There are ample comparisons of iOS and Android, but few take into account jailbreak apps and power-users. Jailbroken iOS apps make up for a lot of shortcomings, but if you’re still interested in Android, here’s what you need to know. (Image credits: nrkbeta and quinn anya) A Little Personal Background I’ve been a smartphone user for a few years. Once upon a time, my AT&T upgrade brought me the Tilt, also known as the HTC Kaiser and TyTN II....

Before computers could handle graphical games, there were text adventure games. The games are interactive stories, so playing a text adventure game is like being part of a book in which you affect the story. Text adventure games are also referred to as “interactive fiction.” Interactive Fiction (IF) is actually a more accurate term for text adventure games, because these games can cover any topics, such as romances or comedies, not just adventures....

Unlike Box, MOG, and Zoho, who are doing random giveaways, the LucidChart giveaway is based on a contest of skill – they are picking the best drawings using their flowchart tool and giving away Chrome Notebooks to the winners. So all you have to do is create one of the most interesting drawings / charts, and you will get your hands on one. We’ve also confirmed this with the fine people at LucidChart, who told us “any user who spends a bit of time and effort to do something creative has a good shot at winning one....

Minus the Number Pad Tenkeyless or TKL keyboards are simply full-size keyboards without the number pad, which is typically found on the right side of a keyboard. As the number pad is often referred to as ten key, the omission of the number pad gives them the name: Tenkeyless. However, it doesn’t mean the TKL keyboards have only ten fewer keys than their full-sized counterpart. While the exact number of keys can vary between different models, most TKL keyboards have around 87-88 keys, which is close to 80% of a full-size keyboard....

Kubernetes is a distributed system that’s designed to scale replicas of your services across multiple physical environments. In many cases this works well out-of-the-box. The Kubernetes scheduler automatically places your Pods (container instances) onto Nodes (worker machines) that have enough resources to support them. Despite its best efforts, sometimes the scheduler won’t select a plan you agree with. You might want Pods to be colocated if they’ll be regularly communicating over the network; alternatively, some compute-intensive Pods might be best allocated to separate Nodes wherever possible....

What Is Undervolting? Just like any electronic component, a CPU or GPU requires an electric current to flow through it. Voltage is essentially the measurement of the “pressure” with which electrons flow through a circuit. When you undervolt a CPU or GPU you’re reducing that pressure, which has an effect on the energy available for that processor to work. The idea behind undervolting is to find the optimal minimum voltage that a processor can use without causing performance losses or instability....

Credit Card Protections Most credit cards, both in the United States and elsewhere in the world, offer a number of protections for online purchases, and most online stores accept credit cards. Using them and their protections should take the edge off any worries you may have about spending money online. That said, they’re not perfect, either, and if something does go wrong you will have to, at the very least, make a few phone calls to sort things out....

Macs are well-known for being easy to use, but they also have a lot of great features hiding just below the surface that many people never notice. Whether you’re a Mac newbie or a Mac veteran, here are ten great features that you should be using. Quick Look Quick Look lets you quickly preview files without opening them in Finder. To use it, open a Finder window and locate the file you want to preview....

You can use the quick sort for those basic options or create a custom sort that gives you more flexibility. Whatever your data, be it text or numbers, take a look at these various ways you can sort it. A to Z Sorting If you want to sort by text in alphabetical order or numbers like currency or decimals in numerical order, you can do this in Excel in just a few clicks....

You’ve got questions and we’ve got answers. This week we take a look at data latency while playing computer games, how to use your laptop screen as a secondary monitor, and how to easily list and ID the components in your Windows machine. Understanding Data Latency and Gaming Dear Watching, My daughter loves a game called Runescape (which I use to blackmail her into getting her homework done). She plays this game on a dial-up account because she says the Wildblue satellite internet account has a big lag to it....

What Makes a Portable App Portable? Dear Portable Confusion, I have read a few articles talking about portable apps and find myself confused as to why they are considered portable? Most recently, their was a question about one-way syncing and a portable version of SyncBack. Is there a guide somewhere that explains what makes apps portable and maybe a set of must-have’s? Sincerely, Portable Confusion At the most basic level a portable application is an application that was either designed from the outset or later optimized to run off removable media without excessive dependency on the host operating system....

What Is an Assert? When a developer starts writing code, they will soon introduce if statements therein. An if statement is used whenever a certain condition needs to be tested. For example, one might write a pseudo-code if statement as follows: In other words, if the water level goes over the high mark, an alert is raised. But maybe the water sensor is broken, so we update the code to match:...

Assigning shortcut keys to launch programs in Windows is probably one of the oldest geek tricks in the book, but in true geek fashion we are going to show you how to do it in Windows 8. Launching a Program with a Shortcut Key Hotkeys in Windows are applied to shortcuts, this allows you to create hotkeys to files and folders as well as programs. All you have to do is find, or create, a shortcut to the program you wish to open with a hotkey, right click on that shortcut and select properties from the context menu....

What Is Cyber Liability Insurance? Cyber liability insurance is a specific form of insurance that covers financial losses that arise from cyberincidents. Typically these are cyberattacks and data breaches. As with all insurance policies, you’ll harbor two hopes. One is you never have to use it. The second is that if you do need to make a claim the insurance company accepts your claim and pay out. There’s a lot you can do to make your organization as safe as possible....

Freeware Genius pitted 5 web-based OCR services and 5 desktop OCR apps against each other. All the services/apps are either free or have a trial/free for home use component. Their reviews include the license, system requirements, input file type, output filetype, dictionary languages, and a Pro/Con section highlighting the best and worst of each tool. Hit up the link below to check out all the reviews plus some additional tips on improving your OCR scans....

Whether it’s your cat, dog, ferret, guinea pig, or rabbit, your pet is as much a part of your family as you are. Here are a few DIY projects for making life with your pet geekier and easier. (Images by jeffreyw and jon_a_ross) Quick and Easy Gifts Sweater Dog Toys (Photo by Erika Kern) Have some old sweaters lying around? Show your canine some love by knitting them around chew toys....

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, and that meant I grew up with computers. Our first home computer was an Apple II, and my brother and I taught ourselves about BASIC programming on the Apple. I wrote a lot of games and math puzzles, because that’s really the limit of AppleSoft BASIC programming. Later, our family replaced the Apple with an IBM PC, and I was excited to try the new DOS command line....

It’s easy to think that servers in the cloud are a magical service that just works. In reality, they’re just someone else’s computer, and all computers break down at some point. If you’re using EBS-backed EC2 instances, you should perform regular backups to AWS S3. Why Backup a Server Already In The Cloud? Even cloud servers aren’t safe from failure. EBS volumes, which all AWS EC2 instances run on, are not entirely redundant....

Need to create a cover page for a report you’re writing? You can create a simple, but professional cover page by centering the text both horizontally and vertically. Centering text horizontally on a page is easy, but vertically? That’s also easy and we’ll show you how. Before you center the text on your title page, you need to separate the cover page from the rest of your report, so only the text on the cover page gets centered vertically....

Once logged into the Netflix website with your original password, select your avatar icon in the top-right corner. Select the “Account” option that appears near the bottom of the pop-up menu. In the Account menu, you’ll see information about your email, password, and phone number. Click the “Change Password” option to proceed with your password change. Next, input your current password and then enter your new password twice to change it....