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Tech News & Commentary
Annette in Sanford, North Carolina listening on WPTF 680 AM asked us: “I wanted to know how can I preserve energy on my iPad, it seems sometimes the power goes out quickly.”
Annette, Preserving energy on the iPad or on any other device is just a matter of knowing what consumes the most battery. If you’re not using your Wifi, turn it off. Wifi consumes battery energy even when its not connected to a network because its constantly searching for nearby Wifi. Turning off Push notifications and Location Services will also increase the battery life. Once you’re finish using apps, hold the home button and close the apps so they won’t be running in the background. Enabling auto-lock will help prevent lost of battery life by turning the screen off when the iPad isn’t being used. Enabling Airplane Mode will disable all wireless features and will increase battery life tremendously.
What seems to drain the majority of people’s tablets and phones is simply brightness. Either turn the brightness all the way low or enable Auto-Brightness. Just by doing so, it will gain you from minutes to an hour longer of battery. Temperature has a great impact on the battery life of an iPad or any high-tech device. Try keeping your iPad approximately between 32 degrees and 95 degrees Fahrenheit.
You can stop all or some of your apps from running in the background from your iPad’s settings, look for Background App Refresh under your General. Most apps won’t use huge amounts of battery when they’re in the background, but some will and even the ones that won’t when grouped together may very noticeably cut your battery life short.
Other common power leeches are AirDrop and Bluetooth, so if you’re not using those be sure and turn them off as well.
For more information tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
Consumer Reports Feature With James McQueen
E3, the World’s Fair of video games, lets companies like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo showcase their newest products. This year’s show focused mostly on games and services, and while the hype was a little quieter than last year’s, there was still excitement. Consumer Reports Electronics spokesman James McQueen is here with some highlights.
The “Into Tomorrow” team discussed the latest apps that they have been playing with recently.
• Mark recommends: HotelWiFiTest.com, FREE
- “Let’s talk about one of my pet peeves, SLOW WI-FI IN HOTELS. Sure, they all advertise their free wi-fi, but when you decide to stream a movie in Netflix you might as well draw yourself each scene, frame by frame, using crayons. It’ll work just as well. My app this week is a WEB app, and it will work in the browser of any computer or device. It’s hotelwifitest.com. This web app measures the wi-fi download speed of any hotel you’re in and reports that information back to the website. When you’re looking for a hotel, you can check the website to see what other users of the web app have uncovered about its wi-fi speed. The database is still under construction, they’d covered New York and San Francisco rather well but most sites in Fort Lauderdale still showed an untested “expected” speed. But I’m willing to give it a test as I find myself in hotels, because to nerds like me, it’s all about the speed. Check out hotelwifitest.com.” — Mark
• Chris recommends: Timberman, FREE
- “Timberman is an old-style arcade game where you have to chop down a tree. Even the graphics in this game emulate the 8-bit graphics of those old games. You have a lumberjack standing at the bottom of a tree and the idea is to chop as much of the tree down as you can before time runs out. Watch out for the branches! there are branches on each side of the tree that get lower each time you chop and you have to move out of the way before they hit you. Once they do, your character disappears and is replaced by a headstone. If you think it’s easy, I challenge you to download the free app and try it. It’s one of those that makes you so mad that you can’t get far, that you have to keep trying.” — Chris
• Samantha recommends: eBay, FREE
- “The new eBay app is more powerful than ever, offering you more of the eBay functionality you love wrapped up in a shiny, smooth user interface. Selling is a breeze with the streamlined, mobile-friendly listing flow. The integrated RedLaser barcode scanner makes it easy to search for items, sell and add tracking information. eBay buyers will never miss the opportunity to snag that one of a kind item with instant mobile bidding, Best Offer and Buy It Now.”
What are your favorite Apps? Let us know at 800-899-INTO and we’ll feature them in this segment!
- Tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast for more details
Guest Segment:
Jim Hunt, Senior Vice President – GENCO
supply chain management
Robert in Tennessee listening on WTN 99.7 asked us: “What is your favorite distribution of Linux? I prefer Linux mint because it is more Windows XP like.”
Robert, Any of the major distributions is probably worthy of a mention, but there are so many that we’d need to add that fourth hour that people have been asking for. Mint is pretty great in that it’s based on Ubuntu and it has the stability and all the feature that have made Ubuntu really popular, but just like you said, the figured out that people like having a Start menu and they added one… we can only assume that people at Microsoft don’t like this particular flavor of Linux.
Ubuntu is definitely worth a mention, deep down it’s Debian-based, and it generally feels like you’re using commercial, paid software. They release new versions every 6 months, they have bug reporting and good documentation. It’s a very professionally-produced free Linux distribution.
Debian is awesome for serious tasks, they don’t release too many updates (maybe one every couple of years), but Debian works with tons of different processors, and it is super stable. If you’re looking for something that will take some work to set up but will run beautifully after that, Debian may be it. It has great quality control and, though it’s not very flashy, it’s very stable.
To illustrate that, Debian has 3 levels of stability: unstable (the one called “sid”), testing, and stable. The unstable one is stable enough that it’s what Ubuntu and Mint use in the background. It’s stable enough to be released with other operating systems that are labeled as “stable.”
If you like the Windows-look you have plenty of options that should appeal to you, CentOS, PCLinuxOS (which has a taskbar that is basically lifted out of Windows 7), ArchLinux, and others, but they’re probably not updated as often as Mint.
Any of the older distributions like Fedora (formerly RedHat) and OpenSuse should work pretty well by now.
There are also plenty of special distributions for specific hardware or specific purposes. So, if you want to take your computer with you, Damn Small Linux (DSL) or Ubuntu Live may work for you, if you’re building a media player OpenElec and XMBC are Linux-based and will do a nice job. In the Linux world, it all depends on what you need.
For general use Mint or Ubuntu with will probably keep you pretty happy… unless you want to watch Netflix, of course. There are workarounds but Netflix and Linux don’t play nice with each other.
For more information tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
Wireless Update with Chuck Hamby
It seems like summer just started, but it’s already time to think about back-to-school shopping. Verizon’s Chuck Hamby is here to tell about some wireless tech that’s cool for class.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
Other World Computing (OWC): NUGUARD KX – Kinectic Energy X-Orbing Case for Samsung Galaxy S4
Joos: Portable Solar Chargers – gives you power anywhere there is sun.
Tylt: ENERGI Travel Chargers with USB ports and built-in cables for iPhones and Micro USB devices
“Into Tomorrow”: Microfiber Screen Cleaning Cloths with Dave’s cartoon on them, for all your smartphones, tablets, TVs, camera lenses and computer screens!