had a network environment where a batch script was run at logon, and you wanted key information in the script hidden, the script could be converted to an .EXE and protected from prying eyes a lot more easily than a conventional batch file. (.EXE files also run faster than batch files, of course.)

Cell phones are great for people on-the-go, but talking on your cellular phone while driving can be downright dangerous. The safest choice is to avoid using your phone while driving, but that’s not always possible. Cellular accessories can help make it safer to use your cell phone in your vehicle.

The first choice for hand-free cell phone use is to purchase an earset. These cellular accessories have two main advantages. Compared to a speakerphone, the microphone is closer to your mouth when you’re using an earset. Earsets are also the least expensive cellular accessories for hands-free cell phone use. However, keeping the wires from becoming tangled while you’re driving is sometimes problematic.

Speakerphones that plug into your car’s cigarette lighter are the best choice for people who frequently use their cellular phone while driving. The primary advantage of using a speakerphone is that your hands are completely free. Another benefit is that these cellular accessories also serve as cell phone holders and battery chargers. However, people may have more trouble hearing you since the speakerphone’s microphone is typically farther way from your mouth than with an earset.

Blu ray is a next generation optical media format developed by the Blu ray disc association, a group of leading consumer electronics and technology companies such as Apple, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sony, TDK to name, but a few.

The format was developed for high definition video, as well as storing large amounts of data. A single layer Blu ray disc can hold 25gb of data, which is the equivalent to over 2 hours of high definition television or more than 13 hours of standard definition television. There are also dual layer versions of Blu ray that can hold up to 50Gb of data.

While current optical media uses a red laser to read and write data, the new format uses a blue-violet laser instead. Despite the different type of lasers uses, Blu ray drives can be made backwards compatible.

The benefit of using a blue laser is that blue light has a shorter wavelength so that it can be focused on a smaller target area than a red light laser. This allows data to be packed in more densely allowing more space for data in the same sized physical space.

When doing an interview there need to be at least three people involved. The person being interviewed, you, the interviewer and someone to work the camcorder. It could be argued - I would so argue - that an extra person to handle the sound is a great benefit but this is a policy of perfection.

Interviewing for video is a skill that can be acquired with practice. The key to successful interviewing is research, research and yet more research.

Before you interview a subject you need to know as much as possible about the person you are interviewing.

And you need to read everything that anyone has ever written about the subject.

This is what the Internet is for. Typically it contains everything written in recent times.

The more information you can get, the more research you do, the smoother the interview will go.

Having said that it is vital that you, the interviewer, both asks questions and knows when to shut up.

The problem is that often you will find yourself knowing more about a subject than the person you are interviewing, and the temptation then is to show off your knowledge.

Well, the Internet access industry is starting to shake its way out. The much-anticipated consolidation of access providers is nearing its end. In broadband, this means that most users have little or no choice of providers. Though many of the changes have been hard on user choice, this is not necessarily a bad thing. In some cases, it’s better to have one stable and pricey provider than 100 unstable, cheap providers. The shakeout was painful for scores of users who often were left with no connection when they needed it most. And some providers left standing don’t exactly have good track records, either.

Still, there is reason for users to be optimistic about the future. The following is an outline of the way the Internet access business should go in the coming year. I provide it to give you a better understanding of where you should go now, assuming you want to stick with the same internet access provider for at least a year.

Don’t ditch dial-up

A lot of users were glad they hung on to their dial-up accounts in the midst of uncertainty with their broadband connections. When things go bad with broadband (as they often do), you at least can get e-mail, if not a quick scan of the headlines in text-heavy Web sites.

I am going to assume that you are running windows xp on your machine, and you are the only user on this machine. That is right, no one else uses your computer except you.

Let me ask you a question: How many user accounts should you have on your computer?

You probably guessing, one user account is the answer, since you are the only user on your computer. This is what most people will answer, one, just like you thought.

Here is the problem, you can run your your machine with only one user account. But, it is not a good practice.

The best practice is to have two accounts, even if you are the only user on your computer.

Here is why: when you install windows xp, a user account is created for you, called the admin account. The admin account has the highest privilege on the computer.

That is installing new programs, deleting, adding user accounts, and all the rest of the administrative services. In other words, you are the most effective user on this computer.

OK I confess I’ve bought at least 10 inkjet printers in the last 5 years and finally found one that I really like. I’m not going to mention the brand here but I will tell you what the must have features are for me.

After years of refilling HP-like inkjet cartridges where the Cyan, Magenta and Yellow tanks were all mixed together in one unit I decided to buy a printer that allowed you to change each color tank individually. Although a minor change this affected how much it cost to print a colored output page in a huge degree. I never liked the concept of having all of the colors in one cartridge to start with. Every time I went to replace an empty cartridge I wondered how much ink was left in the other two colored ink tanks. If you didn’t notice they were always a dark color making it impossible to tell how much was actually in the tank.

My new unit seems to use the Yellow cartridge (black aside) more than any other color which makes me curse the days where I envisioned myself throwing money in the toilet by only using half of the colored ink in a multi color ink jet cartridge. This backs up my initial thought process and confirmed all suspicions.

As an important part of your daily life, your cell phone should reflect your personality. At one time, the only way to personalize your phone was to get one in your favorite color. Today, great cellular accessories such as ringtones and wallpapers make it easy to create a phone that’s as unique as you are.

A ringtone is the sound your phone makes when there’s an incoming call. Custom ringtones are fun cellular accessories to personalize your phone and help identify your phone in a room full of cell phone users. Ringtones are available for purchase or as free downloads on a variety of websites. To download these cellular accessories, your phone must have internet access. Many cell phone providers have websites containing custom ringtones, but you can also type "cell phone ringtones" into any search engine to find sources for these cellular accessories. If your cellular phone supports SP-MIDI files, there are online tutorials that can teach you how to create your own ringtones. However, not all cell phones are capable of playing custom ringtones and some models will only play either polyphonic or monophonic ringtones. If you’re planning to use ringtones, make sure your phone is compatible with these cellular accessories.