Ralph Lauren's Solar Backpack

So let’s say that you’re a hiking enthusiast how also has an array tech gadgets. What happens when your phone or iPod runs out of juice? All you would have to do is plug into nifty the Ralph Lauren RLX Solar Panel Backpack and you’d be good to go. Now this isn’t the first solar but it’s definitely the best looking one. It comes in both black and orange but will set you back up $795.

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Droid Bionic Delayed Until Summer

Even though the Motorola Droid Bionic was announced early this year at CES alongside Verizon’s HTC Thunderbolt and its AT &T counterpart the Motorola Atrix, it’s just be confirmed that its launch will be delayed until this summer. Even then, it’s been said that it will then later be available for purchase sometime during the third quarter (late summer). So basically we are looking at a release date of sometime between late September and early October, a far reach from the proposed quarter one – quarter two launch date. A Motorola spokesperson says that the reason for the delay was that the company is “incorporating several enhancements to make this an even better consumer experience.” This most likely due to feedback they received since the Bionic was displayed back at CES. I personally hope Motorola address the issue of user interface lag that plagues most of their phones. As demonstrated in the video below, it doesn’t compare to the responsiveness of other phones such as HTCs and the Apple iPhone. I think if they address that issue during this release delay then it will be well worth it and the Bionic might have a change when going head to head with other devices.

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Your iPhone Is Secretly Tracking Your Location

With over 50 million units sold, chances are you have an Apple iPhone. If you do, you might want to start worrying as just last Wednesday, two security researchers discovered that the iPhone keeps a detailed record of everywhere you go and have gone since you first activated your phone. Yikes.


The What
It turns out that each iPhone periodically records your latitude and longitude coordinates along with the time, to the second, that you were there. These records are kept on the iPhone in a file called “consolidated.db” and are then synced to which ever computer you use to sync to iTunes each time you connect your iPhone. Even worse, anybody can easily access this file, either from your iPhone or computer, meaning that anyone who stole your iPhone or the computer could discover details about your movements. As one of the security experts, Pete Walden, describes, “Apple has made it possible for almost anybody – a jealous spouse, a private detective – with access to your phone or computer to get detailed information about where you've been.”


“But can’t you just turn location services off?” You can but, that won’t solve the problem as iPhone, as well most other phones, can get it’s coordinates from cell phone towers, not just GPS. What it does is it “pings” three separate cell phone towers and using the response time it can triangulate its coordinates. However this isn’t the first instance of such techniques. Most cellular providers like AT&T already do this and can always store this data. Law enforcement officials can also access this information too like if they need to know your location due to a 911 call (or prank one). But this is the first instance of this information being available to anyone with access to your phone or computer. In addition, there appears to be no reason why Apple is collecting this data and why they don’t allow users to opt-out of the service.


The Apple iPhone also seems to be the only smartphone that records the user’s every location onto an onboard log. The other security research, Alasdair Allan, has looked for similar tracking codes in Google’s Android phones and was not able to find any. "We haven't come across any instances of other phone manufacturers doing this,” says Warden. Whenever you startup a brand new Android phone, Google prompts you to agree to the following terms: "Allow Google's location service to collect anonymous data. Collection will occur even when no applications are running." Gizmodo sent an inquiry to Google asking what it exactly meant but Google refused to respond for the record. However it does appear that the anonymous location data collection is not kept permanently and is an opt-in service unlike the iPhone’s. Gizmodo also asked Microsoft about their Windows 7 phones and they replied that the only location data stored on the phone is your last known location, most likely for use with the Find My Phone feature. As soon as a new location is recorded, the previous data is erased.


The Why
So why exactly is Apple secretly recording your location data? John Gruber has a possible explanation: it’s just a bug. According to Gruber and his Apple insider sources, the location tracking is most likely an oversight. He says the log is probably supposed to be as log that only records a limited number of locations and will delete any old entries but currently isn’t due to a coding mistake. “. I.e. someone wrote the code to cache location data but never wrote code to cull non-recent entries from the cache, so that a database that’s meant to serve as a cache of your recent location data is instead a persistent log of your location history. I’d wager this gets fixed in the next iOS update.” This definitely a possibility as both Android and Windows 7 phones work in a similar way.


Should You Be Worried?
John Gruber provides some comforting news for those of you were preparing your tin foil hats. First of all, the location database isn’t really storing your exact GPS data. What it is doing is just making a rough location fix based on triangulation of cell towers. That means that the aforementioned database can’t reveal where you were, but only the approximate vicinity of where you were. Even better, the location recorded can be miles off course. Gruber suggests that this means that the log’s purpose is to track the performance of the phone and the network, and not to snoop on the user’s location. Second of all, this information is only accessible with physical access to your iPhone or computer. This means that information can’t be sold to companies for advertising such as other privacy exploits. So only if you’ve jailbroken your iPhone and didn’t change the remote-access password or another exploit occurred, no one on the internet will have access to your data. Finally, an easy fix to patch up the computer vulnerability is to check the “Encrypt iPhone Backup” option in iTunes. This prevents anyone, even with physical access to your computer, from accessing your location data.


What Else Can You Do?
Other than encrypting your iPhone backups you can use a nice little jailbroken app called “Untracked” which will provided a fix for the tracking issue. What it does it is it simply deletes the “consolidated.db” file every time it’s created erasing all record of where you’ve been. All you have to do is simply download the app and it will run in the background and will keep your location records nice and clean. The only downside to this app is that its requires a jailbroken iPhone so that’s a little inconvenient.

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How To Torrent

Some of you are already wondering what Torrenting means. Torrenting is when you can share files with other peers through internet from one location to another, this is also known as P2P, or peer to peer sharing. So this means anything that anyone else wants to share you can download i.e. music, videos, programs, and pictures. If this sounds appealing to you then continue learning as I teach you how to torrent.

First there are many torrenting clients you can use such as: utorrent, bitorrent, limewire, and vuze. Personally my favorite is utorrent because it is the lightest and most efficient. So you can go here and download the latest utorrent program. Now you don't need to use this at all until later. So utorrent will download torrent files from the internet. These torrent files can be found anywhere on the internet and consist of things like music and movies. So you can go to Google and type in anything then torrent and you can download the torrent and then open it with utorrent or any client you may have downloaded. There are some websites that have good databases of torrents such as here and here. After you open it with a torrent client it will download to your computer. You have to be very careful while doing this though because people can share anything like illegal music and movies and viruses. To avoid viruses always check the comments of a torrent to see if people give it good reviews and say that it is virus free. There you have it now you can download anything you want to your computer from the internet.

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any illegal activity due to this tutorial

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Top 5 iPod Apps

My top 5 favorite apps for the iPod touch and iPhone, in no certain order, are as follows:

Palringo:
This app is a messaging app that allows you to connect to most chatting clients such as: Facebook, Windows Live, Yahoo, Google talk, and Aim. This application can keep you online when you can’t find wifi with your iDevices. So when you log back on you can see all the messages you missed.


Remote:
This app is very useful because it allows you to control iTunes on the computer with you iPod and change the song and volume no matter where you are as long as you have internet. This saves money because apple sells remotes to control their computers and this is a sufficient replacement for that device.


Peggle:
This isn't a very useful app but it by far is one of the most entertaining ones out there. The game consists of shooting a pinball around trying to hit as many pegs on the screen as possible. There are many levels and many power ups that provide many hours of enjoyment.


WifiTrak:
This app allows you to utilize Wi-Fi more than the iPod settings can do, it receives farther internet and shows you internet that is hidden. It also automatically connects to open Wi-Fi.


Winterboard:
This app is only available from Cydia which means your iPod has to be jailbroken. This app will allow you to apply any theme that you want. This includes changing apps, changing lock screens and changing the charging battery icon

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Android App of the Week

This week the Android app of the week is exclusive to the HTC Thunderrbolt. Earlier this week a Skype Mobile app was leaked and was found to have video confrencing. I was skeptical of this release and I went and downloaded it to test the video calling. It turns out, to my surprise, that it actually worked and it worked even on 3g (bad quality though). Skype has been anticipated on Android for quite a while now and I'm sure that it will be released for all phones with a front facing camera soon. If you are having trouble finding it you can download it here. Thanks you and thats all for this week stay tuned next week for the Android app of the week.

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The One Mile High Kingdom Tower

Saudi Arabia has just announced its plans to construct, the Kingdom Tower, a one mile tall building that take the crown for the world’s tallest structure. To give you some perspective the former tallest structure in the world was Dubai’s Burj Khalifa sitting at 2700 feet high. The Kingdom Tower, also known as the Mile-High Tower in Arabic, is set not only to break that record but shatter it by nearly doubling it with a standing of approximately 2500 feet (just in case you didn’t know how many feet were in a mile, not saying that you don’t).


The Kingdom Tower was commissioned by Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal, the head of Kingdom Holding Company which is the largest company in Saudi Arabia. That’s a good thing as it’s billed to cost about 30 billion US dollars to construct and included up to 12 million cubic feet of space including, office space, hotel rooms, and four tiers of residential area. [Click here for the a general building plan.] The last 800 feet is planned to be used for “alternative energy generation”. Possibly a wind/solar combo to help generate power for the building? Maybe it’ll make enough to sell off and pay for the hefty price tag.

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Navy Lasers Burn Ships

Once only things of science fiction, weaponized lasers are finally being shown to have real world potential. Only just a couple of weeks ago, off the coast of central California, the Office of Naval Research put their Maritime Laser Demonstrator (creative name I know), aboard decommissioned destroyer, the USS Paul. The solid-state laser (meaning it uses a solid medium to create the laser as opposed to a liquid or gas medium) fired a 15-killowat beam at an inflatable boat about a mile away with both ships bobbing out in the sea. Flames suddenly appeared on the boats outboard engines as the boat’s engines began to burst into flames. (Check out the video below for a better look.)

This is a big step for laser development as before, laser testing was only done on steady ground. But this is the first success for being able to do a test on a dynamically changing target. In addition, this isn’t the first successful test of a weaponized laser. Previously, lasers have been used as incapacitation weapons by temporarily inducing vision loss. The US Air Force is developing the YAL-1 airborne laser which is designed to shoot down enemy ballistic missiles from a Boeing 747, though testing has been rather unpromising. However, development for lasers used for direction destruction has been fairly recent. In 2009, Northrop Grumman developed an electric CO2 laser powerful enough to create a 100 kilowatt beam, capable of destroying an airplane or tank.


I’m thinking that once they get this further developed, all you need to do is put the laser and a powerful railgun onto a US destroyer and you’ll have one unbeatable warship.

No not a Gundam.

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Railgun Round Punches Through Steel Plates At Mach 5

We’ve covered the sheer destruction that railguns can unleash before here on the Gizmo-Teched but they only have been firing what have been called “hypersonic bricks”. Although these bricks can already do a lot of damage, but defense contractor General Atomics is looking for something even better. They, with the help of Boeing, created a new “sabot” round that will be aerodynamic and can punch a hole in a steel plate and can still travel for another 4 miles.

Now a sabot round is a military technical term for a device that used in a firearm (mainly tanks these days) to shoot a projectile that is a smaller diameter than the cannon itself. Specifically in today’s terms sabot rounds are used in tanks to penetrate targets with kinetic energy which if punctured will create heat and pressure waves thereby destroying the target. Other techniques used in tank rounds are chemical rounds such as high explosive anti-tank (HEAT) rounds. These use an explosive charge to create a high-velocity jet of plasma metal to punch through armor. Now while that may seem pretty good, they are several types of modern armor made to deflect these rounds and make them ineffective. That’s why many modern tanks today use armor-piercing discarding sabot (APDS) and armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot (APFSDS), that later is currently used in the US Army’s M1 Abram.

APFSDS rounds, also known as kinetic energy penetrators, work through the principle of the kinetic energy: mass and velocity. The main idea of kinetic energy weapons is to maximize kinetic energy and minimize the area which it is delivered to. It can do this through various techniques such as being fired with a very high exit velocity, concentrating its force to a very small impact area yet still retaining a relatively large mass, and finally maximizing the mass of the projectile. To achieve the later technique, dense metals are often used, which is why sometimes depleted uranium rounds are employed.

Theoretically, the best design for a KE penetrator would be a long, thin rod, sort of like an arrow. However, rods are characteristically unstable during flight and tend tumble, thus making it not that accurate. In addition, shells, such as those in artillery, in past have been given inflight stability through rifling which gives the round a spin. However, this is not affective with rounds that are much longer than the diameter of the barrel. The solution would be to add fins, just like the base of an arrow. Rifling also decreases the effectiveness of penetrate of KE penetrator rounds by taking away from the linear energy by rotational energy. This why arms that use APFSDS rounds use smoothbore guns, which are guns that don’t have rifled barrel. In addition most modern tanks use smoothbore guns because rifling takes away from the effectiveness of HEAT rounds as well.

Ok enough background info, back to the new railgun round. So after the some initial testing at Dugway Proving Grounds (a US army testing facility near Salt Lake City) after “launching hypersonic bricks at Mach 5, Mach 6,”the guys from General Atomics were confident that the railgun was operationally. According to Defense Tech, these “hypersonic bricks” were not that aerodynamic and occasionally tumbled out of control. The more aerodynamic round is a sabot which consists of a three part system. The first is the armature which is used to propel the round out of the barrel of the gun. This doesn’t include the any propellant used to move the round but instead is to help push it with the force of the railgun. The second piece is the fin component of the sabot which is used to keep the round stable in the round as well as in the air. Once the sabot has left the barrel, the fins separate and the penetrating part of the round is remaining. During testing the round was fired at zero gun elevation (zero degrees of elevation) and traveled at about 1600 meters per second. Even after punching through a solid steel plate 100 meters downrange, the round traveled for another 7km!

General Atomics is planning on putting this beast of gun on the Navy’s DDG-51 destroyers. Already in the talks, they plan on having a demo of the weapon at sea within 4 years and then in production and on the battlefield within 3. Being able to punch solid holes through ships is terrifying so I would hate to be on the business end of a railgun armed with these rounds.

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HTC Not Upgrading Other Phones to Sense 3.0

HTC announced today that they will not ugrade older phone to sense 3.0 via twitter and that only their dual core phones and new tablets will be pre-installed with the software. They claim that older hardware wont be able to support it. Many developers will probably take it upon themselves to prove HTC wrong and build the own roms that use the 3.0 software. So the phones and devices that will recieve it are the HTC Sensation, EVO 3D, and the two tablets the HTC Flyer and the EVO VIEW from Sprint. Im suer in a short amount of time develpoers on xda forums will have working 3.0 roms for the Thunderbolt and Incredible S and other new but not too old phones.

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HTC Sensation

The HTC Sensation is one of the most anticipated phones. It was previously known as the Pyramid but was released April 12th as the Sensation. It is HTC's first dual core phone. It shows real promise to the growing Android phone selection. It will also have the 3.0 HTC Sense, this is the most advanced HTC Sense. It is an amazing UI and after watching videos I am very anxious to have it on the thunderbolt and test it out. HTC is quickly becoming an empire in the smartphone business I am excited to see what else they keep coming out with. 

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Android App of the Week

Phones are becoming like computer more and more everyday. So why is it we haven't seen any virus protection on our phone? Now we have. Android and iOS have recently suggested that you install anti-virus programs such as Antivirus for android available for free in the Android market. This is because lately it has become popular and possible for a website to install a virus onto your phone without you noticing anything wrong until it's too late. They could look a your passwords or just break your phone causing you a lot of pain and time. So just by regularly scanning for viruses you can protect your phone from any type bad thing that could happen.

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Robotic Animals: The SmartBird

Watch the video above. Be honest, if you hadn’t known that it was a robot, you would of really thought that it was a really bird. The new nature inspired SmartBird can take off, fly, and land on it owns able to flap its wings in realistic and judging the video, even turn its head.


The SmartBird was designed by German industrial control and automation company, Festo, for its Bionic Learning Network which already includes an elephant trunk like mechanical arm and robotic jellyfish (more on these in future posts). The Bionic Learning Network is a cooperation between Festo and several universities throughout the US and Europe whose goal use nature as a model for biomechatronics and automation technology.

The robotic bird is about 6.5 feet from wing to wing so it’s bigger than the Herring Gull that it was modeled after. How it works is that it uses an active torsion system to twist the wings how a real bird instead of like flaps that are in airplanes. In addition, the wings and tail are the only mechanisms creating lift which make it look so realistic. The SmartBird’s wings each consist of a two-part arm wing with an axle bearing on the torso. This combined with a fully integrated lift and propulsion system along with a bending torso for directional control allows for natural movement and propulsion.


As Festo explained on their website, “This bionic technology-bearer, which is inspired by the herring gull, can start, fly and land autonomously – with no additional drive mechanism. Its wings not only beat up and down, but also twist at specific angles. This is made possible by an active articulated torsional drive unit, which in combination with a complex control system attains an unprecedented level of efficiency in flight operation. Festo has thus succeeded for the first time in creating an energy-efficient technical adaptation of this model from nature.”


This obviously a big step for biomechanics as mastering flight has been one of the biggest challenges for humans. I relation to rest of the world’s major innovations, controlled flight was only achieved just a little more than one hundred years ago. However, I personally don’t see much potential use for realistic bird flight. Like almost all technology, this could be easily implemented in the military field as an unmanned aerial vehicle to be used for surveillance. It doesn’t seem possible that this kind of technology can be scaled up or even be used to as small cargo transport as well. Oh well, only time will tell.

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HTC Locking Down For Good?

Usually, it’s been easy to root your HTC Android phone and do anything you wanted with it. Thus HTC Andriods have been generally regarded to being “hacker” friendly phones unlike, their Apple iPhone counter parts. However when experienced Andriod development team, AndIRC, reportedly spend their first 72 hours with the new HTC Thunderbolt trying to root it, HTC’s might not be as friendly after all.


Many in the hacker community found difficulties in trying to prepare the Thunderbolt for custom ROMS as it had a variety of obstacles such as signed kernel, signed recovery image and a signed bootloader. As the folks at Androidpolice.com said, “HTC tried to stop us. They made signed images, a signed kernel, and a signed recovery. They locked the memory. In short, the ThunderBolt is their most locked-down phone to date.”


While they were successful at rooting the Thunderbolt, more issues are predicted to come along in the future. The same guys from AndIRC report the Incredible S having a signature check much like the one on the ThunderBolt. This means if you try to flash a custom recovery image on your phone, it will try to check the signature and will block access if anything is different than the stock HTC signature. Could this mean the end of a hacker-friendly HTC?

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Sony's New Mobile Gaming Beast

With the emergence of the Apple App Store an entire new market for mobile gaming opened up. Now with the multitude of Android phones and tablets in addition to Apple products, the opportunities are endless. Even though you can get everything from intense shooters like Call of Duty to simple arcade games like Tetris, there are still games that are just not playable on these devices because of the lack of pure muscle and input options. This next device I am going to talk about has no shortage of either...actually it has the most input options and is by far the most powerful of any mobile gaming system available.

I am talking about Sony’s newest version of the PSP and it’s been dubbed the NGP (next generation portable). Sony says that the NGP is based around 5 concepts:  Revolutionary User Interface, Social Connectivity, Location-based Entertainment, Converging Real and Virtual (augmented) Reality. They have also decided to change from their iconic XMB user interface to what they call LiveArea and Sony has decided to ditch the UMD (thank god) to something different.

Now to the actual specs of the device…brace yourselves. The NGP has  a quad-core CPU, a quad-core GPU, 5-inch touch screen OLED display with 960 x 544 resolution, dual analog sticks, 3G, WiFi, GPS, a rear-mounted touchpad, the same accelerometer / gyroscope motion sensing as in the PlayStation Move, an electronic compass, and cameras on both the front and back…….what!?!? It seems like Sony went to their warehouse of stuff, picked every single thing that even seemed remotely cool and stuck it on the NGP.

The first thing that hit me was that this thing has a quad-core CPU, which by itself is impressive seeing that even the top of the line tablets are only dual-core, but it also has a separate quad core GPU!! The only reason you would need that much power is if you were for some reason trying to play a full PS3 game directly on the NGP without any conversions…..oh wait, Sony has already demoed a NGP doing just that. At Sony’s live event, a NGP was shown playing a cut scene pulled directly from the PS3 game, Metal Gear Solid 4 and it played perfectly without a hitch. There were also many demos of very graphics intense games such as Killzone, Resistance, Little Big Planet and Uncharted all working without a hitch. Click here to go to Engadget's page with videos of the NGP in action.

Next, what makes the NGP so unique is that not only does it have a giant 5 inch touch screen which has QUADRUPLED (!!!) the resolution of the previous the PSP, but the back of the NGP is a giant touch pad, kind of like the touchpad of a laptop. Since this has never been done before, no one really knows how useful the touchpad will be. Maybe it will just be a gimmick but it also could prove to be revolutionary. In Uncharted, by swiping your fingers between the touchpad and the touch screen on the front it intuitively allows you to climb vines.

Besides the two different touch inputs, there is the usual set of buttons that were on the PSP except that there are two joysticks this time. This time they are real joysticks and not a weird nub thing that always falls off. The NGP also features the same motion sensing package that is in the Playstation Move. As with the touchpad, I really don’t see the usefulness for this right now but hopefully some developer will be able to implement into his game well enough to where it will actually improve the experience.

As I mentioned before, the NGP will be getting rid of the XMB and will be replacing it with what is called the LiveArea. Engadget describes it by saying it is “a bunch of vertically navigable home screens and built-in social networking through PlayStation Network. You can jump between games and the LiveArea without losing your progress and comment on your buddies' great feats of mobile gaming.” The NGP has also gotten rid of the infamous UMD games and has switched to some sort of system where games will be downloadable, similar to the Playstation GO.

There are still many things that haven't been answered yet such as what the resolution of the two cameras will be, what the 3G will be used for and who will provide it and battery life. Personally, I think that even if the NGP lives up to its hype, it won’t become a hit because what Sony is trying to do is bring console gaming to the mobile device. I don’t think that is what consumers really want. If someone wants to play a console game then they will play it on their console but on their mobile device games like Angry Bird and Doodle Jump are more than adequate. 

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Jailbroken App of the Week: Activator

One of my favorite Jailbroken packages is Activator. What it is is an app that allows you change the functionality of all your iPhone buttons from the home button to volume switches in addition to add custom multi-touch gestures.


For example, say you want to quickly change the current song that is playing on your iPod. Let’s say your driving as well. The only way to do test on the default iPhone is by first unlocking your iPhone, possibly putting in your passcode, and somehow hitting the next song button, that is if you already had Music open. That is pretty dangerous seeing how you would be forced to taking your eyes of the road. And only just recently had Apple added the Voice Control functionality. Voice Control is fine and all but you still have to unlock your iPhone and hope that your iPhone manages to hear “Next Song” instead the other different commands. However with Activator you can configure your iPhone to go to the next song when you hit volume down, then volume up within three seconds. This way you can safely change song without taking your eyes of the road, a much safer alternative.

Setting up an Activator event is super easy too. Once you have it installed, you will be brought to menu that will have the option “Anywhere”. If you want created an event that will be activated at any time including at the home screen, in an app, and at the lock screen, click on that. You can also create an event that will be limited to either, at the homescreen, in an application, or a lock screen. This can helpful if you only want to be change song with the volume switch only in an application but not while you are adjusting the volume from inside your pocket. From there you will be brought to list of buttons and available events to activate a variety of actions. For the sake of demonstrating, we will use my next song via volume switch idea. Scroll down the event list until you find “Down, Up” and click on that. There you will be able to choose a selection of actions including for this case “Next Song”. To finish the process all you need to click on that then you are done. You successfully create your first Activator action!


Another cool feature is Menus. The recently added function lets you have a menu pop up over whatever you were doing on your iPhone and will give you variety options that you can customize yourself. For example you set a menu to be activated when you triple tap the home button, and it can give you the option to either quit all apps, lock the device, pull up the multitasking dock, toggle airplane mode, toggle Wi-Fi, and more.


Probably the coolest part of Activator is that since it is pretty popular in the jailbreaking community, there are a lot of neat add-ons that tie with other packages. Just to name a few, Activator can be used with Music Controls Pro, iRealSMS, SBSettings, Backgrounder, and many more. In addition there are extra actions you can download such as brightness activator allows you to change the brightness by setting two different events, one for up the other for down. Another cool bonus action is AppQuit Activator which lets you set an event that will close the app that is in focus, which comes in handy when you don't feel like closing the app, opening the multitasking dock, and quit it from there. You can also create an event to kill all running apps, which is nice if things are starting to run slow on your iPhone. Best of all, add-ons for Activator come out pretty often, making an already extremely useful app even better.

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Backup Your Jailbroken Apps

The main problem with jailbreaking your iPhone is that when you update to a new version of iOS or you restore or it, none of your jailbroken apps (aka packages) are kept. This can be pain since then you have to find and download them all over again, and eventually repeat the process when you need to upgrade again. Those days are over as there are apps that will back up all your packages and will then restore them again. Here today, I will be showcasing off two the best package backup apps: AptBackup and PkgBackup.


AptBackup
The first one is called AptBackup and you can get from Cydia simply by searching for “AptBackup”. The app is free and while it doesn’t actually save and backup all your apps, it saves the names of all your packages and puts them onto a text file. It then saves that text file in a location that will automatically be synced whenever you restore or upgrade your iPhone. To perform a backup all you have to do is run AptBackup and you will be prompted at menu with two options “Backup” and “Restore”. Surprisingly, hitting back up will save all your packages to a text file which will be synced once a restore is performed. Clicking restore will retrieve that text file and then will download all the apps that are on the list. It is good to note that you can only perform a restore after you restore you iPhone. So if you were to upgrade your iPhone to a newer version of jailbroken iOS, you would first run AptBackup to backup all your packages. Then after upgrading, you would download AptBackup from Cydia and then it would download all the packages on the list. While it is not the most ideal way to backup all your jailbroken apps, it is a simple and easy way to do it.


PkgBackup
The second app is called PkgBackup and you can also get from Cydia straight from it’s included repositories. Here is the kicker though; its $7.99 that does not fare well against another app that can do the same thing for free. But in its defense it is slightly more advance than AptBackup. Let me explain what it does. Once you download the app from Cydia and run it. From there you will be at the main menu where it shows all your installed packages and lists some other options. From there you can click on the gear to go to setting on configure it some more. You can change whether it backups your apps via address book or Dropbox if you have a Dropbox account. The difference between the two is that it will create an addressbook file that you can sync to iTunes or it will transfer the backup file to your Dropbox account. There also options you can mess with such as automatically backing up your files on startup. Additionally you can specifically select which packages you want backed up and which ones you do not. Once you have everything configured, click on “Backup” and it will back them up. If you selected the address book option, sync your iPhone with iTunes to transfer the backup file. After restoring your iPhone, simply download PkgBackup again, run it and click on “Restore”. They are definitely much more options than AptBackup and it allows for more configuration so in my opinion it is the worth the $8 price tag. However you can decide for yourself if it is really worth. If your someone who regularly backs up their iPhone I think that it is worth the investment.

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Android App of the Week

This week I was installing a new printer in my house and wirelessly connected it to all my computers. After doing this I realized I might be able to print from my Android powered phone. So I did a little bit of searching and I found the perfect app that lets you print to you printer using WiFi.
The app is called PrinterShare and is $1.99 after a test page is applied to your printer to confirm that it works. So I tried it and it worked wonders and then I bought it and I can now print anything from my email, call logs, texts, and pictures. I would give this app a 5 out of 5 because how productive it is.

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How to Stop Facebook's Theater Mode

Are you tired of Fabook's theatirical mode when you try to view a picture? I am because it is slow and buggy. So that why I'm going to kill it. And I will guide you through how as well. First of all this whole guide will be made around Google Chromes web Browsers so if you dont have that I suggest you download it because it is the best browser out there. It is light and accessible to use and is supported by one of the fastest growing companies, Google. So if you have Google Chrome you can proceed to download the Facebook theater mode killer here. Basically what this does is take the "theater" part off the URL which makes Facebook change it back to normal. 

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Too Much TV for Kids

Everyone knows that kids spend too much time watching TV but studies are now showing that this could lead to irrevocable damage. In the journal, "Pediatrics" they found that "kids who spend hours each day in front of the TV or game consoles have more psychological difficulties like problems relating to peers, emotional issues, hyperactivity or conduct challenges, than kids who don't."

The study consisted of about 1000 10 to 11 year old kids who were asked to report their daily usage of the TV and the computer. For the duration of the study (a week), the kids wore an accelerometer around their waist. An accelerometer is the same thing that is inside a Wiimote that allows it to sense when it is moved. This allowed the researchers to monitor the physical activity levels of the kids. I, addition to all this, the kids took a 25 question quiz to test their psychological state.

The data showed that kids were spending anywhere from 0 to 5 hours of their time per day watching TV or using the computer. They also noticed that kids who spent two hours or more a day watching TV or playing on a computer were more likely to get high scores on the quiz. No, getting a high score is not a good thing, what it means is that the kids actually have more psychological difficulties in life such as relating to peers, emotional issues, hyperactivity, or conduct challenges.

Most people, along with the researchers thought that physical activity can easily counteract the adverse effects of TV and computer usage. So the researchers used the accelerometer data to test this theory. Unfortunately, the study found that even kids who were physically active but spent more than 2 hours in front of a screen per day had a much higher chance of getting psychological problems than kids who didn’t spend much time in front of the TV and computer.

This is definitely a problem that we as a society need to look into. A different study recently claimed that 92% of American children are online from the age of 2. Right now, the average 30 year old has been online for about 10 to 15 years. So in other words they came online when they were around 15. This is shocking seeing that now kids come online as soon as they are 2. This will not only lead to all the psychological problems that I mentioned above but it will also lead to an increase in physical problems such as eyestrain leading to increased eye glass use. 

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Smartphone with one feature that nobody else has

Have you ever been stuck in the middle of the ocean and needed to call someone desperately but had no cell phone service? Or maybe you are one of the bad guys from the show 24? Most are probably are not one of those people but this new phone is pretty cool nonetheless.  It is called the TerreStar Genus and not only can it connect to AT&Ts cell phone network but it also has the capability to function as a satellite phone. This is quite an unnecessary feature for the average person but if you are a fisherman or a park ranger in the mountains then this could be the perfect phone for you that is, if you can afford it. 


The phone itself costs about $800 and you are required to get a voice and data plan through AT&T but the upside is that there is no contract. On top of the normal monthly charges there is an extra $25 charge to be able to use the satellite phone service. Your probably thinking oh that’s not to bad, I pay $20 a month for unlimited text but oh how wrong you are… The 25 dollar charge does not give you ANY minutes; you have to pay an extra charge of $.65 a minute. You can also text message and use data over the satellite network, unfortunately the prices for these features are astronomical. For data, the price is $5 per MB which is measly 400 times the cost of non-satellite data! Text messages on the other hand are not nearly as outrageous at just $.40 per text which is only 4 times the price of non-satellite messaging. 


This is not the first commercially available satellite phone but it is one of the very few that are still in business though I doubt this one will last very long either with prices so high. This phone went on sale tuesday the 21^st so if your company (the phone is only available to busniness for now) has a lot of money to spend and happens to be located in the middle of the mountains or the ocean then call up AT&T and get yourself a TerreStar Genus!

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Qatar World Cup Will Have Artificial Clouds

If you haven’t heard already, Russia will host the 2018 World Cup and Qatar will host the 2022 World Cup. Wait, hold on, wasn’t the last World Cup held in South Africa just last year? I mean it seems kind of early to be thinking of the biggest event in soccer 11 years ahead. 2014 in Brazil seems a long ways away let alone Qatar and Russia. But seriously Russia and Qatar? One country is known for its chilling winters and the other for scorching deserts. I know soccer players are tough but come on!


Well at least Qatar seems to have gotten a head start on preparation as they plan to counter one of the biggest challenges: the heat. You see, Qatar is located in the Middle East, a country that mainly consists of low, barren plains, covered with sand. As a result, June and July, the time when the World Cup is held, are one of the hottest times for the country with temps reaching as high as 115 F and lows at a mild 84 F. Thus Qatar agreed to provide climate-controlled and zero-carbon emitting stadiums. But this is Qatar we’re talking about, the “Saudi Arabia of natural gas” with the highest GDP per capita in the Arab world and the second highest GDP per capita in the world according the CIA World Factbook. They have money to spend.


So of course, it shouldn’t be a surprise that researchers at Qatar University’s Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering are designing a fleet of artificial “clouds” to give some cloud coverage over spectators and players. The Qatari researchers say that they be able to have each one be solar-powered, will float via on-board helium pockets and will moved by remote controlled.


The university’s department head, Saud Abdul Ghani, says that the “Artificial clouds will move by remote control, made of 100 percent light carbonic materials, fueled by four solar-powered engines and will fly high to protect direct and indirect sun rays to control temperatures at the open playgrounds.”


The “clouds” are estimated to cost about a half a million each and seeing how they’re planning to build about a dozen eco-friendly stadiums, the price for development is going to pretty high. Maybe they can spend some money to research how to block out the sun completely. You know maybe like some kind of shade or something.

Yeah like that.

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April Fools!

Well today is April Fools and you know what that means, time to prank your friends. Woopie cushion? Nah, too old school. Here is a couple of cool computer related pranks that we have gathered up from the glorious internet to help scare your friends.


Cracked Wallpaper
Here is a quick and easy one; the classic cracked screen wallpaper. This is perfect if you are in a hurry and need to get a quick laugh. Here is a cracked wallpaper, perfect if you want to convince your friend that you accidentally drop his precious laptop. Aside from quickly setting it as their wallpaper, you can also go the extra mile and hide their desktop icons and set their taskbar to hide to give a more realistic feel. You could also to the classic, print screen their desktop and then set it as their wallpaper. They will be clicking at their icons and wondering why nothing is happening!


Blue Screen of Death Screen Saver
Whats better than someone thinking their screen is broken? Someone thinking their PC has gotten the dread Blue Screen of Death. Normally the BSoD only appears when something goes horribly, horribly wrong, with this it’ll appear when they leave their computer for a couple of minutes. Download it, ironically, from Microsoft right here.

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