Technology

Well, that is if you own a convertible laptop, otherwise known as a tablet. These are notebooks with a single hinge for the screen (instead of two) that not only bends back and forth, but also rotates 180 degrees. This allows you to rotate the screen so that when you close the lid, the display is facing upwards instead of facing the keyboard. This allows you to hold the notebook much like a slate or clipboard, which gives you the freedom to use your notebook on the go instead of just when you’re sitting down.

Also, with a special stylus, you can Ink on your screen. Inking is a term used to explain “drawing”, so-to-speak, on your laptop’s screen using a stylus. And by drawing, I mean drawing in the Photoshop way, not the “Biq Pen” way.

Inking is especially cool because it allows you to capture a perfectly digitized version of your exact, actual signature. Also, when you decide to hand write a document, your tablet will implement advanced techniques to recognize your handwriting – even converting it to text if you so wish.

Thanks to the ongoing battle (recently turned slaughter) between Intel and AMD, and between nVidia and ATI, laptop technology to improve performance has improved tremendously in the past few years. Dual core processors are now standard issue on all but the most extreme budget-targeted laptops (Recall ‘One Laptop per Child’?). But with all this extra power comes extra heat. And heat is the enemy of ANY computer system. To a computer part, heat causes a whole host of problems. And without getting too technical here, heat causes too overall problems in a computer: it lowers efficiency and lowers life expectancy.

And this applies to your laptop just as much as anything else.

If you’re one of the many people who have noticed their laptops starting to feel overly warm, or even hot to the touch, after using them for not just a few minutes, then you probably know what I’m talking about. And if you use your laptop on your bed, setting it down directly on your blanket, that…well…that’s like leaving your child in the car on a hot summer day while you go shopping. Not cool! And yes, that pun was TOTALLY intended.

So, if you’re worried about your hot laptop, think about getting a notebook cooler. Or, at the very least, a cooling pad. You’ll notice a huge difference.

If you don’t know what this is, YouTube it after you finish with this article. Any explanation I give it cannot possible do it justice. Essentially, kinetic typography can be described as a relatively new form of art that involves a systematic and dynamic displaying of words in an animated fashion, in conjunction with audio of a speech or another spoken line.

That was a mouthful!

Basically, it’s a video where the words of the audio transcript fly on and off the screen in animated ways such that they keep up with the audio. It’s sort of like the old bouncing ball lyrics you’d see at the bottom of your childhood sing a long videos, except on steroids.

Creating a kinetic typography piece of even a short speech or audio of a famous movie scene is an EXTREMELY time consuming process. That means two things: there aren’t a whole lot of kinetic typography videos being made and that the ones that are made are VERY meaningful to the artist who created them.

Again, there is no possible way I could describe this type of art in a blog post like this and convey how utterly awesome it is. So do yourself a favor and YouTube it!

After years of repressed curiosity and nerdy infatuation, I bit the bullet and picked myself up an external CD / DVD burner with LightScribe technology. In case you don’t know what LightScribe is, it’s a technology that uses a small laser within a CD or DVD drive to inscribe monochromatic labels on a LightScribe enabled CD or DVD. And a LightScribe enabled disk is a normal CD or DVD that has been treated with a special laser-reactive finish on the label side of the disk and costs a couple pennies more than a normal blank CD or DVD.

So far, I’ve really enjoyed my new toy. It did take some tweaking to figure out what software I needed and I had to play around with the settings quite a bit to make my labels turn out the way I wanted them to. But, after all is said and done, my custom made DVDs are turning out beautifully and I couldn’t be much happier. If you’re like me, and think this kind of technology is pretty cool, then I’m sure you’d love to have one. And what I like best about mine is it covers my rear when I have to come up with a last minute gift!

When people think of investing in high quality audio equipment, they think of home theater sound systems, over priced headphones, and car stereos with unnecessarily flashy LCD screens. What people DON’T usually think about is their computer.

I hope that changes in the next few years, because the truth is a lot of people spend more time listening to music on their computers than they do on their iPods. And the reason is simple. We’re online ALL THE TIME. Between email, facebook, and YouTube, people are beginning to spend more time in front of the computer than anywhere else.

And for many of us, we like to listen to tunes while we’re plugging away at the keyboard. But if you care about high quality audio at all, you know those lousy speakers built into your monitor or laptop all but destroy your music. All they do is make the audio recognizable so you can say, “Oh yeah…I (thought I) like this song”.

If you care about the quality of your music, do yourself a favor and pick up a decent set of speakers. You’ll learn to enjoy your music a LOT more. And if you play games, you’ll really appreciate the deeper bass an actual set of speakers will give you.

And no, I’m not a Microsoft rep of any kind. My statement is genuine. The new Microsoft Office 2007 system is truly a superior suite of office programs over anything else on the market and a serious improvement over older versions of Microsoft’s leading software application brand.

Ironically, what sets the 2007 Office system apart from older versions of Microsoft Office is the very thing that people complain about the most: the new Ribbon system - dubbed the “Fluent User Interface.” The only reason I can think of why people complain about the new interface is because most people are afraid of change (except when electing a presidential candidate).

Sure, the system does take some getting used to; but everyone I’ve spoken who was open-minded enough to give it a fair chance quickly realizes its superiority over the File-Edit-Inset menu system. And on top of that, the new Live Preview feature of the Office 2007 system is invaluable. It allows you see formatting changes in real time when text is highlighted and you are scrolling though different fonts, text sizes, colors, effects, etc. The utility of this feature alone is incredible, allowing you to not only save time creating documents, but also to make them look far more professional.

I stumbled upon this question in a popular internet forum I forum I frequent. The thread seemed to attract a lot of attention very quickly. It was already on its 8th page, within just a few minutes of being posted, before I was able to read through it. And I was shocked by what I saw.

I had no idea how many people think the internet is bad for society. Surely, this forum’s participants are unlikely to constitute a representative collection of the American population, but regardless, the ratio was something like 10 to 1. Again, I was absolutely staggered.

I could not feel more differently about the internet. In fact, I think just about the only true harm the internet “causes” is increased fraud and identity theft by criminals. The other negatives the internet poses I believe to be minor and therefore negligible. On the other hand, the benefits of the internet are enormous and so far-reaching that they are boarding immeasurability. The internet allows for better commerce (Amazon, eBay), improved communication (email, IM), and the ability to expose the entire world to information and new ideas (Wikipedia, and blogs like this). To me, these benefits trump any and all negative aspects the internet brings to our lives.

What do you think?

It’s amazing how many self-proclaimed “HD Experts” there are who don’t have the slightest clue as to what high definition is. Pretty much all you see them say is “1080p! 1080p!” while they point proudly to wide-screen Sony’s and Toshiba’s television sets. So, in order to spare you from this highly annoying type of person, allow me to explain to you what HD really is.

“High” has to do with amount, and “Defining” has to do with resolution. So, translated, high definition means high resolution. That’s a bit better of an explanation, but resolution still is a bit unclear. But that’s fine, because resolution is an easy concept to understand. It has to do with the number of pixels that make up the screen. The more pixels your screen has, the more detail it can show in images, and therefore the higher its resolution. And as we just discussed, a high resolution means high definition.

All this 480p, 720i, and 1080P talk is about different resolution standards in the industry. Kind of like different sized shirts: small, medium, and large. The number represents the number of pixels that line up against to each other horizontally across the screen (or the “X-axis”). The higher the number, the more pixels, which means a higher resolution, and therefore higher definition.