blocking

Shooting Blocks is a free logic game from Adore Games. Its play and objective are deceptively simple, and the game becomes more challenging as players progress through the levels. In addition to helping polish your logical and spatial skills, it tunes the reflexes.

Shooting Blocks has the colorful look and smooth action of an up-to-date game, with a fantasy-based background image that we could replace with free images downloaded from the Adore Games site. Playing the game is as easy as clicking your mouse: Imagine stacked ice blocks, some of which are empty and others filled. You must click on … Read more

Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer are the three most popular Web browsers, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. If you find yourself primarily using one browser but occasionally having to switch back to another for a specific purpose, Lunascape might be just the browser for you. Lunascape combines rendering engines from Firefox, Chrome, and IE and makes it easy to switch between them.

Lunascape has a sleek tabbed interface that doesn't exactly resemble any one browser, but it's familiar-looking enough to be intuitive. It comes with three rendering engines: Trident (from Internet Explorer), Gecko (from Firefox), … Read more

It's really easy to accidentally click on ads when using your phone to browse the Web. Many of us are spoiled by the ad-free browsing we experience on our desktop computers, and wish we could experience the same on our rooted Android phones that have less screen real estate to work with. The solution is simple, AdFree, an app by BigTinCan, offers the ability to block out all ads--if it's the right option for you.

Note: This particular application requires that you have a rooted Android phone. Even though you will still be able to install the app … Read more

Is malware really a problem on Android smartphones? It might just be, as evidenced by the rash of malicious apps that recently appeared in the Android Market.

As much as I dislike the idea of needing antivirus and antispyware software for my phone, better safe than sorry. And if I'm going to run such an app, it might as well kill multiple security birds with one stone.

ESET Mobile Security for Android offers malware protection, an antitheft system, call blocking, SMS blacklisting, and more. It's currently in beta, and currently free.

When you first install it, ESET Mobile Security identifies any immediate threats, which on my new Nexus S 4G included disabled SIM matching, an undefined "trusted" SIM, and an undefined password (for the app itself; it's there to prevent unauthorized attempts to uninstall it).

From there it's not immediately clear what you're supposed to do, if anything, but each of EMS' primary modules--Antivirus, Antispam, Anti-Theft, and Security Audit--comes with extensive built-in help.… Read more

The Senate Commerce Committee voted Wednesday to approve legislation aimed at resolving long-standing issues for mobile broadband users, both public and private.

Co-sponsored by Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) and Ranking Member Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tx.), S. 911, the "Public Safety Spectrum and Wireless Innovation Act," had wide bipartisan support, passing the committee by a vote of 21-4. (A current version of the bill is not available online, pending several amendments approved during the markup.)

A key provision of the proposed law would authorize the Federal Communications Commission to hold "voluntary incentive auctions" both to … Read more

When discussing options for backing up or migrating data to new Macs, we frequently mention cloning as a way to do this. While Time Machine and similar backup schemes can create fully restorable backups of your system, the backups themselves are not bootable, so in order to use them as such you must restore them to an available hard-drive partition, which can take a number of hours to complete. Clones, on the other hand, do allow for immediate booting to the backup, and therefore are quite appealing as an option.

Cloning is when you basically make a mirror copy of … Read more

If you find your Mac is running slowly, generally there are a few things you can do, including running a general maintenance routine, deleting unneeded files to keep at least 10 percent of your boot drive free, increasing the installed RAM, and quitting unused applications (both foreground and background) that you may have installed. In addition to this, one possible cause of slowdowns is if your hard drive contains undetected bad blocks, and forcing the system to remap them can result in things running smoothly again.

Hard disks are "block-based" storage systems, meaning that their writing surfaces are … Read more

A pair of North Carolina-based entrepreneurs believes they have the building blocks, literally, for a new breed of robots.

Blocklets, a line of interlocking sculptural blocks, are individually laser-cut wood or acrylic pieces that artist Mark Plaga and engineer Gabe Cantor say can be used to make anything from bots to furniture to Arduino trebuchets. Combining the individual pieces to make a Blocklet (a unit), builders need only to unblock their imaginations and see what tumbles out.

At the first "Minecraft Blocklet Party," for example, creative types inspired by the digital block-based game Minecraft spelled out the word "Minecraft" in 5-inch-tall Blocklet letters and crafted a variety of miniature robo-guys and amorphous blocky blobs.

Blocket's mascot "Minecraft Blocky," a two-legged robo-man, is one of the founders' prized creations. He is photographed on their Blocklets Web site doing headstands, waving, bending over, and reaching out for what appears to be a hug.

Plaga and Cantor also hope to eventually turn their design into an educational tool, making Blocklets available in the classroom for science students and others.

Blocklets is now seeking funding on Kickstarter and Plaga and Cantor plan to auction off Blocklet-based sculptures at the Maker Faire in Raleigh, N.C., in June. … Read more

Sharon Vaknin shows you how to permanently block sites from Google search.