Author: Evan Wondrasek

  • Track and Share Your Favorite Books Online with Goodreads

    I had long sought a good place to keep a list of all the books I’ve read or listened to. I originally used a service called Visual Bookshelf (now known as LivingSocial: Books) through Facebook, but I was looking for something cleaner and with better performance. Although LivingSocial: Books had basically every feature I wanted,…

  • Simple Droid X Hack Can Greatly Improve Call Quality

    There are many reasons why the audio quality of mobile phones isn’t great. One simple, but fixable reason is that the phone is most likely configured to use an outdated voice encoder algorithm by default. Luckily for us, Motorola includes hidden programming menus in most of its phones where we can adjust advanced settings like voice…

  • Fix: Advanced Search Fields in Microsoft Outlook are Disabled or “Grayed Out”

    Group policy is a feature in the Microsoft Windows operating system that allows administrators to set rules and privileges for users on a network. One of its abilities is to disable indexing of files on your hard drive, which can be done for security or performance purposes. A common problem that can occur when indexing gets disabled…

  • Microsoft Unveils a Slimmer, Smarter Surface 2.0

    How’s that for alliteration? When Microsoft first unveiled their Surface technology in 2007, I was impressed with the possibilities that could be had when combining advanced displays with accurate, multi-touch optical recognition. Their original product combined a 30” display with a series of cameras to establish the position of inputs (like your hands), which produced…

  • Progress Bars use Optical Illusions to Appear Faster

    I’d rather not think about how many hours I’ve spent staring at progress bars in my life. They’re a lot faster than the used to be because of better processors and internet connections, but we still have to wait patiently while transferring large files, downloading video games on Steam, or streaming videos online. Have you…

  • So You Got a New Kindle for Christmas, Now What?

    Like many of you lucky people out there, I got a new Kindle as a present this Christmas (thanks, Mom!).  I’m an avid reader so I know I’ll make good use of it, but I’ve come up with a few simple tips that can help you get the most out of your new toy. Oh,…

  • One Small Step for Android, One Giant Leap for Synthetic Robotic Organisms

    You might remember that we gave away some pretty sweet limited edition Android collectibles a few months ago.  As it turns out, these Androids had a few buddies that recently took a trip to the upper stratosphere (about 100,000 feet above the Earth’s surface) to take part in a research experiment by Google. A team…

  • How to Close Pidgin Chat Windows with the Escape Key

    Pidgin (formerly known as Gaim) is a free, multi-protocol instant messaging application for Windows, Mac, and Linux.  Pidgin is highly customizable and supports popular instant messaging networks like Google Talk, MSN/Windows Live Messenger, AIM, Yahoo! Chat, and can connect to services like Facebook Chat through plugins (or directly through the XMPP messaging protocol). In recent…

  • How to Scale Images While Retaining Aspect Ratio in Paint.NET

    Paint.NET is one of the best applications for editing images in Windows, and can do almost every standard task you’d do in the infinitely-more-expensive Photoshop. The best part? It is completely free. The only downside is that it’s a little trickier to do standard tasks, so in this guide I’ll show you how to resize images…

  • Holiday Gift Ideas: President of Adobe Edition

    Getting the right present for a special person can be a real challenge, and finding the perfect gift for President and CEO of Adobe Systems Incorporated Shantanu Narayen is no exception.  This holiday season, let’s give back to Adobe what they have so generously given to us – unnecessary icons all over our desktops. (In…