It’s hard to judge the state of play with ebooks. There are conflicting standards, various formats, multiple cost models, and an awful lot of material which simply doesn’t find its way out to the world as a result. I’m going to cut through some of the confusion, and show you how to get, keep, and [...]

You’ve probably heard the story about the paranoid king. The king was sitting, looking at his meal, after having had a slave or two test it to ensure it didn’t contain any poison. The king takes another look, shakes his head, and mutters to himself ““ “I know I’m paranoid”¦ but am I paranoid enough?” [...]

The idea behind tilt-shift is to make your photographs of real life-sized objects look like photographs of models. No, not supermodels. That’s a whole different subject. TitlShiftmaker makes this easy, and the results are great. You can buy lenses for big cameras that do this stuff properly, but most of us will never find the [...]

Pixo is an application that allows you to apply special effects to your photos. In this case, it’s not about what you can do. You can replicate most of this functionality with numerous other tools. It’s more about how you do it. This interface is easy, simple, flexible, and a whole lot of fun. They [...]

I love RSS feeds. It’s probably the single thing I spend the most time explaining and persuading people about. And once you turn someone on to RSS, there’s no going back. Generally though, RSS feeds are pretty drab, with the emphasis on drab, rather than pretty. Enter the visual RSS reader Feedlooks, and the world [...]

I was recently looking for a good, easy, and fun way to add impact to some images for a presentation, and I stumbled across what just might be the cutest photo application for creating Polaroid-style images. It’s called Poladroid, and the emphasis is on fun! A couple of years back, Jackson wrote about the Mac [...]

You’ve all been there. You find a great font on an image in a webpage, and you’d love to use the same font for a project of your own but you have no idea which font you’re looking at. Karl recently showed you WhatFontIs which could help you but I’m going to show you another [...]

We’ve all been there. You’re interested in a website or a download, but the site wants your email address before letting you near the goods. You want access, but you’re not quite sure you want it enough to hand over the information. The site asks you to supply an email address, and follow up with [...]

I’ve used a few online library tools over the years, and eventually settled on Goodreads as the one that works the most like the way I work. I love it. But sometimes I can’t take goodreads with me, and need to find a way to just take some of the information. I use a Windows Mobile [...]

Goodreads describes itself as the largest book social network for readers in the world. I can’t comment on the scale of the site, but it sure does a great job of tracking books, and like the best libraries, it’s both quiet and unobtrusive. Let me show you around. We’ve talked about Goodreads on MakeUseOf before. [...]

There’s an old adage that you cannot have enough disk space. It’s true, but a much cheaper option to purchasing more is to make more sense of the space you already have. Windows doesn’t make that terribly easy, though. While you can get a decent view of the clutter in a single folder, expanding the [...]

Today, I’m going to cover how to remove duplicate tracks from iTunes. During my recent Windows 7 rebuild, I made a number of strategic errors. Nothing devastating, unless you include the mess I seem to have got my once pristine iTunes library in. I’ve ended up with everything I need”¦ and more. I’m going to [...]

Queries are the basis of power in a database. They give you the ability to ask questions, record the questions for later, and to take actions on the answers. As a follow-up to my introductory summary post on the product, and a more recent post on tables, this Microsoft Access tutorial is the ideal next [...]

Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing some research on buying a new camera. In the end, I bought a Canon EOS 7D. It’s great, but would I recommend it to everyone? No. It’s important to work these things through, and to find the combination of features and price that work for you. And I’ve got [...]

Last time, you might have been fortunate enough to stumble over my introductory post for Microsoft Access 2007, and then get frustrated because it doesn’t actually show you how to do anything. This is the place to get the cure. I’m going to provide a Microsoft Access tutorial on how to create and use tables. [...]