Tag Archives: apps

How to open (non-DRM) iBooks without an iPad or iPhone

By William Chinda | Published: August 3, 2012
iTunes can do a lot of things. You can buy media (like music or movies) and play them. But when it comes to books, you’ll find you can buy them, but can’t open them with iTunes. If you believe Apple’s own documentation, you can apparently only open iBooks on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch [...]
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How to Borrow Kindle eBooks from the Library

By William Chinda | Published: September 25, 2011
Up until this week, library users who checked out ebooks did not have the option of reading those books on any of Amazon’s Kindle devices or apps. That’s all changed, thanks to a nationwide roll-out by Amazon to over 11,000 libraries in the US. Unlike checking out a book with Adobe Digital Editions, the process [...]
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Turn a Webcam into a Motion Sensing Security Camera

By William Chinda | Published: August 2, 2011
Thanks to the cheapness and ubiquity of the webcam, it’s now both easy and affordable to roll your own surveillance system. In this video tutorial, I’ll be demonstrating how to turn a cheap webcam into a motion-sensing surveillance camera. 0
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Reading an e-book? Turn on the wifi!

By William Chinda | Published: December 8, 2010
In my last video tutorial, I did a demo on loading e-books with Adobe DRM onto an iOS device with the Bluefire Reader app. I’ve been extremely pleased with the app in the month or so that I’ve been using it (aside from its shockingly slow load times), so I was happy to recommend it. [...]
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How to get and read eBooks from the library

By William Chinda | Published: November 28, 2010
Just like with paper books, your local public library is a great source for free ebooks and other digital content. Unfortunately, thanks to strong digital rights management by the publishers of these books, the process for obtaining and reading ebooks can be difficult and confusing. In this video, I’ll go over the specifics of how [...]
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A guide to distraction free writing applications

By William Chinda | Published: October 8, 2010
Technology has provided us with the capacity to greatly improve our productivity, but has it also somehow impaired our ability to concentrate? This has been the subject of some controversy of late, and it’s no wonder that a niche market of word processing applications has sprouted up claiming to remove distractions so you can better [...]
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How to Use Boxee

By William Chinda | Published: August 1, 2010
Attaching a computer to your television opens up a great deal of entertainment content that was previously unavailable to you in the living room. But since you’re not sitting right in front of the screen, it can feel not as easy or pleasant as using your cable or satellite box. Thankfully, there are a host [...]
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All you need to know about Simplenote

By William Chinda | Published: July 13, 2010
Just type. Adam Pash at Lifehacker has put out this complete guide to Simplenote, but even that feels like more explanation than it needs. In short, it comes down to two words: Just. Type. Simplenote, for the uninitiated, is a web and iOS application that automatically stores all of your plain text and syncs it [...]
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Installing non-Android Market Apps on an HTC Aria

By William Chinda | Published: July 11, 2010
If you only followed major media outlets, you’d be forgiven for thinking that only worthwhile smartphone available to AT&T Wireless subscribers in the US is the iPhone. With the release of the HTC Aria running Google’s Android OS, AT&T does offer up a worthwhile alternative. The phone’s biggest drawback, however, is it’s inability to install [...]
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