bit

HANOVER, Germany--IBM showed off technology today designed to let people use their smartphones to take command of their real-world shopping.

Big Blue showed an app idea from IBM Research in Haifa, Israel, that uses image recognition to identify products on store shelves, then lets people sort those products by attributes such as price and nutrition information. A customer could select only gluten-free products, pick food that's from nearby, or filter electronic gadgets by operating system.

"The same experience people expect online is available in the store," said Amnon Rebak, a research staff member on the project, at … Read more

HANNOVER, Germany--In today's James Bond world, smartphones get you instant access to top-secret information. In the real world, security constraints mean mobile phones generally aren't nearly so clever or convenient.

BlackBerry and Secusmart hope to change that through a partnership that at least has won over the German federal government. It has authorized purchases of phones with the BlackBerry 10 operating system augmented with Secusmart's SD card-mounted security chips for classified communications, said Hans-Christoph Quelle, Secusmart managing director, speaking here at the CeBit technology show.

The approach uses a feature in BlackBerry 10 called Balance, which partitions … Read more

Even those with high-speed Internet connections often find Internet videos take time to buffer before playing. SpeedBit Video Accelerator for Mac tries to address this problem by accelerating video downloads, but with poor, if any, results.

While the initial program is free in a trial version, use of the full program requires a yearly subscription of $24.95. The trial version only allows video acceleration of SD videos. Upgrading to the paid version allows functions on HD video and acceleration of iTunes downloads. The program was small, but this did not translate to an easy installation. The process to install … Read more

The biggest issue with any of the activity tracking systems, be it a Fitbit or Jawbone Up, is that some information has to be manually entered by the user. For example, when I'm tracking how much water I drink in a given day, I have to remember to enter it into the Fitbit app, and I'm horrible at it.

When the revamped Fitbit Android app launched last week, I came across another Android app called FitTap. FitTap combines Fitbit activity logging with NFC.

There's two versions of the app, one is free, but requires you to use … Read more

A rare but potentially frustrating issue you might run into after upgrading to OS X 10.8 or after applying an update such as the most recent 10.8.2 release is that a number of applications in the system may start crashing when launched. This does not happen to all programs, and those affected may appear to be a bit random; however, it is likely they share common ground in all being 32-bit programs.

If this happens to you, a potentially quick way to manage it is to reboot the system into Safe Mode by holding the Shift key … Read more

If you use popular computational programs such as spreadsheet workhorses Microsoft Excel and Apple Numbers, you might run into an issue in which, when using large number values, the system will appear to truncate the values of numbers entered.

For instance, if you open Excel and enter the value "12345678901234567890" into a cell, the program will change this to "12345678901234500000," where every value past the 15th character is set to zero. This happens in Apple's Numbers spreadsheet and other programs as well.

While the significance of the last numbers is perhaps questionable, it does limit … Read more

Many different Web browsers are built on Mozilla's open-source Firefox project, including Waterfox, a 64-bit version of Firefox. Waterfox takes advantage of a variety of speed-boosting technologies found in most current Intel CPUs and the latest AMD processors, too, such as SSE3, AVX, and Jemalloc. Of course, while your Internet connection's speed and reliability will have a much greater impact on your day-to-day browsing speed than your browser will, a 64-bit browser offers some advantages in 64-bit Windows, such as increased speed and improved stress handling. The 64-bit Waterfox is also available in a fully portable version for … Read more

A graphic designer's work becomes much harder if they don't have a canvas. Most top-of-the-line design programs have a large barrier to entry, though. If you want to work your way up to those, Scribus is an awesome place to start. It can run stride for stride with higher-end graphic design programs like Adobe InDesign -- and it's free.

It takes a while to actually get started with Scribus. Not only is it a relatively large file to download and install, but the program takes some exploring to figure out. Most of that can be forgiven for … Read more

Office 365 is installed as a 32-bit program on your Windows PC by default. Microsoft recommends the 32-bit version, even on 64-bit systems, to avoid compatibility issues with third-party add-ons. However, there may be instances when you'd want the 64-bit version, like if you're using a very large database or worksheet.

Here's how to install the 64-bit version of Office:

Step 1: Go to Office.com and log in using your Microsoft account.

Step 2: Click on the "My Account" shortcut.

Step 3: Click on the "Language and install options" link under the … Read more