How to Do It Yourself!

How to Save Your Phone After a Short Swim

Photo courtesy of DigitalTrends It happens to everyone at least once in their life, your cellphone becomes a drowning victim. With the price of phones these days it is worth a shot at reviving it rather than declaring your phone DOA. Here is a few steps gathered from various sources on how to dry out your waterlogged cellphone or device. Most are pretty obvious but need to be stated as a reminder in the time of panic and chaos: Get your phone to safety. Don’t just stare in disbelief and feel like all is lost. Get it out of water…

Android Tip – Stopping Apps Using Any Cut

One of the first things that people install on their Android phones is some sort of application to kill background applications. In fact, as Carly noted today, Verizon employees suggested she install “Advanced Task Killer” to help stop applications running in the background. Why not use the functionality that’s already built-in to Android for this?

How to Do It Yourself!

Is a Task Killer Necessary For Android?

I was perusing Androidforums.com today for some software tips and stumbled on a few threads that maintained there was no reason to use a task killer with Android. These posters maintained that the OS was efficient enough to shut down programs that weren’t necessary and manage memory without a 3rd party intervention.

Gear Bits, How to Do It Yourself!

Salt Dough Ornaments are Holiday Fun for the Whole Family

After moving this year, Kevin and I realized we were a bit light on Christmas tree decorations; but instead of going out and buying a bunch of them, his girls and I spent a day making salt dough ornaments. This is something that my mom used to do with my brother and me when we were kids. Mom thinks it’s because play-dough wasn’t easily available living overseas, but it could just as easily be because we were on an enlisted military man’s budget and she was a stay-at-home-mom. Whatever the reason, salt dough is very similar to play-dough, and the…

How to Do It Yourself!

A Low Tech Suggestion to Protect Yourself from Internet and Credit Card Scammers

Ah yes… the holidays. Times for family, food, drink… and scammers! Elana received an email from her aunt last night that included the above credit card scam “transcript”. It has been checked out by Snopes and looks to be legitimate. Even if it is not legit, Snopes points out that the elements of it certainly are and “anyone who holds a credit card is a potential victim of this type of fraud”. The scary thing about this scam is just HOW much information the scammers have. They have your name. They have your address. They have your credit card number……

How to Do It Yourself!

Popularity Contest: Learning a Language on a Budget, Week Five

photo credit: woodleywonderworks So this week we are going to talk about what to do when you are trying to learn a language that just isn’t as popular as some of the biggies. One of the nice things about living in the Internet Age is that we are so connected – all over the world. So I’m fortunate because I’ve got friends all over the world, some of whom speak English, some not. Either way, I like to learn at least a little of their languages so I can better communicate with them. If you haven’t guessed, it’s kind of…

How to Do It Yourself!

In for a Penny: Learning a Language on a Budget, Week Four

So you’re learning a new language. We’ve mostly focused on free or nearly-free resources that you can use to assist you in this process. So now you find you are willing to spend a little money, but not a lot, or you need a little more assistance or you just need a little different approach than the free resources have available for you. What kinds of things are available to you? Like you, I’ve been studying a few languages using mostly free, or nearly free resources I’ve found on the Internet, but sometimes I’ve wanted to use tools that…

How to Do It Yourself!

The Internet Is Your Friend: Learning a Language on a Budget, Week Two

photo credit: woodleywonderworks In part one of “Learning a Language on a Budget” I talked a bit about the things you can do to get prepared to learn a language. A number of you offered comments and provided additional information about some resources that are available. Much appreciated! In this second post in the series I’m going to focus on some of the Internet resources that are available for the study of Spanish and, to some extent, other languages. There are an amazingly large number of resources available to language learners on the Internet. Many resources are free (or near…

How to Do It Yourself!

Making a bootable USB stick to upgrade to Windows 7

So you have Windows 7 and you are all fired up about installing it on your netbook. The problem is that your netbook doesn’t have a CD or DVD player built in which means that DVD media that Windows 7 comes on is pretty much a coaster. You can solve the problem by popping $80-90 bucks on an external drive, but what if you could make that 4GB USB flash drive do the magic for you? Well you can, and it is pretty straight forward to do. All you need is a 4GB or bigger USB flash drive, a little…

How to Do It Yourself!

Translation and Frustration: Learning a Language on a Budget, Week Three

photo credit: woodleywonderworks So far, I’ve talked about dictionaries and dictionary sites, and other language-learning resources on the Internet. There is, however, one Internet service that many of us will come across, even if we aren’t in the process of learning a language – online translation tools. Arguably, the biggest sites today for these services are translate.google.com, and babelfish.yahoo.com. This week, I want to talk a little bit about the differences in these sites and how they approach language translation and some things you can do to make your translation more effective and accurate.

How to Do It Yourself!, Reviews

Rosetta Stone TOTALe Program, Week 7

Buenos Noches. This week I began Unit 3, Lesson 1, and as had happened when I began the previous other two, I was immediately immersed into a new world where unknown words were being thrown at me as if I should understand their meaning and context. But this time was armed with something I hadn’t had before — an ever expanding vocabulary. By paying attention to what was being written or said, even when I couldn’t understand much of it, I was able to pick out words I knew that helped put the unknown words into context, even when their…

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Monolingual: Delete unused language packs on your Mac.

I personally use only one language on my Mac computers, English. Unless you’re multi-lingual or unless you’re like Judie and plan on taking up another language, chances are you only need one language on your computer as well. The Mac comes preinstalled with several language packs. These packs includes fonts, and other things which all take up hard drive space. That’s where Monolingual comes in. Monolingual is a free application (donations are accepted) which allows you to selectively remove any language pack from your Mac that you choose.

How to Do It Yourself!

How to enable, discover, and use Gmail keyboard shortcuts

Gmail has enabled increased productivity for those who large amounts of email due to its unique interface (conversations, labels, to name two!). Not everyone uses keyboard shortcuts, but they can be a big time saver in processing email. Read on to learn more about keyboard shortcuts and how to quickly learn them. Keyboard shortcuts are very useful because they quickly allow you to navigate your inbox quickly. You can also do things like select many messages at once and archive them, delete them, and even mark them as spam. Keyboard shortcuts are disabled by default. To enable them, simply go into…

How to Do It Yourself!

PALMisLIFE.com Puts a Red Wrapper on Hui’s Apple iPhone

[Editor’s note: This article first appeared in Chinese on the site PALMisLIFE.com. Past Gear Diary contributor Larry Liaw did the modifications and translated the story for our readers. Larry has done some pretty radical upgrades in the past, most notably to the Palm Treo series; this marks the first time he has shared an iPhone mod with us, and what a mod it is!] And here’s the story… Once upon a time, a key webmaster of “PALMisLIFE.com”, Hui, owned an iPhone 3G and was happy with its features and elegant looks. He used it for texting, messaging, gaming, web surfing…

How to Do It Yourself!

Understanding and Removing the Application Lock on Windows Mobile Standard Devices

One of the more frustrating things about owning a Windows Mobile Standard device, particularly the ones which are tied to a certain carrier, are the sometimes you’ll find that there are these inane application locks in place. You usually won’t even know about the lock until you try to install a program that you think will make your life easier or your device usage more satisfying. When you try the installation, it is error city and the application will fail every time. I ran into this with the Pantech Matrix Pro that Julie and I reviewed this spring: Is the…

How to Do It Yourself!

Getting to Locations from the iPhone Calendar

One of the things that I found odd on the iPhone was the inability to use Google Maps to plot a route to a locations directly from the calendar. Consider how easy Apple have made almost everything else on the iPhone, it seemed to be a rather odd omission. You can easily navigate to an address or dial a number out of an email, but why not the calendar? This evening however I found a rather neat trick that manages to get around this problem with almost no fuss whatsoever. Take this calendar item I have for tomorrow (well, today…

How to Do It Yourself!, Reviews

Learning Spanish with the Rosetta Stone TOTALe System

I have always wanted to learn a foreign language, to be able to converse fluently with people from other cultures, and to basically not feel like a total tool tourist when traveling. I’ve also always heard that the best time to easily learn a second (or third) language is during one’s formative years, and that even by high-school or college it gets much more difficult. It’s no exaggeration to say that I am well past formative, and I’ve been out of high school for 24 years. While I have never believed that one could ever reach a point where learning…

How to Do It Yourself!

A Quick Tip For iPhone Users Living On The Edge

This quick tip may be obvious to many but it is easy to forget (as I did) so I thought I might share it with everyone. It is especially useful for iPhone 3G and 3GS users but really applies to anyone using a data connected phone and living on the edge… of a 3G signal. Here’s the story…

How to Do It Yourself!

How to get more than 11 pages of iPhone Apps

By default the iPhone limits the user to a total of 11 visible springboard aka home screen pages. Dayna from PHP-Princess has discovered a way around this limitation. Yes needing more than 11 pages of applications (180) is truly for the hardcore iPhone app user, but there are a lot of them floating around. This was a trick I discovered while moving around my icons. First, you have to be an app-aholic and have 11 pages of iPhone apps (and more hidden ones since they can’t be displayed). Then move some of the default apps you do not use like…

How to Do It Yourself!

“How-To”: Run the Slingbox iPhone application on 3G

Back in May I wrote this tutorial which detailed the process for using the iPhone application VOIPover3G on your Jailbroken iPhone to get around Apple’s limitation of only being able to use the Slingbox application for the iPhone over Wifi. Once iPhone OS 3.0 was released the VOIPover3G application stopped working. It was not compatible with the 3.0 update. Turns out that’s not such a bad thing. 3G Unrestrictor is a just released application for Jailbroken iPhones that does the same thing as VOIPover3G but in a much easier to use interface. And it’s all done on your iPhone (VOIPover3G…

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