When you buy a camera, you'll be pelted with specs from a salesperson, many of which are confusing, and even misleading. You will cower, and may cover your head for protection. He will keep pelting. And really, he has to—spec sheets and jargon are integral to camera marketing, at least for now. Here's what it all means, in one handy cheat sheet.

Types of Cameras

Before you set out to buy a new camera, or even just to get to know yours a little better, you've got to know the difference between the different types or cameras. Here are the ones you're likely to come across.

Point-and-Shoots: Also known as compact cameras. If you don't know what kind of camera you're looking for, or what kind your have, it's probably one of these. They're the smallest style of camera, typically—at least in the last few years—trending toward a boxy, mostly featureless shape. The lens is non-removable. The flash unit is built in. They have LCD screens on the back, not just for reviewing photos, but to use as a viewfinder as well. When you press the shutter button on a point-and-shoot, there is a slight delay before the photo is actually recorded. Many new point and shoot cameras will take video, and some even manage to record in HD.

Bridge/Superzoom Cameras: These cameras often look like DSLRs, but don't be fooled: They're just juiced-up point-and-shoots. They will typically come with longer lenses and slightly more impressive specs than your average P&S, and will give you a bit more photographic flexibility to play with. Sadly, they suffer from the same picture-taking delay, or "shutter lag," as point and shoots. The problem with bridge cameras, especially now, is that in order to get a decent one you have to spend at least a few hundreds dollars, at which point you may as well get a...

DSLRs: This unwieldy acronym stands for Digital Single Lens Reflex. Narrowly, this means that the camera has a mirror mechanism which allows photographers to see through the camera's lens while setting up a shot, and which flips up, exposing the image sensor (the equivalent to film in a digital camera). Widely, this means that the camera will have interchangeable lenses, a larger sensor than a point and shoot, and to an extent, more image controls. When you press the shutter button on a DSLR, it takes the photo instantly—no lag, like in a point-and-shoot. Many new DSLRs at mid-to-high price points shoot HD video; some manage 720p, some manage 1080p, but all turn out impressive results, if simply because of the cameras' lenses. That said, they're not really ready to replace proper video cameras yet, because amongother things, no DSLR to date has got the autofocus during video thing right.

These are the cameras that photographers, or people who call themselves photographers, use. They're also the ones that are capable of taking the best photos.

As a rule, DSLRs are more expensive than point and shoots. But they're getting cheaper. Much, much cheaper. Olympus, Nikon, Pentax and Sony all have DSLRs that can be had for under $500—and these are real cameras—rendering the entire category of bridge cameras kind of pointless.

Micro Four Thirds/Digital Rangefinder: Micro Four Thirds cameras are interchangeable-lens cameras, minus the straight-through-the lens viewfinder that defines a DSLR. In other words, they have larger sensors like DSLRs, have swappable glass like DSLRs, but use an LCD screen as viewfinderlike a point-and-shoot. This saves space inside the camera, meaning that—at least this is the theory—it can be more portable than an equivalent DSLR, while maintaining the same versatility and image quality. Most of them record video, too, and they're pretty good at it: They don't have the complex viewfinder/mirror system of a DSLR, so it's technically simpler to record video. Some of these cameras are styled like DSLRs, like the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1, while some are styled more like portable cameras, like the Olympus EP-1.

This is a small category for now, and accordingly, prices are still high, starting at about $750. Panasonic and Olympus are basically the only game in town.

Sensors

The sensor is the part of the camera that actually records the image. In other words, it is your camera.

Megapixels, and image resolution: Megapixels have been central to digital camera marketing since the beginning (it just sounds like a 90s term, doesn't it?). A megapixel, quite simply, is one million pixels. If a one-megapixel image (or sensor) was perfectly square, it would be 1000x1000 pixels. They're usually rectangular, at 4:3 or 3:2 ratios, which means their resolutions look more like this: 2048x1536 pixels for a 3-megapixel camera; 3264x2448 pixels for an 8-megapixel camera, and so on.

As digital cameras mature, this number means less and less—it's easy to cram megapixels in a camera, but without good optics and light sensitivity, it doesn't mean that it's going to turn out an honest, clean, high-quality images at such a high resolution. My cellphone shoots at five megapixels, but the images look like screenshots from some kind of ghosthunting show. My DSLR shoots at 10.1 megpixels, but turns out images more than twice as clean and clear as my phone. My point-and-shoot is rated at 12.1 megapixels, but on close examination, its images are effectively blurrier than those from the DSLR.

If you're planning on making huge prints, or need to crop your images a lot, a high megapixel count is necessary, but beyond a certain point, the returns are minimal. You'll read a lot of guidance from camera manufacturers about how many megapixels you need to print different sized photos, which you can ignore, because they seem to change with every generation of cameras. Unless you're printing billboards or in magazine or something, don't sweat it too much.

Aside from indicating how many dots a camera is capable of capturing, megapixels can be a helpful indicator of how old a camera's guts may be. Megapixel count has been increasing fairly steadily over the years, so within a given manufacturer's camera line, increased megapixels could correlate to newer sensors, which could, along with high resolution, take richer, less noisy pictures.

ISO: This indicates how fast your camera's sensor collects light—the higher your ISO, the more sensitive your camera is to light, the less light you need to take a picture. And while high-ISO capability is most useful in low light, it also comes in handy when you're shooting extremely fast exposures in the daytime, like at a sports game. With higher ISOs, though, comes more noise—some point-and-shoot cameras advertise extremely high ISOs, on the order of 6400. Shots at this sensitivity will invariably look like ass. DSLRs, which have larger sensors that are better at gathering light, can sometimes shoot at 6400 ISO and higher without too much noise.

It might help to think of it like this: ISO ratings are actually a callback to the days of film. You used to have to anticipate how you'd be shooting, and buy film based on how sensitive it was, as expressed in an ISO or ASA rating. The ratings got carried over to digital cameras, despite film getting replaced with sensors.

Anyway, don't buy a camera for its ISO rating alone, because there's a good chance its top two to three settings will be useless.

CCD and CMOS: From our previous Giz Explains on the subject:

There are two major types of image sensors for digital cameras and camcorders: CCD (charged-couple device) and CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor, sometimes also known as active pixel sensor). We're not going to get into the really geeky differences, because you don't really need to know or care. What you should know is that higher-end digital SLRs (the big cameras with a removable lens) use CMOS because it's easier to make bigger CMOS sensors; and mobile phones do because CMOS uses less power. That said, most point-and-shoot cameras and most camcorders use the more common CCD sensor.

Things are a little different now, and CCDs are common in DSLRs nowadays. The difference for consumers is minimal—don't be alarmed to see either on your camera's spec sheet. UPDATE: As some commenters have pointed out, this isn't quite right: DSLRs are still trending more towards CMOS sensors, including most of the latest/greatest cameras. Anyway: still more of a curiosity than a purchasing point, for most people.

White Balance: Have you ever seen a set of indoor pictures that's totally, inexplicably orange? That's a white balance problem. Your camera can adjust to compensate for different light temperatures—tungsten lights have that orange hue, and sunlight will turn your photos kind of blue—and correct your image's color accordingly. Virtually all cameras let you adjust white balance with presets, though it's best if you can adjust it manually, too.

Sensor size, and crop factor: Some cameras have sensors that are roughly the same size as 35mm film, at 36x24mm. These are called full frame cameras. They tend to be more expensive—like Canon's 5D and 1D series, or Nikon's D3s—and their bodies tend to be a bit bigger. Semi-pro to pro equipment, basically.

APS-C sensors, on the other hand, are what almost all consumer DSLRs ship with. These sensors are about 22x15mm, which is significantly smaller than a full frame's sensor. Why does this matter? Larger sensors provide more room for each pixel, which makes them better at picking up light. (A bucket analogy is useful here.) More importantly for APS-C users, though, is crop factor. A smaller sensor will pick up a smaller section of what's coming through a lens, so: A 200mm lens on a full frame DSLR becomes a 300m lens on an APS-C camera, a 50mm becomes a 75mm, etc. Of course, camera manufacturers make APS-C -specific lenses which are designed for the smaller sensors, but the listed focal lengths aren't adjusted—they're still 35mm-equivalent numbers. Just be aware the any given lens will shoot differently from one type of camera to another.

Optics

The optics are the the parts through which your camera sees. They're the eyeballs, basically.

Swappable lenses: There are two kinds of swappable lenses, generally speaking. Ones that zoom in and out, which are called "zoom" lenses, and ones that don't move. These are called "primes." They're all classified by focal length. Strictly speaking, focal length refers to the distance required for a lens system to focus light. In real terms, focal length roughly correlates to physical lens length, and helps indicate how much a lens magnifies an image. 18mm focal length on a DSLR is considered wide, 200mm or more would be considered a telephoto lens.

Point-and-Shoot Lenses, and the X Factor: The second most prominently featured number on your point-and-shoot's obnoxious feature sticker is the zoom rating. It'll be expressed as a number, with an x: 5x, 10x, etc. You'll also see a printed range, something like 5.0-25mm, which describes the focal length of the lens. Here's a trick: Divide the larger focal length measurement by the smaller one. The result should match your "x" zoom rating, because, well, that's all it is: the quotient of the maximum lens length and the minimum lens length.

This is misleading labeling. Mounted on the same camera, a lens that zooms from 50mm to 100mm would be called a 2X lens, while a lens that zooms from 18mm to 42mm would be called a 3X lens, even though at the longest, it doesn't zoom in as far as the 50-100mm lens does at its shortest. Take this equation into account when comparing point-and-shoots, but most of all, try them. You'll see the difference.

Shutter, shutter speed, and shutter lag: You shutter is the little door that opens up between your lens and your sensor, allowing for photographic exposure. Shutter speed ranges are advertised with the intention of implying that the camera will be useful at both ends: from the 10-second long exposure to the 1/4000th-second high-speed shot. Keep in mind, for both numbers, that shutter speed alone doesn't guarantee anything. If your camera can shoot at 1/4000th of a second, but it's got a small aperture and low ISO rating, your shots will probably be too dark.

Shutter lag is something else entirely. You know how on a point and shoot, there's a frustrating gap between when you press the button and when your shot actually takes? That's it. The lower the shutter lag, the better, though many camera manufacturers don't even bother to advertise this.

Aperture: This is the hole through which light passes after its been through part of your lens, and before it hits your sensor. The bigger the hole, the more light gets in. The smaller the hole, the less light gets in. Larger apertures allow you to take pictures in lower light situations, but only allow you to focus on a thin plane—either your background or your foreground will be out of focus. Smaller apertures let you keep more of a scene in focus but they let less light through, and require longer exposure times. Apertures are described by f-numbers—these are the ration between the width of an aperture and the focal length of a lens. The smaller the number, the larger the aperture.

Optical vs Digital Zoom: Another scourge of the camera buyer is digital zoom. Optical is magnification by your lens—in other words, it's true zoom. Digital zoom is just your camera taking the optically zoomed image and blowing it up, like you'd do in Photoshop. It's only useful for framing shots and sometimes helping your camera focus properly. Otherwise, it's a gimmick: Ignore it, shoot wide and crop your shots later.

IS, or Antishake: Image stabilization is fast becoming a standard feature on even the cheapest cameras, though you'll find some sub-$150 point-and-shoots without it. The point of image stabilization is to correct for camera movements during an exposure, which cause blurry shots.

There are two types: Digital IS, which you'll find mostly in point-and-shoots, corrects the image with software, and can be somewhat effective, though the results are often passable, not perfect. Optical image stabilization physically moves some part of the camera to counteract shaking. In some cameras, like Nikons and Canons, the moving parts are in the lens. In most other other manufacturers' DSLRs, it's the sensor that actually moves to stabilize the image. Optical IS almost always works better, but it's not magic—you won't be able to shoot a freehand four-second exposure just because it's on, but you might be able to keep things together for a half-second or more.

Software

"Modes," Face Detection, Smile Detection: Your camera's modes are assistive tools,, not hard features. They're generally just collected presets for settings that you can adjust yourself, like equalizer presets on your iPod. They can be useful, though you'll be a better photographer if you manage settings yourself.

Face and smile detection, again, are like crutches. Face detection guesses when there's a human in the photo so the camera can adjust exposure, white balance and focus to make sure that said human doesn't end up blurry. Smile detection is a crude algorithm that measures facial features, and won't take a photo until the subjects are judged to be SUFFICIENTLY CONTENTED, by which I mean they have vaguely crescent-shaped mouth holes. It's a good way to ensure that nobody is ruining a photo with a grimace. Also, to ensure that none of your photos are ever interesting.

Image formats: You digital camera doesn't have film, but your photos have to go somewhere. In today's cameras, the digitally stored photos are either JPEGs or RAW files. JPEG files are compressed, which means that they are encoded in such a way that they don't take up much space, but lose a small amount of quality. This is how point-and-shoot cameras almost always store images, and how DSLRs store images by default, generally.

If JPEGs are like photo prints (they're not, really, but bear with me) then RAW files are like the digital negatives. (In fact, one popular RAW format, .DNG, crudely stands for "digital negative"). Raw files contain almost exactly what your sensor has recorded, which means you can change values like exposure, white balance and coloration after taking the photo, to a surprisingly high degree. It feels like cheating! There is a downside: larger image files. And, depending on the type of RAW file—different camera manufacturers have different ones—you may need special software to view and edit your photos. Shoot in RAW if you can, and buy a camera that'll let you. This is a huge feature.

As a bonus, most cameras that shoot RAW will also let you shoot RAW and JPEG files simultaneously, so you have a lightweight, ready-to-print-or-upload file right away, as well as the RAW source, for later editing. It takes up a ton of space, but hey, space is cheap nowadays. Spend a few bucks on a bigger memory card, and live your life.

Video: Most new cameras, including some DSLRs, shoot video. But just because your camera shoots stills at 10 megapixels doesn't mean that it'll shoot anywhere near that kind of resolution in motion. The standard resolution for most point-and-shoot cameras is VGA—that's just 640x480 pixels of video, which is good enough for YouTube—while DSLRs, and some nicer point-and-shoots, record in either 720p or 1080p, which are HD resolutions, which translate to 1280x720 pixels and 1920×1080 pixels, respectively.

Storage

Point and shoot cameras usually come with a small amount of onboard storage. This, I'm about 100% sure, is there so that the camera technically works when you buy it, making your inevitable extra storage purchase seem more like a choice, and less like a mandatory camera tax. Anyway, with any camera, you're going to need to buy some memory, or storage.

There are a few peripheral memory card formats still kicking around (Sony, can you please just put Memory Stick Pro out of its misery? Thanks!) but there are only two that matter.

SD: Also seen as SDHC, or SDXC, these little guys are the card of choice for point-and-shoot and bridge cameras, and some newer DSLRs. They're small, they works fine, and they're available in just about any capacity you could ever want. Almost: Most cameras are only SDHC-compatible, a standard which maxes out at 32GB. SDXC, the next evolution of the SD standard, maxes out at a theoretical 2TB, though almost no cameras support it yet.

Compact Flash: These cards are chunkier, can be faster, and are more durable, and anecdotally less prone to temperature and weather damage. These are what you'll find in DSLRs.

Speed ratings: Memory cards come in different speeds. These are advertised in a variety of different ways, for no good reason. You'll see a couple of numbers on most cards, in the "133x" syntax. Ignore them—they are inflated, unregulated and therefore, basically meaningless. What you're looking for on SD cards is a Class rating, from 1-6. The official SD Association chart:
For Compact Flash cards, your best bet is to look for an actual transfer speed on the card, expressed in MB/s.

Further Reading

Reviews: One gadget blog, try as we may, can't cover the hundreds of cameras that come out every year. We'll leave that to the obsessives. See:

• DPReview

• The Photography Bay

• Photography Review

• Photo.net

You really shouldn't buy a camera without consulting these guys first. They have a habit of lapsing into jargon at times, but hey, if you've read this far, you'll be able to get by.

Taking Photos: So now you've got your new piece of neck candy, and you feel awfully cool. You know what would make you cooler? Learning how to shoot, for god's sake. A few of out recent guides:

• The Basics: Your new camera has been removed from the box. It has been fiddled with. You cat has been photographed multiple times. Now what?

• When Not to Use Flash: The answer: Pretty much always.

• How To Shoot HDR: Taking hyperreal photos by combining multiple exposures, without, as we call it, the "clown vomit."

• For general advice, Photo.net's comically extensive set of photography guides provides instructions for virtually any scenario. Need to shoot some, say, nudes? In, say, Namibia's uniquely harsh sunlight? They've got you covered.

And although broad guides are useful, I've learned more about photography and cameras from Flickr than any other resource. Join the Flickr group for your camera, and spend some time on the message boards. You'll learn clever tricks for getting the most out of your hardware, but in doing so, with the help of a gracious community, you'll learn just as much about photography as a whole.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about DSLRs, P&Ses, B&Bs or BBQs here, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

You don't have to use a smartphone for more than a few weeks to amass a staggering amount of stuff on it, from text messages and phone numbers to personal settings and photo libraries. And as with your laptop or desktop, a significant portion of this stuff is stuff you want to keep, whether you know it or not. And cellphone backup isn't just a matter of keeping copies of data that you consciously archive every day, like contacts, photos and notes—it's about keeping copies of information that you didn't even know you wanted. How many times have you needed to dig through an old text message conversation? Referred back to your received call list to recover a number you didn't save? In a lot of ways, your smartphone is more closely tied to your personal identity than your computer is. So, people: back it up. You'll feel better.

By platform:

iPhone

If you've got an iPhone, there's a good chance you've already sat through—and been annoyed by—its backup routine. iTunes updates your iPhone's backups at every sync, which makes users' lives a bit easier, and guarantees some kind of safetly net by default. But! As with most fully automated systems, iTunes backup is kind of enigmatic. It just sort of... happens, and it's not clear what you're saving, where it's going, and how to keep it truly safe.

What it's doing is performing a full backup equivalent. In other words, instead of just mirroring your entire device as a big image file, it's extracting all the useful bits, so it can restore your iPhone as if it had undergone a full, mirrored backup. This includes, among other things, bookmarks, app settings and data (including in-app purchases, but not the apps themselves), contacts, call history, Mail accounts, SMSes, videos and photos. In other words, pretty much everything. Backups are performed automatically, and restoring to one is a simple matter of plugging in your iPhone, alt-clicking on its icon in iTunes, and selecting "Restore from Backup."

Crucially, this is different from selecting "Restore" in the device summary page: doing that will revert your device to a clean, factory-default image, which will delete all your personal data. Which isn't what we're trying to do here! (In fact, it's the opposite!) If you attempt to do this, you will be prompted to perform a backup, which should be a red flag.

iTunes stores its backups as archived files in semi-cryptic directories, so if you want to pull them out of the closed iTunes system for proper backup, i.e. to an external HDD or online storage solution, you can find them here, as per Apple's useful support page on the subject:

On a Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/

On Windows XP: \Documents and Settings\(username)\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\

On Windows Vista: \Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\

To add a backup to iTunes, simply copy it back to its default directory, and it should show up as a restore option, labeled by date, when you're setting up a wiped or recently capital "R" Restored iPhone or iPod Touch.

Android

Google's position Android backup and sync has been translucent, perhaps to a fault: Since it depends so much on web services, it doesn't need to be backed up, right! It's already backed up, in the cloud! We're freakin' Google, y'all! THIS IS THE FUTURE! (Carried to its logical conclusion, this is the Chrome OS ethos. Anyway.) To a certain extend this cloud-focused cheerleading is fine, and can be put to good use. Gmail and Gcal are always safe, and your contacts can be added to your Google account too—should you designate them to be saved as Google contacts, not just SIM or Phone contacts. To do this:

1. Open your Contacts list
2. Press the Menu button
3. Select Import
4. Tick the "Google Contacts" box

But for anyone who wants to back up more than their Google-service-based info, this doesn't really help. For that, you'll need to go third-party. There are lots of backup apps for Android, but most of them are paid, either immediately or after a free trial. I assume just go with the best free(ish) solutions, all of which you can find by searching for their names in the Android Market.

Backup apps on Android are split into two types: the all-in-one apps that sync your data to a single file, and the piecemeal apps. Unfortunately, the AIO apps tend to be paid; doing this for free takes multiple downloads. Download these three apps: SMS Backup and Restore, Call Logs Backup & Restore, and APN Backup & Restore. Each one backs up its respective data to your microSD card (in /sdcard/*appname*BackupRestore/) for easy restoration on another phone. Using these apps is self-explanatory, since there are only three buttons: Backup, Restore and Delete.

Astro File Manager fills a remaining gap: app backup. It's a free file browser at heart, so the backup option is kind of hidden—once in the app, press the menu button, then click "Tools." Select "Application Manager/Backup," and you'll be able to backup your apps to your SD card. To restore, just install this same app on the device, insert the old SD card, navigate to the same "Application Manager/Backup screen" again, and select the "Backed Up Apps" tab. Astro is also a solid file browser, you can can manually move your data—like photos and videos—to a microSD card, where you should probably be storing them by default anyway. [Pic via]

There! Sprite Mechanic does the same in a slightly simpler way, but I'm hearing reports that it's a bit buggy on certain handsets (the Hero variant and Droid, specifically). Still, it's free, so it may be worth a try.

Lastly, if you've got a rooted phone, Backup for Root Users backs up virtually everything, and it's totally free. That catch? You need to have a rooted phone, or else it won't work. Which is either a crying shame, or a great excuse to root your phone.

Palm Pre/Pixi

Where Android's cloud-based not-really-a-backup system doesn't feel remotely complete, the Pre's is actually pretty good: Backup is performed automatically, every day, and linked to your user account. This just covers the basics, though. For example, a list of apps is kept server-side, but the app data itself isn't backed up; browser bookmarks are remembered, but no form data or website passwords. Media isn't backed up at all. Here's the full list. The solution is a bit hackish, but it works fine for most data. From PreCentral, a brief guide on backing up using either Microsoft' Sync Toy for PC, or with slight, obvious modifications, ChronoSync for Mac:

1. Plug in the Pre and select USB Drive.
2. Download SyncToy and install.
3. Click SyncToy on your desktop to run SyncToy for the first time.
4. Click Create New Folder Pair. For the Left Folder, Browse to the Pre's Drive (maybe E: or F:)
5. For the right folder browse to your documents folder and create a new subdirectory such as PreBackup and select it.
6. Choose to Synchronize and name your folder pair something easy to remember like PreBackup.
7. Click Run.

What you're doing here is essentially backing up the Pre's internal storage, bit for bit. Unfortunately, this doesn't back up settings and some application data, so restoring from this image won't ensure that you don't lose some data; just media, ringtones, etc.

Between this, Palm's backup and the natural backup inherent in being tied to online services like Gmail and Flickr, the only notable things not really backed up properly are specific application data and SMS conversations.

Windows Mobile

Microsoft has always offered some kind of backup out of the box, and as of the release of version 6.5, there are multiple options. The core backup utility, of course, is Windows Mobile Device Center, or as it's known in XP, ActiveSync. Pairing your device with these apps is quite simple, and gives shelter to most of the data you could want to back up, including contacts, calendar appointments and media.

In XP, download and install ActiveSync, and when you plug in your phone, start the ActiveSync app, which you should be prompted to open anyway. Set up a pairing relationship, select the data you want to backup, and you're good to go.

In Vista, you'll need to download Windows Mobile Device Center and do the same; in Windows 7, you should be prompted to install Windows Mobile Device Center as soon as you plug in a WinMo handset.

Now, let's assume you're not using a Windows PC, or you don't want to bother with setting up a sync relationship with a computer. You've got two free options, which together back up even more data than ActiveSync, without and external machine.

My Phone, another Microsoft app, is available for free to any Windows Mobile 6.0, 6.1 or 6.5 user. It's a misleadingly basic-seeming little app, which backs up nearly everything you store on your phone:

[By default]: contacts, calendar appointments, tasks, photos, videos, text messages, songs, browser favorites and documents between your phone and your My Phone web account.

Restoring from MyPhone is just a matter of logging into your Live account from within the app. You get 200MB of free storage, after which you've got to pay. Still: pretty fantastic, especially if you set it up to do scheduled backups.

If you want to back up your phone's data without a PC or a cloud-based service, there's PIM Backup. This utility feels and looks kind of ancient, but it's great at what it does. And what does it do? Everything:

- backup/restore appointments
- backup/restore call logs
- backup/restore contacts
- backup/restore messages (SMS, Mails, ...) NEW !!!
- backup/restore speed dials
- backup/restore tasks
- backup/restore custom files

Best of all, it stores your backup in a single file, which can be restored on any device using the same app. The procedure is dead-easy: Download the PIM CAB file to your device, install it, open it, check the data you want to back up off the list, and go. To restore, you go through the exact same interface, selecting "Restore" from the app's pulldown menu instead of "Back Up." In the spirit of safety, you may want to back up PIM's backup files on some kind of external storage. PIM lets you designate where you'd like to store its backups: select your microSD card if you have one, after which you can transfer it to any media your want. If not, you may want to transfer your backup to a PC or external storage device. (Unfortunately, the easiest way to do this is probably with ActiveSync or Mobile Device Center, since most WinMo phones don't allow you to browse the root storage in Explorer.)

BlackBerry

RIM has made life easy for BlackBerry users, who can back up their entire devices using BlackBerry Desktop.

First, install the app.

Under "Backup," select "Options," where you can specify encryption and data type parameters (encrypt the data for safety if you want, but make sure to select "Back up all device application data."

Click "Back Up," and select the destination directory for your backup. It's a single file, so it's easy to throw on an external HDD, USB stick or microSD card for safe storage.

That's it! Further instructions, including a detailed restore guide, are available here. [Pic via]

Symbian

Depending on which brand of handset and Symbian shell you're using, your backup options are going to differ. The Ovi Suite will do the trick. It's a full, automated backup suite, but it's PC-only and works exclusively with Nokia phones. Using it is as simple as setting up a sync relationship—just install the suite and plug the Nokia phone in via USB, and follow the wizard prompts—and it'll keep contacts, calendar items and media backed up. [Pic via]

Non-Nokia Symbian users—Samsung folks, listen up—can use a free app called The Symbian Tool. This will actually pull a full image copy from your Symbian phone, meaning that you can restore your phone bit-for-bit to the state it was in at the time of backup. There are also less severe options for basic media backup, or selective sync. More details here.

So, that's it! If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our How To guides, and your collective troubleshooting efforts have SAVED HUNDREDS OF LIVES, possibly. And if you have any topics you'd like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy backups, folks!

Your Phone

Windows Mobile: To sync with your Windows Mobile phone in Windows 7, you're going to need Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1. Just like in Vista! Except this time around, Windows is savvy enough to autoinstall the suite, which saves a little time and potentially a lot of Googling. (Just give it a minute after you plug in your device via USB—if nothing happens, go here.

This will take care of calendar, contact and media syncing for the most part, though a lot of newer Windows Mobile phones depend on microSD storage for music and movies. For this, you simply mount the disk as a folder, and drag and drop.

iPhone: As always, this is a job for iTunes. However, Windows 7 is compatible with doubleTwist, an alternative media manager that doesn't just sync with your iPhone—it works with almost anything else, too.

Speaking of which, Android: Android generally isn't a "syncing" kind of OS, intended instead to be kept up to date by tapping into Google's services over the internet. That said, doubleTwist will work for music syncing with most Android phones, and HTC Sync will keep their phones, like the G1, MyTouch and Hero, in sync with your Outlook Address book, contacts and calendar.

BlackBerry: BlackBerry Desktop Manager and Media Sync still reign supreme, for contacts, apps, media and software upgrades.

Palm Pre/Pixi: doubleTwist, again, at least until Palm fully withdraws from their silly slapfight with Apple over iTunes and makes their own client.

Your Zune, iPod, or other PMP

Zune: Zune's software plays nice with Windows 7, but it's you only choice. And even moreso than Apple products, the Zune HD is locked to its client software, meaning there aren't any alternative for the time being. Luckily, Zune 4.x is fantastic software—it's just a shame it's not optional, and that it doesn't work with other devices.

iPod: As with the iPhone, you're more or less stuck with iTunes or an app like doubleTwist for music and movie syncing, but that's not so bad: iTunes in Windows 7 comes with some nice enhancements, including jump list shortcuts that can quickly take you to the iTunes Store, and hoverable controls, which give you quick access to skip, play and pause functions. In some ways, iTunes is actually better on Windows 7 than it is on OS X. [via]

Other PMPs: PMPs that rely on raw mass storage never took an advanced degree to use, so it's interesting to see that they've gotten a little simpler in Windows 7. The "Devices and Printers" system in Windows 7 can claim a few advantages over its predecessors, with much better icons—you generally get an reasonable approximation of whatever you've plugged in on the devices screen—customized Device Stage interfaces, seen left, and something called Device Containers, which group components of the same device into one icon. Like, if your 3rd-party PMP has internal and expandable storage, Windows won't just act as if there are two different devices attached; it'll group them together. Just click them to expand.

And if you third-party PMP does have a syncing app, be wary. Many of them, especially for older players, won't have been update for Windows 7. Install them in a compatibility mode for XP or Vista—whichever they're most compatible with—to avoid any potential problems. [pic via]

Your Camera: Camera support is pretty great in Windows 7 so you'll often be able to just plug your camera in and go. As with PMPs, printers and the like, cameras with multiple storage devices will be lumped into the same icon in Device Stage, which will also (hopefully) display other device info, like remaining battery, photo import options and alternative sync apps.
Windows also puts quick shortcuts in the taskbar for supported cameras.
Unfortunately, Windows 7 doesn't add anything in the way of RAW support, so you're going to have to go 3rd-party for that. FastPicture's codec pack supports most of the popular RAW formats used in DSLRs from Nikon, Canon, Sony and the like, and it's perfectly compatible with Windows 7. And free!

Your Displays

Adding a second monitor to Windows has never been particularly complicated, but the methods have never been all that apparent, either. Along with a refreshed multi-monitor displays settings interface, Windows 7 adds a fantastic shortcut: Windows+P will bring up a monitor management widget, which lets you set your monitor to either off, display duplicate or display extend.

The shortcut also works for enabling a projector. Laptop manufacturers have been adding functionality like this with their own software for years, so it's good to see Microsoft taking their ideas onboard in 7—it's easier for everyone that way.

Windows 7 also ships with a monitor calibration tool—again, something that had to be previously furnished by third-party software or monitor manufacturers. It helps you adjust brightness, contrast, gamma and color settings with a simple wizard, accessible by navigating to the Display panel in Appearance and Personalization in the Control Panel

Your Other Computers

These are the gadgets your Windows 7 PC has to play nicely with—your other computers. Windows 7 file sharing has gain some new features, but just as many quirks.

Windows 7 PCs: Since most people just want to share some files and get networking setup over with, Windows 7 includes a feature called Homegroups, which lets you share files and media between Windows 7 PCs with almost not setup at all. Think of it as the old network setup wizard from XP and Vista, except much, much simpler. To create a Homegroup, you need to have a version of Windows 7 that's better, or, er, more expensive than Starter or Home Basic—those two can connect to Homegroups, but they can't initiate one.

To create one, just navigate to "Network and Internet" in the Control Panel, or search "Homegroups" in the Control Panel search bar. At the "Share with other computers running Windows 7 page, select "Create a Homegroup," and designate the types of media you'd like to share. Joining a Homegroup in Windows 7 from Windows 7 should be easy: as soon as you connect to a network with available Homegroups, Windows will prompt you to join. Just enter the passkey generated during the Homegroup creation process.

Windows XP and Vista: Homegroups are nice and new and WOW and all, and they don't work directly, as Homegroups, with Windows XP and Vista. Thing is, under all the fresh trappings, Homegroups are the same old Windows networking protocols. Accordingly, XP and Vista can still access Windows 7 PCs, just not under the official "Homegroups" guise. So, first: Set up a user account for your client PCs to log in to:

Click the Start button, type "user accounts" in the search box, and then click User Accounts and Family Safety.
Click Add or remove user accounts, and then click Create a new account.

Type a name for the new account, such as "share."

Click Standard user, and then click Create Account.

Click the tile for the user account you just created, and then click Create a password.

Log on as the user you created (for example, share), and then log off. (This is required so that the user account is created with the correct credentials.)

Now that you've got the account set up, connecting should be easy: On Vista, just click Start, then Network, then open the computer you want to access—it should be listed by default. Enter the user name and password you've just created, and you're there. For XP, the process is similar: Just go to My Network Places, the click View Workgroup Computers, open the computer you want to access and enter your credentials.

From a Mac, the process isn't necessarily so straightforward. If you're lucky, your Windows 7 share will just show up in your Finder sidebar, where you can click on it and enter login info when prompted. (Windows 7 still uses basic SMB shares, which OS X is more than equipped to access.) If it doesn't show up, the process is a little more complicated. Deferring again to MS:

In [Finder] the toolbar, click Go, and then click Connect to Server (or use keyboard shortcut Command +K).
In OS X 10.3.x and later, click Browse, select the computer running Windows 7, and then click Connect. (Or follow the common instructions below.)

If that doesn't work, click Connect to Server again, and manually enter smb://username@computername/users as the network address, where username is your newly created user account, computername is your Windows 7 machines network name, and users is literally the word users—don't change that. Alternately, you can use the smb://username@ipaddress/users syntax, where ipaddress is your Windows 7 computers local IP. (as in 10.0.0.2, or 192.168.1.102)

Your Streaming Devices and Consoles

Play to: Play To was one of the most touted features in Windows 7, and yeah, it's pretty cool. Here's a breakdown:

One of the most potentially groundbreaking features of Windows 7 is "Play To," the ability to send music, video and photos to any compatible devices on the network, without running any kind of proprietary software, and without any initial setup. Sending a song to a Sonos or a video to an Xbox is-theoretically-just a right-click away.

The important thing to remember here is that "compatible devices" include—or rather, will include—anything that adheres to the DLNA 1.5 standard, from connected TVs to your Xbox 360 to other Windows 7 PCs with Windows Media Player 12. Play To devices show up automatically once they're connected to your network, it's just just a matter of enabling the functionality in Windows:

Before using Play To, you will first need to turn on Streaming. To do this, with media player open, click Stream and then click Turn on media streaming. You will then be given some options for sharing media and which devices you wish to allow.

You can right-click the item that you wish to play and move your cursor to the Play To option and select the device you want to receive that media file.

That's it! To allows a Windows 7 PC to receive Play To streaming, just enable Play To in the receiving computers' Media Streaming options, located in the Network and Sharing Center in the control panel.

Consoles: As I said before, Play To will stream to the Xbox 360 if it's in Media Extender mode (that is, connected to a Windows Media Center PC). Chances are, though, you're going to just want to stream media from your Windows 7 PC to your Xbox 360, controlled from your Xbox 360. Good news: the same old methods work fine here, so shared files with certain codecs, or anything in your Windows Media Center library, are all fair game, and should work straight away. Likewise, the PS3 will play a limited number of video and audio formats streamed from your PC with virtually no configuration, but the utility is limited—especially if you do a lot of downloading, or archive video in a rare codec or container. For both, the solution is the same: Get TVersity, because it's awesome. Setup isn't super-easy, but the results are worth it: Pretty much any video you can come up with can be transcoded on the fly to stream on your console. Full instructions are here.

So that's about it! I've only scratched the surface here—this is like Windows 7 Gadget Mediation 101, or maybe 102—so add you favorite tips and trick in the comments, since your feedback is a huge benefit to our Saturday guides. And if you're still curious about Windows 7 in general, look no further than our Complete Windows 7 Guide. Have a nice weekend!

The magazine drew together reader survey results with their own internal data to evaluate peoples' experiences repairing and replacing certain classes of products, and the results aren't terribly surprising: Point and shoot cameras are cheap and difficult to repair, and get noticeably more advanced over short periods of time, you may as well just replace them if they break outside of two years of ownership. LCD HDTVs? Hold on a little longer.

Granted, the general trend here seem to be that it's not worth repairing anything that's more than a few years old, so it's less a guide about when to replace than confirmation that today's gadgets—even the most expensive ones—are more or less disposable. Full chart below. (Click to enlarge) [Consumer Reports via Consumerist]

Why You Should Do This

Last time we threw together a guide like this, things were different. Snow Leopard was but a glint in Steve Jobs' eye, and in terms of hardware, the Mini 9 was the best thing going—it was pretty much the only netbook you could guarantee would work perfectly. Not to mention the hackintosh process was much, much more complicated. And riskier! And yet, despite all this, it was easy to recommend loading a Mini up with OS X, because to put it bluntly, the results were fantastic.

But the Mini 9 was a bit too small for regular use, and even if it's still pretty easy to buy one, it's not officially part of Dell's product line anymore. Fast forward to now: the Mini 10v is a (quite similar) replacement for the 9, with a slightly larger screen, 160GB HDD standard, and 1GB or RAM. Most importantly, the keyboard is a bit larger, and the price is wonderfully low: $300 for a netbook that's completely ready for hackintoshing. Or to put it another way, the 10v is a $300 Apple netbook.

And it isn't just the hardware that's changed, it's the software. Snow Leopard is fast—faster than 10.5—and its new interface features, like Dock Expose, make using OS X on a netbook even easier. Finder is faster, Quicktime has a new interface. It's a pretty big upgrade from Leopard, is what I'm trying to say.

And installation tools have grown up too. Netbook hackintoshing used to be an all-day process, with external optical drives, Terminal commands, and numerous terrifying driver tweaks. Today, there are simple software utilities to take care of all this for you. So let's recap: Since 2008, the hardware has gotten cheaper and better, OS X more mature, and the installation process much simpler. Oh yeah, and Snow Leopard retail costs $30. (Though strict moralists should note that this is intended to be an upgrade.) There's never been a better time to hackintosh—not by a long shot.

That said, one thing hasn't changed. TERMINAL > SUDO REWRITE DISCLAIMER:

Even though we're using a standard retail-purchased copy of OS X, the disclaimer: Apple does not like Hackintoshing. It violates the OS X EULA, and probably won't make the Dell folks too happy either, should you need to return your hacked Mini 9 for service. So, as always, proceed at your own risk.

And of course, this tutorial messes with some pretty core components of your netbook, which means there's a real, if small, risk of brickage. Proceed at your own risk, again. Anyway.

What You'll Need

• Dell Mini 10v. The stock version, at $300, works perfectly. [Note: I'm getting a lot of questions about this, so just to be clear: This has to be a 10v, not a regular Mini 10. Lots of netbooks can be hackintoshed, but the Mini 10 has an incompatible graphics card/chipset. Sorry!]

• BIOS version lower than A06 (A05, A04, A03 all work fine)

Downgrade instructions are available here, though they require a Windows PC for creating a bootable DOS flash drive. There are a lot of scary acronyms here, but don't worry—it's no more than a few minutes of work.

• Retail copy of OS X 10.6 (NOT an OEM copy that comes with a new Mac). An ISO will do fine here too, but discs are just $30, you cheapskate. Upgrades to 10.6.1 should be applied after the fact.

• An 8GB (or larger) USB flash drive, the faster the better. External HDDs will work too.

• A Mac with a working optical drive, for preparing your flash drive

• Netbook BootMaker (a free Mac application)

Preparing Your Flash Drive

The 10v doesn't have an optical drive, and it's a pain in the ass to have to go find one, burn a new disc, and do things the old-fashioned way. Installing from a USB flash drive is much, much easier. So that's the method we'll be running with.

1. Insert your flash drive and OS X Retail install disk into your computer

2. Open Disk Utility (searching in Spotlight is the easiest way to find this)

3. Select your flash drive from the list on the left. Make sure to select the drive itself, not any partitions you may have written to it before.

4. In the right panel, select the "Partition" screen.

5. From the dropdown menu, select "1 Partition," then click "Options" below the partition map.

6. Select "Master Boot Record." This will ensure that your Mini 10v can boot from your flash drive. Select a name for your partition—doesn't really matter what—and apply your changes. Keep in mind this will delete anything you have on your flash drive right now, so back it up if need be.

7. Once this is done, move from the "Partition" screen to the "Restore" screen in Disk Utility

8. For your Restore Source, select (by dragging) the OS X install disk from the left panel. Make sure this is the item called something to the effect of "Mac OS Install DVD," not "Optiarc DVD" or some other hardware title. For the destination, drag your newly-prepared partition over. Click restore.

This will take at least an hour, so go have sandwich or something. Or even better, skip ahead make sure your Mini 10v is ready for the install, as outlined in the next section.

Ok, once that slog is done, it's time to let Netbook BootMaker do its magic. And let me be clear: it is magic. What this utility will do is install a special bootloader on your flash drive, which allows your netbook to begin an OS X install. It also throws in a few driver tweaks, to make sure your 10v, y'know, work.

9. Running BootMaker is easy—just open the app, select your OS X partition on your newly-minted flash drive, and tell it to GO GO GO.

Aaaaand that's it! You're ready to start hackintoshing.

Installing OS X

First, you're going to need to do some light prep on your 10v.

10. Jump into the BIOS, since we're going to need to check on a few things. You can do this by restarting the 10v, and hitting F2 as the Dell logo first shows up.

11. Double-check to see if you have the right BIOS. As long as it's lower than A06, you're fine. If not, refer back to the "What You'll Need" section.

12. With the arrow keys, cycle over to the "Advanced" screen, where you'll see a list of options. USB BIOS Legacy support should be enabled, as should Bluetooth.

13. Now cycle over to the Boot screen. This is where you tell your 10v which drive to start from. During normal use, this will be the hard drive where your OS is installed. Since we're installing an OS today, though, you're going to want to select "USB Storage," and move it to the top by pressing the F6 key.

14. Once you're done, press F10 to save and exit. If you're ready to dive straight into the install, make sure you have your prepped USB drive plugged in and ready to go.

15. Plug your computer in, if it's not already. You don't want your netbook to die halfway though—this will only lead to sadness.

Next time you boot with your flash drive plugged in, you should see this screen. Don't be alarmed by the spinning pinwheel; just leave it for a few minutes. Your computer is thinking.

16. HAHA, BEHOLD! This screen here, it's awfully Apple-y! But you're not done yet. Let the install complete, following the regular prompts as you go. When it asks you where to install OS X, select and clear the entire HDD of your device. This will delete everything, so make sure you have your stuff backed up. Update: To be more specific on the "select and clear":

The first thing you need to do is format your HHD. Bring up Disk Utility in the installer select it at the highest level possible. Go to "Partition" and make it a single Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) partition. Before hitting Apply, go to Options and select GUID Partition Table. Then hit apply.

After about an hour, you're done. Seriously—that's it. Your first boot will take longer than normal, and your desktop may freeze for minutes at a time. Give it some time to figure everything out. Within about 10 minutes, your desktop should be ready to go.

Odds and Ends

By and large, your install should work out of the box. Sleep, shutdown/startup, sound, keyboard shortcuts, battery indicators, and anything else you can think of should be present and at attention, barring one glaring flaw: the trackpad. It's kinda shitty, and makes dragging-and-dropping nearly impossible. Here's what you need to do:

17. Go here, and download the attached trackpad driver.

18. Open Finder on your 10v, and press CMD+Shift+G (on this keyboard, that's Alt+Shift+G.) In the box that comes up, typed "/Extra" and press enter.
This will bring you to a hidden folder. Copy the .kext file you've download into the Mini10vExt folder, making sure to back up the one you're replacing.
19. Run the app in the "Extra" directory called UpdateExtra, which will alert OS X to the new drivers. Restart your computer.

Now you should be able to click and drag—the cursor should jump when your second finger makes contact. You should see, as you could before, a panel in the OS X preferences where you can adjust trackpad settings. Play with them as you like—two finger scrolling is great, and makes the 10v feel more like a genuine Apple netbook.

The only other issue you're likely to run into is the occasional too-tall settings screen. Here's an obscenely clever virtual screen resolution workaround for that.

So There You Go

You've got yourself a fully-functioning, beautifully small Snow Leopard netbook, which'll do 90% of what a 13-inch MacBook can, at 70% the size and about 25% of the cost. Mine's close to perfect: With an extended battery, I'm pushing 7 hours of battery life with Wi-Fi, which makes my MacBook pro look like a LOSER. And tiny extra bit of size over the Mini 9 means the keyboard is just large enough to work on, meaning this thing isn't just a toy—it's a decent investment. This from a guy with banana fingers.

Performance is acceptable, meaning you can run regular apps like iTunes, Firefox—and even Photoshop in a bind. It's not noticeably slow during normal use, though it'll choke on higher-res Flash video (no YouTube HD, but SD works fine). As with any netbook, this pretty much can't be your main machine. But it's a brilliant extra portable machine, for toilet browsing, travel, class notes and the like.

Anyway, buckets of thanks to the MyDellMini forums, especially users MechDrew (site here) and Bmcclure937. Without their guides, I wouldn't have been able to write this one. And of course, a hat tip to Adam Pash, who was already elbow-deep in Snow Leopard hackintoshing when we were all still too afraid. See his fantastic guide to building the build your own desktop hackintosh here. UPDATE: And I'd be remiss not to mention Meklort, the main developer of the NetbookInstaller suite, which does most of the heavy lifting here. —Thanks, Brian!

So that's about it! Please add in your experiences in the comments-your feedback is a huge benefit to our Saturday guides. Good luck with your own Hackintoshing, and have a great weekend!

The word virtualization conjures images of the dank nerd lairs, populated by lonely network admins, scattered with miles of gray wire, grimy PC towers, processed food packaging and tiny tumbleweeds woven from human hair. It sounds like the domain of the software nerd, the Gentoo jockey, and most importantly, not you. Today, though, virtualization has become mainstream: modern software makes running virtualized operating systems amazingly easy, and undeniably useful.

Intimidating erminology aside, here's what desktop virtualization means today: You can run just about any OS, Mac OS X excluded, inside any other OS. Ubuntu in Mac OS? Sure. Windows 7 within Windows XP? Why not? Windows ME within Snow Leopard? Nobody's going to stop you, I guess! And these aren't patchy, half-assed experiments we're talking about here—these are fully-functioning installations that'll connect to USB peripherals, access the internet, share files with your host OS, and run almost any software, short of 3D games. You can set up as many of these things as you want, and delete them in a matter of seconds. It's pretty great, is what I'm trying to say.

Best of all, virtualization is now something you can try—and stick with—for free, thanks to software like Sun's VirtualBox. It's a free download on any platform, and it does its job spectacularly. Here's how to get started.

What You'll Need

Free hard drive space: VirtualBox is going to create a simulated hard drive (a hard drive image, to be specific) inside your current OS's file system. In other words, you'll need to have space handy to hold a standard OS install, plus whatever apps you're planning on using on the host system. 10GB is enough to play around with in most cases.

Lots-o-RAM: As efficient as modern virtualization is, running one OS inside another isn't going to be easy on your hardware. The easiest way to ensure good VM performance is to have plenty of RAM, such that both OSes—your host and your guest—can have more than their minimum recommended amount of RAM.

VirtualBox: This is the virtual machine software, or the program in which all of your virtual OSes will run. You may've heard of clients like VMWare or Parallels, but these are either paid or have limited platform support. VirtualBox is a free, cross-platform alternative. Getting it is just a matter of downloading the correct version—there are Windows, Mac and Linux editions—and running an installation wizard.

A guest OS: Installing an OS as a virtual machine is almost exactly like installing an OS natively, albeit slightly easier. In other words, you'll need a full, licensed version of your OS, in whatever form you can get it. Downloaded ISO images will work right out of the box—this is how most Linux distributions will come packaged—while OSes on a CD will work too, including your Windows install discs. If applicable, you'll still need to enter license keys—as far as Microsoft is concerned, this is a fresh installation of an OS.

Installing Your Virtual Machine

I've chosen to install Windows 7 within OS X Snow Leopard for this guide, because this will be a common usage scenario, and because the processing of installing an OS in VirtualBox is nearly the same no matter what host/guest combo you're. If you're installing Ubuntu 9.04 within Windows XP, for example, you can still follow along. Anyway, here you go:

Installing Guest Additions

VirtualBox supports so-called "Guest Additions" in some OSes, which are essentially sets of tools and drivers that make the virtualization more seamless. If they're available, you'll want to install them: the guest OS will adjust to your screen resolution properly, your video performance will be smoother (and in Windows XP and Vista, possibly accelerated), filesharing will be simplified, copy and paste will work between OSes, and in some cases, you'll even be able to run individual programs as native windows in your host OS

That's called "Seamless Mode," and if you're running Windows inside Mac OS or Linux, you may as well try it out. It's not quite perfect—the Start Menu stacked atop the Dock is a little awkward—but this way you don't have to switch between entire desktops just to switch from one app to another. It's a cool effect, at the very least.

To install Guest Additions, click "Install Guest Additions" under the "Machine" menu while running your virtual machine. Guest Additions should appear in your guest OS as an optical disc, which should contain an installer. Run it, then restart your virtual machine. Once Guest Additions are installed, you can access Seamless Mode from the VirtualBox menu, under "Machine."

Shared Directories

Copy and paste will often work between the host and guest OS, but if you're planning on using your guest OS for productivity or downloading any kind of media, a shared folder is the only real solution. In the bottom right corner of a running virtual machine, you should see a small folder icon. Clicking it will bring up a shared folder creation dialog. Select where on your host OS your shared folder should be—it can be an existing directory, like your "Music" folder—and check the box to make it "Permanent." On your guest machine, the shared folder will show up as a VirtualBox shared directory in your local network.

(Note: I'm getting reports that some people running Windows 7 guest machines have trouble finding the network share. You may have to map a network drive manually—just right-click "Computer" anywhere in Windows—the Start Menu works fine—and select "Map Network Drive." Choose whatever drive letter you'd like to give your directory, then enter "\\vboxsvr\myshare" as the folder path, where "myshare" is the name you've given your shared folder in virtualbox.)

Connecting USB Devices

One of the most common reasons for installing a virtual machine is to circumvent some kind of driver incompatibility. VirtualBox recognized most of your computer's inbuilt components, like sound cards, extra storage or webcams, and can use them automatically. For most USB devices, though, you'll need to tell it when to take control.

In most cases, this just means making sure your device isn't in use by your host OS (a flash drive will need to be unmounted, for example), and clicking the small USB plug icon in the bottom right corner of the screen. This will bring up a list of available connected devices; simply click the one you want, and you're good to go.

Odds and Ends

Virtualizing isn't just a good way to get around some kind of nagging compatibility problem, it's a fun way to wile away a few hours experimenting with weird new OSes. Setup is just about the same no matter what you're installing, so there's really no reason not to try some of the more esoteric software out there—anything with an ISO available for download will do. For a taste, try the Haiku Project—a revival of the long-dead BeOS, or see what the hell FreeBSD is.

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you'd like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy virtualizing, folks.

Avid photographers, you already know the score, and this isn't a guide for you. Nor is it for the dude with the brand-new 5D Mk II with an external flash gun, or the weekend strobist. This is a reference to be passed around as a public service; a quick guide for the aquarium-flashing, face-flushing, baby-blinding friends and family you all know and tolerate love.

When You Shouldn't

At Large Events
Every time I go to a nighttime sporting event or concert, I see hundreds of starry flickers coming from the stands. When I see them, I die a little inside. For your average point-and-shoot, the effective range of your built-in flash is about 15 feet. You might stretch this to 20 feet if you jack up your camera's ISO settings to 800 (or God forbid 1600), but under no circumstances will your camera's flash reach down to the field or stage.

Every little flash you see in the photo above represents a failed photo, unless the intention was to get a well-lit out-of-focus shot of the dude sitting two rows forward. Shooting artificially lit events may be hard, but letting your camera's automatic flash have its way won't help. Shut it down.

Through Glass
Walk into any aquarium for a classic flash infraction: Shooting through glass. People press their cameras up to the fish and everybody goes blind. This almost never works—ever notice that giant white explosion where the fish was supposed to be? We don't have an aquarium in our office, so I put Kyle, our new intern, in a glass conference room for a similar effect. He now has a glowing orb for an eye. Thanks, flash.

Shooting Gadgets, or Anything With a Screen
This one may be a bit of a tech blogger pet peeve, but please, turn off the flash before taking pictures of your gear, especially if it has a screen. Even the brightest, matte-est screens act as flash mirrors, as do all manner of plastic and metal finishes. It's nearly impossible to take a good photo of a gadget with your flash on, and there's rarely a reason to: Gadget generally won't move unless you tell them to, so find a way to stabilize your camera and treat your subject to a nice, loooong exposure. On point-and-shoots, this usually requires nothing more than manually turning off your flash and staying in auto mode—the camera will figure out the rest.

On Anything That Isn't Moving
Know what I said about shooting gadgets? Honestly, it applies to all inanimate objects, and even animate objects, assuming you get get them to sit still enough. Set your camera on the table, prop yourself against a tree, make an improvised monopod out of a lamp—if your subject is still, the only person to blame for not turning off your flash is yourself.

On Humans
It's not a hard rule, but it's a good guideline: built-in flash units emit whitish xenon light, and generally make your subject look like a malnourished villager from medieval Europe, often with horrifying red pupils. If you can help it, avoid the flash. (If you can't, we've got some tips below for making your shots look less ghostly.) Photo by Flickr user busbeytheelder

In a Baby's Face
Because as adorable as this overdramatic baby is, flashing blindingly bright light into your newborn's pupils seems like bad parenting. And babies don't usually move too fast.

When You Should

In Daylight
Counterintuitively, one of the only times your camera's built-in flash is genuinely useful is when it's bright and sunny out, and you've got a shadow problem. Ideally you should try to illuminate a subject with natural light, but in the event that your photo is lit from behind or above, like this here cat, knocking out a few shadows is a reasonable excuse for using flash. Why? Because the mix of ambient and flash-bulb light is much less harsh than straight flash. Photo by Hoggheff aka Hank Ashby aka Mr. Freshtags

When It's Totally Dark
Because you have no other choice.

How to Avoid It

Stabilize Your Camera
Keeping your camera still isn't always easy. If carrying a tripod or Joby-style stabilizer isn't an option, you can always do it yourself. From our piece on hacking together camera accessories on the cheap:

Shooting long exposures without something to prop your camera on is a pain in the ass, not to mention a blurry mess. So is carrying a tripod. This video shows how to build a pretty effective foot-looping camera stabilizer out of some string, a bolt and a washer. The results are surprisingly good.

And another! Here's what I call the David Pogue Special, and it's great: Many lampshade mounts share a diameter and thread size with the tripod mount screw on the bottom of your camcorder, point-and-shoot or DSLR, providing quick and dirty stabilization in a bind.

If You Absolutely Have To

Reduce the Flash's Intensity
Many cameras will have a setting for flash intensity. Find it. This will essentially just turn down the brightness of your flash, which will avoid overexposing your subjects' faces, albeit at the expense of range.

Improvise a Diffuser
External flash units turn out better photos because they have bigger, better bulbs, mostly, but also because they're often fitted with a diffuser. These accessories soften your flash's harsh glow, but they're both expensive and generally impossible to fit onto your mom's point-and-shoot.

Luckily, you can fashion them yourself, sometimes in a matter of seconds. Again, from the DIY camera accessory roundup:

A coffee filter held in front of a flash, a translucent film canister with a notch cut into it, a simple piece of A4 paper or even a piece of matte Scotch tape over the flash lens will measurably improve your drunk party photography.

Tricks like this tend to take a little trial and error, but you'll love the results. Top image via SharperFocus

Still something you wanna know? Can't get your brother to stop flashing himself in the mirror? Send questions, tips, addenda or complaints to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

Why Homebrew?

Pre homebrew is as much about adding apps that Palm has been so slow to approve as it is tweaking your handset. Think of it like jailbreaking an iPhone, except that it's easier to do, and the benefits are much, much greater.

(This guide owes a huge debt to the PreCentral forums, where the developer of WebOS Quick Install, with others, have collected most of the necessary resources. Recognition is nice, but donations are better. If you find WebOS Quick Install useful, send Jason a few bucks.)

What You Need

Some downloads! The only app you'll need to run on your computer is a Java app, so it's completely cross-platform. This guide should work for Windows, Mac or Linux.

1. WebOS Quick Install:
This is the desktop program that effectively opens up your Pre for business. It's got quite a bit of power on its own, but one of its greatest talents is the ability to install package managers like Preware, which make installing homebrew apps to your Pre, from your Pre super-easy.

2. WebOSDoctor ROM (Sprint, Bell): This is just a restoration ROM for webOS, which WebOS Quick Install needs to work. It should be saved into the same directory as WebOS Quick Install, then left alone.

3. Java SE 6: Make sure you've got Java 1.6, or SE 6, so you can run these apps properly.

And one trick:

4. Dev Mode: Switching your Pre to dev mode is either sort of fun or sort of tedious, depending on your capacity for nostalgia.

All you have to do is type "upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart" on the keypad. That'll open a search query that'll uncover a new app on your Pre called "DeveloperMode." Run it, and it'll switch your phone into, you guessed it, developer mode.

Running WebOS Quick Install

5. Plug your Pre into your computer. When prompted for connection type, select "Just Charge"

6. Open WebOS Quick Install, making sure that the WebOSDoctor ROM is in the same directory as the Quick Install JAR.

You'll get this message:

Heed it.

7. When you reopen WebOS Quick Install, you'll be prompted to choose which kind of device you want to access. Choose "USB Device," which'll install the drivers necessary to crack into a physical Pre, not just an emulator.

8. Follow the driver installation prompts through to completion.

9. Open WebOS Quick Install again. You should see the app's home screen. Click on the bottom button in the right panel, as indicated here:

10. Select "WebOS-Internals Feed (all)" from the download list. Select both "Package Manager Service" and "Preware" from the resulting list. These will enable you to download and apply the tweaks and apps you want.

11. After download, they will be added to the previously empty list in the app's homescreen, where you should highlight both, then click "Install"

There you go!

Getting the Most Out Of Homebrew

Now that you're set up and ready to go, it's time to do stuff. Launch the Preware app on your Pre—at first load, it takes a while to sync up with all the repositories, so be patient—and explore the 200+ apps included by default. (You can add other repositories on your own, but most of the good stuff is already here.)

The "Package Manager Service" installation doesn't just enable downloads through Preware—it enables a whole range of WebOS Quick Install tweaks, which you can access through the Tools ->Tweaks menu. WebOS Quick Install may prompt you to install a few patches; just go along with it, it'll only take a second.

Once you're in the panel, you'll see a wealth of useful tweaks, from a 4-icon-wide app launcher, to a browser ad-blocker, to a user agent string changer, so your Pre asks for snazzier iPhone mobile pages instead of standard mobile fare. Generally, each tweak will restart your Pre.

Themes are managed either through Preware, which has a selection of over 200 that you can install with a single button press, or through the WebOS Quick Install menu, at Tools -> Themer. To install a new theme from WebOS Quick Install, you'll have to manually download from an external site, which you'll be directed to automatically. Once you've downloaded the theme, it's just a matter of loading it into the app. Preware is probably your best bet for this, though there isn't really a way to find out if a theme is any good without actually trying it.

As for that onscreen keyboard? You can install that through WebOS Quick Install: It's in the same place you found Preware, in the "WebOS-Internals Feed (all)" section of the package downloader. A word of warning: It's only officially supported up to WebOS 1.2.0, so you might be best advised to wait a few days until the developers have worked out any bugs with 1.2.1.

Anyway, the Pre Homebrew community is rich and fast-moving, so I'll let you all take it from here. Some great resources to get you started:

• PreCentral
• WebOS-Internals
• PimpMyPre
• PreYourMind

And again, a gajillion thanks to WebOS Quick Install Developer Jason Robitaille and the users over at the PreCentral forums.

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you'd like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy homebrewing, folks!

First off, some reasons to take this road: iTunes is a decent audio encoder, and it'll get your music from point A—the CD—to points B, C and D—your computer, your MP3 player and your backup drive—without much trouble. But it'll do it with a less-than-great encoder, with occasionally inconsistent tagging, with album art that'll only work on Apple devices, and without support for the best lossless audio formats and MP3 encoding options, which you probably want, whether you know it or not.

In short, the ripping process deserves a little more care than iTunes or Windows Media player can give it. You can pay people for this, which feels dumb and wasteful, or you can do it yourself. It's not difficult, at all. Here's what you do:

Get Your Software

The first step to ditching iTunes is to, well, ditch iTunes. What we're looking for is ripping software that offers more encoding options than iTunes, but more importantly, a better encoder. And as far as MP3 encoders go, the open source LAME is as good as they get. There's plenty of software for both Mac and PC that leverages this encoder, but here are two programs that do lots, lots more.

Mac OS X: Max
From the makers:

When extracting audio from compact discs, Max offers the maximum in flexibility to ensure the true sound of your CD is faithfully extracted. For pristine discs, Max offers a high-speed ripper with no error correction. For damaged discs, Max can either use its built-in comparison ripper (for drives that cache audio) or the error-correcting power of cdparanoia.

What this translates to: Great error reduction, fantastic sound quality, and tons and tons of encoding options—not that you really need those to do a good rip, but hey, they can't hurt. On top of all this, Max is also a great file converter, in case you've got some delinquent WMA files scattered around.

Windows: Exact Audio Copy
From the makers:

Exact Audio Copy is a so called audio grabber for audio CDs using standard CD and DVD-ROM drives. The main differences between EAC and most other audio grabbers are
• It is free (for non-commercial purposes)
• It works with a technology, which reads audio CDs almost perfectly. If there are any errors that can't be corrected, it will tell you on which time position the (possible) distortion occurred, so you could easily control it with e.g. the media player

What this translates to: The best error correction money can buy, for free. Seriously: Audiophiles swear by exact audio copy, and with good reason. You'll have to download your own LAME encoder before you can enable MP3 encoding in the program options, but you can do that right here without a problem. Additionally, setting up tagging, which you'll definitely want to do, takes an extra, albeit easy, step.

If you want to take a simpler route you can just download CDex, which supports LAME and tagging databases out of the box, and produces results nearly as good as—if not as good as—Exact Audio Copy.

On both platforms, you're going to have a lot of personal decisions to make. How do you want to organize your files? How do you want to name them? Unlike iTunes, these apps don't pressure your to store your music in a certain way—it's up to you to archive as you please. Both offer plenty of options for storage and organization, easily available in their Preferences menus:
As I said, this one's up to you.

Choose Your File Type

MP3: If you're encoding only for portable devices, not concerned about archiving perfect copies of your music, hate hate hate audiophiles, think FLAC and OGG just sound like gurgling baby noises, you're probably going to want to stick with MP3s. Yes, there are other formats that offer a better size-to-sound ratio, and no, it's not open source or anything, but for pure compatibility, control, and encoder choice, it's hard—-no, impossible—to beat MP3. And if you set up your encoder correctly, MP3s can sound great.

It's tough to pick the optimal MP3 bitrate on your own, since at a certain point, differences in sound quality seem to come down as much to psychological factors as to actual clarity. Thankfully, we've crowd-sourced this issue and come up with a rough guide: 256kbps is, it seems, where people just can't really tell the difference. In practical terms, this means setting your encoder to these settings:

That's no higher than 256kbps VBR—for variable bitrate, which modifies the amount of information in your file's stream according to how much is needed, and saves you space without sacrificing quality—with the highest (read: slowest) available encoding option. For almost everyone, in almost all circumstances, this'll do, and it sure beats iTunes default 160kbps constant bitrate rips.

FLAC: If archiving is your intention—as in, digitizing your music without losing any quality, no matter how imperceptible—then you're going to want to go lossless. And of the lossless formats, FLAC is the most well-supported in terms of software and hardware, albeit not on any of Apple's products—though iTunes can be made to play nice with FLAC with a few simple tweaks.

But don't fret! The beauty of FLAC music is that it can be converted to other lossless formats, like Apple's iPod-compatible Apple Lossless, without losing any quality, or compressed into MP3s without having to worry about muddy transcoding. Think of them as CDs without the physical disc, basically.

Embed Your Album Art

On Mac OS, assuming you're doing your listening in iTunes, which is pretty handy at fetching album art, you can just use one of Doug's famous iTunes scripts to write said album art directly to your MP3 files. Here's how you install it:

To install the files/folders, drag the items in the disc image window to your [username]/Library/iTunes/Scripts/ folder. If there is no folder named "Scripts" there, create one and drag the files into it. AppleScripts placed in this folder will be listed in the iTunes Script menu. You do not have to install the .rtf/.rtfd documentation file in the "Scripts" folder, but it's as convenient a place as any.

For Windows users, Lifehacker's written a fantastic guide to collecting and embedding album art, which you should definitely read. The short version? Download MediaMonkey, and let it do the work for you.

Granted, once you embed album art into your files, apps like iTunes and Windows Media Player might not display it, and may ask you to search for it from their databases. This is fine: Both programs use proprietary album art storage systems, so just because they can't see your ID3 tag album art doesn't mean it's not there, or that you shouldn't have embedded it—having it around can't hurt, and it's by far the most compatible and rational method for storing album art, as far as other software, most MP3 players and long-term storage go.

Anyway, that's it! Now you can set your CDs aside comfortably, knowing that you've squeezed the purest, most delicious audio files you can out of them. Now:

Listen to Your Music

Because that was the whole point.

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you'd like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy ripping, folks!

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Looks like cock rings make excellent cable organizers, and we bet those girls on Sex and the City weren't nearly open-minded enough to think to use The Rabbit vibrator as an immersion blender. My personal favorite, for sheer vulgarity, has to be the use of penis extenders (I had no idea such things even existed) as replacement bicycle hand grips. That one'll scare hell out of the neighbourhood committee. [Homemade Sex Toys]

Why should you upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.5? Disregarding the mixed coverage the OS has gotten—which tends to compare it to more modern software like iPhone OS and Android—6.5 is much, much better less terrible than 6.1, especially for touchscreen phones You've probably heard about the new graphical start menu and fantastic Titanium home screen; they're great, but there's a lot more to appreciate. IE has been updated; all menus are now finger-friendly; the whole system has inertial scrolling; there's been a system-wide cosmetic refresh. That's not to mention the upcoming Windows Mobile Marketplace, Microsoft take on the App Store. On top of that, at least in my experience, it's pretty snappy.

Dozens of Windows Mobile 6.5 Beta ROMs are floating around the tubes, collected, tweaked and prepared for your use by the kindly souls over at XDA Developers, from whom I've adapted this How To. Despite their unofficial-ness, they're really quite good—the fancy new interface elements are buttery smooth, and as a whole, and enough bugs have been stamped out to make 6.5 solid enough to use as your day-to-day OS.

This How To is based around my experience with a GSM HTC Touch Diamond. The process is largely the same between the few handsets that can run 6.5, but for the sake of brevity, I'm sticking to one handset, and its QWERTYed brother, the Touch Pro. For further guidance on other phones, head over to the XDA forums (CDMA Touch and Pro, Touch HD, Sony Xperia, Samsung Omnia)

Also, the necessary disclaimer: this tutorial reaches deep into your phone's software, which means there's a (slim) possibility that you'll brick your phone should anything go wrong. If you're worried, read up on the risks here. Otherwise, follow closely and you—and your phone—should be just fine.

What You'll Need:

• An HTC Touch Diamond or Touch Pro (GSM only. Folks with CDMA handsets—that's you, Sprint and Verizon—go here or here.)
• A (free) account at XDA Developers
• A Windows Mobile 6.5 ROM (Lotsa choices here: Diamond, Pro)
• A Windows PC, set up to sync with your handset
• A device flashing utility (Both)
• A bootloader (Diamond, Pro)
• A device radio (Diamond, Pro--Make sure to download from the "Original" list, not the "Repacked" one.)

Before you get started, you'll probably want to back up your contacts and personal info. I'd recommend PIM Backup, which I've used for years. Or you could try Microsoft's new, free online service called My Phone. This How To will replace all your device's software, so if you have anything worth keeping, you'll need to back it up.

Installing the bootloader:

Many of you have probably updated, or "flashed" your devices before, but this will have been with an official, signed utility from either your carrier or handset manufacturer. What we're doing today is installing unofficial software, something which your handset isn't currently set up to do. Our first order of business, then, is to install a new bootloader, called HardSPL, on the device, which will allow your handset to load software from third parties, i.e., your sweet, sweet Windows Mobile ROM. Let's go:

1. Connect your phone to your PC, and establish an ActiveSync (on XP) or Sync Center (on Vista, or Windows 7) connection to your device. You don't need to set up any sync rules—just makes sure the connection is active. You can check this by looking for a bi-directional arrow in your phone's taskbar.

2. Extract the bootloader you've downloaded, and note the location (see "What You'll Need" for links)

3. Find your extracted files, and run the executable file (usually called "ROMUpdateUtility.exe" or something like that.

4. Follow the instructions, carefully. The software performs lots of checks to make sure you don't goof this up, but make sure you a.) have at least 50% battery left in your phone b.) the correct bootloader c.) a host computer that won't shut off, go to sleep or otherwise interrupt the process. Heed! Or else there may be bricking.

5. Wait! You'll see paired progress bars on your phone and computer screen. This part of the process doesn't take that long, since you're only updating a small piece of software.

6. Restart your phone. The small text in the corner of your Windows Mobile splash screen will have changed to something unfamiliar, but don't worry about verifying your new bootloader. If you ran the utility to completion and the device restarted on its own, it's more or less a sure thing that you're upgraded.

Installing a new device radio:

This is the most esoteric part of the process, so I'll try not to get too deep into the nuts and bolts. Basically, your device has firmware that manages its various antennae, letting you connect to cellular networks, GPS, etc. Installing a fresh Radio onto your device usually won't make much of a change in how your phone works. it just lets us—or rather, your soon-to-be mobile OS, manage your phone's communication capabilities freely. Some radios can improve reception on certain networks, or even connect to entirely new mobile bands. For more info on that, I'l refer you again to XDA.

You'll probably notice that this process is seems an awfully lot like the last stage: that's because it is. Since we're "flashing" different parts of your phone's software in each step, the core utility, and general technique, is quite similar. Anyway!

7. Pair your phone with your PC, like you did in step 1.

8. Extract your downloaded radio files and note their location

9. If the radio came with its own bootloader, skip to step 12.

10. Extract your downloaded bootloader, noting location.

11. Copy the extracted radio file—it should have an .NBH extension—to the directory where you've put your bootloader.

12. Run the bootloader, as in step 3.

13. Follow the instructions, as in steps 4 and 5.

14. Let the phone restart. Nothing much will have changed, but you may need to perform some minor network setup. Don't worry too much about that now, since you're about to wipe your whole device.

Flashing the ROM, i.e. Installing Windows Mobile 6.5

This is when we get down to actually installing our new OS. This is the step that'll take the longest, and it's the biggest leap of faith, since you're replacing your device's main software. Luckily, if you've come this far, it'll be a snap. Same process, different .NBH file. Onward!

15. Pair your phone to your PC (this is the last time! promise!)

16. Extract your downloaded bootloader, again, to a different location. (Or you can use the same copy you used to flash your radio; just make sure you delete the radio file from the directory)

17. Extract your Windows Mobile 6.5 ROM, which should be an .NBH file of about 80-100MB, to the same directory that your bootloader is in.

18. Run the bootloader, and follow the instructions. Same warnings as before—don't let your PC or phone sever the connection at any point.

19. Sit and wait. This time it'll take a bit longer, but shouldn't top 15-20 minutes.

20. Your phone will reset, and you should see a fresh Windows Mobile 6.5 splash screen. It might look hacked or unprofessional—don't be alarmed! The guys who so graciously put together these ROMs, which often take a good deal of tweaking, leave their marks on the software in various ways. Anyhoo, you'll have to let your phone run through a set of initialization routines for a little while. Just follow along.

21. WinMo should automatically guess your carrier and apply the appropriate connections settings. If not, you can do it from the device's Settings page, found in the top level of the new start menu. As for the settings parameters, Google is your friend.

Conclusion:
Congratulations! You are now the proud, semi-legal owner of a Windows Mobile 6.5 smartphone! It's hard to imagine wanting to switch back, but if you do, just repeat the above process with a different ROM. There are plenty of 6.1 installs, including the official carrier versions, available from the same place you found your 6.5 download.

Resources:

• XDA Developers
• ModMyDiamond

So that's about it! Please add in your experiences in the comments-your feedback is a huge benefit to our Saturday guides. Good luck with your flashing (firmware only, please), and have a great weekend!

If you saw our feature earlier in the week, you know Michael Fremer is crazy about vinyl. He's been defending its merits ever since digital formats started to surface, and has published several DVDs detailing how best to set up a number of nice audiophile turntables.

But of course, you don't have to have to have an audiophile turntable to enjoy vinyl—great used tables like the Technics SL-D202 I got in high school (pictured) can be picked up all over the internet, at garage sales or from your Dad's basement for very little dough, and will serve you well as long as they're in decent shape.

Plus, with tons of record labels including a free digital download with the purchase of an album on vinyl these days, it's a great way to give back to your favorite artists—you'll get a cool tangible object that has the potential to sound far better than your MP3s, but with a digital copy for you iPod nonetheless.

So if you have a turntable that's never received a proper tune-up, here's how to set it up to get the best possible sound from it. With Fremer's help, my table is now in tip-top shape, and yours can be too.

What you'll need:
• The manual for your turntable and cartridge (the part with the needle attached)
• A 2mm Allen/Hex wrench for the cartridge screws (most are 2mm, anyway)
• A ruler
• Magnifying glass and flashlight (not essential, but makes things easier)
• Needle-nose pliers or tweezers
• A printout of a standard cartridge alignment ruler (available at vinylengine.com for free)

First thing's first, though—if you're unsure of the progeny of your table, or if it hasn't been serviced in a long time or ever, the easiest upgrade you can make to ensure it's at its best is a new cartridge. This part is almost solely responsible for the sound generated by your table, and you can get a very good new cartridge for less than $100 (try Shure's M97XE for a good one in the $90 ballpark, but there are cheaper options as well).

After that, there are three variables you want to make sure are set, and those are the three variables we'll be covering: cartridge alignment, tracking pressure and anti-skating. While there are tons of other adjustments that can be made, with some tables having more calibration options than others, these three are fairly universal and will get you in the ballpark of calibration, which is much better than fresh-from-the-dusty-garage.

Let's get started!

Tracking Pressure
This is what the weight on the back of your tonearm is for—it controls how much pressure is put on the stylus as it tracks the record's grooves. This should be set according to what's suggested in your cartridge's manual. Google around for your cartridge make and model and you should be able to find the manual, or your turntable manual may suggest a baseline range. Again, Vinyl Engine is a great resource for manuals.

1. If you're installing a new cartridge, connect the red, blue, green and white wires to the corresponding marked terminals on the back of the cartridge. If they're too loose and fall off the pins, put a toothpick inside wire clips and tighten it with the pliers. Once it's hooked up, loosely screw the cartridge into the headshell (we'll be adjusting its alignment later) with your hex screwdriver.

2. Set the turntable's anti-skating dial to zero, then turn the weight on the back of the arm just up until the point the tonearm floats on its own. Then, by turning the part of the weight with the gauge but not the entire weight, set the gauge back to zero to "re-zero" the weight.

3. Now, turn the entire weight to the number (in grams) specified by your cartridge's manual. If it specifies a range, stick it in the middle.

4. If you're feeling like getting serious, you can buy a specialized tracking pressure gauge that will tell you the exact pressure. But for most folks, the guidelines on the tonearm's weight are fine—mine was almost exactly correct when measured with Fremer's digital gauge (as you can see in the picture).

Cartridge Alignment
Ideally, a tonearm would track across the record from the beginning to the end in a straight line across the surface, so that the stylus was perpendicular to the groove at all times, thus keeping distortion to an absolute minimum. But since the turntable arm is fixed, it traces a parabola across the surface of the record as you play it. Mathematically, the parabola arc has two points where the stylus should be sitting perfectly perpendicular to the groove. These are the points we'll use to set the alignment.

But you don't have to be Pythagoras Jr. to plot them—thankfully, there are protractor PDFs you can print out which will mark the approximate position of these points on most turntables. There are also PDFs for specific tone arms and turntables floating around—Google your model to see, but you should be served just fine by the standard approximation provide by the basic print outs at Vinyl Engine. (We're using a glass version here in the photo, but the paper ones are fine).

1. Many turntable manuals specify an ideal distance from the back of the headshell to the tip of the stylus, so consult your table's manual and screw in the cartridge into the headshell's adjustable slots so this measurement is correct.

2. Now, place your alignment protractor on the platter, and carefully drop the stylus tip onto the first alignment point. The goal is for the cantilever (the metal part that extends down from the cartridge with the stylus tip on the end) to be parallel with the guidelines on the printout. If it's not, loosen one of the screws in the headshell and move it back or forward slightly. This is where a magnifying glass and flashlight can be handy, as the clearance between the bottom of the cartridge and the platter may be slim.

3. Once it's aligned in the first point, test it on the second point. Both are mathematically determined, so it should be aligned on the second point too. If not, try to find a happy medium.

Anti-Skating
Most turntables have an anti-skating dial somewhere. This setting counteracts the vector force that naturally pulls the stylus tip toward the inner lip of the groove as the record spins, because as mentioned before, you want it to track dead-center whenever possible.

1. All you have to do is turn the anti-skating knob so that the number matches the tracking pressure you set earlier. Fremer likes to set it a quarter of a gram or so less, which he feels is more accurate than the scales provided on most turntables. So do that.

More Tips
• Keep your turntable on as sturdy a surface as possible—this will prevent it from warbling or skipping if you walk/dance around near it.

• Keep your stylus and records clean. You can get very inexpensive tools for cleaning both of these parts, and it will keep everying sounding great and will prevent your records from wearing out too quickly.

And that's it. For more info, check out Fremer's calibration DVDs, which many vinyl junkies swear by.

Hope you guys enjoyed our Listening Test audio week as much as we did. If you have any other advice or tips to share, please do so in the comments, and if you're interested, check out last week's audio-related How To on maintaining a lossless music library. Have a great weekend listening everybody!

Listening Test: It's music tech week at Gizmodo.

Thankfully, there is an easy answer to this that covers most of your bases when dealing with CDs: Use the Apple Lossless Codec. It's a fine way of compressing files into smaller packages than WAV rips without losing quality, and iTunes has supported Apple Lossless since 2004 which means it's widely supported now beyond the Apple world.

But even though lossless files are smaller than uncompressed WAV rips, they're still considerably larger than a good 320kbps or high-bitrate VBR MP3 file—usually between 2 to 3 times larger, depending on the song. And if you're going to be listening to it all on your $15 Magnavox computer speakers, you're not going to be able to tell the difference, so stick with MP3. But if you've got good headphones or speakers, you'll appreciate the added audio resolution and the pleasing absence of the compressed sound that even a well-encoded, high-bitrate MP3 can possess.

So if you're ripping your new CDs and have plenty of storage (which is, after all, ridiculously cheap these days), make sure you encode in a pristine Apple Lossless file to save space over WAV but at zero loss of audio resolution.

But when's the last time you bought a CD?

If you want to extend the lossless kick to your online music acquisitions, you're going to invite a few more file formats into your life that don't play so nicely with iTunes and iPods. Most common among these is FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec that is used to encode much of the high-quality lossless music you'll find available to download on discerning Torrent sites and most serious live music archives (including the fabulous Archive.org treasure trove). So let's deal with that little obstacle and get FLAC files to play nice with our iProducts, shall we? And even if you get tired of having 2-3 times less music on your iPod or iPhone, you can always keep a lossless copy on your home machine and re-encode to smaller MP3s for mobile use without losing the original.

What You'll Need
• For OS X: Fluke (Free)
• For Windows: dBpoweramp (Free limited version will still get the job done)

Dealing With FLAC Files
While Apple Lossless is great for files you encode yourself from source, like we said, you don't see it too often around the web, where FLAC is favored. So to use FLAC files efficiently at home and on the go, we'll need to do a bit of converting. But it's all relatively painless.

For Mac:

1. Download Fluke, an excellent software package created by Dmitry Kichenko that provides nearly seamless support for FLAC files in iTunes. What it actually does is install a free QuickTime plugin to allow QT to play FLAC files in the OGG container, then fools everyone into thinking your FLAC is actually an OGG container. Confused? It doesn't matter. It works.

2. Once Fluke is installed, you'll have a Fluke app in your Applications folder. To add FLAC files to iTunes, just drag them onto the Fluke icon (you can keep it in your dock) and they'll be converted and added automatically. If you have iTunes set to copy files to your library folder, it will do that.

3. Now you can play your FLAC file through iTunes like normal, with full tagging support just like an MP3 (the only thing you can't do is add album art). If you're going to be moving the file to your iPod, you can use iTunes' built-in encoder to make a still-lossless switch to Apple Lossless, which should be almost the exact same size as your FLAC. Enjoy your audiophile vinyl rips the way they were intended!

For Windows
If you're a windows user and dealing primarily with FLAC files, it may make mores sense to use Winamp or another non-iTunes media manager along with the standard FLAC codecs. But if you want to play FLAC on an iPod, you'll have to convert it to something else eventually, so you may as well use Apple Lossless for better file size than a straight WAV.

1. Download and install dBpoweramp. You'll get a trial version of the for-pay Reference version, but after 30 days it will rever to the free version, which will still convert FLAC to Apple Lossless, which is what we're going to do.

2. Once it's downloaded, right-click on any FLAC file on your computer and select "Convert to" and choose Apple Lossless in the drop-down. The first time you do this, you'll be prompted to download an additional codec pack. Do that.

3. Once your codec is installed, you can select as many FLAC files at a time as you want and quickly convert them to Apple Lossless. For huge conversion jobs, you can use dBpoweramp's batch encoder.

4. Add your new Apple Lossless files to iTunes, and you're done!

Now go grab some well-recorded (and free) FLAC music from Archive.org. Ahh, doesn't that sound better?

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you'd like to see covered here, please let me know. Have a good weekend listening everyone! And if you're into audio, you're going to love Gizmodo next week. Stay tuned.

VNC (virtual network computing) is one of those tricks that never gets old, and having it set up can often save your ass—whether you left some info on your home computer that you need at work, want to check on your massive BitTorrent queue to schedule the evening's entertainments, or help your poor parents use clip art in Microsoft Word, having remote access can be handy dandy.

So let's get started:

What You'll Need
• A VNC Server. Mac OS X 10.4 and higher and Windows Vista Ultimate and higher have them built in—but for Windows we find it's easier to use the excellent standalone software TightVNC. Try OSXvnc (Vine) if you're in pre-10.4 territory. For this tutorial, we're using OS X's built-in services, and TightVNC for Windows.

• A VNC client that you will use to access the server running on your home computer. Again, OS X and Windows have built-in clients, or you can use standalones like Chicken of the VNC for Mac or TightVNC for Windows. You can also install these external clients to a thumbdrive for use on computers that aren't yours.

The process is a little different depending on which platforms you're using on each end, but the first thing you'll need to do regardless is set up your home router to forward all VNC network traffic to the computer you wan to control. You may recall we had to do this exact same thing to get BitTorrent working properly—so for a primer on port forwarding, check out last week's Torrent guide or Portforward.com.

And note: any time you're opening up a port to your home network for access from the greater internet, you're taking a bit of risk. Make sure you choose good passwords, change them often, and don't proceed if you're feeling skittish.

Set Up Your Home Machine

1. In your router's admin pages, set up a new port forwarding service for port 5900—the default for VNC screen sharing. Make sure assign it to both UDP and TCP ports, and for the IP address, enter in the IP of your machine on the local network.

Again, just like for Torrenting, make sure your machine has a static local IP address on your network so this info won't change. This is easy to set up on both Windows and Mac—for OS X simply choose "Using DHCP with manual address" under "Configure IPv4" in the TCP/IP section of the Networking preferences, and follow this guide for Windows.

2. Activate VNC sharing on your home machine:

Windows: Download TightVNC and install it. Launch the server, and set a password. Everything else should be good to go, so save settings and the server will continue to run in the background.

Mac: Activate "Remote Management" in the Sharing preferences. Here you can also set which user accounts can access your computer and how. And under "Computer Settings" choose a good password in the "VNC viewers may control screen with password" field.

3. And finally, figure out your home's external IP with whatismyip.com. This can also change from time to time if you're on a big ISP without a static IP, so check it frequently. You'll need this number to connect.

Update: Setting up DynDNS makes connecting with your external IP even easier. Read more here.

Connect to Your Home Computer
This is slightly different depending on which computers you're using. But we're here to hold your hand!

Windows -> Mac:
Start the TightVNC Viewer. Type in the external IP, enter your VNC password, and you're connected.

Mac -> Mac:
In Finder, go to Go -> Connect to Server and type in vnc://xxx.xx.xx.x (enter in your EXTERNAL IP from whatismyip.com. Type in your account user name and password for the active account on your home machine, and boom. Remote control. Note: if you're doing Mac to Mac connections, you'll use the username and password for an account on the Mac, not the VNC password you set in the preferences.

Mac -> Windows
Use the exact same process as above, only use the VNC password you specified in TightVNC.

Windows -> Windows
Same as Windows -> Mac.

More Fun: Connecting With an iPhone
Mocha VNC is a great client for the iPhone that lets you control from your phone. It's a pretty amazing feeling, and the free lite version works fine for basic stuff.

And you're done!

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you'd like to see covered here, please let me know. Have a good weekend remote controlling, everyone!

[Photo By Theis Kofoed Hjorth/Flickr]

This guide is intended for folks who understand the basics but may have only just started to scratch the surface of what BitTorrent clients are capable of. If you're even more hardcore than the tips here, feel free to drop some knowledge (and links!) in the comments for everyone's use. Spread the love.

Throughout this guide we'll be using two of the most popular multi-platform BitTorrent clients, Vuze (formerly called Azureus) and µTorrent. Both apps take two fundamentally different approaches: Vuze packs in just about every feature you could imagine, including a search tool, social-networking-like sharing among friends, a content guide, and much more. µTorrent on the other hand is the opposite: sleek, simple and barebones. The choice is yours.

Lots of our pointers here will take advantages of some of Vuze's newest features, but we love µTorrent too. Where applicable, we'll highlight standalone applications that can help bring some of Vuze's integrated functionality to µTorrent fans.

Set up Your Router's NAT and Transfer Limits
This is, without a doubt, the single most important thing you can do to ensure the highest possible BitTorrent performance. And it's also something often overlooked by casual and even intermediate Torrenters.

BitTorrent clients pipe all of their network traffic through a single "port" on your network. But your router likes to partially or fully block traffic that doesn't come through on all the "standard" ports (like port 80 for web traffic, for instance). So you want to make sure your computer has a clear and open channel to all that data you're going to be sucking down by setting up "port forwarding," which lets your router know to which computer on the network it should send traffic on certain ports instead of blocking it. Make sense?

1. In your Torrent client's preferences under the "network" or "connection" heading, find out which TCP/UDP port it's using. Keep the default, but for the record, you can choose basically any number you want (but read Vuze's "Good Port Choices" article first) and if you have multiple machines on the same network using BitTorrent you'll want to choose unique port numbers for all of them.

2. Now, open up your router's admin page. This is pulled up by going to your router's IP address in a web browser (commonly 192.168.0.1, 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.2.1). Sometimes you'll have to enter a username and password; Google around for your model's default name/password if you can't remember it. Users of Apple's AirPort routers should use the AirPort Utility app.

3. Now, the terminology for what you're looking for is called different things by all the router companies. Some call it "port forwarding," others call it "virtual servers" or "port mapping"—the terminology is surprisingly varied, but it's usually listed under an "advanced settings" tab if there is one. The site Portforwarding.com can help you locate yours if you're having trouble.

4. Once you've found where this all goes down, enter the port number from your client in step 1 for BOTH UDP and TCP fields (you'll enter the same port number for the "private" or "local" UDP/TCP fields). You'll also enter your current machine's IP address (found in Network preferences on both OS X and Windows).

Note: If your machine is a laptop and you're frequently connecting and disconnecting from the network, you'll want to set up a static local IP address so you don't have to switch your router's settings every time you Torrent.

5. Hit save, and you should be good to go. Your BitTorrent client will have a network test built in somewhere in the preferences—use that to make sure your connection is clear.

6. Now, the final step, is setting a limit to your uploading speeds. As you know, BitTorrent simultaneously uploads to other peers while you're downloading, and to ensure solid download speeds you must upload. But you don't want these uploads to take over your limited upload bandwidth, especially if you're on a cable connection. To be safe, cap your uploads around 20 kb/s. This is a good general ballpark that'll ensure good download speeds and won't clog your pipe. If you're on FIOS you may want to kick that up a bit, but play around.

Vuze has a tool that can help you auto-configure your speeds too—probably worth experimenting with in the prefs.

Cover Your Ass
All the regular disclaimers apply: don't be an idiot when you're downloading stuff you probably shouldn't. Here are some tools and strategies to make sure you keep yourself virus- and subpoena-free. But like always, no guarantees! Proceed at your own risk! Etc.

1. Don't seed more than is absolutely necessary. The RIAA/MPAA/NARC's number one priority are heavy uploaders. Not to say that the downloading part is any less illegal, but if you stop seeding and delete your .torrent file after it's done downloading, your odds of staying safe are significantly higher.

Note: If your carefully crafted code of online morals compels you to continue uploading beyond the amount you shared during the download, feel free, knowing that it increases your odds of getting a friendly note from your ISP. And, please, do seed any files that are intentionally being distributed via BitTorrent, like a Linux distribution or Creative Commons licensed stuff from friends like Nine Inch Nails. You can't get hurt by that.

You could make an argument that Torrenting is mainstream enough to survive on many thousands of people seeding very small amounts (ie: the amount uploaded while they're downloading), or you could make an argument about the double (triple? quadruple?) paradoxes that surface when contemplating the morals of consuming vis a vis sharing in the gray to grayish-black Torrent market. But I'm not your dad—what you do is up to you.

2. Go for torrents with a lot of seeds and good comments. If hundreds of people are seeding a file, the odds of it being of good quality and virus free are higher. I know this may seem contradictory to point #1, but you're not in this for the geek cred. You're in this for you. So go with the herd. Also, comments on torrent sites will often have some shreds of useful info—if a lot of people report strange behavior with the downloaded file or a mysterious password lock, skip it.

Also, seeking out the geek legends of the Torrent community will go a long way to ensure good downloads. Choose people like aXXo's Torrents where possible.

3. Use the Bluetack IP filter to keep known baddies out of your life. The folks at Bluetack maintain a list of IP ranges of known spammers, virus seeders, and undercover snoops like Media Defender who might bust your ass. To add the list to Vuze, go to Preferences -> IP Filgers and type in the following URL into the auto-fill field: http://www.bluetack.co.uk/config/level1.zip

Update: Someone who should know has advised us against using Bluetack for a whole litany of reasons, most shocking of which is that Bluetack is some elaborate ploy to mess with P2P networks from the inside. Over my head, but for what it's worth, maybe don't use Bluetack.

4. Look at private torrent sites. Even though Oink's hallowed days are over, there are still a number of good, private BitTorrent sites, where your odds of getting hit with random malware or a federal subpoena are lessened. But they may take some conniving to get invited to, and you'll likely be forced to upload a certain amount to keep your membership.

5. Moderation, moderation. When you can, watch on Hulu, or heaven forbid, buy from your favorite artists. And the less massive your bandwidth usage, the less likely you are to draw the ire of your ISP (or their monthly bandwidth cap).

Autodownload Your Favorite Shows via RSS
For serialized stuff like TV shows, you can easily set up Vuze to subscribe to popular series via RSS and auto-download them every week. It's nice. µTorrent lovers should check out TED, a cross-platform standalone app that does the same thing.

1. In Vuze, search for your favorite show. Once you've found the newest episode and added it to your download list, click the orange RSS button under "Subscribe." The subscribe window can also look at other files in your library and subscribe to those too.

2. You'll see a lot of different options, all seemingly the same. Choose HD where possible, and if there's an EZTV option, choose that—it's a reliably source of good torrents. Then, new episodes will appear in your Subscriptions area automatically, and you can pull them down.

Stream to Your Game Console or Transcode For Your iPod/PMP/Phone with Vuze
The newest version of Vuze added a seriously useful transcoding and streaming tool—just when you thought there couldn't be anything else crammed into this app. But it's great, and works perfectly to auto-detect a PS3 or Xbox 360 on your network and stream your downloads to your TV without any annoying configurations.

1. Enable the streaming add-on under the "Devices" option in the left pane.

2. If your PS3 or Xbox 360 is on and connected to your network, it will automatically show up as a device. Simply drag a file from your library to the icon for your console, and it will be available in the expected area (in the Video menu of the PS3's XMB and the My Video Library, as another PC, on the Xbox 360).

3. The tool will also transcode to iTunes in sizes optimized for iPods, iPhones and Apple TV using the same process. Just drag the file from your Vuze library to the iTunes icon, and after a somewhat slow conversion time, it will be copied to your iTunes library. Pretty sweet.

Next Steps
There are plenty of places you can take it from there. Like setting up a dedicated, always-on torrrent machine, either with a spare PC or a standalone NAS box with a built-in Torrent client. Then you can take advantage of web-only interfaces to access and manage your downloads from the road.

Sounds like pretty good fodder for a future how to, doesn't it? Keep your eyes peeled.

So that's about it! Like we said before, if you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments—your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you'd like to see covered here, please let me know. Have a good weekend Torrenting, everyone!

Image courtesy of, you guessed it, Jason Chen.

Now, we're not saying we're surprised, or angry, or anything. It's beta software, and beta software is by definition not ready for everyday use. But in the pursuit of the latest and greatest thing, we all have learned that a little bit of inconsistency or crashiness is often a fair price to pay for being on the cutting edge.

Not so in iPhone 3.0. It's slow as hell, locks up on everything from launching an app to entering a phone number on the numeric keypad, sucks down battery life like an alcoholic who just found his first bottle of MD 20/20 in days, and so on. Add to that a lack of support for MMS as of yet and no apps to take advantage of the background notifications, and you have a fairly useless upgrade, right now. So let's roll it back.

Note: Your iPhone 3.0 OS backups (your phone settings, unsynched photos, text messages, etc) will not be compatible with 2.2.1 once you go back down. So make sure you have a backup from the 2.2.1 days to restore from, or else you'll be starting from scratch.

iPhone EDGE
If you're running OS X 10.5.6, you'll need to do the USB DFU fix outlined in our jailbreaking guide before proceeding.

1. With your phone plugged in, put it into DFU mode by holding both the power and home buttons for 10 seconds, then releasing power and continuing to hold down home until iTunes recognizes a phone in "recovery mode."

2. Download the 2.2.1 firmware .ipsw file from Apple. Hold down option (Mac) or shift (Windows) and click on restore. Choose the stock iPhone 2.2.1 file you just downloaded.

3. Let it do its thing, and you should be in business. Restore your backup should you have one, and proceed to jailbreaking if you want to.

iPhone 3G
On the iPhone 3G, the 3.0 software flashes the baseband (the chip that controls voice and data network traffic), which confuses iTunes when you try to downgrade. So you have to jump through a few more hoops to downgrade your 3G, but it's still easy enough.

1. Follow the first two steps above for iPhone EDGE, only using the iPhone 3G 2.2.1 firmware package of course. Again, OS X 10.5.6 users will have to do the USB driver switcheroo detailed above.

2. When it's done restoring, you'll get an error message that looks like this:

As long as it's a four-digit error number like 10xx, don't worry, that's just iTunes telling you it's confused by the updated baseband on your phone. Everything will work fine, but unfortunately your phone will be stuck in restore mode until you jailbreak it, which is what we're doing next.

3. For Mac (Windows users skip to step 8): Download a utility called iRecovery. This tool forces your phone to reboot out of restore mode, which is necessary for the QuickPwn jailbreak software to recognize it.

4. Go to the terminal and change to the iRecovery directory, wherever it is on your system, and type these two commands:

chmod 755 libusb-0.1.4.dylib
chmod 755 iRecovery

5. Next, copy the "libusb-0.1.4.dylib" file to the /usr/local/lib directory on your machine (you'll have to shift-command-G to go to this folder in Finder).

6. And finally, with your iPhone plugged in, go back to Terminal and type:

./iRecovery -s

You'll get a prompt, where you should then type "fsboot" (no quotes) and hit enter. If nothing happens after 10-15 seconds, type it again and hit enter again. Your phone should boot.

7. Download QuickPwn and jailbreak your phone (see our guide if you need help). Restore your 2.2.1 backup in iTunes, and you should be in business.

8. For Windows: After you restore to 2.2.1, you can skip straight to running QuickPwn to get your phone up and running.

And that's it. Enjoy an iPhone free of horrible slow-downs until summertime. Bigup to the tutorial over at thebigboss.org, which was very helpful in this endeavor.

• How To: Fake the iPhone 3.0 OS On Your iPhone Today
What everyone can do is check out our directory of iPhone apps—both legit App Store apps and unofficial jailbreak software—that already provide the iPhone 3.0 OS's major feature additions. Copy and paste, tethering, running apps in the background—we've got almost all of it covered.

• How To: Install Unofficial Apps on Your iPhone 3G or iPod Touch, Easily and Safely
But first, you'll want to jailbreak your phone. And thankfully, we have a detailed guide for that too. Jailbreaking unlocks the wide world of Cydia, where you'll find most of the iPhone 3.0-related features covered.

• How To: Enable 3G Tethering in Your iPhone 3.0 Now
And finally, if you've cozied up to a dev and gotten them to register your iPhone's ID as a beta tester, here's how to test out iPhone 3.0's built-in, official tethering solution to use your 3G connection on a laptop.

Happy iPhone hacking everyone, and have a great weekend!