About James Bruce
James has a BSc in Artificial Intelligence and is CompTIA A+ and Network+ certified. When he's not reviewing hardware and producing YouTube videos, he enjoys LEGO, VR, and board games. Before joining MakeUseOf, he was a lighting technician, English teacher, and datacenter engineer.
Latest Articles
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.
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.
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.
What Is the Difference Between a Netbook, Notebook, Ultrabook, Laptop, and Palmtop?
The term "laptop" encompasses so many different types of laptops these days. Here are the important differences between them all.
How To Make Your Own Sticky Header Bar Like MakeUseOf
About a month ago, we introduced a new interface element to MakeUseOf – a floating navigation and search bar. The feedback we’ve been getting is almost entirely positive, internal search traffic has rocketed, and some readers having been asking about how to make one for their own site, so I thought I’d share.
When Reality Is Too Dull: A Look At Alternate Reality Games
Alternate Reality Games are a curious subculture that attempts to bring the concepts of gaming into the real world. Does this mean running around an industrial complex with water pistols? Not quite. The game nomenclature is deceptive; they’re best thought of as a mix between role-play, puzzle-solving, team-building, immersive fiction and creative writing.
Replace Windows Home Server With These Great Free Tools
Microsoft has been implementing big changes lately, and none of them are sitting too well with me. If you’re as jaded as I am about the $50 Windows Home Server being killed off - replaced by the $450 Windows Server Essentials - then fear not; you can get pretty much all the same functionality from these awesome free tools, and not give Microsoft a penny in the process.
Create a Social Updates Wall in Your WordPress Blog With Socialist jQuery Plugin
Socialist is an incredible new jQiuery plugin that aggregates your updates on various social networks and displays them beautifully in a grid similar to Pinterest. Socialist is a jQuery plugin. I’ll be giving full instructions on how to implement this in WordPress, but a working knowledge of jQuery would be helpful to identify typos or errors in your code.
Who Owns That MP3? Rights & Ownership In The Digital Era
This is pretty new ground - what happens to your legally purchased MP3 collection when you die? When one of the least trustworthy British newspapers around reported that Bruce Willis was going to sue Apple because he couldn’t bequeth his digital music collection, the Internet at large jumped at the chance to spew their vitriolic Apple hate. The story was completely false of course - but it raised an important question worth considering - who does own that mp3?
Kodiak PHP IDE For iPad Lets You Write And Run PHP Code Offline
Plain text and code editors are certainly nothing new to the iPad - but the Kodiak PHP IDE brings to the table one incredibly powerful feature: the ability to actually run your code, offline, on your iPad. It’s also an incredibly slick code editor, as you’d expect. Let’s take a look at what makes Kodiak stand out. The app is on-sale for $4.99 for a limited time, before going up to full price of $9.99. This app couldn’t come more highly recommended.