SD cards: the cheap way to boost laptop storage

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

An increasing number of laptops these days boast SSDs, but capacities are rising quite slowly. For some people, 128GB as your main drive might be enough, but if you want more, is it worth shelling out the huge fees charged by manufacturers to upgrade to a higher capacity SSD, or can you make do with alternative storage?

To find out, we ran our standard file transfer tests – first between a RAM disk and the SSD of a brand new laptop, then between a RAM disk and a variety of external storage devices. (more…)

What’s really killing your Wi-Fi? Here’s a graphic illustration

Friday, August 19th, 2011

We’ve written many times about how crowded the 2.4GHz frequency band is becoming these days, and how that can affect the reliability and speed of your wireless network.

There are so many devices and routers now using the unlicensed space between 2,400MHz and 2,475MHz that finding a quiet, undisturbed channel for your network to reside on is nigh on impossible. That’s why we recommend anyone upgrading their wireless router chooses a dual-band model — one that gives you the option of connecting in the less congested 5GHz frequency band.

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Intel Thunderbolt FAQ

Tuesday, March 1st, 2011

Intel’s Light Peak technology has made a surprise early appearance in Apple’s MacBook Pros, under the new name Thunderbolt. But those leaving the Apple store with a shiny new laptop will find it’s not as simple as plugging in and getting started. We run through the facts.

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Top ten price comparison websites

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010

Looking to save pennies in the aftermath of a blowout Christmas? Made a New Year’s resolution to tighten your belt? You need to get down to your local price comparison website.

It isn’t just about Kelkoo and Google Products any more either. These days there’s a huge choice of specialist sites, catering for everything from supermarket shopping to selling your mobile phone. Here’s our pick of the best.

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Displaying a location marker on a Google Map

Thursday, December 23rd, 2010

One of the most popular features on websites today is a marker pinpointing a location on Google Maps. It’s incredibly easy to add such a map to a website and I’m going to show you how.

I said it was easy, and with the recent release of version 3 of the Google Maps JavaScript API, it’s become even easier. With the previous version of this API, you had to register your map to receive an API key, but that’s now no longer necessary.

Naturally Google provide a comprehensive guide to the Maps API, but I will run through the basics here.

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How to store website data with HTML5

Monday, September 27th, 2010

Throughout your web browsing careers I’m sure you’ve come across the notion of cookies, pieces of text stored by the browser to be retrieved and used at a later date. These vary from simply remembering your name to welcome you personally next time you visit, to more complicated storage of authentication and shopping-cart contents.

Cookies generally work well but can be fiddly to implement, as they are set to be deleted by default once the browser is closed. If a website owner needs the data to be stored for a longer period, a cookie can be given an expiry date. Again this isn’t as clean as it could be: how far into the future do you set the date, for example? And what happens when a user flushes out their cookies?

HTML5 attempts to clean this up with the introduction of web storage.

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Adding your Twitter feed to your website with jQuery

Monday, September 13th, 2010

If you or your company has a Twitter account, chances are you’d like to promote it and display your latest tweets from your website. Since many websites – both personal and increasingly business – are built on blogging software such as WordPress, this is usually achieved via a plugin, of which there are many out there.

But what if you simply want to add your live Twitter feed to a “normal” web page? Twitter itself provides a number of HTML widgets, but in this article I’ll show you how easy it is to achieve with a little bit of JavaScript, CSS, and jQuery.

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Adding audio to your website with HTML5

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

With all the furore around the HTML5 video element, the poor audio element sits in the background wondering what it’s done wrong to receive so little attention. So in an attempt to redress the balance, I’m going to show you how you can stream audio to your website visitors without any additional plugins.

As with the video element, in the past the only method of embedding audio files into a web page was to use Flash or another third-party plugin. There simply was no other way. With the introduction of the audio element, this has changed.

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Why you (probably) shouldn’t worry about diffraction in your photos

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

As most right-thinking people will already know, I wrote an article in the latest issue of PC Pro explaining how to turn your photos into high-quality print-outs.

And I wrote what I considered to be an innocent line: “…for landscape shots, place your camera on a tripod, use a remote shutter release to minimise the risk of camera shake, and apply a small aperture (f/16 is ideal) to get as much of the frame in focus as possible.”

This prompted subscriber Simon Barnes to write to PC Pro’s editor, Tim Danton, to say: “he makes a canard, suggesting f/16 is good for depth of field in landscapes, when in fact, even at full frame this is already straying into diffraction, which will be worse with smaller sensors. He’s not the only one saying this of course, it’s regularly trotted out.”

Quite apart from teaching me a new word, Simon was raising an interesting point, which I’ll attempt to tackle here. I should add that the pratical effect of diffraction in photography is to limit the resolving power of the camera as a whole – in other words once diffraction sets in, your images will in theory be softer, with less detail. (more…)

How to make your website more attractive with @font-face

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

In my last blog entry I briefly mentioned CSS3 when talking about the confusion surrounding HTML5. In this post, I’m going to talk about one of the new features of CSS3 and one which will possibly be noticed most by the non-web developer.

Allow me to introduce @font-face.

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