Comic Book Heroes – The Best Readers for Mac and Windows
The Internet has brought revolution to the worlds of music and films, altering forever the commercial landscape and bringing once mighty chain stores to their knees. Books took a kicking too, but it wasn’t online sales that killed the book shops, but eBooks for devices like the Kindle and the iPad. Now that same revolution is sweeping through the world of comics – whether it will affect the already niche world of the comicbook store remains to be seen – but it is certainly opening up the world of graphic novels to a whole new audience.
There are plenty of comicbook readers available for both Windows and Mac and we’ve tried most of them. Some, like ComicBookLover for the Mac have received a fair bit of coverage on the other blogs, but we found that particular application seriously lacking in just about every way. So we’d like to introduce you to the best comicbook readers for Windows and for Mac.
Read MoreConcerned about Google shutting your accounts down? Here’s how to protect yourself.
Recently there have been some high profile cases of a totalitarian Google imposing its will on the little people. Users who’d pretty much moved their online lives onto Google’s growing suite of web applications suddenly found themselves locked out or deleted and with no clear way of getting their stuff back. It’s pretty worrying, when you want to place your faith in a company whose motto is ‘don’t be evil’, but you find yourself hammering at the door of the biggest online monopoly on the planet, and no-one’s home. There are some steps you can take to mitigate this, should the worst happen and Google lock you out.
Firstly, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. By all means use Gmail as your main email account, but set-up an automatic forwarder to another free online email service. This is a set-and-forget measure that I’ve had in place pretty much since I created my Gmail account. Every single email I receive to my Google account is automatically forwarded to my old Hotmail account too. To set up this forwarding, just go into Mail Settings > Forwarding and enter your email address, making sure that ‘Keep Gmail’s copy in the Inbox’ is set. Should the worse come to the worse, you have copies of everything waiting for you over at the company-formerly-known-as-evil – Microsoft. If you want to archive all your existing email to a service like Hotmail, then you can use the excellent TrueSwitch web app to back everything up.
Sometimes it isn’t actually Google’s fault that you’re locked out of your account, sometimes it’s because you used a password that’s been hacked elsewhere or your PC has been compromised. In any case, you absolutely need to set-up the recovery settings. To do this go into Settings > Change Account Settings > Change password recovery options. Here you can set up a secondary recovery email address (perhaps the account you set-up for automatic forwarding), a mobile phone for SMS identity verification and your security question. Without these you will find it incredibly hard to regain control of your Gmail account should it be compromised.
Two questions – when was the last time you changed your Gmail password and how secure is it anyway? We are, by nature, lazy creatures and the odds are that you use a Gmail password that is exactly the same as the one you use on a multitude of other websites. Hackers count on this kind of behaviour and once they get a list elsewhere with your google email address and a password (for instance on a web forum somewhere) then they will absolutely try and log into your Gmail account with that address and that password. So change your Gmail password now and use something secure, not a dictionary word, not your middle name, not ‘sex’, ‘password’, ’123456′, ‘pussy’, ‘qwerty’, ‘letmein’ or any of the other incredibly common passwords people use. 
More importantly only use this new password on Google – do not use it on any websites (particularly dodgy ones, if you know what I mean), restrict this password’s use solely to Gmail. If you want get serious about security but have a hard time remembering passwords then install something like RoboForm on Windows or 1Password on Mac and you’ll only have to ever remember one (good) password.
These days, when Google runs so many high profile websites, it’s easy to forget just how much we rely on that one username/password combination. Getting locked out of Gmail means you’re also locked out of YouTube, Adsense, Blogger, Picassa, Calendar, Contacts, Feedburner and so on. So you should try and mitigate any account closure by backing up your stuff on these sites. The first place to start is Google’s own Data Liberation centre. This enables you to backup your Picassa, Profile, Stream, Buzz, Circles and Contacts. Backing up your Gmail is pretty simple – in fact Google have a little step-by-step that explains how or you can setup IMAP on your Gmail account and download your email to as many desktop clients as you want.
If that all sounds like too much hard work then you might like to take a look at Cloud Export. This is a simple tool in the early stages of development that automatically extracts your data from web applications and save it to your PC for backup purposes. At that stage it’s a Windows only application. Cloud Export will liberate your data from Gmail, Google Contacts, Picasa, Reader, 
Finance, Blogger, Health, Talk and Docs. In addition it will also enable the bacup of Twitter, Identi.ca/StatusNet, any RSS feed, IMAP and Jabber.
If you’re really serious about your backups, particularly from Google and other social media sites, then perhaps its time to consider a premium service. Backupifyoffer a couple of packages (including a free one that offers a three account backup facility) that can backup data on Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Picasa, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Blogger, Zoho and LinkedIn. If you only want to backup the major Google based web application then BackupGoo is a terrific little application (Windows, Mac and Linux flavours available) that will assit you in this matter – it’s free for 14 days or $12 to buy outright. There’s also Windows-only GmailKeeper, which can be set to backup your Google Mail on a scheduled basis and costs $20.
It’s easy to assume that your stuff up in the cloud will always be secure and that no harm will come to it, but complacency is not going to help you if someone gains access to your account or Google deem you to have contravened their terms of service and shut you down. Take ownership of your stuff, set the necessary safeguards in place and you can use your online web applications with confidence.
Read MoreThe TFI Friday Time-Waster – Week 4 July 2011
Happy Friday everyone. Some more YouTube action for you again today, this time featuring a radio-controlled helicopter. Now, I’ve tried to fly one of these suckers and let me tell you, it isn’t easy. So please check out the insane flying in this video and keep a tally of the number of times you thought he was going to ram that buzzy mofo right into the tarmac.
10 Things You Hate About OS X Lion – And How to Fix Them
So you’ve put your $30 or £20 down on the App Store counter – or you downloaded it weeks ago from a torrent site (because, fuck them, it’s Apple, they can afford it) and you’ve had a play with the OS and you’ve checked out all your favourite programs and now you’re finding a few things that piss you off. These might be small things, they might be big things, but gee-whizz they make your blood boil and why’d Apple have to go and mess up things anyway. Right?
The good news is that in most cases, there are fixes for the changes that have been made to OSX. We’ve had our ear to the ground over the last few days and have picked out 10 common complaints about Lion. Here’s how to make your big cat pain go away.
Read MoreIs Flickr going to be the real loser in the Google+ land-grab?
Even by Google’s standards, the buzz surrounding their Google+ service has been little short of amazing. Indeed there have been so many (what we used to call in the pre-digital age) column-inches written about the service that anyone and everyone was baying for an invite to the [beta] service. For all the coverage however, one area hasn’t received the same amount of attention as Circles, Hangout and Stream.
Google’s long-standing photo sharing service Picassa is getting a Google+ makeover shortly and will be renamed Google Photos. Sharing functionality has already been built into Google Plus such that photos you upload to the service are added to your Picassa/Google Photos album. If the masses descend on Google+ and adopt it in the same way that they have with Facebook then the volume of content uploaded and shared to Picassa/Google Photos will increase massively. With your social media stream and your photos in the same place, why would you bother uploading them to a separate photo site like Flickr?
Comparisons have obviously been made between Flickr and Picassa for some time now. Flickr is seen as the cooler service and one that, with its Pro subscription service and slick organisational features, is the place to upload photographs. Meanwhile Picassa with its rough and ready Google interface is simply somewhere you dump your holiday snaps. If you want to show off your images you put them on Flickr, if you just want them kept safe, you put them on Picassa.
Until Google gets its house in order, it’s hard to imagine Flickr losing out too heavily to Google Photos, but the day can’t be far off. Flickr groups, sets and collections and the print and create products will not be hard to emulate within the new Google+ infrastructure. Circles can just as easily be applied to photos as they can people and the print products that Flickr offers are all out-sourced third party products. All of which leaves Flickr without a USP – sure they have a massive user-base now, but then so did MySpace and I don’t know anyone that posts there anymore. It’s going to be interesting to see how this one plays out.
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The TFI Friday Time-Waster – Week 3 July 2011
Happy Friday everyone. This week we bring you a most excellent YouTube video, which we found linked from the also most excellent MetaFilter. It’s the one and only Christopher Walkern reading The Three Little Pigs. We shall say no more. Enjoy …
How to use Google Image Search to turn detective
Last week I was cruising through Reddit when I chanced upon the image you can see to the right. It was in a long combination image titled ‘Borderline Genius’ and as with most pictures you find on Reddit these days, it was a repost of a repost. However, unlike the last time when I came across the image, this time I was struck by the neat design of the chest of drawers. Maybe it’s something to do with being the father of a nine year old son who has a creative outlook on storing his clothes.
I was sufficiently interested in the drawers to ponder upon their origin, so I decided to see if I could track them down. This is something you can do yourself if you ever end up with an image of unknown origins that you’d like to find out more about. The first step in my search was to isolate the image of interest from the others, because searching for the montage would just result in an endless succession of sites that post reposts of images that were first 
submitted in 2002. Once I’d cropped out the image, the next step was to utilise the power of image look-up websites.
Living the dream – the happiest DJ in the world
Remember this video clip? It’s called ‘The Happiest DJ in the World’ and it was uploaded to YouTube in July 2010. As you can imagine, it wasn’t long before the video went viral and even people like David Guetta (whose track the happy DJ is playing) tweeted about it. So who is the exuberant master of ceremonies in the video and what’s his story?
Originally people thought it was some crazy professor DJing at a college party, but the truth is actually much more interesting. He’s a German, from Cologne and he’s not a college professor or father of the bride, he’s a real DJ. The man in the video is called DJ der guten Laune, which literally translates into DJ In Good Spirits and the video that marked his rise to fame was shot by a cinematographer who was a guest at the wedding DJ der guten Laune was hired to work at.
What’s interesting about DJ der guten Laune is that it’s only this year and thanks completely to the viral success of that YouTube video that he’s been able to pack in his day job and become a full-time DJ. Amazingly, the bloke’s 56 and for the last 28 years has basically been an office worker. He’s now working full-time on the nightclub circuit and enjoying lots of on-going press coverage in Germany. All of which makes him something of an inspiration for anyone who thinks they’re ‘too old’ to get into the DJ game.
Contrary to appearances, DJ der guten Laune reckons he doesn’t need any herbal or chemical stimulation to get in the mood, the music and the vibe from the crowd is what he gets off on. Clearly the party vibe he loves has mass appeal because he now has his own track out and a compilation CD titled, The Happiest DJ’s Party Mix. If you’re a fan, then drop by his Facebook page and his website (Google translated).
DJ der guten Laune is a laptop DJ who mixes entirely digitally. He utilises a MIDI controller to cue up his tracks and runs everything off a Windows laptop. In case you’re interested in following in his footsteps and throwing in that day job and becoming a superstar DJ, he uses Virtual DJ Pro, which is available in Windows and Mac flavours or try the free home version. If you want to be able to cue up your tracks in your headphones without interrupting your mix, you’ll need a breakout soundcard such as the DJ|IO. If you are interested in getting into digital DJing, I can recommend Digital DJ Tips – a great DJ blog with loads of great advice for aspiring deck spinners.
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The Minimalist Collection July – 12 Stylish New Wallpapers
Here’s a piping hot and brand new batch of minimalist wallpapers to adorn the coolest desktops around. We’ve curated this collection from DeviantArt, which is no mean process as many ‘Deviants’ seem to have a pretty fucked perception of what constitutes minimalism. If you like this article, plus consider ‘Liking’ or ‘+1′ing it below. Anyway – on with the show:
Read on for the links …
Read MoreBeat the traffic jam – take to the skies in your very own flying car
When I was a kid I had one of those books that offered a glimpse into the future. According to the author we’d all have eschewed eating three meals a day in favour of a trio of pills. We wouldn’t actually work, so much as direct the actions of robots. And above all else, we would travel by flying car. And now, after a lot of false-starts, it looks like a viable flying car might actually be entering production soon.
The Transition, which is just about to enter production, is a light aeroplane that transforms into a car. You can drive it legally on the roads (in America at least) enabling you to garage it at your house and drive to the airport to take-off. The wings of the aircraft fold neatly up when not required and the car elements of the craft include such as enhancements as airbags. It’s capable of flying at a maximum of 185Km/h and includes a fail-safe parachute in case of engine failure.
[Terrafugia via TNW]
Read MoreThe TFI Friday Time-Waster – Week 2 July 2011
Once upon a time I used to work for a magazine called Amiga Format. The editor of the magazine (Marcus Dyson who you can find over at the most excellent Spong gaming blog) decided to run a competition for original games for the Amiga that would then be published by Team 17. The winner of that competition was a game called Worms and it has proved itself to have the sort of longevity the Queen would be proud of.
Worms Special Edition is a streamlined version of the PC best-seller Worms Reloaded. The game includes an (up to four player) offline multi-player mode, new high-definition landscape themes, new landscape editor, new play modes, hats, forts, skins and speech banks. The single-player mode features tutorials, deathmatches, races, fort games and puzzles. It’s terrific and you can download it now for $9.99 in the App Store.
Paper Planes Wallpaper
Inspired by this Reddit thread, I’ve made a wallpaper based on the paper aeroplanes in the original image. Resolution is 1920×1080 and you can get the full size version here. Hope you like it.
Whatever happened to Friends Reunited?
Every few weeks or so I get an email with the subject heading, “Latest news from your friends, groups and places.” Without even looking at this email, I delete it. Sure I could swing by the website it originates from and unsubscribe my email address, but I can’t be bothered to do even that. So the emails keep coming and I keep ignoring them. I’d hazard a guess that many of you do exactly the same, since according to the company itself, most subscribers only pay it a visit once every 18 months.
Poor old Friends Reunited – once the most popular kid in class, now the pasty-faced ginger-haired kid with the adenoids problem and chronic halitosis. Primarily a UK site, it was started at the turn of the last decade by a bedroom web designer and within five years had become one of the most visited websites in the UK. Even though it predated Facebook by four years, it is now a bit like that other British institution – the monarchy – once all-powerful, but now toothless, irrelevant and running low on funding.
At least the founders had the sense to sell up when the going was good. In 2005 they off-loaded their white elephant to a gullible ITV (UK media company) for £120m. In cash. Whoever brokered that deal deserved a hefty bonus. The site was sold again in 2009 for just £25m once ITV had realised they’d bought a dud that would only continue to haemorrhage money for them. Today, despite repackaging, marketing and a change in emphasis to a genealogy and a dating site, its page views continue to decline. It’s an anachronism and a perfect example of the fickle nature of social media.
Read MoreFive Accessories to Transform the Quality of your iPhone 4 Photos
One of the most welcome upgrades on the iPhone 4 was the camera. Yes, it’s still ‘only’ a five megapixel chip, but it produces high quality images that belie its capabilities. It’s also now one of the world’s most popular cameras – in fact the iPhone 4 recently became the most popular camera used to take images uploaded to Flickr.
As good as the built-in technology is, however, there are plenty of ways of improving the quality of the photographs that you take with it. With the addition of an accessory or two, you can drastically improve your photos or open up whole new areas of photography to enjoy. Here are five iPhone accessories that will transform your iPhone photos.
Bubo for iPhone 4 – $169 – OWLE
The Bubo is a neat looking case that totally envelops the iPhone 4 and enables it to use a full size lens to greatly enhance image quality. It also comes with an external microphone for capturing high quality audio. 
The case is equipped with four mounting points to enable you to securely mount it to a tripod in any way you like.
Perhaps one of the case’s most useful features is the integrated cold shoe mounting point which enables you to use lights or directional microphones. The unique double-grip style of the weighted case lends itself well to action shots and hand held shooting. For your $169 you get the aluminum uni-body Bubo mount, a silicone case , a wide-angle/macro combo lens, a carrying pouch and a cleaning cloth.
Dot – $99 – Kogeto
Here’s an incredibly innovative iPhone accessory that recently got funded through Kickstarter. The Dot is a 360º (panoramic) lens attachment and app for the iPhone 4. It enables your iPhone to capture immersive, fully navigable, panoramic video in real-time. 
So instead of recording static two dimensional videos that have one viewpoint, you can record an entire scene in all its detail. I know – sounds terrific, doesn’t it?
To get an idea of just how cool this lens is, check out the videos on the Kogeto website. The developers will also be bundling their own ‘Looker’ capture software with Dot, to enable you to instantly upload your videos to the web and share with your friends via Facebook and Twitter.
GorrilaMobile – €39,95 – Joby
Joby were one of the first companies to produce the flexible leg style of mini-tripod. And while you can go on eBay and buy knock-offs for $10, once you try a real Joby tripod, you’ll never go eBaying again. The GorillaMobile is designed specifically for the iPhone 4 and features the
trademark bulbous-legged tripod design which you can use in traditional upright fashion – or wrap safely around any nearby object.
The stand weighs 350g and utilises a rail design which enables you to switch from portrait to landscape orientation and position your phone for your needs. If your images suffer badly from camera-shake, or if you’d like to get into the photos yourself with a few delayed timer shots, you need one of these.
The iPhone Telephoto Lens- $35 – PhotoJojo
So one of the main problems with the iPhoto camera is that it’s a fixed lens. Sure you can use the digital zoom, but as you’ve probably found out, it only degrades the image and produces a pixelated mess. So if you want to get a bit closer to the action, 
your only option is to, ermm, get closer to the action. Unless you’re packing one of those funky little zoom lenses.
The lens is a fixed telephoto iattachment which gives your iPhone a whopping 8x zoom. The lens comes with a case and a cool little mini tripod that can twist to shoot from any angle. The lens itself attaches to the iPhone via a special case that is bundled with it – once it’s in place you just twist to focus manually and then take your photos.
Zgrip iPhone PRO – $295 – Zacuto
The main problem with the iPhone camera is one of handling. Firstly, to take a photo you have to let go of one side of the photo to press the touchscreen shutter button. Secondly, holding it to film video is uncomfortable and fairly impractical for longer periods. What you need is a cool harness 
that would safely hold the iPhone and give the photographer a comfortable and stable grip. Just like the Zgrip iPhone Pro in fact.
One look at this gizmo and you’ll see that’s a pro-grade product in every way. It features an adjustable, quick releasable handgrip system that enables you to shoot professional looking video. The handgrip fully articulates and the levers enable you to adjust every angle to get the shot you want.
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The TFI Friday Time-Waster – Week 1 July 2011
Here’s something that’s fourteen flavours of awesome – a remote controlled life-size superhero. This cunningly disguised RC aeroplane wouldn’t fool too many people at ground level, but up in the skies it’s a whole other ‘is it a bird, is it a plane’ ball game.
Produced by RCSuperHero.Com, the superheroes are available in 57″ and 75″ models. According to the developers, the low weight to surface area, high wing and low center of gravity make it very stable to fly. To get it in the air, you either throw it or standing it upright in a stand and it’ll take off near vertically. Check out the video below for the full details.
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