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Extending your iPhone's battery
IntoMobile has a few good tips on how to extend your iPhone's battery life, and most of them involve the most obvious thing you can do to keep your iPhone running: cut down on any and all extra functions. They actually recommend to turn off 3G, but you don't have to go that far -- just by holding down the Home button, you can close any background applications sucking up juice. And by resetting your phone, you can do the same thing -- clear out anything running that you're not using.Actually, while I was in Los Angeles last week, I heard the great Leo Laporte mention a great tip on his radio show: turn off the "Ask to join networks" feature in the WiFi settings. If you're like me, you almost always know when there's a WiFi network around that you can use on your iPhone, and so it's pointless (and a waste of battery life) for the iPhone to be constantly searching for one. You can always flip it back on if you do want to do a little poking around, but leaving it off will significantly help battery life.In fact, when in extreme trouble, you can go even farther and just switch the whole thing into Airplane Mode. It'll make your phone useless, but when you really need it -- out on a trip, or waiting to make an important call -- the extra battery time might make all the difference.[via Apple Enthusiast]
Ten things every new player should know about EVE Online
There are some valuable lessons learned as you progress in EVE Online, lessons which get pounded into you when making mistakes. There are so many things you wish someone had told you before you went out and made a noobish ass of yourself. Even with the much-improved Aura tutorial that's been implemented in EVE, there are lots of things that still cause players to scream something to the effect of, "Why didn't anyone warn me?!" This is often accompanied by frantically warping away from one's obliterated ship in an escape pod with a liberal amount of cursing. Of course, it doesn't have to be this way.
Mac 101: Finder window preferences
As we know, the Finder offers four ways to display your files. Namely icon view, list view, column view, and Cover Flow. Perhaps you prefer one over the others (let's say column view), but your windows open to icon view by default. That can be annoying but here's how to fix it.First, open a new Finder window. Next, select your preferred display method and then close the window without doing anything else. Don't open a folder, drag an icon, nothing. Now subsequent Finder windows will default to your preferred setting.
Friday Video: Super Glitch Bros. Brawl
Sure, last week we highlighted Smash Bros. Brawl, but we felt the need to do it again. The above video, which is a collection of glitches and tricks you can pull off in Brawl, was too much to pass up. So, give it a watch, as it features a very cheap Sonic, a pair of Luigis pulling off ridiculous combos mid-air and Bowser being trapped in a very small space.%Gallery-3347% Each week, our Friday Video segment takes a look at the gaming landscape online and brings forth an interesting video that (hopefully) gets the dialog started. Past entries included a look at Mario going berserk, The Simpsons Game in a brief clip and Donkey Kong done with LEGOs.
Bumping your recruitment posts
Many guilds out there have their recruitment posts up on both the realm forums and the global recruitment forums. One of the big keys to a recruitment post is to keep it up on the top of the forums so everyone sees it, and sees it before any other posts. This means that you and your guildies have to bump the post to the top of the list, and bump it quite often.The global recruitment forums recently underwent an upgrade, where the forums were split into Alliance and Horde factions. This has helped a bit with the number of posts per day, and has thus lessened the number of required bumps a recruitment posts needs to keep it on the front page.However, you still have to bump it quite a bit.
Mac 101: Zoom and pan images in Quick Look
Is your laptop not among those that can do Multi-touch? Don't feel badly, you can replicate those great features!Well, kind of. First, open an image with Quick Look. Next, hold down the Option key while performing a two-finger scroll. The image zooms in and out! Finally, let go of the Option key but keep your fingers in place on your trackpad. The cursor turns into a four-point directional, and then you can pan the image within the Quick Look window.This also works with a mouse and scrollwheel.Thanks, Max!
April Fool's is upon us
Yes, it's only midnight, and already the wackiness has started. These people just couldn't wait to do something a little silly on the first day of April. Reader Tim let us know that Baron Soosdon has quit his job at Machinima.com and stopped making machinima in general. He's said goodbye with (what else?) a Linkin Park video. WoWWiki has apparently switched places with the Guild Wars wiki, and vice versa. Make sure to check out their news section, where they mix up Guild Wars news with WoW news. Have you heard about the CM leaving, or the upcoming sequel? Wowhead's site, as you can see above, looks strangely familiar (thanks to everyone who sent this in). More to come for sure. Don't believe anything you read today (unless you read it here on WoW Insider, of course).
Scattered Shots: Beloved complexity
This week on Scattered Shots, David provides a break in the rushing waves of Patch 2.4 news to wax philosophical about his love of being a hunter. To be perfectly honest, he hasn't had time to even try out the new patch yet, but he's really looking forward to waxing on and off about the patch at some point as well.They say that being a hunter is WoW on easy mode, but in reality, the "easy mode" style of hunting is only the beginning of what a hunter can do. Sadly many hunters never really arise out of that stage - easy hunting can become like a rut in which one may not even realize that there is another way to do things. A player can rise out of this rut, however, either through an enterprising nature, or through acquaintance with a good hunter role-model. However one rises to it, the opportunity is there for hunters to do all kinds of things amazing things, mostly at the same time. In fact, you could say that a fundamental mechanic of the hunter class, probably the mechanic I love most in the entire game, is that of controlling multiple characters at once: the hunter and the pet. You have the most control over your hunter character, obviously, and the pet functions as something like a yo-yo which is attached to the hunter. You can point the pet in the direction of an enemy to attack, or you can recall it to wherever you are, but you can't tell it, for instance, to kite an enemy around in circles in the same way you yourself could.The limitations inherent in the abilities of the hunter and the pet, as well as the synergy between them, reminds me a bit of chess. Managing both the pet and the hunter to greatest effectiveness in different situations means you have to keep more than one thing in mind at all times. When you play most other classes, you can just pay attention to them and what they're doing, but being a good hunter requires you to be more aware of what's going on around you, just like chess requires you to keep track of the whole board, not just the little portion of it where the most action is happening.
Blood Pact: Warlock tips and tricks
Between Arenas, V'Ming spends his time as a lock laughing ominously in AV, tanking Olm with his own minions and pondering troll fashion from Zul'Aman. He's recently started to plumb the depths of SSC with his 0/21/40 build and bragging about 8k shadow bolts.The internet is a beautiful thing. It gives everybody a voice and an easily accessible goldmine of human ingenuity and intelligence. (It is also a repository of human scum and stupidity, but we're not going there today.) As a warlock player, there are TONS of resources out there that you can use to improve your game. Unfortunately many of these resources are scattered far and wide - and it takes a certain deftness with search engines to separate the wheat from the chaff, or simply to find what fits your playstyle.So, for the benefit of the newly initiated and the time-challenged, I'll start and maintain this list of tried and tested Warlock tips, from the frivolous to the essential. I will not claim credit for these tips, but humbly serve as the chronicler of community content in this case, and will give due credit wherever possible. If you have pet tips that you swear by as a Warlock, please feel free to share them - and I'll add it to this list after the jump.
Playing with your mouse
Lots of us purchase these nifty mice from the local computer store. Be they a fancy new Logitech mouse with a dozen keys placed strategically around the unit, or a slick new beauty from Apple, the mouse is a strategic part of your game play.At least, it should be.All too often people don't utilize what they have in front of them. Today we're going to look at how you can increase your game play by using your mouse more effectively. In particular, the buttons.However before we look into buttoning strategies, lets just quickly cover moving with the mouse. It's pretty simple, right? Push both buttons down, move forward. Right click and hold to turn your character. Left click and hold to look around without moving. Mike Schramm covered this in a post about a month and a half back, and it's a pretty good read for those interested more in the topic of mouse moving.So now that that's out of the way, let's look at basic mouse buttoning techniques. I own two Logitech MX5000 cordless optical mice. They work very well and have a battery life of a couple days; but even then I recharge them both every night just so I don't have disaster strike me in the middle of a raid when the battery goes out.
Forum post of the day: Mage confessions
Apparently Warlocks are not the only evil class in World of Warcraft. Today on the official forums, Mages aired their dirty laundry. Gompers of Archimonde began a thread that quickly filled to capacity with some of the tricks, cheats, and jokes Mages employ for amusement and profit. Some of the highlights include*: Shlippmack of Earthen Ring, "I pyro the lvl 1 critters to boost damage." Tiinsi of Bloodhoof, "On wipes I ice block and let everyone else who's fleeing pull the mobs further away so I have time to invis." Amarius of Alleria, "I sheep horde who are fighting warlocks or hunters just to give them a heal and hopefully the help they need to kill said warlock or hunter." Reoko of Sargeras, "I confess most of my deaths are caused by me hitting the windows button** when I'm trying to press alt 2 for ice block. /facepalm" Haruka of Shadow Council, "I once carried around multiple stacks of Scrolls of Intellect rank 1 that I would use on people in the raid who complained about not getting an int buff." Walugiee of Zul'jin, "I sometimes break my own sheeps and blame hunter multi-shots just so the raid leader yells at them." The thread has some real gems in it. If I ever level my Mage, I may steal some of their ideas. Do you have anything you'd like to share with the group? * Quotes are copied directly, I take no ownership of spelling and grammatical mistakes.** This is why there are holes where the Windows keys were on my keyboard. They were pried off about my second day of playing WoW.
How to create your own Toast DVD menu style
A while back reader Michael Coyle was nice enough to send us this write-up on how to customize Leopard's Guest account, and just recently he sent along another guide that you might not need right away, but will come in handy when you really need it. He's got an in-depth look at how to create a custom menu style when authoring a DVD in Toast Titanium 8.As he says, the default styles that come with the application are a little less than formal, so if you want to create a professional menu for the DVD that fits your needs, this will show you how. As far as I can tell, the style is just a Photoshop file with various layers for the DVD to use as a menu (selected, frames for videos and the border around them, and so on); so the trick is finding the right layers to edit and leaving everything else alone (so nothing breaks).If you've got some DVD authoring in your future, and plan to use Toast to get it all done, there you go.
iPhone 101: Two Home screen tricks
Here are two simple but useful tips from TUAW readers David B Alford and Andrew Akker that help you navigate through your iPhone or iPod home screens. David points out that if you tap just to the left or to the right of the dots at the bottom of your screen, you can move a page at a time without having to drag. Tap left, you move left. Tap right, you move right. It's quick and it's easy. Andrew figured out how to pause his drag Home screen drags. If you start to move between screens by dragging and then tap the dots control during that drag, screen pauses. You'll see bits of both home screens at once, and can interact with them normally by tapping icons. You can see up to 24 icons at once (16 off to one side, 4 along the other side, and 4 in the bar at the bottom). I've tested both tips extensively and they work great -- two really nice additions to one's Home-screens skills.
Things you wish you'd known about PotBS
Potshot has an awesome roundup (from a post over on the official forums) just in time for today's Pirates of the Burning Sea release about "things you wish you'd known" (and that the in-game help didn't exactly tell you). From practical tips (you can CTRL-left click to set things on your action bar to autofire when they're available) to the should-have-been-obvious (ship position and wind direction when entering ship combat on open sea are the same in and out of battle), there's a lot of terrific insight here. And some of the tips even reveal stuff that make Pirates a much more attractive game-- did you know that you can train a skill to see what other nations say in chat, or that you could fire half-loaded guns?If you're entering PotBS to host the mizzenmast and keelhaul some landlubbers today (or even if you've been playing in the preorder), it's definitely a must read. Every game has its hidden depth and player lore, and it's great to see players start digging into a game like Pirates as early as release day.
WoW Insider Weekly
Every week, we round up all the great work of our weekly columnists here at WoW Insider, and put it all in one big post for your perusal. From funnies to serious strategy, and cooking recipes to disenchanting tips, here's all the weekly columns from the last week of WoW Insider.Sunday Morning Funnies: GigglesBuffly!Spiritual Guidance: Mind Vision of 2007Marcie takes a look into the past year of priesting.Addon Spotlight: RecountDPS meter done right.All the World's a Stage: Something to remember me byPutting those quirky touches on your own characters.The Art of War(craft): Outdoor PvP, part II - an Outlandish warFighting in the expansion and how to do it.Officers' Quarters: The right stuffJust what does it take to join the ranks of officerdom? Scott tells you.Reader UI of the Week: Slazareth the MoonkinMy god. It's full of addons!Build Shop: Mage 10-47-3This is what they mean when they talk about nuke mages. Fire at will!Raid Rx: Pigeon-holing healersMarcie breaks down the stereotypes on the various healers you can choose from when raiding.15 Minutes of Fame: Noor the PacifistLeveling without killing? Good luck.Shifting Perspectives: When am I outside?When it comes to spells and mounts, the definition of "outside" gets a little weird.The Light and How to Swing It: Year in ReviewPaladins in the past year.Guildwatch: Caught redhanded, but too lateYour weekly dose of guild gossip, progress, and recruiting news.World of WarCrafts: Kibler's BitsTasty tidbits for the feline (or canine) in your life.Tales from the Lion's Pride Inn: Cap'n BlainNow here is a man who looks like he knows what he's talking about.Encrypted Text: 222223, or how to level 1-20 as a RogueI have no idea how Elizabeth knew I had SS mapped to the 1 key, but she's right.Well Fed Buff: Maiev's GrudgeRevenge, like this dessert, is best served cold (all right, it's best served lukewarm, but the saying doesn't work as well that way).The WoW Insider Show episode 19: Looking back on 2007Our podcast examines the WoW year that was.Blood Sport: "Locks OP as hell," says top WarriorAn interview with an Arena player.Gamers on the Street: Patch? What patch?Lisa talks to a few people who didn't completely read the patch notes last time around.Totem Talk: We were not preparedIt's been an angry past year for Shamans.WoW, Casually: The Year of the CasualRobin looks at casual WoW playing in 2007.The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Saying hi to the new bossPushing for progression isn't easy-- especially when you're the one staring down the big monster.Insider Trader: A disenchanted professionWhy we're so enchanted with disenchanting.Phat Loot Phriday: Galgann's FireblasterWait, there's an actual reason to go into Uldaman? Who knew?
Let the Month of the Burglar begin
The Burglars of Middle-earth should be happy about Book 12 -- of this we can all be sure. We had the months of the Minstrel and the Hunter, and so on, but it's Burglars' turn for some lovin'!Turbine has finally all-out announced the Month of the Burglar, and laid out Book 12's changes to the class for all to see. Burglars will get a new a new toggle skill called "Mischief," by which Tricks, Trick removal skills, and Riddle will be cheaper and more frequently usable, respectively. Two new skills are also available in Mischief mode -- Clever Retort and Confound.They'll also get the previously-announced ability to bring a friend into stealth mode with them, a position-sensitive strike, some Fellowship Maneuver Response Skills, and perhaps most awesomely, the ability to summon a vendor to sell stuff to. Oh, and they'll finally be able to use clubs. And there will be equipables that will beef up Fellowship Maneuvers.Phew! Surely all that is worth the wait, right?
Media Player boosts WoW performance
Many players have experienced faster WoW loading times with Windows Media Player (WMP) running in the background. Some players are also reporting lower latency and higher frames per second.This tip surfaced in the Europe forums late November and was picked up by the US forums two weeks ago. Many players are reporting shortened loading times, some by more than 50%.I did a quick test and found that by running WMP in the background, minimized and not playing anything, the login screen popped up about 20 seconds quicker than usual. The world loading time (time between clicking Enter World button and character appearing on screen) was also faster by about 15 seconds. However I did not see any significant improvements in latency or framerate. To eliminate performance boosts due to caching or preloading, I rebooted my machine between each set of timings.Some players have also suggested adding:SET timingMethod "1" or SET timingMethod "2"to the config.wtf file to achieve the same effect without running WMP. For me, this shortened the time for the login screen to appear by 20 seconds as well, but only shortened world loading time by 5 seconds. Combining WMP and the config.wtf tweak resulted in the same timings with just running WMP alone.There's been no official Blizzard response to this yet, although a likely explanation is that WMP modifies how your computer handles background applications. With WMP open, all available CPU resources apparently become allocated to WoW, leading to better performance.Does this quirk work for you? Do you see any improvements in framerate and latency?
Guild bank checkers
Guild banks are one of the banner features of patch 2.3, along with leveling improvements and of course Zul'Aman. We all know that you can store lots of things in them, although it might cost you. People are even making single-person guilds just to get to use the guild bank for storage. Come to think of it, why can't we have account banks, where we could transfer items and gold among our alts on the same server without having to use the mail? But that's not the point of this post.No, the point of this post is a new use of the guild bank that has nothing to do with storage: checkers! Affix, from Tichondrius-A, has discovered that the bank is good for fun as well as utility. One player is using Netherweave, the other is using Arcane Dust, and they both seem to be having a good time (check the thread for more pictures). I have to say, this is the first time I've seen somebody playing a minigame inside WoW without AddOns or anything. Drysc speculates that chess would be somewhat viable, despite the fact that there is one row too few, what with the variety of item icons that exist. Tic-tac-toe should obviously work as well, though that's a fairly trivial game to not lose. Who wants to play guild bank connect four? Can you think of any other games that could be played within the default interface?
Mac 101: Whip your widgets into shape
Widgets are way too much fun. Though your Mac ships with a few of them already installed on the Dashboard, frankly they're kind of boring. I mean, how much fun is a calculator, clock, or calendar? Did you know there's a bunch more hiding in the far corners of your computer, and even more waiting to be discovered online? Let's take a look at where to find the extra goodies.
Spoiler-free Phantom Hourglass tips
Not everyone has been able to run through and complete The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass yet; some of us have been too distracted with exploring every single pixel of the ocean or maximizing our cannon minigame scores (2660) to rush to the adventure's end.If you're still in the beginnings of your quest to save Tetra from the terrible Ghost Ship, the feel of Link's boomerang still unfamiliar to your hand, make sure to check out Portable Video Gamer's collection of miscellaneous tips and tricks. Some of their advice is obvious, but their points on performing Link's roll ("As you walk, touch the very edge of the screen, then drag your stylus towards Link and quickly slide back to the screen's edge.") and practicing for multiplayer battles in the Temple of the Ocean King are helpful.Provided that you've already sailed past the fog in the northwestern section of the map, the page of info should be spoiler-free, unlike the forum threads out there riddled with casual posts that give the game's great parts away. Have any random tips of your own that you'd like to impart to your fellow readers? Make sure to leave them in our comments!
