Since it arrived last year, the Galaxy S III has been the world's best-selling smartphone that wasn't born in Cupertino. An impressive feat, but one that—along with Samsung's Megatron-sized hype-machine—has made for sky-high expectations for the sequel.

Our first impressions of the S4 left us a little cold, but we've now spent a full week getting to know it better. It's definitely one of the best phones you can buy. It's just shame it couldn't stay out of its own way.

What Is It?

Design

If you're familiar with the Galaxy S III, the S4 will look strikingly familiar. It retains the same rounded-rectangle look, with metal edges and a slippery, finger-print-trapping plastic back that looks like it belongs on a far more downmarket phone. It's at least functional, though; the back is removable, so you can swap out the battery or expand your storage capabilities with a micro SD card. A lot of people prefer that added utility over the more solid-feeling, and more beautiful unibody design of, say, the HTC One.

One place Samsung does manage to score design points is growing the screen from 4.8 inches on the Galaxy S III to a full 5.0 inches on the S4, while still making the phone thinner, narrower, and easier to grip. The side bezels are shrunk down to nearly nothing, and the screen takes up almost the entire front of the device. Speaking of the screen, it is easily the nicest Samsung has ever made. The colors (especially blues and greens) really pop, and the 441 pixels per inch ensure that text is super-clear. It's also bright enough to be clearly readable on a bright, sunny day, and the Super AMOLED screen makes the blacks like staring into the abyss.

That being said, we still slightly prefer the screen on the HTC One. There's something about it that looks matte, like a magazine, and colors are more accurate.

While Nexus phones are moving away from physical buttons for navigation, Samsung has opted to include three of them here. The S4 has capacitive buttons for Menu and Back, and a physical, clickable button for Home. It's wasted space. But worse, the capacitive buttons don't light up until you actually touch them, so if you forget which side is Menu and which is Back you might end up closing out of something unintentionally. Annoying!

The final touch: on top of the device is a super tiny IR blaster for controlling your TV. You'd never even notice it if you weren't looking for it, and you won't look for it.

Using It

As we noted in our original hands-on, the S4 comes packed full of "features." There's Air View, which allows you to hover your finger over the screen to see some information without actually clicking. There's Air Gestures, which allows you to wave your hand over the phone to change between tabs or photos. There's Smart Scroll, with which you tilt your device to scroll, instead of using your finger. There's Smart Pause, which will pause a video when you look away from the screen. And there's Group Play, which lets you play a handful of selected video games with friends on the same Wi-Fi network, or use several S4 phones as Sonos-like speakers.

The most important thing you need to know about these features is that you will never use any of them. Ever. Never ever. The end.

Why not? Oh, lots of reasons. Air View only works with Samsung's customized apps—not Gmail, not Chrome—and even then it doesn't work very well. Air Gestures are less accurate and less convenient than just touching the screen. Smart Scroll is totally unreliable, and Smart Pause is totally useless. The only, only justification for any of these features is that you can wave your hand over the phone to answer a call while driving, or, again, maybe if you're addicted to buffalo wings and have an aversion to moist towelettes.

Make no mistake. These "features" are nothing more than gimmicks, case studies in why different doesn't always mean better, and can often be worse.

The good news is that you can turn off and/or totally ignore most of these extraneous "features," and when you do, there's a very good phone underneath. It's generally very fast, and HD games like Temple Run: Oz, Inertia HD, and Naught all ran smoothly. The pre-installed sliding keyboard is better than most manufacturer keyboards (looking at you, HTC), with plenty of space between keys and a dedicated number row, but auto-correct has a lot of issues, and we still prefer the keyboard on stock Jelly Bean or SwiftKey 4. The unit we tested was on T-Mobile's HSPA+ 42 network (no T-Mobile LTE in NYC, yet, though this phone will work with it when it rolls out); data speeds were good, and it connected reliably.

There will be a cadre of S4 accessories available (TV adapters and such) at some point, but the only one available at launch is the S View Flip Cover. It's a good-looking cover that adds almost no thickness to your phone by completely replacing the back. The phone can sense when the cover is closed, and it will only light up one little (plastic) window on the front, which should save you a little battery power (when an AMOLED pixel is black it doesn't use any power). You can swipe to accept or dismiss calls even when the cover is closed.

All of which sounds handy, but it makes the phone more cumbersome to use. It means you have to use two hands when you first pull your phone out, and when it's folded back, there's an extra piece of plastic your camera has to shoot through. It also makes the volume rocker way harder to access. In general, not worth it. Especially for the $60 price tag.

Camera

In decent lighting, the camera is among the best shooters out there. Images are very sharp and there's a surprising amount of depth of field. Colors are rich, though they border on over-saturation, and video quality is excellent. You can check out plenty of our sample shots here.

We've also included a few comparison images below to give you a sense of how the S4's shooter performs relative to the competition:

With Flash

No Flash

Outside

The camera app's mode selection wheel, which was lifted from Samsung's own Galaxy Camera, is the most intuitive method for switching between shooting modes on any smartphone we've tested. It has photos showing you exactly what you're getting, underneath clear text, which eliminates any guesswork.

Like

Battery performance on the S4 is among the best we've seen from smartphones this year, though it's still not anywhere near as everlasting as the RAZR MAXX HD. It's important to note, though, that our testing took place on T-Mobile's HSPA+ network, and not the more power-hungry LTE of Verizon and AT&T (Update: See below for test notes with LTE). With that advantage, it slightly edged out the HTC One by an hour or so on average (which itself does pretty decently).

The S4 did, though, make it to the end of the night without additional charging fairly often, thanks to both the larger battery (2600mAh vs. 2300mAh on the One) and the more economical AMOLED screen, though the processor's higher clock speed taxed it somewhat.

Speaking of which: that screen really is leaps and bounds better than the one on last year's S III. It's very sharp, pretty, and easy to read. The camera app is laid out very nicely, and the included OCR (optical character recognition) software, which can translate written words on the fly, are both examples of app actually done right. Overall, the S4 is definitely a sizable upgrade over the S III. But it's still got its issues.

No Like

Big surprise to nobody: the software is not up to snuff. Let's ignore for a moment that all of the "innovative" banner "features" mentioned above are at best useless and at worst annoying. The rest of the UI ain't much better. For example, there's a "feature" that gives you access to a little drawer of favorite apps on the left side of your screen, called the "Multi window." Just tap the little tab, and the drawer slides up. The problem? That tab does not go away. Even when you're watching a video.

Worse, you'll accidentally click it when scrolling through your email or web pages. You can disable it entirely, but isn't there a way to have it be there and be a hinderance to your productivity? [UPDATE: Allow me to admit my wrongness. As commenters have pointed out, the Multi window can be disabled or enabled by holding down the Back button. This is not intuitive, per se, but once you know that's how it works, it's certainly easy enough to do.] Or there's the Watch ON app, which is a combination of a program guide and a universal remote. Aside from the fact that it's hard to navigate, it gets your TV's inputs all mixed up, despite the fact that I was testing it with a Samsung TV. Or it let me control my Roku player, but it forgot to include a home button, so you can't switch out of HBO Go and into another application. The phone is full of little face-palm moments like this.

But the software's worst offense? It makes the phone slow. Well, not slow, exactly, but much slower than it should be. The Galaxy S4 has a 1.9GHz Snapdragon 600 processor. The HTC One has the exact same processor, but it's only clocked to 1.7GHz. So the S4 should be faster, right? Wrong. Despite that fact that the S4 benchmarks better, the HTC One leaves the S4 in the dust in every practical way possible. The One boots up three times faster, navigates the UI quicker, scrolls smoother, opens apps speedier, and most importantly, takes photos with no shutter lag, whereas the Galaxy S4 generally takes about a second to fire off a shot.

Can you solve that by rooting your Galaxy S4? Probably. But we're reviewing the phone as it will be sold to you. And that phone has no excuse for being this laggy.

Sound on the S4 is another problem. It still has just one tiny, tin-can-sounding speaker on the bottom back of the phone. It's quiet enough that I often missed a call or text even when I was just one room away. This problem is exacerbated if you put the phone down screen up (as one usually does), especially on something soft like a couch. Here, again, the HTC One blows the S4 out of the water, with its dual, stereo, front-facing speakers which are both very clear and loud enough to give you a heart attack in the morning if you set your alarm too loud.

And while the camera on the S4 edges out the HTC One in bright daylight, the HTC One absolutely stomps the the S4 in low-light. Spot much of a difference in the photo above? The phrase "it's like night and day" has never been more apt. To be fair, you can manually flip it into Night Mode, which will have the same effect as cranking your ISO waaay up. In other words, you'll be able to see more, but it will be noisy as hell and lose a lot of detail in the fuzz, and it's just inconvenient to have to do that, anyway. In terms of design and build-quality, the One just feels like it's one or two tiers above the S4. There's simply an "Oooh!" factor that the S4 lacks, and all of Samsung's bells and whistles can't hide it.

Should I Buy It?

The S4 is a very good phone, but there are very few compelling reasons to buy it over the HTC One. Let's list them.

You Should Buy the S4 Over the HTC One IF...

• 1. You're on Verizon. Unfortunately, Verizon is the only major carrier who won't be carrying the HTC One. If you're a subscriber, you can and probably should yell at them about that. UPDATE: Actually, Verizon just announced it will be carrying the One as well.
• 2. You absolutely must have expandable storage and/or a removable battery.
• 3. You really need that extra hour of battery life.

And that's about it.

The S4 is far from a bad phone. In fact, were it not for the HTC One, it would be the best Android phone you can buy. And one can't help but think that had Samsung poured all of its innovation into maximizing the practical user experience—instead of highly ignorable gimmicks—it might have taken the crown.

UPDATE (6/3/13): We just spent the last week with Verizon's LTE version of the Galaxy S4, and we have good news. The LTE radio really doesn't seem to have impacted battery life at all. We still made it to the end of the night more often than not with medium-heavy usage.

Data speeds (tested around New York City) are nice and fast. Average download speeds were roughly 15Mbps with peaks around 22Mbps. The slowest we ever got was 9.2Mbps, which is still extremely fast. The upload side was a bit of a surprise, though. The average upload speed was 2.2Mbps. That's slower than we're used to seeing from Verizon. Still, fast enough for everyday communications, it'll just be annoying if you're uploading a ton of HD video (which you probably want to be doing over Wi-Fi anyway).

In general, we're still really enjoying using the S4 and we're still calling it our second-favorite Android phone. Whether you go with this or the HTC One, you'll be happy with your decision.

Samsung Galaxy S4 Specs

• Network: All major U.S. carriers
• OS: Android 4.2.2 with TouchWiz UI
• CPU: 1.9 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600
• Screen: 5-inch 1920x1080 Super AMOLED (441PPI)
• RAM: 2GB
• Storage: 16 or 32GB + micro SD up to 64GB
• Camera: 13MP rear / 2MP front
• Battery: 2600 mAh Li-Ion
• Dimensions: 5.38 x 2.75 x 0.31 inches
• Weight: 4.59 ounces
• Price: Starts at $200 with a two-year contract

We're finding out about the new Xbox in just a few hours. But that doesn't mean we have no idea what's coming. Here's a rundown of everything we know, or think we know, about the next Xbox.

The Specs

We are pretty sure we know what the guts of the new Xbox look like. It'll have a 64-bit, 8-core, 1.6GHz processor made by AMD with x86 architecture and 8GB of DDR3 RAM. (x86 means, broadly, that it's a lot like the chips in your home computer, which is a change for Xbox, which had until now run on PowerPC.) The GPU is an 800mhz DirectX 11.x, and will be accompanied by custom hardware to accelerate certain Xbox-specific tasks. It's also got an ethernet port, an optical disc drive (reported Blu-ray), a default 500GB SATA 2 HDD, USB 3.0 ports, and HDMI out and in ports.

For reference, the current Xbox 360 has a 500MHz GPU, a 3-core 3.6GHz processor, and 512MB of RAM. The upcoming PlayStation 4 also has an 8-core 64-bit processor and 8GB of RAM.

Price

This one's tricky. There is zero official information out there. But we do have some clues. Microsoft supernerd Paul Thurott spitballed a "$500, $300 with subscription" number that hints at the real issue with the new Xbox: subsidized pricing.

Microsoft already offers a subsidized Xbox 360 + Kinect package for $100 up front, if you sign up for two years of Xbox Live Gold at $15 per month. That comes out to $360 for just the two years, which is more than you'd pay if you're bargain hunting for cheap subscription renewals.

A two-year subscription for a next gen Xbox probably wouldn't stick in the craw as much as being locked into two years with the current system (though there's no reason to think the current subscriptions won't work on a new Xbox). But the relative surety of the subsidized pricing implies two things. One, this is probably coming in higher than the $400/$300 levels of the 360. And two, Microsoft understands that a gaming console, no matter how many features you pack in, is a tough thing to swallow as that big of an up-front cost.

Availability

This seems like a no-brainer, but a Microsoft exec strongly indicated recently that the next Xbox would be in stores in time for your holiday shopping spree. Which is good! Not many people are looking to buy a gaming console as a President's Day gift.

Name

There's a popular rumor floating that the next Xbox is going to be called Xbox Infinity, but it's not based on much more than a clever mock-up made by a Redditor. While Xbox has trademarked Xbox 8 (which is an infinity sign turned upright), there's no real indication that that will be the name, any more than Xbox 720 or just plain old Xbox.

The Controller

Largely the same! Most of what we know about the new Xbox controller comes from our friends at Kotaku, who tell us the controller is mostly the same, if a little smaller.

According to Kotaku's sources:

The controller, according to Kotaku sources, actually seems quite similar to the current Xbox 360 one. Same two analog sticks in the same upper-left/lower-right position, same positioning of the d-pad and face buttons and forward and back buttons. Triggers. Bumpers. Top-center power button. It all seems to be the same, though we can't tell if any of these buttons have been improved-if, say, the d-pad responds more crisply, if the triggers pull more deeply, and so on.

More broadly, this means that you won't see new points of interface on the new controller, like the Wii U's 5-inch LCD or the PlayStation 4's touchpad.

Kinect 2: Mandatory

OK, so the part about the controller being mostly unchanged is only partially true. Why? The Kinect will be standard with every next gen Xbox sold, making it even more of a de facto controller extension than the current iteration.

The Kinect 2 will be upgraded significantly, to not just detect broad arm movements and laborious, seizure-like movements generously described as "dancing", but finer hand gestures sent from multiple users. It's also said to implement more natural language controls (think Siri), as well as features like wake-on-speech.

Which sounds great. But in reality, it's probably more realistic to expect the new Kinect to perform the tasks the original was meant to at a now-acceptable level, and for these new features to be at about the same level as the curent Kinect (that is, passable, at times). So look for refined gesture recognition and improved speech control accuracy, chiefly.

Other less certain rumored features include eye-tracking, which can be amazing in the right environment, and features like pausing videos or games when you turn your head (which might be the most pointless feature being adopted by multiple companies right now).

"Always On"?

This has been a major sticking point. Rumors have persisted that the new Xbox will require a persistent internet connection, presumably at broadband level, in order to play games. And the people have not been amused.

The move, which we've seen with individual games like Diablo 3 and SimCity, would presumably be to enforce stricter security and anti-piracy features. It would also prevent a smaller-every-day but still significant group of people from playing and enjoying Xbox games. But we've also heard that it could only pertain to entertainment features, which would make slightly more sense, since that would require constantly pulling down information about content.

Microsoft has kowtowed to public sentiment on other future-facing issues after backlash from the slow or unreliably networked, like its original musings about ditching the optical drive this generation in favor of downloaded games. So it could go either way.

Update: An internal Microsoft memo obtained by Ars Technica indicates that you'll be able to play Xbox games offline after all. Phew! Hopefully.

Xbox TV

One of the underplayed details is that the new console will reportedly have an HDMI in port. What does that mean? The Xbox is in all likelihood going to be used to control literally everything your TV does.

How would that work? The HDMI-out from your cable box would route through your Xbox, which would then apply its own interface on top of it. Theoretically, that would let Microsoft integrate all sorts of features into that. It's likely where the reports of the Kinect controlling your cable box came from.

Don't sleep on this as a major feature of the new Xbox. It could include capabilities ranging from deep content recognition to DVR to (hypothetically) picture-in-picture TV shows in games. This is especially interesting given the reported capability to "hot switch" between two games, effectively running both at once. The WSJ recently reported that Microsoft had definitely at least explored these options—though how many show up tomorrow is anyone's guess outside of Redmond.

And don't forget, Microsoft is also reported to have a cheaper, set-top-box-only version of these features coming later this year, too.

Original Content?

Back in September, Microsoft hired a CBS executive to head up production of "original video content" for the Xbox. We still don't really know what that means. (The UK Xbox is already getting into the business of distributing movies, for instance.) It could be that, like Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu, Xbox Live Gold and the Microsoft Video Store is going to get its own original series. Which would be sort of insane. But don't rule it out.

Windows Integration

This is based on speculation, but hear us out anyway. The new Xbox will probably integrate tightly into Windows 8, and the broader Windows Universe that Microsoft is building. It will do this as a gaming system, but also as a set top box.

The first thing to note is that this is actually possible this generation. The new Xbox has moved to an AMD x86 chip, meaning it's using the same type of chip that Windows PCs have. Rumors have the new Xbox running Windows 8, but even if it's not quite running the same operating system, the change of platforms should make developing games, especially for indie developers, a lot easier.

Consider: Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) is hugely successful. It's a wonderful place to find and enjoy indie content. And that's exactly the sort of thing that Microsoft would love to get into its Windows Store, which is doing fine, more or less, but still hasn't reached the level Microsoft would like.

Further, tighter integration of apps like Xbox Music, Internet Explorer, and other Windows 8 features, would make sense for the central location of Windows 8 in your home. Of course, that doesn't mean you'd just fire up the Xbox and see the Windows 8 start screen. The Dashboard has been revamped a few times, but it's already in tune with the Windows 8 aesthetic (and, really, was the incubator for it), so figure that'll go along mostly untouched.

Goodbye, Used Games?

The biggest bummer to come out of the rumor mill is that the new Xbox might ditch the ability to play, and therefore buy and sell and trade, used games. It's unclear whether that will happen, but we do know that games will have to be installed to be played, though that will take place in the background over the course of play, instead of up front before you can even get into the game.

Xbox Tablet?

Microsoft is also rumored to have a 7-inch Xbox tablet coming this year, running on an ARM processor (possible Intel SoC in the future). Originally reported by the Verge, the tablet is supposed to be running a "custom Windows kernel" instead of Windows RT, which would make sense if it's to retain ties to older XBLA titles.

For a more hardcore gamer perspective on the new Xbox, check out Kotaku's rundown on what to expect.

With clear skies and rising temperatures around the country, the summer travel season is nearly upon us. And unless you've got money to burn or a first-born to offer, now's the time to book your travel plans. Here's how to get away without breaking the bank.

Timing Is Everything

Airline ticket pricing is a fickle mistress. While prices overall have steadily risen over the last two years—and showing no signs of stopping any time soon—the cost of an individual ticket depends on a myriad of factors, the largest of which being when you buy it and when you want to leave.

By and large, prices are lowest when book your flight at least 21 days in advance and rapidly increase as the departure date draws near. Seat pricing often fluctuates depending on the departing day, with weekend flights costing more than mid-week ones. If you can be flexible on what days you fly, say on a Tuesday rather than a Friday, many additional seating options will be available for less. Obviously, there are exceptions to that pattern: booking for major travel days like the night before Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Superbowl Weekend are going to be uber-pricey no matter what, and flying during the North American travel season (June to August) will see many of the less expensive seats purchased months in advance.

Sometimes it also pays to be patient. Airlines will often post "weekend deals" for flights and routes they're trying to fill. Prices for these seats likely won't be as 21-day advance purchases but if you're travelling last-minute, they'll get your butt in a seat for less than what you'd pay at the ticket counter.

Get a Price Check

Used to be, if you didn't buy your tickets directly from the airlines, you'd have to go through a intermediary, a travel agent. These people would put together vacation packages for travelers, including flights, car rentals, and hotel accommodations. The rise of the Internet, of course, put a stop to all that silliness. Now, a plethora of travel sites (including the airlines themselves) perform the same function, you've just got to know how to use them effectively.

Every major American carrier will gladly sell you a seat directly from its website. United, Delta, Virgin, American, Southwest, Jet Blue, and Alaska all do, as well as a number of smaller, regional carriers. If you tend to fly primarily on one carrier than the others, sign up for the company's newsletter or mobile app—which often contain deep discount offers—and follow them on Twitter—Virgin and JetBlue both regularly drop great deals through the social media service. If you can afford the debt, sign up for an airline-branded credit card that delivers miles or other flight perks.

If you're airline agnostic and want to compare the fares for a given time and trip across multiple airlines, there's no need to check each website individually. Instead, use a cost comparison site like Fare Compare, KAYAK, or Skyscanner. These services not only list the flights available for your specific departure time—sourced from both the airlines themselves and other booking sites like Hotwire and Priceline—it also allows you to see all the flights for that date from up to three other travel sites. So say you're flying SFO to JFK, leaving May 23 at 6pm. The service will show both the flights available for 6pm, but also all JFK-bound flights out of SFO for the 23rd. You might find something cheaper if you fly two hours earlier. Hipmunk might be your best option of all; it sorts by price just as effectively as other providers, but also by how much of a pain in the ass your connections will be.

You Want Lodging with That?

Chances are, you're probably going to need transportation and accommodations once you get to wherever you're going so you might as well bundle those in with the price of the flight and save a few bucks, right? Sites like Orbitz, Expedia, and Priceline all provide this service and operate much like the flight comparison sites above. Each service has different limits to the discounts it can provide for any given package, so you'll do well to give all three a quick look before pulling out your credit card.

For the more adventurous traveler, apps like HotelTonight (iOS) and AirBnB (iOS, Android) offer great rates on last-minute hotel/apartment/couch deals.

Who Says You Have to Pay Cash?

There's no reason to fork over your hard earned cash when you've got hard-earned miles that can cover the cost but you'll have to book early. Airlines only designate a couple of seats per flight to reward passengers (those paying with miles). Only about 10 percent of a carrier's total number of seats are reserved for rewards and those go quickly—even on otherwise empty flights. You can thank the airlines' yield management software, which determines the price of a particular route or flight, for these blackout dates.

Mile Rewards are also governed according to their status as either Saver or Standard. Saver rewards are usually capacity-controlled but require half as many miles as Standard rewards, which are available regarless of how full the flight. In general, you should expect to pay somewhere in this ballpark when using saver miles, though for off-peak travel, these figures may be as much as 5,000 miles less:

• 120k - Free round-trip first-class ticket US to Asia
• 100k - Free round-trip first-class ticket US to EU
• 60k - Round-trip one-class upgrade US to Asia
• 50k - Free round-trip coach ticket US to Asia
• 50k - Round-trip one-class upgrade US to EU
• 50k - Free round-trip coach ticket US to EU
• 45k - Free round-trip first-class ticket in the continental US
• 30k - Round-trip one-class upgrade in the continental US
• 25k - Free round-trip coach ticket in the continental US

Well, what are you waiting for? Book your flight and go see the world—or at least visit your parents. Hey, it's still better than the In-Laws.

[Smarter Travel - Budget Travel - Independent Traveler - Cheap Flights - Wild Junket - Mashable - Image: doomu / Shutterstock, tratong / Shutterstock, FuzzBones / Shutterstock, michaeljung / Shutterstock]

There's something on the internet that you desperately want to keep everyone from seeing. Something you're deeply embarrassed of. That would show all your friends how you're not actually as smart and fashionable and ironically self-aware as you pretend to be. And you really ought to get over it.

We all have stuff like this. Maybe it's a gross Facebook album from college. Or a Xanga or Livejournal or Blogger account, or a dance you did, or an a cappella YouTube video. Or, god forbid, your dating profile. (Thanks again for that, Sam. Dick.)

So what's the underlying holdup we have about this stuff? On one hand, yes, yours are the same skeletons everyone else has tried to scrub from the web. But just the same, they leave you feeling impossibly exposed—especially ones where you really tapped into your feelings, like those old personal blog entries. And it's all kind of earnest for the way the internet works now, where you're required to maintain a constant ironic detachment. Which is true. But at some point, all that earnesty really betrays is that you're a human being with human feelings.

Still, it's a tough sell. I asked Gawker's advice maven and wonderful person Caity Weaver what she thought (while she was starving and all crazy, she asked us to specify), and she said, "Oh my God that is like my greatest nightmare. People are vicious animals." But isn't everyone an awkward mess, and doesn't it just end up being endearing? "I meeeaannnn, I would not want that to happen to me, even with your sweet logic. I guess it depends how embarrassing. If your life was just boring, then enjoy your boring life, no one cares."

Point taken. But how boring is anyone's life, really? No one you know who's spent any amount of time on the internet—or really, any amount of time being a human being, because humanity is inherently sad and creepy and idiotic—is without humiliating memories. And the thing is, the entire internet, basically, has declared embarrassment bankruptcy. There's just too much stupid now, ours and the world's, to really shame you the way you feel you deserve.

That's relegated what at one time might have been life-scarring bungles into pieces of digital ephemera. Or actually, diluted the idea of embarrassment to the point that your polemic about how all these haters need to back the hell off of Travis Barker is basically the internet equivalent of those pictures your mom has of you when she used to dress you up like a baby duck whenever she took you to the mall, or that Homecoming lip sync video she refuses to let die. You bristle when they're brought up, but ultimately, they're usually more fun than they are mortifying unless you're a huge closet racist.

Obviously, this doesn't include things that can actually cause material damage to you, your loved ones, or your career. Yes, you should probably do everything in your power to scrub the photo of you peeing in the break room coffee machine off of the net. And that Ashley Madison account is probably asking for trouble. And if you're committing crimes, it probably doesn't matter if you're found out online or off.

But that horrid Facebook picture your jerk friend Ashley keeps re-tagging you in where you have nine chins and the pallid complexion of a Se7en victim? Who cares. How do you possibly expect that to compete for your friends' internet mindspace when you're competing with assholes dunking their heads in buckets of urine and futuristic dong thongs?

So you can go on imagining your past being held up to the internet's magnifying glass as a total nightmare. But unless you were doing something especially anatomical with that Labradoodle, no one's going to be half as embarrassed for you as you are of yourself. So embrace it. Own it. No one likes the girl who's too cool to make funny faces in pictures.

Our days of sales-taxless, free-love internet revelry may be numbered. Thursday afternoon, the Senate voted to open the floor to a bill that could end tax-free online shopping once and for all.

And strangely enough, everyone's favorite online tax-free haven is leading the charge. Et tu, Amazon? Also... why?

The new legislation would require all internet retailers to charge the sales tax rate of the item's destination, overruling the 1992 Supreme Court decision in Quill v. North Dakota that made online shopping an easily tax-free zone. According to David French, senior vice president for government affairs at the National Retail Federation:

The industry is evolving very rapidly, and the law today is a 20th-century interpretation of an 18th-century document that is holding back the entire retail industry as it adapts to 21st-century consumer preferences and demand.

In other words, states are tired of missing out on the estimated $22 billion a year that taxed online sales could produce. And Amazon's doing everything it can to help them get it back.

How did this happen?

According to the Quill ruling, retailers without an actual physical presence (stores, warehouses, computer servers, what have you) in a state aren't required to force customers to throw down sales tax on their purchases. While a lot of business that allow mail and online orders do, in fact, have brick-and-mortar locations in plenty of states—think Best Buy, Target, Walmart—it's this ruling that spurred Amazon and others like it to build as few of their warehouses around the country as possible. With this handy little loophole, massive online retailers get to offer lower prices, lure in more customers, and put another nail in Mom and Pop's respective coffins, all in one fell swoop.

But the bipartisan, 10-senator-backed bill thinks the playing field's become uneven, and they're ready to level it out. Rep. John Conyers (D) of Michigan said at Wednesday's hearing:

Today, while local small business retailers follow the law and collect sales taxes from customers who make purchases in their stores, many big business online and catalogue retailers do not collect the same taxes. This puts local neighborhood-based small businesses at a disadvantage to big, out-of-state, online companies. And because these out-of-state companies are able to cut corners and play by a different set of rules, cities and states lose out on funding for K-12 education, police and fire protection, access to affordable health care and funding for roads and bridges.

Of course, just because the retailers aren't required to collect the tax themselves doesn't mean that it's technically not still there. For every online and otherwise non-sales-taxed purchase you make, the government is putting you on your honor to add up the missing taxes and pony up of your own volition. But shocking as it may be, the vast majority of people steal from our poor, helpless government every year by filling that line in with a miserly little zero.

But isn't Amazon screwing itself over by supporting the legislation?

Why no, no it's not! Sure, the tax-free party it's been enjoying for the past 21 years was a great business strategy for a while, but times are changin'. Most people these days are united by at least two factors: an irrational demand for instant gratification and a desire to have as little face-to-face interaction with other people as is humanly possible.

So to keep up with our whiny, minsanthropic ways, Amazon has installed same-day, one-click delivery in 10 cities across the country. Same-day delivery means huge, fully stocked warehouses. Warehouses mean obeying state tax laws. And the heavy populations in the places getting the service will almost always mean a state sales tax.

So with these additions, Amazon's days of skirting tax law are coming to a close. Rather than find another way to sneak around the sales tax rules, its lawyers and lobbyists have opted to make damn well sure that everyone else is going down with them. Or as they chose to frame it, create "an even-handed federal framework for state sales tax collection."

So why does this matter?

Everyone hates paying extra taxes. Remember the Boston Tea Party? And with the rate we as a nation have been growing increasingly dependent on online shopping, those extra dollars spent are going to add up quick. Long story short: it's going to make your life a whole lot more expensive.

It's not just going to hurt your wallet. The diversity of the marketplace could get slashed as well. As individual sellers with retail aggregators like eBay and Etsy decide the tax hike isn't worth the time it takes to carefully craft their cat hair necklaces, they'll start taking down their online stores. And YOU'LL never get to know the joys of wearing metal balls of cat sheddings around your throat.

The situation's not totally dire. As we very well know, getting a law passed can be a complicated process, even when it's pretty widely supported. Conservatives, in particular, are not fans of increasing pressure on businesses just so our states can turn into socialist hand-out free-for-alls. A lot of voters aren't too keen on an effective tax hike, either (gasp!), which means that the bill might not make it past the House of Representatives pending Senate approval on May 6.

Still, even if the House does kill this particular piece of legislation this time around, you can bet Amazon won't go down without a fight. It seems almost certain that sales tax will invade the internet someday. Let's just hope Super Saver Shipping isn't next. [Wall Street Journal 1, 2, 3, Real Clear Politics, SupremeCourt.gov]

Have you tried to put together a Transformer lately? Without an instruction booklet, you stand a better chance of dismantling a nuclear warhead than making Optimus look like Prime, instead of a 16-wheeler with a robot head for a butt. That wasn't always the case.

In our visit to Transformers HQ in Providence, RI, we asked Senior Design Director Josh Lamb about, well, what the deal is. He nodded in agreement, acknowledging that generation by generation, the toys have become gradually harder to assemble. But when asked what the tipping point was or is, what Transformer was the single most challenging to make, and the most complicated for users, the answers were the same: the movie tie-ins.

"The reference style is so phenomenal in the movie tie-ins, we got more complicated than we had to," Lamb says. "Right now, there's a big effort to get back to simple; and more than simple, intuitive."

What was the issue, exactly? "Bay and ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) work it pretty well," Lamb says, "But they also do some magic." In the movie, a car's parts could fold into infinitely small sections. Tiny pieces of interlocking plastic? Not so much.

Take Bumblebee. In the movie, he's a 1977 Chevy Camaro, which is a license deal agreed with Chevrolet. Meaning Hasbro not only had to deal with the normal mechanics of turning a car into a robot, and do it in a way that resembled the on-screen transformation, but it had to make sure the car was as detail-specific as possible to the original ‘77 Camaro. Not easy.

Not only that, but the team had to match that replica car to the movie's version of the robots, and find some approximation of the transformation you see in the film, which isn't always possible. "If the bumper isn't on his chest," Lamb says, "and his doors aren't back here [motioning to his shoulder blades], it isn't Bumblebee."

They figured it out. "We were definitely proud of them when it was all said and done," says Lamb. "The movie models were the most accurate and realistic we'd ever produced." In the end, the movie toys used more points of articulation and movable parts than any generation before. But they were also supremely hard to assemble. "You get back to G1 [the well loved first generation of American Transformers] Optimus Prime, and you can transform it with your eyes closed one you figured it out."

So what brought everyone back to the idea of more intuitive design? Ironically enough, the movie.

"With the movie, for the first time, Transformers wasn't about a whole line of characters, it was about two characters, Optimus and Bumblebee," Lamb says of the need for kid-friendly Transformers. "And you'd really like the billions of kids out there to be able to pick up any Transformer off the shelf and just pick it up and start playing with them." Which, hopefully, spells the end of toys abandoned in a state of Butt-Head-Optimus variant.

Photography by Ryan Yzquierdo, Courtesy of Seibertron.com

More from our visit to Transformers HQ:

Autobots Assembled: How Transformers Come to Life
Where the Toys Come From: Inside Hasbro's Model Workshop
Here's a Skinless, Laughing Elmo to Terrify You Forever

Editor's note: This is the last in a series of introductory pieces on mechanical watches from our friends at Hodinkee. You can read the rest here.

Against all odds, it seems the wristwatch has found a place all its own in the 21st century. In fact, watches are experiencing a surge in popularity. Not only are heavy hitters buying investment grade pieces, but a younger generation is also discovering the beauty of mechanical watches for the first time. So with new digital gadgets and wearables constantly flowing into the market, what is keeping the wristwatch relevant?

Modern watches have done more than grow in size over the past 50 years (for better or worse): they have also pushed the boundaries of how we read and interact with time. Progressive watchmakers such as Urwerk, Christophe Claret and MB&F have shed conventional wisdom in order to re-interpret what a mechanical watch can be from the ground up. This means using cutting edge production techniques, creating decidedly modern designs, and telling compelling stories to elevate their vision far beyond a circle with three hands.

The UR110 from Urwerk, for instance, ditches the hour hand for 3 orbital satellites that track minutes along a vertical arc. Having a hard time visualizing that? Check out this video. The Opus 11 from Harry Winston is quite literally made up of small pieces that flourish to display the time, which you can see in action right here.

One commonality between many of these horological outliers is a man named Max Busser (the MB of MB&F). It is his vivid imagination that has brought us the brilliant Horological Machines and Legacy Machine One, and his knack for bringing people together that brought us Harry Winston's Opus series. Not only has he helped bring the wristwatch squarely into the 21st century, but in doing so has caught the attention of a generation increasingly detached from the analog and mechanical world.

Sure these examples live well outside of the average budget, but they are nonetheless important in that they hold public interest and build excitement around the craft of watchmaking in general. So instead of cashing in your 401(k) to buy an HM3, maybe you'll settle for something like a d.m.h. that captures the spirit without the price tag.

Either way, looking at your wrist for the time will be a far greater treat than pulling a phone out of your pocket. The people around you just might appreciate it that much more as well.

Most of your exposure to silk probably comes in the form of uncomfortably sensual linens or cobwebs in a dusty old closet. In reality, though, silk is an incredible and overlooked material. While it may have roots in the ancient past, it could also form the building blocks of the future.

Spinning a Good Yarn

You probably know that insects like spiders and silkworms, among others, produce silk, but you might not know exactly how. Composed primarily of a protein called fibroin and bound together by a sticky protein called sericin, silk is produced on-demand: the creature in question has a gland which secretes the two proteins, initially in liquid form, which in turn combine to form the fine strands that you can see in cobwebs.

Crucially, the silk keeps coming as the strand is drawn away from the body. A spider uses its body weight to extrude the stuff (strictly pulltrusion, yes, pedants); it can be drawn by human hand from silkworms.

Regardless of the method, the result is a long, fine fiber, which can be crafted into webs or cocoons. Either one just happens to have amazing mechanical properties. A strand of spider silk has a tensile strength of around 1.3GPa, which is comparable to that of high-grade alloy steel. It's also extremely ductile, which means it can stretch to up to five times its original length without breaking. Those two qualities combine to give it an insanely high toughness, too, which is a measure of how much energy is required to break something. In fact, it's at least four times tougher than either steel or kevlar.

It's the structure of silk that grants it such amazing properties: strong hydrogen bonds within tiny crystals of its structures provide strength; weaker bonds in the protein chains lead to ductility. The real kicker, though? It is super light; with a density of 1.31 g/cm³, it's six times lighter than steel. Add to that the fact that it's also biodegradable, and you have somewhat of a supermaterial on your hands.

Cleaning Up Its Act

As impressive as those properties are, they're associated with long, thin fibers, that are mostly good for weaving into questionably sexy bedding. There's certainly demand for silk—worms are cultivated and harvested for their wares to feed the trade—but truth is, it's not really being used in a way that truly lets it shine. There are, however, some researchers—chief amongst them Fiorenzo Omenetto from Tufts University and Fritz Vollrath at the University of Oxford—who have been thinking way, way outside the boxers.

In fact, they've developed techniques to transform silk from the humble wisps which end up in your tie into something quite amazing. By washing, treating, and remoulding the silk taken from silkworms, scientists can mold it into all manner of complex shapes, and even tweak its material properties to make it more hardwearing, for instance, or even more readily biodegradable. Perhaps understandably, they're a little secretive about what's actually involved in that process, but what is clear is that, once the silk is purified, they can use a combination of natural glues and resins to turns those fibrous clumps into something far more versatile. The result looks a little like plastic, but retains those insane properties that silk can offer—and that really shows when it comes to the host of possible applications on offer. The height of silk's utility in the past might have been the kimono, but in its new guise the possibilities seem limitless.

Strong and Supportive

Silk is clearly well-suited to situations that demand materials with high strength and light weight, sure, but it might come as a surprise that it's enough of both of those things to be used in the next generation of body armor. Researchers have already developed a material which uses a thin sheet of silk as its base, onto which genetically engineered skin cells can be grown. The resulting material is relatively thin and light, completely flexible, and can stop a .22 calibre long rifle bullet traveling at 360mph. That's impressive, and means that soliders could someday not even have to wear extra body armor. Their clothing would be tough enough by itself.

If a bullet did sneak its way through? Silk has that covered, as well. A team of Oxford researchers has set up a company called Orthox that specializes in casting silk into shapes suitable for use in replacement joints. The units provide ultra-tough, long-lasting joint replacements, which is great—but they're also highly biocompaitble, which means they encourage regrowth of replacement tissue, and over time becoming a living part of the body. They can even be doped with drugs to make the transition as smooth as possible. Another, company, Neurotex, uses fine filaments of silk to bridge gaps in damaged nerves. Their experiments show that severed nerves grow along biocompatible silk filaments like plants along a trellis—and they can even make new, functioning connections which carry the electronic signals sent to and from the brain.

Soft and Sticky

That's not silk's only electrifying capability, either. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for instance, have been using silk to develop a new breed of meltable electronics. Designed specifically to become one with living tissue, the researchers have been using silk films as an amazingly flexible base for electronics because, unlike silicon wafers, they can bend and twist without breaking. The long-term goal is to deliver ultra-thin electronics directly onto the surface of the brain—where the silk will be dissolved and broken down by the surrounding tissue. Hopefully what's left behind is an embedded electronic system, which can be used to monitor and treat conditions like epilepsy.

And there are other exciting possibilities still to explore. The fact that silk can become sticky via a little electricity, for instance; turn on an appropriate electric field nearby, and you can tweak the properties of the polymers that make up the silk so they suddenly switch between being sticky and firm. It's not clear exactly how that can be reliably exploited yet, but it's an exciting and unheard of material property just begging for an application. There's even the hope that, if silk can be mass-produced in large enough quantities, it could be used anywhere that srength and low weight are required. That means everything from car panels to bike tires.

Look Out, It's a Spider Goat!

But with all these opportunities open, you have to wonder how on earth those poor silkworms and spiders will keep up with demand. Fortunately for them, the reality is they might not have to—thanks to a farm full of goats, and the clever genetic engineering of a Utah State researcher named Randy Lewis.

When Randy milks his goats, he doesn't get something you'd like to make cheese out of. Instead, he gets a white liquid that actually contains the same proteins as spiders use to cast their silken webs. He's engineered these goats specially to make silk; all he needs to do is treat the proteins—clean them, dry them, and add a few solvents—and he has a silk nearly almost identical to that created by spiders. Dubbed BioSteel, the farm is now home to 30 goats that create the stuff, and it's hoped that over time they'll be able to create enough silk to meet up with demand (and to save a few silkworms some discomfort0.

So, there looks set to be no shortage of the wonder material, nor applications for it. The future isn't made of silk just yet—but it soon could be.

Image by Eric Kilby under Creative Commons license

Jon Kessler is an artist known for his kinetic sculptures formed out of ragged machinery and surveillance cameras. His latest installation, The Web, at the Swiss Institute in New York, is a sensory rabbit-hole into to our hyper-connected world.

Walking into Kessler's installation is like entering a kid's fort made out of circuit boards, TV monitors, and torn sheets. Everywhere you look something is in motion, and it isn't long before you realize that these aren't just disparate moving parts. Everything is connected. The tiny surveillance camera that seems to look at nothing is actually producing meticulously composed images that may appear on a monitor 50 feet away. As you walk through you are constantly noticing things in one corner affecting things in another corner. It's as if a Rube Goldberg machine was put through a blender with a bunch of tiny cameras and glued together.

In a bid for interactivity (a buzzword that many artists seek to exploit), Kessler has built an iPhone app that visitors can download as part of the installation. The app lets you take pictures that will appear on various monitors throughout the space. It's a bit of a gimmick, but does serve its purpose in turning an audience peering through their phones into part of the spectacle.

The Web joins the long line of artistic ventures looking to critique our unrelenting smartphone-obsessed culture. The typical signs and metaphors are all there—the appropriated advertising imagery, the surveillance cams, even a mechanized automaton dummy stroking an ipad. We are slaves to our devices. We know. But no matter how much Kessler's installation basks in the conventions of cultural critique so ingrained in the art world, the real delight is in the visual and physical cacophony he so artfully constructs.

So you got caught with your pants down on the Internet (figuratively, folks) and contracted a virus. That sucks. Or maybe you were wearing protection but still fell victim to some nasty bit of code that managed to slip by your antivirus software undetected. That sucks even more. Either way, it's nothing to feel ashamed about. The web is a dangerous place and even the most tech savvy users sometimes slip up. You can even get a virus through no fault of your own simply by visiting a reputable website that, unbeknownst to you, has been compromised by a hacker with malicious intent. The web is a war zone, and even if you're not a target, you can still end up a casualty.

That's not to say you can't stack the odds decidedly in your favor, because you can. And you should. To help you do that, we've put together a comprehensive guide on how to protect your PC from malware. We cover everything from smart (and not so smart) computing habits, the best free antivirus programs, and what tools work best for removing an infection when all else fails. Don your hazmat suits and let's get started!

Computer viruses can happen to the best of us, and chances are you're going to confront one at least once in your life online. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to fend them off as best you can. Maximum PC's Paul Lilly shows us to build the best possible defense for free and what to do if those walls ever come tumbling down.

Virus 101

If you're reading this, it's safe to assume you already know what a computer virus is, and certainly the majority of Maximum PC readers are well informed. So, we won't spend a ton of text dissecting the different kinds of viruses, but we do want to quickly cover the basics. Strictly speaking, a virus is a program that can replicate itself and is designed to spread from one computer to another, doing things the end-user doesn't want and/or doesn't know about.

A broader term is malware, short for malicious software, and there are many different forms, including viruses, Trojan horses, keyloggers, worms, adware, and spyware, to name a few. These days, malware is most often spread through web browsers. According to Kaspersky, there were nearly 1.6 billion browser-based attacks in 2012, up from 946 million a year prior.

A common misconception is that only Windows users need to concern themselves with malware, but that isn't true. Malware writers have traditionally focused their efforts on Windows, but have started targeting other platforms as they become more popular, including mobile. Even Mac users have to be on the lookout.

"In early 2012, the Flashfake botnet was discovered, consisting of 700,000 computers all running under Mac OS X," Kaspersky states in its most recent security bulletin.

The bottom line is, if you use the Internet, you're a target.

Safe Computing Is a Start

Your best line of defense is still you, the end-user. The less risks you take, the lower your chance of becoming just another statistic, and it all starts with developing smart computing habits. Here are five easy ways you can remove yourself from the line of fire:

• Never open unexpected email attachments, even if you know the recipient. If a PC belonging to someone else is infected, it could be auto-generating malicious emails with dirty attachments or booby-trapped URLs.
• It's easy to spoof URLs within emails. Instead of clicking on email links, type the URL directly into your browser, especially if you receive a notice that appears to come from your banking institution or PayPal. This exponentially decreases your risk of falling for a phishing scam. You know what they say about a fool and his money...
• Stay diligent with updating and patching your software. These updates often patch security holes that malware writers can otherwise exploit. If a program has the option of automatically checking for updates, enable it. We also recommend running Secunia's Personal Software Inspector (PSI) on occasion, which is a free security tool that scans for and identifies vulnerabilities in many third-party programs.
• Avoid visiting shadier sides of the web. We're in no way trying to play the part of moral police, but sites that serve up illegal downloads or triple-X rated content are popular places to set digital landmines.
• Use Alt-F4 to close suspicious pop-up ads instead of clicking on the X button. Why? Sometimes the X button is really a part of the ad, and clicking it could redirect you to a malicious website.

A Word About Passwords

As much as you might love your significant other, using his or her name as your password is a really dumb idea. It's far too easy to guess, just like "123456," "iloveyou," "letmein," and others found on SplashData's list of worst passwords.

A good password will be at least eight characters long and will use a mix of letters, numbers, symbols, and capitalization. For example, "Ey3LMpC!" which stands for "I love Maximum PC" is relatively easy to remember and much more secure than a word or phrase that can be broken with a brute force dictionary attack.

You also should be using multiple passwords for different websites so that if one account is compromised, your others are still safe. The downside to this approach is that it can be difficult to remember multiple passwords, especially strong ones. An alternative to remembering them all is to use a password manager like LastPass or KeePass, both of which are free. RoboForm is another option, and though it isn't free, it also fills in forms and allows you to access RoboForm Logins and Identities on all your devices, including mobile. The same is true of 1Password, though it doesn't fill in forms.

Second Line of Defense: Antivirus Software

Whenever the topic of security software comes up, inevitably someone chimes in that it's completely unnecessary so long as you surf the web safely. They'll then provide anecdotal evidence based on their own personal experience, and while it's true you can get by without AV protection, it's a constant roll of the dice. And for what? To save a few CPU cycles? It's simply not worth the risk, and certainly not the cost when there are free options out there. Let's focus on those first.

Avast Free Edition

Every year we run a roundup of security software and you can read the latest one in the April issue of Maximum PC magazine. In it we tested three free antivirus programs — Avast, Microsoft Security Essentials, and AVG — and out of those three, we found Avast to be the best free antivirus software.

We like Avast because it scans for viruses and spyware, and has a built-in remote support tool that allows you to dish out (or receive) assistance to other trusted Avast users, which is extremely handy if you're the IT guy for family and friends. It also offers tons of fine grain control.

One of our few complaints is that Avast doesn't guard against Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs) by default. To change that, click on Security > File System Shield > Settings > Sensitivity and check the box underneath "PUP and suspicious files."

We also recommend doing a full system scan at least once a month. If you keep your PC on 24/7, it's not a bad idea to schedule nightly scans when you're asleep. This ensures that any potential threats are caught before they have much chance to do any harm, provided they get past Avast's real-time scan engine to begin with.

Second Opinions

No virus scanner is capable of catching and neutralizing every single threat; it's simply not possible due to the sheer number of new malware that is created on a daily basis. For this reason, it's in your best interest to solicit a second and/or third opinion on occasion using a dedicated spyware scanner. How often depends on how risky your online behavior. If all you're doing is surfing Maximum PC, sports sites, and updating your Facebook feed, quarterly scans should be sufficient.

One of the best programs out there is Malwarebytes. It's free (there's also a paid version) and it does an excellent job of detecting deeply embedded threats that other scanners miss. Malwarebytes is also great at cleaning up remnants left behind after you've eradicated a virus, such as lingering registry entries.

Another popular program is SuperAntiSpyware, which is also available in free and paid flavors. Scanning with both Malwarebyes and SuperAntiSpyware on occasion is a potent one-two combo to supplement your daily AV program.

Internet Security Suites

If you're willing to pay for security software, an Internet security suite offers more robust protection than what's available in any single free program. One of the best available is Norton Internet Security. Put your pitchforks away, if you haven't taken Norton for a test drive in several years, then you have no idea what you're missing. It's not the same bloated program that it was prior to 2009. That's when Symantec re-wrote the software from the ground up with an emphasis on performance. These days it offers top-notch protection with little impact on system performance

Stick Your Head in the Cloud

A substitute for installing security software is to tap into the cloud. There are several cloud scanners at your disposal, but only a select few will go the extra mile and actually disinfect your machine if it finds something wrong, while others try to upsell you. Panda Security's Panda Active Scan detects and removes, though it only works with Internet Explorer. There's also an option to install a small front-end, but even if you go that route, it's still a cloud-based scanner that won't suck up your system resources.

Another handy bookmark is VirusTotal, a free, on-demand online scanner with a twist. Let's say you downloaded a file or email attachment, but are suspicious of its contents. Before you open it up, just upload it to VirusTotal and it will be put under the microscope of dozens of scan engines. It's the ultimate second opinion for single files and URLs, albeit the maximum file size is 32MB.

Hide Behind a Virtual Machine

Have kids that share your PC? You're a brave soul. Kids have a tendency to click on pop-up requests willy-nilly, but there are steps you can take to mitigate any potential headaches. Here they are:

• Teach them smart computing habits. It's never too early to learn, and since their brains are like little sponges, they may surprise you with how much they retain.
• Set up a different user account. It won't save your PC from nasty infections, but hey, do you really want to login and find that your Windows theme has been changed over to Spongebob or Dora the Explorer? We didn't think so.
• Install Sandboxie, a free application that runs selected programs in an isolated environment. You can configure Sandboxie to run any time a browser is opened, so when your kids inevitably download something they shouldn't have, the changes aren't permanent. This is also a wonderful tool for installing on PCs belonging to friends and family. It works with any browser, too.

If you're particularly reckless on the web, a full-blown virtual machine is the next best thing to a dedicated web box. A virtual machine isn't completely fool proof, but it's close to it. Microsoft's Virtual PC works relatively well, especially if you're mostly interested in surfing the web, and so is VMWare's Player. Another thing VMs are good for is installing suspicious programs and beta software. If something turns out to be malicious, the damage is contained away from your OS.

I'm Already Infected, Now What!?

Despite your best efforts, sometimes the bad guys win. If that happens, or if a family member drops off a badly infected PC, follow these steps to clean it up.

Scan, Scan, and Scan Again

First, try installing a free antivirus program. If it works, great, proceed to scan the system, and then follow that up with Malwarebytes and SuperAntiSpyware sweeps. This three-pronged approach should rid the system of most, if not all malware, unless it's a particularly nasty infection. If it doesn't, don't worry, we're not ready to throw in the towel.

Before we proceed, are you even able to install security programs? Some malware detects when security software is being installed and stops it dead in its tracks. If that's happening to you, try to disable the offending program. Hit CTRL+ALT+DEL to start the Task Manager and look for any suspicious entries in the Processes tab. Anything that's gibberish — for example, "mgbelwisfl" — is probably up to no good. Highlight the entry and press End Process. Are you now able to install AV scanners?

If not, you'll need to boot into Safe Mode, which only loads the bare minimum drivers required to run Windows. To do that, hit the F8 key during boot (press it repeatedly during during bootup if you have trouble with the timing). When prompted, select Safe Mode with Networking. Now try installing/running your security software.

HiJackThis

If your system's still displaying malware symptoms (slowed performance, random pop-ups, etc), you may need to dig deeper. HiJackThis is a free utility that generates an in-depth report of registry and file settings, but be warned it doesn't discern between good and harmful settings. If you don't know what the settings are, solicit outside help by posting a HiJackThis log to a computer forum like one here at Maximum PC. Alternately, you can post the contents of the log on HiJackThis.de Security and/or I Am Not a Geek for quick and basic parsing, though you should still seek outside help before nuking an entry you're unfamiliar with.

Running HiJackThis is simple. Just click the "Scan" button and wait for it to finish scanning your system (it only takes a few seconds). When it's finished, click on "Save Log" to save the contents to a Notepad file, which you can then copy/paste into any of the sites mentioned above.

Assuming you recognize an obvious malicious entry, check the appropriate box(es) and click "Fix checked."

Comodo Cleaning Essentials

At this point, we're starting to run out of options, but all is not yet lost. Comodo Cleaning Essentials (CCE) is a tool that any geek should be toting around in his/her tool chest. It doesn't require any installation, meaning you can run it direct from a USB key, which is perfect for making house calls.

CCE digs deep for a variety of infections, including rootkits, making it an indispensable tool. It even scans the Master Boot Record (MBR), so to say it's thorough is an understatement.

Inside the CCE directory, you'll also find an entry called KillSwitch.exe. It's a much better version of the built-in Task Manager because it provides a bunch of additional information, and will even tell you if a program that's running is safe or known to be malicious. If you can't get into the Task Manager to kill an offending program, try using KillSwitch. If you want, you can even have it replace the Task Manager by enabling the setting in the Options menu.

TDSSKiller

Persistent infections that manage to evade your best efforts to eradicate could be indicative of a rootkit. A rootkit is particularly stealthy, though not entirely invisible. Download and run Kaskperky's TDSSKiller if you think you might have a rootkit. Like CCE, this utility doesn't require installation and can be carried on a USB stick.

ComboFix

When you're at your wit's end and ready to reinstall Windows, that's when you should try ComboFix, a powerful cleanup tool that can either save the day or leave your PC unable to operate correctly. Before downloading and running ComboFix, backup any data as if you're reinstalling Windows, because in the end, you might have to anyway. Before you proceed, you should also read through the extensive usage guide on Bleeping Computer.

If you've gotten this far and your system is still infected, throw in the towel and start with a fresh Windows installation. Sure, you could keep plugging away in hopes of cleaning up your system, but by the time you're done, you could be rocking a fresh Windows install with no trace of malware.

Know of any tips we missed or have software recommendations of your own? Let us and other readers know by posting them in the comments section below!

Top Image: Shutterstock/JMiks

During any form of physical exertion, most people don't think about breath until they're gasping for it. The most advanced exercisers among us are conscious of trying to breathe lower, into their bellies. But there's an even better way, and making this simple switch will get more oxygen into your blood, faster.

Welcome to Fitmodo, Gizmodo's gym for your brain and backbone. Don't suffer through life as a sniveling, sickly weakling—brace up, man, get the blood pumping! Check back on Wednesdays for the latest in fitness science, workout gear, exercise techniques, and enough vim and vigor to whip you into shape.

We all know that you need extra oxygen as you exercise (and, y'know, to be not dead). You need plenty of it in your blood to keep your muscles happy as you expend energy. Once the muscles aren't getting enough oxygen, fatigue sets in mighty quick and the whole thing comes grinding to a halt. Also, let's be honest, nobody likes it when there's massive amounts of lactic acid spreading throughout your body. You know your lungs are what deliver oxygen to your bloodstream, but let's take a quick look at how that happens.

The Science

First a quick refresher on how breathing works. When someone talks about their "lung muscles," know that they are speaking colloquially. The lungs have no musculature of their own. They're really like limp bags, hanging in your chest. So what fills them with air? A vacuum, basically. The lungs are covered with the inner pleural membrane. There is also an outer pleural membrane which is attached to your diaphragm (below your lungs) and intercostal muscles (muscles that wrap in and out of your ribs). Between the two membranes are a fluid, which is not easily compressible or expandable. So, when the diaphragm and intercostals pull away from the lungs, the membranes pull on each other via suction, and the lungs expand along with the expanding cavity they're in (assuming you're letting air in through your mouth or nose). The lungs are very stretchy, so the main point of limitation is how far you can expand the cavity that they're in.

Your lungs absorb the oxygen through a series of bronchial tubes inside them, which are fascinating in and of themselves. Speaking to Gary Logan, director of the Academy for Classical Acting at George Washington University/The Shakespeare Theatre, he spoke of the bronchial tubes as proof that we are built to take in much more oxygen than we typically do. "Every stalk of bronchial tube splits up into two more, and then each of those spit up into several more, and then those split up, and so on," Logan said. "If you took the original stalk, and cut it to measure the circumference of that circle, then went to its two off-branches, and cut and measured them, the circumference of those two together adds up to more than the circumference of that first stalk. This is true all the way down. So even as the tubes get ever and ever smaller, even to microscopic size, they are ever and ever increasing their capacity for oxygen absorption. Which is kind of amazing."

It is! So how do we get more oxygen into them?

The Secret

The chest-breathers among us are the worst off, as they expand only around their upper ribs. It's a shallower breath and much less efficient. Gut-breathers (or diaphragmatic breathers) are moving in the right direction, since your distended belly can certainly push out pretty far and create a larger pocket for your lungs, and as a result of your chest being in between your gut and mouth/nose, it, too, expands. This is about as far as most of us get in the refinement of our breathing, and it's not bad, but we can do better. Not by extending out further from the belly, but by extending out in more directions, namely, from your back and sides. In other words, we've been putting all our focus on the diaphragm, but we've neglected the intercostals.

"We think of the breath as being almost all diaphragmatic, or pulmonic from the front," says Logan. "But, you can take attention to the major and the minor intercostals that weave inside and out of the ribcage. And by allowing their expansion you can expand the lungs further." In other words, by expanding not just from your front, but from your back and sides, too, you can fill your lungs (and thus, your blood) with far more oxygen.

It's a very simple adjustment with tangible rewards, but it can take some practice to become habitual.

The Stretching

For most of us Americans, our lower backs are very locked up, especially those of us who spend a lot of time sitting at a computer. It may even feel like you couldn't possibly expand your lower back and sides, but you can.

Start by standing up, feet shoulder width apart, knees straight but not locked. Now, let your head gently tilt forward, and allow it to lead you down, vertebra by vertebra, until you're hanging all the way over. If you have a partner with whom you're comfortable, it helps to have someone gently tapping with their fists along the sides of your spine, as each vertebra folds over. Don't try to muscle further than you can go; just let yourself hang naturally where your body stops you.

Now try to breathe into your lower back. You'll find it's easier to do in this position because your stomach and chest are collapsed, so you have no where to expand but your back and sides. Try to stay down for a minute or so, really getting used to what it feels like to breath into your lower back, and then slowly roll back up, vertebra by vertebra, starting with your tailbone. Once you've come back to standing, try to keep breathing into your lower back and sides. Repeat as necessary.

Another great stretch that's perfect for working on this is the one you see above. Again, breathe into your lower back and lower sides. Don't push too hard, and make sure you do both sides.

Not only does this stretch help to relax your lower back, but it stretches your obliques and lower intercostals as well. When you unfold, try to be conscious of where your breath goes. If it wants to run back up into your chest, try to redirect it back down into your back. If you can get your lower back and sides to play ball, your diaphragm and chest will follow unconsciously.

Implementation

Perhaps you're wondering what exercise this can be incorporated into. The answer is pretty much anything and everything. All physical activities require a little extra oxygen, and all of them can benefit from more of it. Runners will find they don't get winded as quickly and weight-lifters will find that they can get more power with a fuller, more supported breath. I just recently rediscovered this for myself on a long bike ride. I wash hunched over in a low position (using aerobars), and found myself struggling to get enough air because I couldn't fully expand my stomach or chest. But I thought back to my voice lessons, all those years ago, and started breathing into my lower back. It really was like magic. I could suddenly get all of the air I needed, and the quality of my ride improved dramatically. I was barely winded at the end of it, despite it being the longest ride of my life.

And while we may have unlearned this sort of breathing, it's actually the most natural thing in the world. Says Logan:

When runners run and are really heaving, they typically don't arch their back and lift their chin up to the sky to catch their breath. Instead they hang themselves over, they brace their hands on their knees like flying buttresses to support their torso, and they round out their back. And if you've ever seen someone at the hospital with emphasima or a similar affliction they do the same thing—they hunch and round the back. So, there's something natural about feeling that you can take more breath in when your back ribs are free. And even though they're really always free, there are certain things we do to inhibit them.

Hopefully we've helped you uninhibit them a little.

Make sure you check back next week for another Fitmodo.

Big thanks to Gary Logan for all his help.

Top Image credit: Shutterstock/ Lerche&Johnson

Yoga Image credit: Shutterstock/paul prescott

Samsung provided DisplayMate Technologies with an early production unit to test and analyze for our Display Technology Shoot-Out article series. It is likely that the retail units will have additional display firmware and software tweaks and improvements over our test unit. If that is the case, we will update the article when our unit is upgraded by Samsung.

OLED Displays

While most mobile displays are still LCD based, OLEDs have been capturing a rapidly increasing share of the mobile display market. The technology is still very new, with the Google Nexus One smartphone, launched in January 2010, as the first OLED display product that received widespread notoriety. In a span of just a few years this new display technology has improved at a very impressive rate, now challenging the performance of the best LCDs. Virtually all of the OLED displays used in mobile devices are produced by Samsung Display. We have provided an in-depth analysis on the evolution of OLEDs in our Galaxy S I, S II, and S III Display Technology Shoot-Out article.

The Shoot-Out

To examine the performance of the Samsung Galaxy S4 we ran our in-depth series of Mobile Display Technology Shoot-Out Lab tests and include the Galaxy S III in order to determine how OLED displays have improved, and the iPhone 5 to determine how it compares to a leading high-end LCD display. We take display quality very seriously and provide in-depth objective analysis side-by-side comparisons based on detailed laboratory measurements and extensive viewing tests with both test patterns and test images. To see how far smartphones have progressed in just three years see our 2010 Smartphone Display Shoot-Out, and for a real history lesson see our original 2006 Smartphone Display Shoot-Out.

Results Highlights

In this Results section we provide Highlights of the comprehensive Lab measurements and extensive side-by-side visual comparisons using test photos, test images and test patterns that are presented in later sections. The Comparison Table in the following section summarizes the lab measurements in the following categories: Screen Reflections, Brightness and Contrast, Colors and Intensities, Viewing Angles, Display Power Consumption, Running Time on Battery. You can also skip the Highlights and go directly to the Conclusions.

A Full HD 1920x1080 Display

By far the most interesting recent development in smartphones is a full High Definition 1920x1080 display in a 5.5 inch or smaller screen size – the same pixel resolution as your 50 inch living room HDTV – that's very impressive! First of all, this is a benchmark spec with tremendous marketing power for driving consumer sales. But there are other important reasons for going to Full HD in a smartphone—there is a tremendous amount of HD 1920x1080 content available. Displaying that content at its native resolution (without the need to rescale up or down) results in the best possible image quality, plus rescaling requires processing overhead that uses (wastes) precious battery power. The Galaxy S4 is one of the first few smartphones to offer Full HD.

400+ Pixels Per Inch Displays

Apple started a major revolution in display marketing by introducing their "Retina Display" with 326 Pixels Per Inch (PPI) on the iPhone 4 in 2010. While not equivalent to the resolution of the human retina, people with 20/20 Vision cannot resolve the individual pixels when the display is held at normal viewing distances of 10.5 inches or more. It started a display PPI and Mega Pixel war similar to what happened with smartphone digital cameras, which is still an ongoing wild goose chase now into the stratosphere.

Hopefully the same thing won't happen with mobile displays because there are tradeoffs involved that affect other important display performance issues. The real question is how high do we need to go before reaching a practical visual PPI limit? I'll cover this in an upcoming article. However, a new generation of 400+ PPI displays is already here, driven by the desire to produce a Full HD 1920x1080 display on a smartphone screen. The Galaxy S4 has an incredible 441 Pixels Per Inch. People with 20/20 Vision cannot resolve the individual pixels on a 441 PPI display for viewing distances of 7.8 inches or more, which is exceedingly close for viewing a 5.0 inch display.

PenTile Displays

The pixels on most current OLED displays have only 2 sub-pixels in each pixel instead of the standard 3 Red, Green, and Blue sub-pixels found in most other displays and display technologies. Half of the PenTile pixels have Green and Red sub-pixels and the other half have Green and Blue sub-pixels, so Red and Blue are always shared by two adjacent pixels. This makes PenTile displays easier to manufacture and at a lower cost. It also improves brightness and reduces aging effects. Because the eye has lower visual acuity for color this works very well for photographic and video images. But for digitally generated fine text and graphics with precise pixel layouts the eye can visually detect the reduced number of Red and Blue sub-pixels unless the number of Red and Blue Sub-Pixels Per Inch is very high. And it is for the Galaxy S4 – there are 312 Red and Blue Sub-Pixels Per Inch, which is only a few percent lower than Apple's Benchmark 326 PPI iPhone Retina Display. Visually the Galaxy S4 PenTile display delivers excellent visual sharpness across the board.

Digital Display Technology

Most consumers are not aware that LCDs are actually non-linear analog displays that perform really well only as the result of highly refined electronics and careful factory calibration. This is the same reason why even living room HDTVs provide coarse and imprecise color and image controls, and why professional calibration is desirable. One interesting technical development is that the latest OLED displays use digital Pulse Width Modulation to specify the brightness of every sub-pixel. This makes it possible for OLED displays like the Galaxy S4 to precisely vary and directly digitally control their Intensity Scales, Gamma values, White Points, color calibration and color management of the display in firmware or software. Plasma and DLP displays also use digital Pulse Width Modulation, but the OLED displays perform better because of higher frequencies and faster response times.

Screen Modes

One important application of the Digital Display Technology mentioned above is that this makes it relatively easy to provide a number of different display calibration options and settings that will appeal to differing consumer tastes and preferences under various viewing conditions and applications. The Galaxy S4 (like its bigger cousin the Galaxy Note II) includes 5 user selectable Screen Modes: Adaptive, Dynamic, Standard, Professional Photo, and Movie, which we discuss below and include measurements for the Standard and Movie Modes.

Color Gamut and Color Accuracy

The Galaxy S4 Movie Mode delivers the closest Color and White Point calibration to the standard sRGB/Rec.709 consumer content used in digital camera, HDTV, internet, and computer content, including virtually all photos and videos. Use the Movie Mode for the best color and image accuracy. Its Green primary is still somewhat too saturated – hopefully it will get toned down some as in the Galaxy Note II, which is very accurate. The Professional Photo Mode provides a fairly accurate calibration to the Adobe RGB standard, which is rarely available in consumers displays, and is very useful for high-end digital photography applications. The Standard Mode is the default mode for the Galaxy S4 – it delivers higher color saturation, which appeals to some, and is a better choice for high ambient light viewing conditions, which wash out image colors and contrast. This mode is very similar to the Professional Photo Mode, but has a more bluish White Point. Its Green primary is also too saturated, but noticeably less than in the Galaxy S III. The Dynamic Mode produces the most vibrant image and picture quality.

Brightness and Power Efficiency

OLED displays are generally not as bright as the brightest LCD displays. There are two reasons for this: first, while OLED power efficiency has been steadily improving they are not yet as power efficient as the best LCDs. Second: there is a marketing obsession for producing ultra thin and lightweight smartphones, which sacrifices much needed battery power. Since the display often uses 50 percent or more of the total smartphone power, various display power management schemes are frequently used. The Galaxy S4 uses one innovative approach to overcome this—when Automatic Brightness is turned on, the Peak Brightness becomes significantly brighter in high ambient lighting than is possible with Manual Brightness, up to as high as 475 cd/m2, which is 34 percent higher than is possible with Manual Brightness. This is done so that users can't permanently set the brightness to very high values, which would run down the battery quickly.

Performance in High Ambient Lighting

Smartphones are never used in the dark. In fact, they are often used in very bright ambient lighting, which can significantly degrade and wash out their image and picture quality. The Galaxy S4 performs very well in high ambient lighting in spite of its typically lower screen brightness because it has one of the smallest screen Reflectance values of any display we have ever tested, and its more saturated colors can help cut through the reflected light glare. When Automatic Brightness is turned on, the screen brightness increases considerably at high levels of ambient lighting as mentioned above. The Galaxy S4 is then comparable or brighter than most LCD smartphones, but still 15 percent less than the much smaller iPhone 5, which is the brightest smartphone we have tested.

Viewing Tests

The Galaxy S4 Movie Mode provides very nice, pleasing, and accurate colors and picture quality. The Movie Mode is recommended for indoor and low ambient light viewing. The Standard Mode has significantly more vibrant and saturated colors. Some people like that. The Standard Mode is recommended for medium levels of ambient light viewing because it offsets some of the reflected glare that washes out the images. The Dynamic Mode provides incredibly powerful colors that are overwhelming in low ambient lighting. The Dynamic Mode is recommended for high ambient light viewing only. For all of the Modes a slight green color tint was sometimes noticeable, but not objectionable. It results from the Green primary being more saturated than the Red and Blue primaries. Readjusting the internal color management could fix this.

Comparing Displays on the Galaxy S III and Galaxy S4

The Galaxy S4 display is a major enhancement and improvement over the Galaxy S III – a good reason to consider trading up. The screen has Full HD 1920x1080 resolution with more than double the number of pixels and with 44 percent higher Pixels Per Inch than the Galaxy S III. It is 25 percent brighter (and up to 68 percent brighter with Automatic Brightness) and the display is 20 percent more power efficient. The Galaxy S4 also has 5 user selectable Screen Modes and delivers much better picture quality and color accuracy.

Comparing the Galaxy S4 with the LCD Display on the iPhone 5

The iPhone 5 is now more than half way through its product cycle, which is important to keep in mind for our comparison. However, high-end LCDs like the iPhone 5 are a very mature and refined display technology, so other than screen size, resolution, and the Pixels Per Inch not much is likely to change in the next generation, no matter what Apple decides to do. The iPhone 5 is significantly brighter than the Galaxy S4, particularly for screens with mostly peak white backgrounds. Its color calibration is a bit better, although the Galaxy S4 has a more accurate White. The Galaxy S4 has a much bigger screen, higher resolution, higher PPI, much darker blacks, and better screen uniformity than the iPhone 5. They each have their own particular strengths and weaknesses, but if you scan our color coordinated Comparison Table, both displays are quite good and comparable overall – so it's currently a tie – we'll see how they both evolve and improve in the next generation…

Conclusions: An Impressive OLED Display

The Galaxy S4 continues the rapid and impressive improvement in OLED displays and technology. The first notable OLED smartphone, the Google Nexus One, came in decidedly last place in our 2010 Smartphone Display Shoot-Out. In a span of just three years OLED display technology is now challenging the performance of the best LCDs. Each have their own particular strengths and weaknesses, but if you scan our color coordinated Comparison Table, both displays and technologies perform quite well and look quite good and comparable overall – we'll see how they both evolve and improve in the next generation, which we consider next.

The biggest challenge for OLEDs is continuing to improve their power efficiency and full screen peak brightness. We measured an impressive 20 percent improvement in power efficacy between the Galaxy S4 and S III, and a 25 percent increase in brightness (and up to 68 percent with Automatic Brightness). If this keeps up then OLEDs may pull ahead of LCDs in brightness and power efficiency in the near future.

Of course, LCDs are not standing still either. There has been a remarkable increase in their resolution and Pixels Per Inch. IGZO and more advanced Metal Oxide backplanes will help to significantly improve their efficiency and performance. Quantum Dots should help them to efficiently enlarge their Color Gamuts to catch up with OLEDs, which is important for delivering accurate color and image contrast in high ambient lighting.

Both OLEDs and LCDs need to carefully expand their color management and color calibration. The biggest improvements for mobile displays will come from dynamically changing the display Color Gamuts and Intensity Scales to automatically compensate and correct for reflected glare and image wash out from ambient light. Which ever one succeeds is likely to win in the next generation of mobile displays

Display Shoot-Out Comparison Table

Below we compare the display on the Samsung Galaxy S4 with the Samsung Galaxy S III and Apple iPhone 5 based on objective measurement data and criteria. For additional background and information see the Samsung Galaxy S OLED Display Technology Shoot-Out that compares and analyzes the evolution of the OLED displays on the Galaxy S I, II, and III.

Below is a partial excerpt of the table; you can see the full comparison at DisplayMate.

This article has been republished with permission from DisplayMate.com, where it can be read in its entirety.

About the Author
Dr. Raymond Soneira is President of DisplayMate Technologies Corporation of Amherst, New Hampshire, which produces video calibration, evaluation, and diagnostic products for consumers, technicians, and manufacturers. See www.displaymate.com. He is a research scientist with a career that spans physics, computer science, and television system design. Dr. Soneira obtained his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Princeton University, spent 5 years as a Long-Term Member of the world famous Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, another 5 years as a Principal Investigator in the Computer Systems Research Laboratory at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and has also designed, tested, and installed color television broadcast equipment for the CBS Television Network Engineering and Development Department. He has authored over 35 research articles in scientific journals in physics and computer science, including Scientific American. If you have any comments or questions about the article, you can contact him at dtso@displaymate.com.

About DisplayMate Technologies
DisplayMate Technologies specializes in advanced mathematical display technology optimizations and precision analytical scientific display diagnostics and calibrations to deliver outstanding image and picture quality and accuracy – while increasing the effective visual Contrast Ratio of the display and producing a higher calibrated brightness than is achievable with traditional calibration methods. This also decreases display power requirements and increases the battery run time in mobile displays. This article is a lite version of our intensive scientific analysis of smartphone and mobile displays – before the benefits of our advanced mathematical DisplayMate Display Optimization Technology, which can correct or improve many of the deficiencies – including higher calibrated brightness, power efficiency, effective screen contrast, picture quality and color and gray scale accuracy under both bright and dim ambient light, and much more. Our advanced scientific optimizations can make lower cost panels look as good or better than more expensive higher performance displays. For more information on our technology see the Summary description of our Adaptive Variable Metric Display Optimizer AVDO. If you are a display or product manufacturer and want our expertise and technology to turn your display into a spectacular one to surpass your competition then Contact DisplayMate Technologies to learn more.

Only a decade ago, sustainable building techniques were fairly rare, a fringe culture on the periphery of mainstream architecture. But with Stephen Colbert interviewing radically green architects like Mitchell Joachim and Passive House buildings popping up in New York City, that's all changing very quickly.

For concrete evidence of the shift, look no further than this year's Top Ten Green Buildings, an annual list chosen by the American Institute of Architects. A few years ago, this list was full of single-family homes commissioned by clients with a special interest in sustainability. Lately, it's full of schools, government buildings, and commercial developments.

And while it's tough to sum up complex buildings in just a sentence or two, there are a few fascinating details from this year's crop that stand out. From snails that filter water to nails harvested from a WWII-era warehouse, here what's helping the future go green.

San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Headquarters by KMD Architects with Stevens & Associates

This civic building houses almost 1,000 employees, which means there are dozens of bathrooms sprinkled throughout. Every drop of water used to flush the toilets and urinals comes from the building's Living Machine, a system that cleans water using bacteria, algae, protozoa, plankton, snails.

On the north facade, a wind tower accelerates the speed of air passing through wind turbines, which help the building generate seven percent of its own energy. Right now, the tower is home to an installation called "Firefly" by the artist Ned Kahn, who covered the structure in thousands of tiny pieces of polycarbonate. The hinged slats flutter in the wind, triggering a wave of embedded LEDs—at night, the facade glitters.

Federal Center South Building by ZGF Architects

This Recovery Act-funded building—which houses the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—had a lot going against it: it's located on a Superfund Site, it's right next to a cement plant, and it's hard to get to the site without a car. Besides developing a set of unique ventilation and shading systems, the designers "harvested" nearly 300,000 feet of timber and decking from a nearby WWII-era warehouse. And yes: they even re-used the building's 70-year-old nails, brackets, and bolts.

Clock Shadow Building by Continuum Architects + Planners

This commercial building in Milwaukee was built using nearly 30% salvaged materials—most of the facade is made from reclaimed wood, rusty metal panels, and Milwaukee's ubiquitous "cream city" bricks, salvaged from local razed buildings. On the ground floor, there's an artisanal cheese and ice cream shop, because WISCONSIN.

Marin Country Day School Learning Resource Center by EHDD

Inside this super-efficient K-12 school, each classroom has its own energy meter, where students can see how much electricity they're using. Online, they can visualize how their usage changes over time, and compare themselves to other rooms—it's a teaching building, in the most literal sense of the term.

New Norris House by the College of Architecture & Design at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Norris, Tennessee was a model project of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built the community in the 1930s to as a model of how electricity and plumbing could improve living standards in the rural South. 75 years later, architecture students and professors at University of Tennessee built this Norris House redux, which serves—just like its ancestor—to show what new systems can do for small, low-budget homes.

The 1,000-square-foot house is super-insulated and airtight, reducing energy costs by 50%. A cistern collects rainwater and greywater, channeling it towards the garden out back. All in all, it uses zero fossil fuels, relying on wind, sun, and water, instead.

Pearl Brewery/Full Goods Warehouse by Lake Flato Architects

This gigantic mixed-use development occupies San Antonio's long-abandoned Pearl Brewery, which once produced the most popular beer in Texas. It relies heavily on what the architects call "energy surfing," or finding passive ways to cut down on usage, like a series of breezeways carefully oriented to the prevailing winds and a series of light monitors that do the same for light. There are also plenty of active systems, including the largest roof-mounted photovoltaic spread in Texas and plenty of big ass fans (really, Big Ass Fans).

Yin Yang House by Brooks + Scarpa

This Venice, California home and office generates all of its energy on-site, thanks to plenty of passive features like cross-ventilating windows that cut down on usage. A twelve kilowatt photovoltaic roof array covers the rest of its energy needs—in fact, there's no mechanical A/C system at all. The owners have never (and likely will never) receive an energy bill.

Editor's note: This is part four in a series of introductory pieces on watches from our friends at Hodinkee. You can read part one here, part two here and part three here.

The perpetual calendar is one of the most useful and romantic complications in all of horology. You may have noticed that many watches have some sort of date indication, usually in the form of a small window in the dial displaying the day of the month. Some even have a day of the week display as well. The perpetual calendar has both of these and more, plus it only needs to be adjusted once a century. Yes, we said once a century.

With the perpetual calendar you can track the date, day of the week, month, year, leap year, and sometimes even the century and millennium. Thanks to the varying lengths of the months and those pesky leap years, a perpetual calendar watch has a plethora of gears that turn multiple times per second to only once every four years or more. As such, this is a watch that, assuming you keep it wound (good time to invest in a winder), will not require any adjustments until the year 2100 at the earliest - leap years are skipped at the turn of a century, so the normal mechanical calculations require a tiny push forward at the end of February.

Perpetual calendars are typically elegant and dressy, which you might attribute to their usually high price tags, and the perpetual calendar chronographs from Patek Philippe are some of the most sought after watches of all time. That said, Jaeger-LeCoultre has just released an elegant perpetual calendar in stainless steel, one of the few dressy perpetuals to come in under $30,000, and IWC has produced a number of interesting perpetuals over the years, including the Da Vinci, the Portuguese, and the Ingenieur Digital Date-Month.

Because each watch takes weeks or months to make, and only highly skilled watchmakers can even begin to work on them, perpetual calendars do come at a cost. While it may keep them off the wrists of most watch enthusiasts, there are few complications that get true watch nerds so excited.

Last month, we tested the best smartphone cameras out there and declared the HTC One's ultrapixel camera the master of all. Now it's time to see how the Samsung Galaxy S4 and Sony Xperia Z measure up.

Today, we're comparing the cameras on five top smartphones: The Samsung Galaxy S4, Sony Xperia Z, HTC One, Nokia Lumia 920, and Apple iPhone 5. We tested them in four common situations, two in daylight and two in a blacked out corner of the office. The winner is the camera that gets flawless results with minimal hassle.

In all cases, we used the cameras as simple point-and-shoots. We didn't fuss around with special settings or filters for the simple reason that the most common use case for a smartphone is a quick, snapshot on-the-fly. Menus make you either late to work or late for your photo. We resized identical portions of each image down to a height of 900 pixels, which is a reasonable Facebook size.

Note: We tested the global version of the Sony Xperia Z, called the Xperia ZL. The two phones have identical cameras.

Daylight close-up

The shot of flowers above is a typical shot of something pretty on the street. We're looking for how well the cameras balance color and how well they render detail.

The Xperia Z, iPhone 5, and S4 all do a solid job, but the iPhone 5 wins here for beating the S4 on details and the Xperia Z on color. The HTC One photo gets the color right, but the photo is pretty fuzzy compared to the rest, showing the limitations of its lower-resolution 4-megapixel sensor. The Lumia 920's colors are way off, so it's the clear loser in this test.

Winner: iPhone 5 (by a hair)

Low-light without flash

In this test, we're trying to avoid the horrid blast of LED flash that you're better off not using if you can avoid it. While all of the cameras (except the iPhone) have a "Night Mode" setting, we did this test in automatic because we think a simple camera should be able to make that adjustment on its own if its necessary. Diving into a menu isn't something your average user is going to bother with.

Both the Galaxy S4 and Xperia Z are hopeless when the lights go down. We'd argue about which is worse, except what's the point? The iPhone 5's photo is gross with grain, but at least you can see the little statue. Both the Lumia 920 and HTC One perform well. The One has better color, but the 920's sharpness is exceptional so it's our cave-dweller of choice.

Winner: Lumia 920

Low-light with flash

Flash is a delicate art that's easy to screw up, but sometimes you've got no choice but to use it. Here, we're looking for the flash that softly illuminates the scene without blowing out details. It's incredible to see how much the expression on our statue's face changes depending on how the flash hits him. As in last month's test, the HTC One's gentle touch fills the scene with light without turning our friend into a sunspot. It's a tad dark, maybe, but so was the scene, no?

The S4 and the Lumia 920 each have their advantages. The former does a nice job with details in the foreground but casts a long shadow behind the statue. The latter does a better job filling the scene evenly but doesn't quite deliver when it comes to color and detail on the statue itself. Once upon a time, the iPhone's flash would have been impressive for being at all decent, but this image looks like it's bathing in the light of a flashbulb filled with egg yolk. The Xperia Z's flash makes our man look like a drunk looking into a cop's strobe.

Winner: HTC One

Daylight landscape

In this shot, we're looking at each photo's detail and exposure. The Lumia 920 wins on account of its detail and dynamic range. The sky is properly exposed, and you can still make out clean details all the way to the much darker brick foreground. The S4 and HTC One both do well on exposure, but we're partial to the S4's sharper details. The iPhone does a good job as well, but there is a lot of noticeable distortion in the tiny details compared to the other good shots. The Xperia Z photos is improperly exposed. Interestingly, when we did this test the last time around it was a brighter sunnier day, and we had a hard time picking a favorite between the Lumia 920 and the HTC One.

Winner: Nokia Lumia 920

Bottom line

The HTC One and Nokia Lumia 920 are still the best all around camera phones out there despite their idiosyncrasies. In particular, they're excellent in the dark. The HTC One's photos sometimes come out grainy and the Lumia 920 doesn't do a good job with color balance.

As for our newcomers, the Galaxy S4 takes solid, sharp photos in most conditions, and it was at least a contender for the top spot in several of the tests. Unfortunately it's terrible in low-light. Despite using entirely new imaging technology, the Xperia Z fell short more often than not.

The iPhone 5 is just over six months old and it's already feeling like a straggler. It's still solid, but Apple better have some new tech to juice this camera whenever the next iteration of the iPhone drops.

The Federal Reserve is making it rain new hundred dollar bills on October 8, 2013. They're more colorful, more secure, and easier to authenticate, but harder to replicate. Here's everything that's changed.

Most of the benjamins you see today were designed way back in 1996. Sounds pretty old, right? An overhauled hundo was supposed to enter into circulation in February of 2011, but production was shut down a few months prior because of a manufacturing flaw that revealed a blank space in the note when a crease formed. But the latest batch of seems to be a big improvement.

If you were contemplating going into the counterfeiting business, you'll be talked out of it by the time you see how the Treasury Department has booby-trapped this bill. It looks nearly impossible to duplicate. You can take an interactive tour of the new C-notes here, but we went ahead and did a breakdown of the features for you:

A hologram-like 3D security ribbon woven into the paper has bell icons that change to 100s when you move the bill.

When you hold the note steady, both the inkwell and the bell inside of it are copper. Move the bill, and the bell turns green.

To the right of the big portrait of Ben Franklin is a smaller, faint portrait watermark. You can detect it when you hold the bill up to light.

A security thread imprinted with USAs and 100s is located to the left of big Ben's head. It can be detected when it's put under a UV light.

The numeral 100 in the bottom right-hand corner of the front of the note changes from copper to green when you move it.

Just in case you don't know what kind of cash you're handling, there's now a giant gold 100 on the back of the bill.

There are a couple of micro-printed words located on the hundred. "The United States of America" sits on ol' Ben's collar, "USA 100" surrounds the portrait watermark, and "One hundred USA" appears next to a golden quill.

Franklin's jacket feels rough to the touch; there's raised printing all over the bill so it feels like a legit piece of officially issued currency. And so that it's harder to copy.

[NewMoney.gov]

Microsoft just announced that it's going to fill us in on the next Xbox, alias Durango, alias Nextbox, on May 21st. The event will take place at Microsoft's home base in Redmond, Washington, but streamed on Spike TV. Here's what we can expect.

The full lineup of games, according to a post on Xbox big wig Major Nelson's blog, will be announced 19 days later at E3.

The official reveal will clear up a lot of debate swirling around the new console. Reports have cropped up that the next Xbox will require an internet connection to play, and also that it will not be able to play used games. For its part, Microsoft has gone out of its way to distance itself from the furor over these rumors, going as far as parting ways with Adam Orth, who had joked about users who were upset about an "Always On" function, but Redmond's also gone out of its way to neither confirm nor deny them.

Other less incisive rumors include broader, system-wide controls for the Kinect that go down to cable box level, and broader functionality for the Kinect in general.

We're expecting big things from the new console. Even considering the massive importance of Windows 8, the new Xbox might be the most important product to come from Microsoft in a while. It's already massively successful—something Windows 8 still hasn't achieved—and is an avenue to take Microsoft's unified universe into millions of willing living rooms. So, exciting times.

Monsters Inc blew more than a few minds when it premiered in 2001. Sully's coat comprised a million rendered hairs, and Boo's oversized pink shirt moved with such a natural flow it appeared nearly life-like to audiences. And while advances in technology during the twelve years between the original film and the prequel—premiering in June—will provide another jaw-dropping visual experience, Monsters University was no less challenging to make.

Here's an inside look at how everyone's favorite animation house makes its movie magic.

While the writers and story artists are busy nailing down the overarching plot points, character and set designers are busy imagining what this universe would actually look like. In addition to Mike and Sully and other primary characters, MU designers invented another 300 background characters based on six basic body types, called Fungus, Slugs, Charlie, Block, Spiff, and Pill. These background characters were based loosely on those from the original film, with the addition of varying numbers of appendages and growths—an average of 3.7 eyes, 6.2 limbs, 5.4 horns, and four claws per monster.

Many of the characters in the film were heavily influenced by real animals. The Helen Mirren-voiced Dean Hardscrabble, for example, was created by mixing the head of a horned lizard with the wings of a bat and lower half of a millipede.

Set designers, meanwhile, spend their days creating the "style and feel of the campus, specific to the Monsters world," as Robert Kondo, Sets Art Director, explained. An immense amount of consideration went into the architectural design of the movie's buildings, taking into account issues of scale and ability. "Monsters come in all sorts of different sizes—both big and small," explained Kondo. So designers took great pains to incorporate architectural features necessary for that universe—doors within doors, for example—that would allow monsters of any size easy entry. Their various aerial and aquatic abilities were taken into account as well, with the incorporation of underwater and window entrances. And if you squint your eyes just right, you'll notice that the buildings on campus bear a striking resemblance to the monsters they contain.

As Kondo explained,

One nice thing about Monsters University versus Monsters Inc is that the campus needs a lot of vegetation so we got to play a bit more with what the vegetation looks like in MU. You can see we took that the same sort of idea of finding horns and things in the architecture, but we also wanted to take the ivy and integrate it with this idea of [buildings' faces], so it makes sort of this tentacled monster on the front of the building.

Once the storyline solidifies, the storyboards are slowly converted into the film's basic animation. Emphasis on slow. "Watching an animator work in real time would be like watching paint dry," Scott Clark, the film's Supervising Animator joked. "It takes a long time to animate. It takes weeks to do second's worth of work." That's why the studio leveraged the talents of a small army of artists—70 at the peak of production—working on a proprietary Linux-run animation software platform known as Presto, which reportedly operates much like the commercially available Maya.

During a recent demonstration, Clark explained that much of the animation process revolves around a massive central spreadsheet listing every animated element in the scene and it's relative position in space over time:

These models have every joint in their skeleton that we have in ours. Well, Sully has a tail. And he has one fewer finger than we do. And he only has three toes. But he's got a lot of the same things we have...I can go into the spreadsheet here and I can pull up pieces of his model—like here is his tail and all of the controls for his tail—I can move the value back and forth and the tail moves around.

Each row of the spreadsheet, which tracks a single element's position over the 129,000 frames that constitute the 90 minute film, can also be displayed in graphic view, which closely resembles the EKG from an internist's nightmares. It's a stack of line charts, hundreds of jagged overlapping sine waves, each denoting the sway of a single body part at any given moment.

Once the baseline animation for a scene is finished, the frame's fine details are rendered. This includes character elements, vegetation, elementals like water or fire, bags, ropes, and book pages. With over 400 different characters—an average of 25 per shot—Monsters University required 100 million computer hours to generate. That's 29 hours per frame performed at Pixar's on-campus processor farm in Emeryville, CA. With the use of global illumination algorithms, which auto-populates hundreds of lighting effects per scene based on real physics, and a revamped simulation engine, Pixar is able to create strikingly realistic characters. Sully's fur alone has seen a five-fold increase in volume since the last film with a total of 5.5 million hairs.

The finished film is then reviewed, packaged, and shipped to theaters where it is slated to open June 21st. We received a sneak peek of the first 40 minutes of the film (the second half was still in rendering) during a recent tour of the studio. Rest assured, this franchise will once again have you screaming—in delight.

Editor's note: This is part three in a series of introductory pieces on watches from our friends at Hodinkee. You can read part one here and part two here.

Let's face it, there are a lot of well-engineered and beautiful inventions that you wouldn't exactly call useful (here's a good example). In watchmaking, the pinnacle expression of such a creation has got to be the tourbillon.

Developed in the late 18th century by Abraham-Louis Breguet, the tourbillon's original purpose was to counter the effects of gravity on the escapement of a pocket watch. Because it sat upright in your pocket all day, the spring was stretched unnaturally by gravity, so putting it in a gently spinning cage prevented deformation and inaccuracy over time. But now we wear our watches on our wrists and this just isn't a problem anymore.

That hasn't stopped a cult of the tourbillon from developing though. It's a beautiful thing to behold and has that charm that only old-world mechanics have. Traditionally the rotating cage makes a full revolution every 60 seconds (though not always) and it often doubles as the running seconds hand.

Modern makers have continued to push the tourbillon to the extremes, though most acknowledge that it's purely an exercise in watchmaking prowess rather than an actual push for accuracy. Watches like the Duomètre à Sphérotourbillon from Jaeger-LeCoultre, the MikrotourbillonS from TAG Heuer, and the Thomas Preacher Flying Triple Axis add varying speeds, extra axes of rotation, and other complications to make the visual display even more impressive. Others like artisan watchmaker Haldimann have stripped it down to basic purity in the H1. The modern master of the tourbillon is Greubel Forsey, who makes exceptional multi-tourbillon watches like the Invention Piece 2.

No matter the complexity, you need a tourbillon in your wristwatch about as much you need a muscle controlled Iron Man repulsor. Their both cool, they both represent something impressive, and they're both completely unnecessary.

If you've got a 3D printer and a little bit of imagination, you can make pretty much anything. While these machines are still too expensive to be completely ubiquitous, early adopters are making some really amazing things. We got a look at a few of these objects at the 3D Printing Expo in New York this week. Here are the most unbelievable items we saw.

3D System's adorable 3D printer—the Cubify—would fit right in with other home appliances. From a design standpoint, it looks just like a little sewing machine. And the company is using its machines (not just Cubify) to create some pretty neat stuff, like this platform shoe.

And this purse.

Or this chain-like belt.

It's not exactly a Fender, but the 3D-printed guitar we saw at the 3D systems booth was awesome. Bonus points for the patriotic design.

There are certainly a lot of random, useless 3D-printed tchotchkes. But the wine opener we saw at 3D Systems' booth is something you actually need!

Form Labs showed off an incredible chess set. The Rook you see is so very detailed, it even has a spiral staircase inside.

To see the detail on other objects from Form Labs, we looked at them under a magnifying glass.

Doesn't this vase look like it was formed on a pottery wheel? Nope. It was printed on Sculpteo.

These creepy 3D-printed busts—including one of Tom Hanks—were churned out by an MCor machine, which prints using paper.

This 3D printed bangle is something you could actually see someone wearing, not just as a novelty. For a long time, 3D-printed items *screamed* 3D-printed. But as the technology improves, design quality is improving along with it.

Photos by Nick Stango

Ethics aside, espionage is an indispensable part of statecraft. The ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance] information gathered helps steer national policy decisions for everything from mundane trade negotiations to the blackest of ops. And nowhere is this more evident than in the development of the US spy satellite fleet during the Cold War. These orbital telescopes granted an unprecedented peek over the Iron Curtain—revealing Soviet military capabilities, supply reserves, industrial sites, and more—that no ground-based spook could hope to provide.

During the Cold War, accurately ascertaining the USSR's military capabilities was a top US priority—as well it should have been given that we had as many as 21,000 nuclear warheads pointed at each other during that time. And while we had plenty of spies operating in Moscow, the view from overhead provided the President and his cabinet key insights into the extent of Soviet strategic capabilities which influenced defense planning and arms control negotiations. As such, the US invested vast sums of money into high-altitude research—from early "weather balloons" to the SR-71 Blackbird and U2 Dragon Lady to orbital telescopes—and established not one but three Federal agencies—the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—all in an effort to glean any speck of information that could give us an advantage.

Satellite technology is, by far, the most expensive ISR method at the US's disposal but also the most effective, its results well worth the billions of dollars spent. As President Lyndon B. Johnson famously quipped in 1967 after a Soviet hoax led to worries of a bomber gap:

I wouldn't want to be quoted on this ... We've spent $35 or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor.

Of course, much of the development of our national reconnaissance capabilities is still shrouded in veils of classification. Heck, the NRO was established in 1961 and operated for three decades before the government even ever acknowledged its existence. Press reports made limited references to the agency as far back as 1971, but it wasn't until the Deputy Secretary of Defense revealed the NRO in 1992, was it ever formally discussed by the DoD. Oversight from the DoD and Congress was virtually non-existent save for the "open-checkbook" policy of the times. As long as the intelligence justified the price tag, any cost was acceptable. It wasn't until the early 1990's that any information on these devices was declassified, after the fall of the Soviet Union brought an end to the Cold War. Even now, information on the early satellites is sparse and anything after 1972 is non-existent save for a few photos taken by the KH-11 satellite which were leaked to Jane's Defence Weekly in 1985.

What we do know is that the US has been researching high-altitude reconnaissance technology since about 1946 when the RAND project, precursor to Rand Corp., began campaigning for its development. When the Army and Navy couldn't agree on who would have control over the orbital technology, it was assigned to the newly-formed USAF in 1947. It took a few years for RAND researchers working on "Project Feedback" to figure out how a satellite would even function—this was a brand new technological concept, mind you—but by 1953 they had not only devised the general characteristics and capabilities of a reconnaissance satellite but had begun to develop many of the components as well, like the television system and altimeter. The Atomic Energy Commission also began work on miniaturized nuclear power sources for the vehicles at that time. By 1954, the USAF accepted RAND's assertion that the technology was of "vital strategic interest to the United States" and officially established the US satellite program.

The Corona Program

The first such program was the Corona project, a codeword itself code named "Discoverer" for the public explanation of why the government was firing a rocket into space (a rare event in the late 1950s that would have attracted a curious public and international scrutiny). The program began in 1959 at the Onizuka Air Force Station, ran until 1972, and was declassified in 1995 by President Clinton. Its initial budget was a modest $108.2 million ($860 million adjusted to 2013), though that quickly increased following the 1960 incident in which Gary Powers' U2 was shot down over Soviet airspace. The 144-member family of Corona satellites—each designated Keyhole-#, or KH-#, depending on the spacecraft iteration—were produced and operated by the CIA in conjunction with the USAF and provided invaluable photographic surveillance of the Soviet Union as well as the People's Republic of China, and other Communist countries.

Launched aboard a Thor booster rocket and Agena spacecraft, these satellites relied on a pair of five foot long stereoscopic Itek cameras using 12-inch, f/5 triplet lenses and a 24-inch focal length (later models also incorporated a third "index" camera for reference). The early cameras could achieve a 40-foot resolution. By KH-3, optical improvements decreased that figure to 20 feet. Later missions continued to halve the resolution until researchers were able to resolve one-foot wide objects, realized that that was way too close to be of any strategic use and backed off to a more manageable 3-foot resolution.

They were fed a special Eastman Kodak 70 millimeter film that produced 170 lines per mm—more than three times the 50 lines/mm resolution earlier WWII aerial photography could compose. The first Coronas carried a paltry 8,000 feet of film—per camera—though through improvements in the film chemistry and design reduced the material thickness, researchers were eventually able to double that amount. The cameras themselves underwent numerous upgrades as well, elongating to nine feet and incorporating panoramic Petzval f/3.5 lenses.

Once the camera had run through its full complement of film, it would eject the roll via a reentry capsule designed by General Electric. After the capsule discarded its heat shield at 60,000 feet, it deployed a parachute and could either be nabbed by a passing plane equipped with a claw hook (above) or land safely in the ocean where it would float for two days awaiting pickup. If the capsule wasn't retrieved within 48 hours, a salt plug at the bottom of the canister would dissolve and sink it. If it was picked up in time, the film would be transported to Rochester, New York, for processing at Eastman Kodak's Hawkeye facility.

The Argon Program

The KH-5 ARGON ran in conjunction with Corona from 1961 to 1964, though never with the same degree of success. These 1150 - 1500 kg satellites manufactured by Lockheed Martin and operated by the NR used a single 76 mm focal length camera with a 140 meter resolution were operated primarily for map-making—they were the first to image Antarctica from space—and took less than a week to produce. Of the 12 flights attempted, however, only five successfully put the unit in orbit.

The Lanyard Program

The KH-6 Lanyard program was the NRO's first attempt at high definition photography but lasted just six months and three launches in 1963, two of which failed to produce images. These 1500 kg Lockheed satellites were hastily constructed using the previously-cancelled Itek "E-5" camera in order to survey a rumored anti-ballistic missile site near Tallinn, Estonia. The E-5 had a 66-inch focal length and six foot resolution covering a 9 x 46 mile area. The only successful flight returned 910 photographic frames. However, the image quality was so poor that they were virtually useless.

The Gambit Program

Outside of the Corona program, America's initial attempts at satellite photo-reconnaissance failed more often than not. The KH-7 and KH-8 series, codenamed Gambit, were a marked departure from that trend and the only other predominantly successful satellite ISR program in the 1960s. This 3,000 kg Low Altitude Surveillance Platform developed by Lockheed flew just 75 miles up (Coronas orbited at 100 miles) and operated for nearly two decades from 1964 to 1984. No fewer than 54 such satellites launched (these things only worked for three months, tops) from Vandenberg AFB aboard Titan III rockets during that time.

Eastman Kodak's A&O Division in Rochester, New York, produced the Gambit's primary strip camera system. With a focal length of 175.6 inches, a 6.3 km wide coverage area, and 3-foot resolution, the KH-8 was ideal for gathering high-resolution images of Soviet sites. Unlike conventional aperture cameras, the Gambit's slit camera reflected light off of a 48-inch mirror, through a slit aperture, and on to a moving length of Eastman Kodak Type 3404 film. It would then either drop the roll as the Coronas did or automatically develop the photographs, scan them, and transmit the images back to Earth in as little as 20 minutes through the Film Read-Out GAMBIT (FROG) feature (though after $2 billion dollars and nearly a decade of development the 1971 administration nix(on)ed it).

In addition to keeping tabs on Soviet air capabilities, Gambit was also designed to photograph the spacecraft around it. This ability came in handy in 1973. The brand new Skylab had just launched when its meteoroid shield broke loose and damaged the space station. As NASA scrambled to send up a manned repair mission, the NRO launched a new Gambit, which snapped this picture and helped NASA engineers plan accordingly.

The HEXAGON Program

The KH-9 HEXAGON was, by all accounts, an unmitigated success with 19 of its 20 launches reaching orbit between 1971 and 1986. This $3.262 billion Lockheed-built NRO program is officially deemed a Broad Coverage Photo Reconnaissance satellite but is better known as "Big Bird." And while its existence wasn't revealed until 2011, the program dates back to the 1960s as a successor to the Corona program.

The first generation of HEXAGON employed a pair of f/3.0 folded Wright Camera cameras with a 60-inch focal length able to resolve objects down to 2 feet and carried four re-entry vehicles. The last three generations featured a pair of panoramic cameras as well as upgraded electronics, C&C systems and nitrogen-supplied re-entry canisters. They also a began surviving longer. Most spy satellites have very limited life spans—two to three months—and once they're out of film they have no further purpose. But with ever increasing film payloads, the final iteration of the KH-9 lasted 275 days in space. Between 1973 and 1980, these satellites imaged every square foot of the Earth in 29,000 pictures, much of it better quality than LANDSAT, a rival satellite mapping program. Most of these images have been declassified since 2002, though sensitive areas such as government installations and most of Israel remain tightly guarded.

The KENNAN Program

The KH-11 KENNAN is the most advanced recon satellite to be unclassified. First launched in 1976 by the NRO, it's the first US satellite to employ an EO digital sensor and charge-coupled device (CCD), which reportedly provides an Enemy of the State-style real-time observation capability. Very little is known about the satellite's hardware though many have speculated that its roughly the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope with a similar 2.4-meter mirror producing a six inch resolution. There's also wide speculation that the KH-11 is the source of images declassified in the wake of the 1998 embassy bombings, as well as others of China and Russia declassified the year prior. The images the CIA used to find Osama bin Laden's hideout were reportedly supplied by the KENNAN. Fifteen KH-11's have been launched in total—nine between 1976 and 1990 aboard Titan-3D rockets, five between 1992 and 2005 aboard Titan IVs, and the final one in 2011 aboard a Delta IV—at an estimated cost of $2.2 to 3 billion.

The end of the Cold War certainly put a damper on reconnaissance satellite funding, as did the rise of commercial satellite technology, but it remains a staple of our intelligence gathering resources. The technology has also found new use in providing tactical information to ground troops (not having to catch film canisters with sky hooks helps). Satellite imagery was first used in 1991 during Desert Shield and again in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan (above).

[Raytheon - NRO - FAS 1, 2 - Wiki 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 - Oneonta - Images: NRO, CIA, NASA]

When I was growing up, my parents would tell me about all the ancient technologies they had to use in their youth. Whether it was a car with a manual choke, a phone that required you to ask an operator to connect you, or a record player with a hand crank, mom and dad experienced a ton of tech frustrations I would never know.

As my 1-year-old upgrades his speech capability, I expect to tell him about these 10 awesome tech frustrations that he'll never experience. I hope he feels sorry for me, at least a little bit.

As old tech gives way to the faster, newer, and shinier, we can't help but feel a few pangs of nostalgia for our gadgets of yore—even if just for the trouble they caused. Laptop Mag's Avram Piitch takes us on a tour of all those technology-born pains in the ass that new generations will never have the joys of knowing.

Glacially Slow Dial-Up Internet

I've been using cable Internet since 1999, but I'll never forget the excitement of dial-up Internet. Barring a broadband apocalypse, my son will be able to count on boringly consistent connectivity throughout his life. Dial- up was like a box of chocolates; you never knew what you were going to get.

Listening to the modem dial was like watching a croupier spin the roulette wheel. I'd hold my breath as it punched the final number. Would I get a busy signal, or would it just keep ringing until I hit the cancel button and tried again? Even when my ISP's modem picked up, I was on pins and needles for at least 30 seconds while I heard the familiar "boing, boing, bing" of its handshaking process. In the end, I could come out a winner with a speedy 56K connection or take the penny prize with a 14.4 Kbps rate that took 10 minutes to download a single photo.

Flimsy Floppy Disks

These days, you have to work pretty hard to lose your work. Everything my son writes, from his first scribbles to his college term papers, will be preserved in the cloud for his great- grandchildren to see.

When I was growing up, we had flimsy 5.25-inch floppy disks to save our data. Unlike today's flash drives that survive 30 minutes under water, these fallible floppies could fall victim to magnets, heat or even overuse. Even better, it took a good very long time to save a document, making you less likely to write to disk while you worked.

More: 7 Ways to Reboot the Crashing PC Market

Germ-Ridden Pay Phones

Throughout his life, my son will never be out of pocket, because he'll always have a phone or some communication device with him. However, when I was growing up, the only way to reach out and touch someone from the road was to use a payphone.

These days, you'll have an easier time finding a drive-in movie theater than a working payphone — and for good reason. The ear pieces on these contagion kiosks were about as sanitary as a public toilet seat that hadn't been cleaned in years. Even worse, I never had the right amount of change, so I had to use a pricey calling card. Remember those?

More: The 10 Hottest Smartphones Available Now

Ambiguous Pager Messages

By the time my son is in kindergarten, he'll probably be wearing a headset that beams full emails into his retina while he walks around. But his father was excited to get an alpha numeric pager that buzzed with a caller's phone number.

Unfortunately, when you received a page, you often didn't know whose number it was and what that person wanted until you returned the call. I can't tell you how many times I ran to the nearest payphone just to call back telemarketers or strangers who paged the wrong number.

More: 10 Best Smartphones of All TIme

Renting and Rewinding a VHS Tape

When I sit down on the couch with my son and show him all my favorite movies, they'll be streaming from the cloud right to our tablet or TV. So he'll spray milk from his nose when I tell him about how we used to rent VHS tapes from a store.

When you think about it, every single aspect of the video- rental process was an exercise in frustration. First, you had to drive to the store and hope it still had available copies of the movie you wanted, but more often than not, you'd come for "Pearl Harbor" and settle for "Pootie Tang." You then had 24 hours to watch the film and bring it back fully rewound or risk painful penalties. I'll never forget standing in front of my VCR rooting for it to rewind the tape more quickly so I could speed out to Blockbuster in an ice storm and get it there by 11:59 p.m.

More: 10 Future-Proof Gadgets You'll Still Love Next Year

Dot Matrix Printing

If and when my son actually needs to output something to paper, the inkjet will print it in full color on a glossy piece of paper within a minute or so. If he needs more paper, he'll just load regular 8.5- x 11-inch pages into a tray and be done.

He'll never have the same sense of satisfaction I experienced after finally aligning the holes on my ream of paper with the sprockets on my dot matrix printer and waiting 20 minutes for it to print 10 pages of black-and-white text. The printing process was so slow and painful that teenage girls could use "I need to print tonight" as an excuse to get out of a date instead of classics like "I need to dry my hair" or "something suddenly came up."

More: 15 Technologies My Newborn Son Won't Use

Writing in Palm Graffiti

Today's best software is like a pair of comfortable shoes; it adapts to the user's existing preferences over time. My son's first computer, phone and tablet will undoubtedly learn from him, predicting the next word he'll type or song he'll listen to, based on his previous activity.

Growing up in a world where personalization is king, my kid will be surprised to hear that there was once a device that forced you to learn an entirely new alphabet just to enter text. An entire generation of PalmOS PDAs required you to write in Graffiti, a synthetic alphabet that was designed to make it easy for the device to read your scribbles.

More: 10 Biggest BlackBerry 10 Annoyances

Dithered Web Graphics

If my son sees a picture that has a limited color pallette, it'll be on Instagram. Back when the Web was new, however, a lot of video cards and color monitors could show only 256 different colors (8-bit color) on screen at once.

With 8-bit color, photos appeared grainy because the computer had to use dithering technology to approximate more colors than it could actually show at once. Even the desktop wallpaper and icons in Windows looked pixilated when used in 8-bit color mode. When I finally got a 16-bit video card, the entire Internet looked different.

More: What Were They Thinking? 6 Most Senseless Gadgets

Adjusting the Rabbit Ears on Your TV

Whether it's a streaming video from the Internet or an HD channel on cable TV, the videos my son watches all appear at the press of a button. On the rare occasion that he has to wait for buffering or the picture freezes, there's not a lot anyone can do about it.

When I tell him that I grew up poking and prodding the rabbit-ear antennas on top of the TV just to get a decent picture, he'll throw his sippy cup across the room. Unfortunately, for decades before cable and digital TV, everyone had to get up from the couch and periodically fiddle with the TV antennas, because the picture would suddenly get wonky. A whole generation of children were charged with this task.

More: 10 Best TV Apps

Developing a Photo

If my son wants to take a picture of something, all he needs to do is point his smartphone, tablet, digital camera or webcam at the object and click a button. In about a second, he'll have a completed digital image he can edit, print or share with the world.

When his dad was growing up, most pictures were taken on film cameras with two dozen shots per roll and no ability to see them until they were developed. Sometimes, it would be weeks or months before you finished a roll and had it developed. Even Polaroid pictures took several minutes to appear. By that time, if someone had red eye or was looking away in a shot, it was too late to capture another image.

More: Action Cams Tested: What's the Best Outdoor Camera?

Related Content:

• 15 Current Technologies We'll Still Be Using in 2030
• 13 Tech Sounds You Just Don't Hear Anymore
• The 15 Most Overpriced Gadgets of All Time

Image: Shutterstock/Alexey Losevich

Republished with permission from Laptop Mag. Laptopmag.com brings you in-depth reviews of the hottest mobile products, the latest tech news, helpful how-to advice, and expert analysis of the latest tech trends.

The Atom, a Kickstarter project that launches today, is a small device that connects to your bike and converts the mechanical, locomotive energy into an electrical charge for your gadgets. In practical terms, it will charge an iPhone one percent for every two minutes of pedaling. That should be enough to at least keep the battery meter from dropping while you're using an intensive navigation program. It can charge your device directly via included USB cables, or it can charge its own removable 1300mAh battery, which you can take with you when you stop and use as an external battery for your phone.

The rub for the Atom is that it's super small, easy to install, and, supposedly, reliable. It's a low-profile, weather-proof, 10.5 ounce device. It feeds your device the same amount of power as the USB port on your computer (5 volts at 500 mAh), so it can charge anything your laptop can (including lights, phones, bike computers, and GPS devices).

Where Siva's Atom really shines is how easy it is to install and use. You pop off your bike wheel's quick-release, pop the Atom onto the axle, and then pop the wheel back onto the bike. Done. No bike shop required, no extra hardware needed. Pretty slick. Siva claims it delivers 80 percent efficiency—meaning 80 percent of the energy it's siphoning off of your pedaling actually makes its way to your gadget—which is an impressive number if it bears out. More energy for the same amount of pedaling. The key to that is the 3:1 internal gearing, so it's as if your bike's wheel is spinning much faster than it really is.

Of course, adding any generator will cost your legs something. Siva estimates that using the Atom is about like adding a 0.3 percent grade, which translates to a verrrrrrry gentle incline, to your ride. That's the kind of thing your legs will get used to after a few rides (obviously, take it off if you're going to be racing).

It's no harder (or easier) to steal that your rear wheel, since that's what it's attached to, so you'll want to make sure you lock your bike in a way that the wheel can't be disengaged. Or just remove it and take it with you.

Now, there are other bike-powered generators out there. The most common (and cheapest) type is known as a bottle cap generator. It's essentially a contraption that is mounted to your frame or seat-post and has a little bottle cap-like wheel that is spun by your spinning tire. They are, however, not super reliable, as it's pretty easy for the cap to become disengaged with the wheel. They also aren't particularly efficient—they typically hover around 50 percent efficiency, with some high-end models claiming as much as 70 percent. The other type of generator is a dynamo hub. This is where the generator is put right in to the hub of your wheel. It's a more efficient and reliable system (typically 65 to 70 percent efficiency), however, it has to be built into your wheel, which isn't cheap ($250-300, plus instillation). Both of these generator types have another problem: they deliver raw current. For charing a gadget, you need a nice, steady current that doesn't surge or ebb based on how hard you're pedaling. So for both of these types you need to buy an additional device to regulate the current and make it usable, and that device has got to be stored somewhere on the bike, typically in a saddlebag. The Atom, supposedly, lets you sidestep all that extra cost and bulk.

The Atom's Kickstarter project launches today. The first two hundred or so can get one for the early-bird price of $85. After those are gone, they'll go for $95, which is still a good deal if it works as advertised. When it eventually hits retail in the fall, the MSRP will probably be $105. The components are made in China and the U.S., and they are assembled stateside. Siva is hoping to ship units in October and November of this year. Also, there's a humanitarian element: for every 10 Atoms they sell, they will donate one to a developing country. Warms the cockles of the heart.

Obviously, this isn't for racer types who try to shave every gram off their bikes and be as efficient as possible. And it comes with the usual buyer beware warnings attached to any Kickstarter. But hypothetically at least, it's for the millions of bike commuters and weekend explorers. Drivers get to charge their devices while they drive, why shouldn't bicycle commuters? [Kickstarter]

Editor's note: This is part two of a series of introductory pieces on watches from our friends at Hodinkee. You can read part one here.

The mechanical chronograph is perhaps the most recognizable complication to be seen on the watch since the late 60's. It is also one of the least understood. Often confused with a chronometer, the chronograph is simply a stopwatch integrated into a wristwatch. Pretty simple, right?

The first things you'll notice about chronographs are the extra subdials and the buttons, or pushers, along the side of the case (or sometimes on top). These pushers start, stop, and reset the timing function, while the rest of the watch runs as usual.

A press of the top pusher brings the chronograph dials to life, starting with the long, centered seconds hand. Every trip that hand makes around the dial will be recorded in one of the sub dials. Some record up to 30 minutes, while others go a step further and record up to 12 hours with the help of an additional sub dial. Another press of that top pusher stops timing and the bottom pusher resets everything.

Mechanical chronographs have had a certain cool guy cachet since the late 60s, when most of the iconic models were designed. Sure they have been around much longer, but Apollo Astronauts strapping Omega Speedmasters to their space suits and Formula 1 drivers sporting Heuer chronographs on the track did wonders for their popularity. Some of the coolest watches of all time came from this era, including the Rolex Daytona and the iconic Heuer Monaco.

There are also all kinds of more esoteric chronographs that are variations on the basic theme. Some use a center minutes hand, some feature only one pusher that does all the functions, and others beat extremely fast to track tiny slivers of time.

Sure, these days you can whip out your iPhone and time anything down to tenths of a second, but if you want to cook al dente pasta, avoid parking meter expirations, or time your bike rides like Buzz Aldrin, look at your wrist instead.

A recent Wall Street Journal article posits an interesting question: Is Apple a hardware company or a software company? Does it sell iPhones or iClouds? The answer has deep meaning for the analysts who evaluate the company's worth. It's framed as an identity crisis, one with dangerous implications for the most dominant consumer electronics company in the world. There is much gnashing of teeth.

Let's save them the anguish. Apple isn't a hardware company, or a software company. It's not iOS or iMac. Apple, like Google and Microsoft and anyone else that wants to survive in the 21st century, sells only one thing: an ecosystem. The most powerful one in the world.

What Apple realized before anybody—and what Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have slowly but aggressively come around to—is that the act of buying a phone or a tablet or a computer isn't an isolated incident. Gadgets don't exist on islands. They're one-way tickets to platform archipelagos, to fiercely guarded fiefdoms where everything works in harmony within walls that are high and strong. And the longer you're inside, the harder it is to leave.

An iPhone isn't just an iPhone. It's access to nearly a million apps that only work on Apple products, to 1.5 million books that you can't read on a Kindle. It's a remote for your Apple TV, a place to pluck your iTunes music and movies out of thin air. You don't buy an iPhone for the A6 processor or for iOS 6. You buy an iPhone for Apple, every bit as much as you buy a Chromebook Pixel for Google or an Xbox for Microsoft.

That's the endgame. An ecosystem so interconnected, entwined so tightly, that you can't leave even if you wanted to. It's not hardware, or software. It's a family of products, apps, services, and accessories with the gravitational pull of a black hole. And Apple, today, simply does it better than anybody else.

It's true—and wonderful—that Android is giving Apple the best competition it's had in the mobile space since forever. And that Microsoft is pursuing relevance with the dogged patience that Gerard pursued Dr. Richard Kimble. But breaking up with Apple isn't as easy as divorcing Dell. We're willing captives of our gadgets of choice these days, and the ransom for leaving—new chargers, new apps, even the time spent just getting set up—is often too damn high.

Why do these categorizations—hardware company, software company, neither, both—matter in the real world? They don't much, day to day, not to you and me. But to Wall Street analysts, pressured to quantify every aspect of a company's performance and impact, it matters a great deal. Hardware companies are vulnerable to consumer wanderlust and technological leapfrogging; just ask Sony how many Walkmen it's sold lately. Software companies, though, are nimble, and they have more opportunities for repeat business.

It doesn't take an MBA to figure out how Wall Street views Apple. The company's stock price has plummeted since last fall, making $280 billion in value vanish in just six months. To them, Apple's a hardware company, or at best, a hardware company that also sells software. And when Cupertino reports its earnings this afternoon, analysts will scramble to explain why more iPhones weren't sold, why laptops are a dying breed. What they can't see, and what anyone who actually uses these things day to day knows instinctively, is that all of that is secondary.

All that matters is the size of the garden, the strength of its walls. If you want to know what Apple's worth, figure out a way to quantify that.