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.
How To Control Your Windows PC With Kinect
Last time, I introduced you to Kinect hacking on the PC and the drivers involved, as well as a basic zombie survival game demo. While killing zombies is awesome, it's time we moved onto doing something actually useful. So I'd like to show you the Kinemote application, as well as how to use it to control both your mouse for general Windows tasks, and Xbox Media Center.
How To Hack Your Kinect & Use It To Kill Zombies
Microsoft Kinect development has moved on to a more user friendly state now, and the drivers have been released for all to download and play with. One studio has even gone so far as to make a little tech-demo zombie game for the PC, so today I thought I'd walk you through the process of setting up the Kinect on your PC and getting the game running.
How To Create Your Own Basic Wordpress Widgets
Many bloggers will search for the perfect Wordpress widget that will do exactly what they want, but with a little programming experience you may find it's easier to write your custom widget. This week I'd like to show how to do exactly that, and the widget we will be writing is a simple one that picks out a single random post from your site, pulls the featured image, and displays it on the sidebar.
3 Cool Things You Can Do With Windows 7 Cloud
If you're running Windows 7, it's entirely possible you've never even heard of the Windows 7 Cloud. Beyond being the thing that came installed with your new computer, there's actually an awful lot of incredibly useful technology built into Windows 7 and the entire Microsoft product line. The Windows 7 Cloud is Microsoft's way of promoting and tying together a range of different technologies.
Setup A Perfect Media Center With Plex [Mac & Windows]
Plex is widely regarded by many as being the best media player, manager and streaming application around - available for both Windows, Mac and even mobiles (though the mobile apps are not free). If you're looking for a single solution as both a media center and server, then read on.
How To Set Up A Motion Detection Surveillance System With iPhone Notifications
One thing I've been meaning to do is set up my always-on home server as a CCTV Surveillance System that sends alerts to my iPhone whenever it detects motion. Though the results are fantastic, you do need a lot of free software to get the thing up and running properly. It's a lot to download, but there isn't anything inherently difficult about it.
Optimize, Sterilize, & Harmonize Your System With ioBit Advanced System Care [Windows]
Having given ioBit Advanced System Care a test run, I can confidently say it’s a great free solution for – indeed – many of your windows problems. The app makes a thorough effort at both cleaning and optimizing your system.
Automate Your Wordpress Backup With Simple Shell Scripting & CRON
Last time we talked about Wordpress backups, I showed you how incredibly easy it was to backup your entire database and files though SSH with only a few commands. This time, I'm going to show how to automate those commands, giving you fresh backups of your entire site every week, with very little effort.
5 More Action-Packed Free iPad & iPhone Games
I'm back again with 5 absolutely top-quality, action packed iPad games to suit every taste, and this time I have a real variety for you from soccer-based streaking games to quirky trivia and steampunk shooters. Be sure to check out the archives of iPad and iPhone games we've covered before too.
How to Fix the Windows 7 Activation Countdown After Installing the SP1 Update
If you had previously applied an activation hack to your Windows install to get around that restriction, you may be shocked to find that the recent Service Pack 1 update from Microsoft nullified that hack and is now given you a warning and countdown. Here's how to fix that and activate Windows permanently again (without phoning Microsoft).
5 Cool CSS3 Effects You'll Be Seeing More Of
CSS3 (combined with the power of HTML5) is rapidly being supported by all the major browsers (read - anything except Internet Explorer), so I thought now would be a good time to see some of the incredible effects we can achieve using the power of your the browser and a little CSS code.
Protect & Speed Up Your Website For Free with CloudFlare
CloudFlare is an intriguing start-up from the creators of Project Honey Pot that claims to protect your website from spammers, bots and other evil web monsters - as well as speed up your site somewhat by caching certain page requests. It's free, setup is relatively painless, and who can say no to free security protection?
Your iPhone Is Tracking You - How To View That Data & Turn It OFF
It has come to light in the past few days that all 3G based iPhone and iPad devices are recording a complete history of your location data ever since you bought the device (or upgraded to iOS v4). If you're worried about the availability of this data, I'll show you how to turn off the tracking.
How To Use Your Dedicated Virtual Server As An Internet Proxy Using SSH Tunneling
If you have your own virtual private server for hosting your website, you may not know you can also use it as a private proxy to get past various firewalls and internet blocks. Let me show you how you can set up a simple SSH proxy tunnel using your hosting account in Windows, Mac or Linux.
2 New Cool Wordpress Plugins & Understanding The Wordpress Theme Structure
This week I'll be a taking a look at a superior alternative to the often praised All-In-One SEO; a plugin that gives you the power of a Wordpress publishing system but allows you to output static HTML files for hosts that don't support PHP; as well as showing you how to make sense of some of the template files contained in your theme directory.
How To Configure The Various W3 Total Cache Plugin Settings For Your Wordpress Blog
A while ago I talked about the benefits of installing the W3TC plugin on your Wordpress blog in order to speed it up with various caching, but some readers were understandably a little wary about the plugin without some sort of tutorial to help them. Luckily, the defaults will work well for 90% of us. Follow the guide, and even with some basic settings you're going to see some form of speed improvement.
The Free Guide To Your iPad
The iPad is an e-book reader, a newspaper, an entertainment center and a workstation. This device can do a lot in a very small package.
Wipe Your Mac of Sensitive Information with Washing Machine [Giveaway]
Washing Machine is a simple, single purpose app that keeps your Mac clean of personal information in this increasingly security conscious age. We've got 25 standard licenses for Washing Machine 2 -- each license protects up to 2 Macs.
How To Diagnose Hardware Problems When Your Computer Won't Turn On
Last week I showed you some of the simplest DIY repairs and upgrades that you can do yourself, but one reader asked how to diagnose which component was the problem. Today I’d like to walk you through the process of diagnosing a faulty PC that won’t turn on.
4 Great Uses for Amazon's S3 Web Services
Despite Amazon being most well known for their retail services, they actually offer a host of web services for developers and home users that take advantage of Amazons experience and scalability with massive amounts of data warehousing. One of those services is called S3, which stands for "Simple Storage Service". Here are 3 ways in which you can MakeUseOf Amazon S3 today.