Howto

When Apple launched Siri with the iPhone 4S, "she" instantly became a household name. The internet buzzed, casual consumers took notice, and Apple used it to market the incrementally-upgraded handset for nearly a year. But those who have spent time with it know that Siri is still a beta product. One of the biggest omissions is an API to connect to third-party apps. There are, however, roundabout ways for third-party apps to play nicely with Siri. Starting in iOS 6, App Store apps can access Reminders (with user permission). This opens a variety of doors, including this nifty trick for creating shared shopping lists.  Read More

When an architect is designing a building, they build a scale model to check how their design will work as an actual physical structure. What happens, however, when engineers are designing things that will have to be compatible with the currents in rivers ... things like dams, bridges, or pump stations? Well, that’s where water resources engineering firms like Northwest Hydraulic Consultants (NHC) come into the picture. Their work often includes building exact miniature recreations of waterways, complete with flowing water. We recently caught up with NHC principal Darren Shepherd, who guided us through the production process of one of his more exciting models – a one-twelfth scale Norwegian whitewater kayaking park.  Read More

With Mountain Lion set for a July release, Gizmag offers some tips on backing up, cleaning up and optimizing your Mac to make the upgrade process go as smoothly as can be for those wishing to adopt Apple's latest "big cat."  Read More

Apple introduced many significant changes with the release of OS X Lion and Mountain Lion is set to shake things up yet further, making this an exciting time to be a Mac user. However, it’s also an exciting time to be a PC user, and the buzz which surrounds Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 release even has some die-hard OS X fans wondering if it’s time to make the jump. If you’re a Mac user who would like to dip a toe into the Windows 8 experience with the minimum of commitment or fuss, here’s how to go about it.  Read More

Space travel can be boring. Voyages to Mars or the Asteroid Belt may sound exotic and exciting, but the fact is that most of the time there’s not much to see and not much to do. Wouldn’t it be great if morale on these long missions could get a boost by a reminder of home like fresh baked bread? Thanks to NASA’s “Space Apps” program, that might one day be a reality. Sixteen-year old “citizen scientist” Sam Wilkinson has come up with a way to make bread simply and efficiently using carbon dioxide and a slow cooker that is designed to work within the limitations of a spaceship’s galley.  Read More

The Nook Tablet from Barnes and Noble offers meatier specs than Amazon's Kindle Fire for half the price of an iPad, but the selection of apps on offer for the e-reader/tablet hybrid is a bit underwhelming. Fortunately, it takes less than 30 minutes to turn a Nook into a fully-functional Honeycomb tablet with access to the Android Market.  Read More

While Solid State Drives (SSDs) are seen as the way of the future for computer data storage and their prices have started to come down as their capacities increase, they still can't compete with traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) in terms of bang for your buck. Now a team of researchers from Singapore has moved the goalposts yet again and shown traditional HDDs still have some life in them by developing a process that can increase the data recording density of HDDs to six times that of current models.  Read More

A "capsule hotel" is Japan's solution for cheap accommodation for guests primarily wanting to sleep and nothing else. Though the idea sounds similar to a hostel, the sleeping quarters consists of "capsules" measuring approximately 2m x 1m x 1.25m/6.5ft x 3.3ft x 4ft (that's not much bigger than a coffin) and stacked next to and on top of one another. A separate section of the hotel houses the public bathing facilities, lockers for personal belongings and if you are lucky a restaurant or vending machine. It is also common to find men- or women-only capsule hotels, however they are predominantly used by men.  Read More

Even if you're using IMAP to access your email, certain newer email clients like Thunderbird 3 and Postbox will download and store your emails locally in plain text. This leaves many users making a difficult choice between leaving sensitive data unencrypted, or venturing into overkill territory by using a tool like FileVault, PGP Whole Disk Encryption or TrueCrypt - which see you encrypting your entire home directory or hard drive and dealing with a performance overhead. This article will show you how to encrypt only your Postbox email on a Mac, but can easily be adapted to other email clients (or other folders like your Documents folder).  Read More