An Introduction To DMX Lighting Control - Take Your Lighting To A Whole New Level
Intelligent lighting systems used to be an expensive domain for professionals only; but with the proliferation of cheaper electronics and computer control systems, incredible lighting effects are now firmly within the reach of the hobbyist. Whether you’re planning the most awesome house party ever, or want to take your Christmas or Halloween lighting to a whole new level, it might be time to invest in some DMX systems.
The Top Tech Gifts for the Men in Your Life
Christmas is coming and we all know that men are the most difficult people to buy presents for. Unless they’ve explicitly told you what they want, reading their feelings is pretty much hopeless, and subtle hints just isn't their style. Well, no worries - I’m a guy - and here I’ve picked out 8 of the top tech gifts for him this year, so you don’t get lost.
6 Crazy, Interesting Or Useful Ways To Use a WiiMote
When Nintendo released the WiiMote, it was arguably a console industry game changer. The concept of interacting with a game using your physical body was born. Lifelike motion controls enabled it to appeal to a wide audience that might otherwise never have touched a video game. Like any new piece of technology, the humble WiiMote was quickly subverted to other uses beyond the Wii.
How To Publish a Podcast To iTunes With Podcast Generator
Publishing a podcast is not rocket science, but it’s probably something you’ve never done before. That was the situation we found ourselves in when Dave, Justin and I decided to start a weekly tech podcast called Technophilia; that was nearly a year ago now, and we’re getting close to 50 episodes and now live broadcasting too. Read on to find out how you too can publish you own podcast to iTunes.
Get Great Windows 8 Features Without the Upgrade [Opinion]
Windows 8 was officially unleashed on the world on 26th October; I’m going to assume you either attended or held your own mini launch party, because that’s what everyone does every time a new version of Windows is released. However, we understand there are some of you who can’t afford the “upgrade”, so here are 5 tips to get the best features of Windows 8 on your shoddy old Windows 7 machine, right now.
How To Set Up A Live Skype Audio Broadcast With A Chatroom [Mac]
Now that our little Technophilia Podcast has amassed over 500 weekly listeners (guys, we love you), we’ve been looking for ways to interacts with listeners in real-time while we record live. That’s no easy task. We've been experimenting with just a chatroom, but without a live audio broadcast too it’s not very compelling for people to participate. So today, I’m going to share an easy way to broadcast your Skype audio (both yours and your co-hosts) to a Mixlr stage.
60 Years Of Barcodes - Amazing Uses For Lines & Squares [Geek History]
The humble barcode - named for its ability to encode information in a series of machine readable bars (or lines) - began its life in 1948. Nowadays all manner and style of barcodes exist, so let’s take a quick look down memory lane and see how the barcode has evolved over the years, and how they work.
4 Apps To Read Magazines On Your iPad
I know, MakeUseOf provides you with more than enough quality reading material, but what if you're after something other than fantastic technology tutorials and app reviews? I think we all have those moments of thinking "I wish I could get some design inspiration for my new living room", or "how about some light reading material about manly things?" - don't we? Well, it turns out that your iPad is the perfect size for reading magazines.
Sort Out Your Music Collection with Tune Up for Windows and Mac [Rewards]
If your iTunes collection is measured in the thousands rather than hundreds, you’ll no doubt understand the need to keep it under control. The best way to do this is to correctly classify tracks, make sure things are named correctly, and avoid duplications and variation on artists or album names. Setting the correct metadata manually for thousands of songs is quite a formidable task. TuneUp makes a bold promise to do this task for you with only minimal supervision.
3D TVs: What They Are, How They Work, & What Can They Show In 3D? [MakeUseOf Explains]
If you’re in the market for a new TV, chances are it’s going to be 3D - not because you particularly want one that can do 3D, but simply becuase 3DTVs typically have better displays than their plain HDTV equivalent. Today I’d like to explain about the different types of 3DTV as well as touch on some confusion that surrounds them.
6 Awesome Bits Of Technology For Your Perfect Halloween Party
Over the years I've organised some pretty awesome parties and even entire summer camps. I like to think I know how to throw a cool party, and technology always plays a part of that. Here's 6 essential bits of technology to MakeUseOf at your Halloween party!
Vroom, Vroom: A Comprehensive Guide To Speeding Up A WordPress Blog
MakeUseOf serves hundreds of thousands of visitors everyday, and we do it all on Wordpress. Wordpress can and does scale from tens to millions of pageviews, but you’re going to need some heavyweight plugins and strategies to increase performance at that level. Here’s a comprehensive list of things you can do to speed up your blog, and the plugins you can use to do it.
DOS Was Not Alone: Forgotten Operating Systems Of The Past [Geek History Lesson]
Linux, Windows or OSX - that's basically your choice today - but it wasn't always that way. There used to be a huge range of operating systems in various stages of development and often drastically superior to Windows. Join me in a look down memory lane as we look at 6 of the biggest forgotten and dead OSes.
Reader, Beware Of Content Thieves: Why Pirates Steal Website Content
Picture this: you sign into the admin page of your Wordpress blog, and your dashboard shows 15 new incoming links - awesome, you think - until you look through each of the links to find they've actually just stolen and reprinted your content, word for word, and the only reason you found out is because they forgot to strip the link, which have caused it to automatically ping you. What the heck?
Switching From iOS To Android? Here's What You Need To Know
Having recently decided to abandon my iPhone in favor of an HTC One X, I'm in the unique position of being "behind the enemy lines" already. If you're as frustrated as I am by Apple's recent policies and lack of innovation as I am, here's what you need to know about switching to Android. It's not an easy ride, but it's fun, and I hope you join me.
Why My Next Phone Is Not An iPhone, From An Apple Fanboy [Opinion]
I have been called an Apple fanboy on numerous occasions, so I may as well accept the moniker and move on. Yes, I love Apple products, and I shudder at the thought of touching Windows. I have no less than 5 Apple devices in my home, but as of last week they were joined by a lovely little HTC One X, an Android phone. What could have possibly induced such madness and out-of-character purchase? One word - maps.
4 Video Game Sequels I Am Actually Looking Forward To [MUO Gaming]
Last week, I attended the Eurogamer Expo in London; a geek fest of smelly teenagers, scantily clad booth babes and insanely long queues. For the most part, I was disappointed; I don't know what I expected really, but it wasn't that. There were a few unique indie titles on show, but nothing truly compelling. Anyway - here's my pick of sequels that I am actually looking forward to this and next year.
How To Try Out Wordpress, Joomla & More Quickly & For Free In a Virtual Machine With Bitnami
We've talked about setting up a local server before, but the process is still fairly complicated and there's lots of quirks and incompatibliities if you're trying to run it on Windows, leading to nothing but hassle when you actually upload the thing to a real website. What if you could just boot up a virtual machine and have instant access to a Wordpress install to play around with, all contained within a fully functional standardised web server setup?
What Is Git & Why You Should Use Version Control If You’re a Developer
As web developers, a lot of the time we tend to work on local development sites then just upload everything when we’re done. This is fine when it’s just you and the changes are small, but when you’re dealing with more than one person working on something, or on a large project with lots of complicated components, that’s simply not feasible. That’s when we turn to something called version control.