Appearance, feel and weight

The outer parts of the lens are coated in a black, rubber-ish material with a special feel to it. It has a definite touch of quality and style, and besides being rather good to look at, it comes very much in handy when zooming or focusing (as it provides good grip). The filter-size of 58mm means many lenshoods and filters will fit - many of them making the lens look very professional when viewed at a distance. Weighing around 550g it’s neither clumsy nor difficult to handle, and it feels very good when resting in one’s hand.

Features and quality of image

As I lack different lenses to test, I can’t really comment on the quality of it. All I can say is that I am happy with the quality - it’s enough for my needs. At maximum zoom a tripod is mandatory as the lowest aperture one can shoot at it 5.6. Also, due to its lack of Vibration Reduction (VR) (Nikon’s stabilizing engine), hand-shot images can sometimes be slightly blurry if taken in low lighting-conditions. It has a built-in auto-focus engine that does its job - however if you let it work too much it will consume a lot of battery!
The reason the lens is called a macro-lens is because of its ability to focus at objects at a mere 1.5 meters distance! If you select the special “macro-mode” this distance is even lower - 95cm! This means one can come very close to subjects and still get a crisp, clear image - very handy to say the least.

Conclusion

The SIGMA 70-300mm lens is a great lens for amateur photographers looking for some serious zoom. Shooting at 300mm is fun and interesting - this lens will unlock the door to a whole new world of detailed photography. Examples of areas of use are during sports-events, wildlife photography and portrait photography. Considering its very low price, a minimum of around $200, it is an excellent addition to your collection of lenses if you’re lacking tele-zoom abilities.

• Pros
  • Price
  • Quality and feel
  • Appearance
  • Zoom capabilities

• Cons

  • Lack of Vibration Reduction (VR)
  • Small aperture
  • Badly optimized auto-focus engine

The display

The first thing about the new Sony Ericsson XPERIA X5 (just X5 in short) you will notice is the display. Not only does it sport the usual you’d expect from Sony Ericsson - high resolution and crisp, clear pixels - but the display itself is transparent! It’s like looking through a piece of tinted glass, except for the fact that the piece of glass can display text, images, videos and even games! The only major downside to it is the lack of colors, although I personally am not missing it too much.

The outside

The rest of the phone consists of a glossy black keypad, all in one piece except for the lines dividing the numbers and the Call, the center and the Cancel buttons. When lit up, the three mentioned buttons glow with a green, white and red light respectively. The + and - volume buttons are placed one on each side, in line with the three main buttons. On the sides there is also the power input and the SIM-card slot. On the back side of the phone the back side of the display is visible (which you of course can see through) and the small power button.

Built-in battery

What’s interesting about the XPERIA X5, apart from the display, is the way it handles battery and storage. The X5 features a built-in media-storage module of up to 2GB’s - enough to fit more than 500 standard-sized MP3’s - and a built-in regular storage of around 100MB’s. It also has, in contrast to most other phones, a built-in battery. I suspect the reason Sony Ericsson chose to build the battery inside of the phone was to avoid the extra cost and vulnerability of a battery cover.

Light-weight

Although the X5 lacks a camera, it’s a great mobile phone. The design of the outside, not to forget the design of the menus inside the phone (!) gives a very luxurious impression and modern impression. Most, if not all, standard features are there (such as Bluetooth, radio, synchronization, music player and fast 3G internet). Thanks to its design, the X5 is very light weight and small, it can be used by a lot of different people with different lifestyles.

Conclusion

I love this phone. Sure, the lack of colors can be annoying at times and it sure would be fun to have a built-in GPS and WiFi internet. But for anyone, ranging from businessmen to simply every-day users, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X5 is a great phone. Just wait until it reaches the markets, I guess!

The XBOX is Microsoft’s old gaming console - it was good at the time and it still is. My goal is to educate people about everything there is to know in and around the XBOX. I’ve written content about connecting the XBOX to a TV, changing the harddrive in the XBOX and a lot more!

For this purpose, I’ve started Thy Old XBOX. Please, visit the site and read some of the articles and do comment on the content if you wish!

#1

Open Spotify and log in with your credentials. Click Edit in the top-hand menu and then press Preferences….

#2

Set the Proxy to HTTPS and enter these details as your host and port:
Host: 213.203.241.210
Port: 80
Make sure your settings look like mine:

Now, play your favorite music without ads interrupting! Comment back if this works for you!

Other notes

A reader by the name Christoffer had an idea about how this fix works. Here’s what he said:

But I’m pretty sure that I understand why it did work before. They seem to have targeted the ads to the countries in which it was possible to register for spotify only, so if you used a proxy from a country with no ads, you wouldn’t get any at all.

Sounds like a reasonable explanation, does it not?

How does AutoISO help you then? Well, imagine you’re shooting indoors. The lighting conditions can change rapidly and you need to take well-exposed shots all the time. Keeping a firm ISO is not flexible enough whilst constantly changing the ISO-sensitivity is not time-efficient. The AutoISO-feature keeps you shooting at a fast shutter speed all the time by making much faster and more accurate changes to the ISO-sensitivity on-the-fly.

All-in-all the AutoISO-feature is a great tool and is well worth the time to try it out!

VIPRE Antivirus features, other than its very intuitive and sleek design, advanced anti-rootkit technology, real-time monitoring with its Active Protection™ and a unique and very resource-friendly anti-virus and spyware engine.
VIPRE is highly worth a try, whether you’re satisfied with your current antivirus or not, and you can now download the free working 15-day trial to do so now!

#1

Download the Safari Beta from Apple’s homepage and mount it or unpack it anywhere.

#2

Open the Safari4.0BetaUninstall.pkg file and complete the steps necessary to uninstall the software. Note that after the uninstall, you will not have a working web browser unless you install another browser!

After these steps and a restart your MSN Messenger should be working fine!

Introduction

This guide will cover just how easy it is to play TV on your computer using nothing but software and internet. I was amazed at how well it worked, and although the quality could have been better the choice of channels makes up for it.
This guide involves, as stated above, an acquisition of PCSatelliteTV and you may choose in which way you do this.

Install

Install the program using custom or standard settings, either way works well. No crucial configuration is needed during the installation process. I found some trouble with NOD32 giving virus warnings however I found that the warnings were only issued to the temporary files that were extracted - not the final product.

Scan for channels (optional)

Before opening the program you may want to scan for channels. This extremely slow process (can take hours) scans a directory for any channel available. I have as of now not fully completed a scan like this, so I can’t tell you whether it’s useful or not.

To start the scan, open the Scan Channels.exe file in your installation directory (the one you specified during installation), press the Scan For Available Channels  and let it sit for a long time. A progress bar will tell you how much is left.

Conclusion

After all of this it’s time to enjoy your TV! Open up the main PCSatelliteTV application and doubleclick on any channel to start playing. The quality could be much better and some channels fail to work entirely, but at least it’s TV - and not only free channels but also paid ones.
It does its job - it works, but of course it can be made much better.

Screenshots

ESPN Nascar
Al Jazeera

Using Live View drastically shortens the time you’re able to use your camera on its batteries, unless you plug it in to a charger. As new images constantly have to be rendered on the screen - many frames per second and often a high brightness - this easily drains your batteries.

Accuracy? - I don’t think so…

What Live View shows cannot in any way reflect what the viewfinder shows, nor how your subject really looks. A lot of times you can be lead into believing that colors, brightness and even sharpness is correctly tuned - after taking the picture you see that none of this corresponds to what was taken.

Unnecessary icons and information

A display is usually cluttered with icons, information and lots of other things that really can disturb when taking photos. A good viewfinder has all the information placed outside the actual image, and only the focus is actually shown.

Stability is lost

Imagine yourself holding your camera so that you can see the Live View. This requires most people to hold the camera away from the body and head to be able to see anything. Although you might be holding with two hands there is still a lack of stability and you will often encounter unsharp images - simply due to shaking. Looking through a viewfinder eliminates this as your head is helping to keep the camera stable.

You have to look cool when taking photos!

Look at someone taking a picture using the Live View and compare it with someone who is using the viewfinder. Go figure, viewfinder is a lot cooler. End of discussion.

• Intel Pentium 4, 3.0GHz (15 x 200) dualcore
• MSI PT8 Neo-V (5 PCI, 1 AGP, 2 DDR DIMM, Audio, LAN)  VIA Apollo P4X533
• 1024 MB (DDR SDRAM)
• ATI Radeon HD 2400 Series (256 MB)
• MAXTOR S TM3160211AS (160 GB, 7200 RPM, SATA-II)
• DVD-RW Drive
• FireWire-1934 Connections

Description

A newly built PC with a fast Intel processor and a robust motherboard from MSI gives you all the performance you need for surfing the web, playing less intense games or watching HD-videos on large screens.
The ATI GPU-card is one of the more modern and faster AGP cards and can handle high resolutions and intense action. FireWire and USB2.0 ports are added for your convenience.
The Operating System installed is an original Windows Vista Ultimate with all updates and drivers pre-installed!

I published this computer on a buy-and-sell-site in Sweden and set the price to about €234, hoping to attract people looking for a cheap alternative to expensive powerhouses - which still can run most games and act as a great media-computer.

And after a few weeks I finally did manage to get it sold - for €234, a very good price if you ask me!

What do you think? Opinions? Suggestions?

These files will increase your USB polling frequency from the Windows Vista default of 125hz to 500hz or 1000hz making your mouse much more responsive in gaming. This file will only work on the RTM/Final version of Vista 32-Bit and 64-bit. If you want the same hack under Windows XP just search google for “XP usbport.sys 500hz”.

1. Restart Vista and repeatedly press F8 to bring up the boot menu. Select Safe Mode.
2. Press Start > Run… and enter this into the box: bcdedit -set loadoptions DISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS . This disabled the constant integrity checks that will disable you from overwriting system files. After the restart, it is set back to default.
3. Open the same window and this time enter this: takeown /f “C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\usbport.sys” . This commands lets you take full ownership of the usbport.sys file, enabling you to rename it.
4. Again, in the Run… box enter this: cacls “C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\usbport.sys” /G username:F . Replace username with the account you’re using on Windows. This further makes sure you are allowed to edit and rename the file.
5. Open C:\Windows\System32\Drivers and locate the existing usbport.sys, and rename it to usbport.old
6. Download this file, unzip it and copy the usbport.sys from the appropriate folder over to C:Windows\System32\Drivers.
7. Restart your computer, and use mouserate.exe to check whether the settings have had effect.

Hope this helped you!

This is how an article at Microsoft’s TechNet describes the changes in Vista’s sharing.

• The default workgroup name in Windows Vista has been changed to WORKGROUP. In Windows® XP Home Edition, the default workgroup name is MSHOME. If you upgrade a computer running Windows XP Home Edition to Windows Vista, it will keep its existing workgroup name. However, new computers with Windows Vista can have a different workgroup name than the other computers on your network. With different workgroups, it takes more time and effort to view all of the computers on the network.
• Windows Vista uses the Public folder, rather than the Shared Documents folder in Windows XP, to simplify file sharing. With Public folder sharing enabled, the public folders and all of the folders within the Public folder are automatically shared with the name Public. You do not have to configure file sharing on separate folders. You only have to either move or copy the file or folder you want to share on the network to the Public folder.
• Windows Vista by default does not allow simple file sharing. Access to shared folders, including the public folder (if shared), requires a user name and password. Simple file sharing is enabled by default in Windows XP Home Edition.

Sharing hard drives was perhaps not easy in Windows XP, but it sure is harder on Vista. It took me a while to figure out what to do, but after a bit of messing around with security settings I finally achieved what I had intended. This guide consists of five steps, and I take no responsibility for what happens with your computer!

Steps

#1

Right-click on the harddrive you intend to share. Click Properties to open a window with most changeable settings on your harddrive.

#2

Select the Security tab. In front of you is a list of the different users that have access to your hard drive. Select Everyone and click Edit….

#3

At this prompt you have the ability to change how much you want everyone to have access to. Customize this yourself, or use my settings, then apply the settings by OK-ing this window and the previous one.

#4

Now, right-click the hard drive again but this time select Share…. In the prompt (which is the sharing tab in the properties-prompt) click Advanced Sharing… and authenticate yourself if needed.

#5

In the window in front of you, check the Share this folder checkbox and enter a name for the share. If you need to specifcy the amount of simultaneous users, do so, but for most home networks this is not needed. To enable everyone to access the share, click Premissions and use either my settings or your own.

Conclusion

There are of course security implications associated with sharing an entire hard drive. You should avoid sharing the drive you’re booting from and/or using Windows on, also you should also generally be careful of how much you’re letting people do with the drive.

First of all you need the skin itself. It can be found on several places, but most notably on the uTorrent site itself. Go there and find yourself a nice looking skin, and make sure it’s called toolbar.bmp when downloaded!

Open up an Explorer window (or simply open up My Documents or any other folder) and type %AppData%\uTorrent in the adress bar. Paste the toolbar.bmp file here!
The only thing you need to do is restart (or open) uTorrent and voila! Your new skin is there!

Have fun, and comment if you find any good skins out there!

Steps

Click Tools in the top menu then Options to open the Option-menu. In the left-hand part of the window, click Advanced and then Connection in the options that pop down under Advanced.
Check the box that says Display technical info during calls and call someone! Hover your mouse on the same part of the window where the Call and End Call buttons are and you should see a windows popping up telling you about what’s going on behind the scenes!

The Console feature

Pressing this button/tab takes you to a console with one line of code-input. What this thing enables you to is to run specific JavaScript commands to test and debug various features you may have. I have personally yet to find use for it, however I can definitely see large websites with a lot of JS making use of it!
I will further try this out, perhaps even inputting some jQuery code and seeing if something happens!

The Network tab

Let me start off by saying the following. The Network feature is awesome. As the picture depicts, it is all about load-time. What objects load? When does an object load? Where does it load? How long time does it take to load it? Is there anything I can do to improve this? The graph to the right of Transfer Time takes you back to the intuitive interface of iTunes and it’s graph of the layout of your iPod harddrive… All this is something I have found use for (and which I can’t see how anyone wouldn’t!) and which I will be using in the future!

What doesn’t work?

• SPTD (SCSI Pass Through Direct) does not seem to be installing properly. This prevents mounting software such as Daemon Tools from working.
• The sidebar in XFire (social gaming client) is empty, and the sound notification doesn’t work.
• Ventrilo (Voice-Over-IP software) seems to have problems with minimizing and opening other program while transmitting.

What works?

• Steam (games provider) seems to work flawlessly. I am testing the games within Steam at this moment.
• PowerISO (ISO-manager software) works well except from some issues with installation and registration.
• Google Chrome (browser) doesn’t register as the default browser. Opening it with administrator rights fixes the problem.
• WinRAR (archiving software) appears to work well, and extraction is actually fairly fast compared to XP and Vista.
• Spotify (music streaming service) works fine.
• uTorrent (torrent client) works well, giving just as fast speeds as in any other operating system.

This is the image we will come up with, in comparison with the old one.

Steps

#1
Change the color mode to “Lab Color” inside Image > Mode > Lab Color. This is the main start-off point and plays a key role in this tutorial.

#2
Select Curves in the Image > Adjustments > Curves. Using this tool we will now edit the colors to perfection!

#3
In the Channel drop-down, select a and b respectively and change the curves to something that resembles this.
a-curves
b-curves

#4
Revert back to RGB color mode, otherwise this can create problems when further editing the picture!

Good job, you’ve now gotten yourself a lot more color! Is it a bit too much? Fiddle around with the Saturation settings until you get what you like!
Did you like this or have any questions? Comment!

Introducing you to the SoL R38. It’s a highly efficient modern LED lamp with power-saving in mind as well as long life of operation, performance (the light itself is crisp and white) and heat emissions.
And best of all, it’s coolest on the block. Buy a few of these and you can turn any dull room into something well worth the stay, more or less! The outer shell, the housing, is made of anodized silver, looking a bit like a heatsink.

Thanks to NYTimes!

First thing you should try is to use the built-in drivers available on the modem itself. See, the little egg works like both a storage device and a modem, and on the storage part are included drivers for both Windows and Mac.
As a Mac user, you will only see the Mac drivers, and as a Windows user it’s vice versa, so you do not have to worry about choosing the wrong drivers. Open Finder and click on the newly appeared device in the left-hand bar, and proceed by double-clicking the Mobile Connect.app. However, the installer is very buggy and for some it just does not work.

If all goes well and you do manage to install it, just run the application and use the internet! If you’re unlucky, it will, as I mentioned, briefly open and then close itself. You need to get a driver from the Huawei homepage. Fortunately I’ve fetched up the drivers for you (it was kind of hard to find one’s way around, I can tell you that), you can directly download the driver from over here.

The file being downloaded on your harddrive is called just plain “E220” without any extension. You won’t be able to do much with it in it’s current state, so to proceed you must rename it to “E220.dmg”. Now just double-click it, let it mount and run the installer - it should take you through the installation process and configure everything for you!

Congratulations on getting fairly good 3G internet anywhere in the world (depending on coverage, of course)!

What is all this about?

XFire introduced Live Video back a few months ago. Live Video is a tool for gamers to broadcast what they see to the masses. It’s quick and easy, requires only a few configuration steps and the XFire client itself. You can only broadcast a current game in progress (i.e. you can’t (regularly) broadcast anything else but a full-screen DirectX game), and only some games are supported.
Now what I’ve managed to find out is how to broadcast pretty much any video player (though I’ve only tested it on a certain player it should theoretically work in any environment) by doing some fairly straight-forward editing of files. Enough talking, let’s get to the actual guide.

Steps

#1
Download Media Player Classic from here (direct SF link). Extract the file (mplayerc.exe) to a location of your choice (I put mine in C:\Program Files\MPC) and open it. You will be greeted with an empty window. Click on View and then Options. In the left-hand menu navigate to Output, and choose the following settings:

Press OK, close the program and remember the path to where you extracted it.

#2
Close XFire and then navigate to the folder where it XFire is located (usually C:\Program Files\Xfire) and open the file xfire_games.ini in Notepad or any other text-editor (no, I’m not saying you can use Word). Scroll down to the bottom and paste this a few lines under the last row:

[9999]
LongName=MPC
ShortName=mpcplayer
LauncherDirKey=C:\Program Files\MPC
LauncherExe=mplayerc.exe
Launch=%UA_LAUNCHER_EXE_PATH% %UA_LAUNCHER_EXTRA_ARGS% %UA_LAUNCHER_NETWORK_ARGS%
InGameRenderer=D3D9
;InGameFlags=USE_PRESENT|ENABLE_MOUSE|USE_DINPUT_MOUSE

Change the path after LauncherDirKey= to wherever you extracted Media Player Classic. Otherwise make sure everything else is as it looks.

#3
Open XFire again, let it log-in and then press Tools and then Options. In the top bar select Games and let it detect any newly installed games. Double-click Not Installed, scroll down and click on MPC (the games are in alphabetical order). Select Manually Setup and Browse to the location of where you extracted Media Player Classic (same path as in the xfire_games.ini file, yes I know) and press OK.

Now go Tools again, this time hovering over Launch and then clicking MPC. When it’s been launched, select File and Open File, browse to the file you want to open, press OK and press ScrollLock + B to start the broadcast! If nothing happens, make sure you’ve enable Live Broadcast (Options, Broadcast (ALPHA), check Enable Broadcast).

Conclusion

As far as I know, there are no legal implications as to the modifying of core files, and it’s really nothing that can destroy your installation of XFire (if it does, just re-install).
I am aware of the fact that it doesn’t display the broadcast in the XFire status window. The solution to this is for the viewers to go to http://www.xfire.com/live_video/username directly.

Have fun, and let me know how it goes!

To add other email accounts to your Gmail account (i.e. pairing them together) is easy and painless and can improve your efficiency by loads. Imagine having all your emails right in your Gmail inbox, ready to be read and archived inside your other around 8GB’s of space! This is all possible and pretty easy to set up. Let’s do this!

Log-in to your GMail account and have the credentials for your other accounts ready to be typed. Click on Settings at the top of the screen and choose the Accounts tab. Click on Add another mail account and follow the on-screen instructions, and you’ll have the account paired up with Gmail in no time! To later change the settings you do not need to re-add the account, you only need to press edit info on the right-hand side of the account-name and change whatever you need to change.

Remember, if you want to move your emails from the other account when receiving them, leave the Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server checkbox unchecked. If you wish to leave a copy of the mails you’re receiving then tick the box.

Labels, for those of you who do not know, is like putting mail into different folders or categories without moving them into other folders (i.e. keeping them in the Inbox). If you download mail from an external mail account, for example, you can choose to have it labeled automatically. It will then receive the label corresponding to the email address of the mail account you are downloading from.

One can also, of course, create own labels and apply them to different mail. This can be achieved by going into Settings and choosing Labels and pressing Create. But the main question here is how to filter by labels and how to search them! Labels are useless if you can’t actually filter the mail to exclusively show them!

The key lies, as so many other times, in the Gmail searchbar. This Google-powered wonderful little input-bar of rejoice let’s you do numerous things inside Gmail relating to filtering and searching. As with the regular Google searchbar you can apply certain rules to the search by adding parameters infront of the query such as define: and related: .

Solution
To search for (and essentially filter out) certain labels you only need to add label: in the searchbar and type parts of the, or the whole, name of the label you’re looking for. Gmail quickly and easily grabs all mail with the corresponding label(s) and displays it in a green box. One can also open an email with the label one’s looking for and just click the label itself. Either way labels are a very handy way of organizing mail.

I tried installing it by copying down the image onto an iPod and using it as a boot device, but hopelessly. The Mac wouldn’t recognize it as bootable, therefore eliminating all chances of ever booting from it (obviously).

However, I still knew I could use Dual Layer DVD’s (I just wanted to avoid mal-burning one of them and having to replace it), and that’s what I did. I burned the image onto one of the 25 duallayered DVD’s I was forced to buy and let it boot up.

The installation screen was familiar to me (as I’ve tried installing Leopard on PC’s several times) and I jumped through a dozen or so screens and finally started installing.
The install itself took perhaps an hour or so, and was fairly painless.

Now, before I go on writing about how Leopard behaves I must gather more intel, do more research and prepare myself. So, until then, stay tuned!

Conclusion

After testing this out I came to the conclusion that setting categories is tough and that adding custom keywords might be difficult. I will continue using the normal web-based publishing until something better comes my way!

• Sony Vegas
• Adobe Premiere
• Adobe After Effects (this is mainly used for intros)

• WeGame
• XFire
• Fraps

The laptop itself is of the brand Lenovo and is called 3000 N200. It has an old dual-core processor (1.46GhZ per core?) and comes with two sticks of 512MB SO-DIMM DDR2 PC5300 RAM.
As I have been running Vista on it for a long time now, I felt that it absolutely needed a boost in the memory as Vista takes incredible amounts of memory while idling. So I took a bike-ride to a nearby computer store and bought myself a stick of the same specifications but with 2GB of memory.

I have never touched the insides of a laptop, neither have I ever needed to. After taking a quick look at the three different panels underneath, I immediately saw a little imprint of a chip beside the screw on one of them.
That must be the RAM, I thought, and after unscrewing 1 (one) screw I was ready to open the panel and have a look. So far so good, the sight of two sticks (one being pushed forward for viewing purposes) met my eyes and I was pleased.

This is too easy, I thought to myself. There’s gotta be some catch to it all. But there really was not. After releasing the overlying stick from it’s metal holders it flipped up at about 45° and was easy to remove.
The “art of inserting the stick of RAM” was basically just inserting it into the pins and applying pressure to the top, eventually clipping it back into the metal holders on the sides.

That was all I had to do and after putting the panel back in place I now enjoy 2,5GB’s of memory!