About James Bruce
James has a BSc in Artificial Intelligence and is CompTIA A+ and Network+ certified. When he's not busy as Hardware Reviews Editor, he enjoys LEGO, VR, and board games. Before joining MakeUseOf, he was a lighting technician, English teacher, and data center engineer.
Make A Product Review Database With Wordpress: Custom Post Types, Custom Fields, Featured Images & Widgets!
Last time we showed you how to create a simple events listing using perhaps the most powerful feature of WordPress 3.0 - custom post types. After some requests to develop this further, today we’ll be creating a product review database to tie together everything we've learnt so far.
An Extensive Guide On Upgrading To OSX Lion & Making Installation Disks [Mac]
With OSX Lion in the App Store awaiting you, I’m sure some of you have some concerns about the upgrade process, so today I’m going to walk you through some of those concerns, give a few warnings, and show you how you can copy the download-only installer to a USB and DVD drive.
World Of Warcraft Now Free To Play To Level 20 [Mac & Windows]
World of Warcraft gets a lot of bad press, yet clearly it’s doing something right to a have a few million players worldwide. In a bold move to invigorate the aging game, attract new players and just let everyone have a little fun, Blizzard recently announced that the game was now 100% free to play up to level 20.
Manage Your Real Life Vegetable Plot Online For Free With VGA Live
One of the key factors in growing your own vegetables is ensuring you rotate your crops every year to avoid a build up of disease and prevent a complete depletion of nutrients. For this particular dilemma, you could make use of VGALive, a free online vegetable plot management system and encyclopaedia.
How To Install OSX Lion On An External Drive To Test It Out [Mac]
One of the great things about Macs is that the OS is bootable on any Mac machine, regardless of which computer it was originally installed on. This means that if your desktop breaks, you can grab the drive and boot it from your laptop instead, without having to worry about data recovery services and lost work time.
Are Your Search Results Being Personalised To Your Individual Tastes?
One of the biggest attractions of the Internet is that we basically have instant access to all of the information in the world - but we rely rather heavily on search engines to bring that content to us. A worrying trend is emerging in both Google search results and your Facebook friend feed in that what you see is increasingly personalised to your preferences.
5 Must Download New Free iPad Games
Every few weeks we track iPad game releases on the App Store and relentlessly play each one to find those worthy of precious homescreen real estate. Ladies and gentlemen, here are another 5 to keep you going, an eclectic mix of depraved horses, sim tower, fun for the kids, and irked bears.
8 Reasons Why I Switched To A Mac
I've been using Macs for about 5 years now, and before that I was a 100% Windows and PC guy. What happened exactly? Why did I switch? Without wishing to start a flame war, here are 8 reasons why I now buy into "the Apple way".
How To Backup Your Mac With A Homemade Time Capsule
After losing some fairly important accounting files recently, I realised that my backup strategy is quite flawed. Although I take a weekly bootable backup of my Mac, that doesn't really help when I deleted the file I want a few weeks ago. To do that, I would need to make use of Apple's built-in Time Machine functionality.
The Top 5 Websites For iPad App Reviews
Finding good iPad apps in these new fangled app marketplaces is hard enough at the best of times, so let me show you 5 of the best sites I use to find great iPad apps and those little hidden gems, without having to trawl through the entire app store.
How To Find And Watch YouTube 3D content
Love it or hate it, 3D is here to stay. It’s a natural progression of visual displays, and I’m kind of bored of hearing it’s a fad. So let’s take this opportunity to look at something which is in fact, quite clearly a fad – yes, YouTube in 3D.
What iCloud Is & Why It Changes Everything [Mac]
Perhaps the biggest announcement made by Apple at the recent WWDC was that of iCloud, but many people are understandably not sure what it is. Is it a streaming media service? Is it a Dropbox clone? What's this about wireless syncing? If you find yourself a little confused and wondering why you'd even want iCloud, and how much it's going to cost, then read on to have all the answers revealed!
5 Baby Steps to Learning CSS and Becoming a Kick-Ass CSS Sorcerer
CSS is the single most important change webpages have seen in the last decade, and it paved the way for the separation of style and content. In the modern way, XHTML defines the semantic structure - the meaning and content of the webpage, while CSS concerns itself with the presentation. While most of us are comfortable writing a little HTML, we seem to think that CSS is some kind of black magic.
5 Ways to Increase Your Torrent Download Speed
For many people, the distributed peer-to-peer download power of torrents isn’t all it’s made out to be. If you’re feeling drowned in fake files, choking from ISP speed throttling, and sick of being told you’re unconnectable - this guide is for you. We'll have your torrent downloads in tip-top shape in no time. If you follow everything I show you here, your torrent overview screen should soon be capable of looking like this.
5 High Quality and Free iPad Games
When you talk about free games on the iPad - let's face it, they aren't always the same quality as you might expect from a paid-for game. Admittedly, sometimes they're actually better though. Today I've chosen to focus on high quality games that are either premium, used to be paid-for, or are simply of fantastic quality.
How To Make Your Own CinemaGraph In Photoshop CS5
Cinemagraphs are small animated GIF files created from a movie, that capture a tiny moving section of that movie in a forever looping sequence. See the sample to the left if you have no idea what I'm talking about, or check out Tim's upcoming article on the 5 best blogs to find Cinemagraphs. Today I'm going to show you how to make your own from a movie file, using Photoshop CS5 Extended.
7 Amazing New Features You Can Expect to See in iOS 5
The iPhone and iPad are still the leading devices in the mobile and tablet market, and with the announcement of the next major version of the iOS, I see no end to their dominance. Let's take a look at some of the awesome new features that have been revealed for iOS 5 which is scheduled for release this autumn.
Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About CAPTCHAs But Were Afraid To Ask [Technology Explained]
Love them or hate them - CAPTCHAs have become ubiquitous on the Internet. What on earth is a CAPTCHA anyway, and where did it come from? Responsible for eye-strain the world over, the humble CAPTCHA has been the centre of much attention as the single most effective weapon in the fight against web spam. But are they effective?
Take a Look at James' Home Setup [Show & Tell]
Taking a break from our regular awesome software reviews and tutorials, I thought it’d be interesting if myself and some of the other staff writers here at MakeUseOf show you our own home setups - whether that be in the form of fantastic custom desks, complicated home media-streaming networks, or just the apps and services we make use of on a regular basis and our favourite software tools.