Articles by Patrick Nelson

Instagram, an app from Instagram, is available for free at Google Play. Instagram, the popular photography and social networking app for the iPhone, with a whopping 27 million iOS users, recently became available for Android. Around 5 million Android users reportedly signed up for the app in the first few days of the Android release. Then social n...

One of the simplest ways to improve performance on a laptop is to add more RAM, or random access memory. RAM prices have been steadily dropping over the years, and it's now possible to see a significant performance boost with an investment of twenty or thirty dollars. If your machine is sluggish, you might need additional memory....

Hulu Plus, an app from Hulu, is available for free at Google Play, but the service requires a US$7.99/month subscription. The 5-year-old subscription streaming video service known as "Hulu Plus" has doubled its subscriber numbers in the last seven months to more than 2 million, according to numbers bandied about by the company.

Have you ever accessed your home or small office router configuration settings and been bombarded with a mass of incomprehensible, cryptic computer-eze and senseless acronyms and abbreviations? ...

Phonedeck, an app from Desk.io, is available for free at Google Play. If there's been a common thread to some of the recent "How To" articles I've written for Technewsworld and my Android app reviews for LinuxInsider, it might be the taming of the ever-proliferating devices that are taking over my living space.

The tumultuous convergence of entertainment devices, greater interaction with the television-viewing experience, and increased involvement of social networks were all in the Klieg lights at the IP&TV World Forum, the Internet television show I attended recently in London. I was immersed in the future of television content delivery mashed with user...

Historically, freelancers have carried their software tools as compact discs, or as copies of the discs on a portable hard drive. Both have needed to be installed on the library, or client's computer. This has been time-consuming additional work. Security has also been an issue, with temporary document files and software footprints being left behi...

Smart Diagram Pro, an app from Sillycube, is available for US$4.30 at Google Play. The much talked about demise of the laptop in favor of tablet device, it could be argued, will be dependent on the tablet offering much of the functionality of the laptop. Gaping holes in tablet function will likely perpetuate the laptop as a tool.

The more devices that I accumulate, the more I'd like to move seamlessly from one to another. I'm finding more and more that I'm hopping from one device to another, and one Web browser to another I've got a mini-laptop hooked up to my TV, a larger laptop on my desk, a 7-inch tablet in my back pocket for reading at coffee shops, a 10-incher that flo...

PDF to Speech, an app from Practical Apps, is available for US$2.99 at Google Play. The Classic Text-to-Speech Engine from SVOX is available for free at Google Play.I've been looking at ways to optimize the time I spend sitting in traffic. The old days when listening to the radio constituted the sum extent of productivity achieved while staring a...

Overclocking a CPU (central processing unit) sounds seductive, right? Adjust a few settings on your phone or tablet, and the device goes faster. Games play without laborious, stuttering, forced slow-motion effects, and everything loads quicker Well, like everything in life, these adjustments involve a tradeoff. Just as there are risks in taking you...

I'm surrounded by screens here at the Olympia exhibition hall -- tablet-sized, big screens, you name it -- and they all connect with each other. It's day three at the IP&TV World Forum, or Internet Protocol Television Show. The lowly remote control can soon be buried under the sofa cushions for good, judging by the offerings from set-top box manuf...

Remote Web Desktop Full, an app from SmartDog Studio HK, is available for US$4.99 at Google Play.We've been seeing applications that allow you to remotely access desktop PCs for years. They have tended to function on a PC-to-PC connection basis over the Internet -- like Symantec's pcAnywhere software, which is often used for remote PC troubleshoo...

I'm attending the IP&TV World Forum, aka the Internet Protocol Television Show, at the Olympia exhibition hall in sunny London I have been checking out technologies being deployed in Europe that we may be seeing state-side very soon. HbbTV is a hybrid television delivery system available now in some European countries that combines synchronized bro...

New home construction and remodeling projects, from a multimedia wiring angle, have the advantage of incorporating cable management at the design stage. That design is structured into the build. Unfortunately, existing homes don't have this luxury -- tearing into walls is disruptive and expensive....

Internet-delivered television was once thought of "disruptive," but it looks like it's about to be firmly adopted by common television programming suppliers worldwide and incorporated into their delivery systems. Looking around at the IP&TV World Forum, I'm seeing a whole bunch of monkey wrenches sitting on the sidelines ...

Microsoft has made available a consumer preview version of its upcoming Windows 8 operating system that you can try out. The OS caught my eye because the tile-like user interface appears radically different from the boring old reiterations of Windows 3.1 -- with minor tweaks that irritatingly require getting used to after every upgrade This looks l...

If you were looking at television weather maps during last week's U.S. tornado activity, you were looking at a GIS, or Geographic Information System. Those red and purple splotches racing across the screen represented intensity levels of rotating storm cells. The map itself, the county lines, and the splotches were all data layer elements making up the map.

Smart Tools, an app from Smart Tools Co., is available for US$2.50 at the Android Market.I was looking for an app that would substitute for the dedicated and expensive rangefinder device that's used for judging long distances while hunting and golfing, when I came across Android Boy's remarkable all-in-one $2.50 Smart Tools. This product has take...

With cable-and-wire spaghetti proliferating in and around our homes and offices, threatening to consume our devices and us in the end, it may be time to take a look at Bluetooth wireless technology, which is great if you can get it to work Wire management in the financial trading floor school of thought consists of filling raised flooring with cabl...