Posted: 31 Dec 2010 06:30 AM PST

Your new Macbook is a brilliant Christmas present. One of the finest laptops known to man, the Macbook is a truly beautiful beast and we’ve been studying it for yonks to bring you its secrets. Read on to discover the five coolest tips and tricks for your new Macbook…

Gift your new Macbook longer battery life when you travel

To stretch your new Macbook’s battery life, turn off keybaord backlighting, switch off Bluetooth and dim the display to the lowest level. That’ll keep your new Macbook battery life to its longest possible amount which comes in very handy if you’re on a long flight without a power supply or stuck in the standard carriages on a train.

Get your new Macbook ready to travel
OS X allows you to set up locations and select system settings for that location. Make one called “on a plane” where all your Airport and other networking features are switched off. If your new Macbook isn’t constantly searching for WiFi you’ll save lots of battery life.

Keep your new Macbook awake
If you’re watching a video or film and don’t want your new Macbook to slumber in the middle of it, grab Caffeine. It’s a small app that puts an icon on your menu bar. Click it and your new Macbook will be stopped from sleeping, dimming the screen or activating the screensaver.

Power up your new Macbook’s wireless
WiFi hotspots use a specific channel. If you live somewhere with lots of WiFi access points clustered together like a block of flats your reception can suffer from interference. Use the iStumbler app to scan the area and find out what accesspoints are around you. Find out what channels your neighbours are using and then adjust yours accordingly. Set your network to at least two numbers higher or lower than your neighbours and your wireless performance will be perked up.

Cool your new Macbook down
Your new Macbook may get pretty hot when it starts working really hard. Thankfully there’s a free app to help you control the fanspeed of your new Macbook and get it to cool down a bit. With smcFanControl 2.1 you can adjust the fanspeed and monitor your new Macbook’s temperature. To make sure you don’t break your new Macbook, the app won’t operate at a fanspeed lower than OS X would choose automatically.

10 web services to try before 2011

Posted: 31 Dec 2010 04:00 AM PST

With Google’s Chrome OS nearly upon us, next year looks like it will be the big one for web apps. But you don’t need a Chrome OS computer to get cracking.

Before you throw yourself into the abandon of the New Year celebrations, fish out your laptop, fire up the Mac, park yourself in front of the PC and take a gander at our list of 10 web services to try before 2011.

mflow
Music streaming apps are becoming more common but mflow has a uniquely social take on the idea, as well as a pleasantly minimalist interface. With over 5 million tracks and claiming to offer “No ads, no subscriptions, just music.” mflow plans to make money by selling high-quality MP3s of the music it streams. It’s still in beta but has just opened up signups to the public.

Rapportive
You know that space in GMail to the right of an email that Google usually fills with contextual ads? Rapportive will fill it with contextual social network info about the person who mailed you. There are plugins for most browsers and bookmarklets for others. It’s a small thing, but surprisingly useful. In fact when we came to write this we had almost forgotten about it – not because it’s rubbish, but because it just feels like the way Gmail should handle social data. Nice.

Chrome web store
Google is confident that Chrome OS is going to transform the way we use the web to get things done. While we wait for it to make an impact, don’t forget that you can get a taste of the web app revolution via the Chrome web store, where you can download extensions for the Chrome browser to do just about anything.

Improve your images
There are many imaging editing sites that offer enough tools to rival Photoshop. Improve your images just does what it says – chuck an image at it and it will make it better, sharpening up blurs, fixing poor lighting and just generally sprucing things up.

Check out our Best gadgets of 2010 now

Prezi
Prezi will let you create jaw-droppingly good presentations that run from within the browser. Seriously, once you run one of Prezi’s swooping, infinitely zooming presentations past your boss you will never want to go back to boring old Powerpoint again.

Hunch

Hunch is the brainchild of Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake. It is a recommendation engine that asks you a few (often rather oblique) questions and builds a profile of your tastes before suggesting other sites, services and products you might like. A host of associated services and apps such as the Hunch Local iPhone app can make further recommendation and you can use Hunch as a sort of personalised search engine.

PicPlz
iPhone owners has been enjoying Instagram for a while but PicPlz is shaping up to be a credible cross-platform alternative. Upload pics direct from your phone or on the web (sign in using your Twitter or Facebook ids) and instantly apply filters and effects. The site has a social element and will recommend other people you know on social sites for you to follow.

OurGroceries
We’ve got into the habit of emailing ourselves shopping lists, then asking our partner to mail any more updates if she realises we’re running low on anything. OurGroceries takes this idea and makes it about a thousand times better by giving you a list that can be updated via the web and Android and iOS apps that will show the updates live. It also stores the ingredients for your favourite meals to make writing a shopping list even quicker.

Carbonite
Carbonite is a simple, almost thought-free backup system that will slurp up your valuable data and stash it away in the cloud. All your sensitive data is encrypted and you can get at it remotely using a web browser or via Carbonite’s iPhone or BlackBerry apps. Get stuck into Carbonite, and get yourself some peace of mind for 2011.

Google Latitude
Yes, we know this has been around for a while but a lack of iOS support has meant that Goole’s superb location service has been somewhat relegated to the sidelines. Now that there is a proper Latitude iPhone app we expect the influx of Apple fans will give it a boost and the lonely Android owners will suddenly see a lot more of their friends pop up on their local map.

Best gadget of 2010: Top 10

Posted: 31 Dec 2010 01:10 AM PST

We keep a running chart of the best gadget of 2010 that we update continuously – and you can bet we’ll do the same for 2011 too. But with the year up, it;’s time to stop the clock and see where we’re at. Read on and we’ll show you the best gadget of 2010 Top 10.

Microsoft Kinect
It’s genuinely hassle free motion gaming, and it is glorious. Stunningly responsive, and already offering brilliant launch titles, this is what Nintendo only wish it could have pulled off four years ago: family gaming. A must have for Christmas.

iPhone 4
Apple’s always relied on the best software, rather than the best hardware, to sell its iPhones, but this year it cranked out the best smartphone for the latter too. An unbelievably sharp screen, solid camera with HD video and editing and a super sexy, super slim frame make it our smartphone of the year.

Google Nexus S
We loved the Samsung Galaxy S, but as we remarked in our review, the thing holding it back wasn’t its hardware (a zippy 1GHz CPU and shockingly beautiful 4-inch Super AMOLED display), but Samsung’s software skin. The Google Nexus S is a very similar phone, but with a guarantee of getting the latest version of Android ASAP for a long time to come. If you don’t want an iPhone, you need this.

Check out our Best smartphone Top 5 now

HTC Desire HD
If the Google Nexus S is the best phone for Android purists, this is the mass market Android mobile of choice. Its huge 4.3-inch screen is housed in a lavish, thin unibody shell, and HTC genuinely adds value with its Sense software and cloud services. Shame about the battery life though.

Apple iPad
Apple’s tablet is a true trendsetter, and it’s only got better and better over time. It’s still too pricey to justify instead of a laptop, rather than alongside, but believe the hype: it’s an instant on slate with apps galore, that never runs out of battery.

HTC Legend
This was our phone of the year until the iPhone 4 came along, and even now, it’s still the sexiest smartphone ever made. An utterly beautiful aluminium shell houses an AMOLED display and Android, even if the screen is low resolution compared to competitors. Style and substance.

Check out our Best games console Top 5 now

Xbox 360 slim
Microsoft’s new Xbox 360 trims down the size, slashes the noise and throws in Wi-Fi and a Kinect port too. All very welcome improvements which make choosing between it and a PS3 slim an incredibly hard choice, which is as it should be.

iPod touch 4G
The iPod touch 4G gets all the best bits of the iPhone 4, like the incredible screen resolution, FaceTime and HD video recording, and crams them in at a lower price, and in an even thinner case. Unless you’re a lossless audio obsessive, this is the best PMP out there.

Humax HDR-FOX T2
The best of the first wave of Freeview HD PVRs has a huge hard drive, IPTV skills, media streaming thrown in and an easy to use UI. A big brand, with a box that backs up its reputation.

Toshiba Portege R700
Toshiba turned in a surprise laptop late on in the year: this 13.3-inch machine has blazing performance, weighs nothing at all and doesn’t cost the earth. A brilliant MacBook rival.

Made for Life

Friday, 31 December 2010

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