How To

How to get home movies onto the iPad

The iPad makes a great photo album or "brag book" to pass around to friends and family.

Its big screen is far superior to a smartphone for showing off snapshots and home movies. Getting photos onto the device isn't too hard. But getting your home movies onto the iPad so you can share them is not nearly as easy, especially if you're syncing the tablet to a Windows machine.

I've been poking around with different ways to get the videos I take with my Canon S90 compact camera and different Flip video cameras onto the … Read more

Hidden iPad keyboard options

Most people generally consider  the iPad's lack of a physical keyboard a disadvantage. However, if you do a little digging, you will find that Apple includes a few useful features in the iPad's onscreen keyboard  that physical keyboards can't match.

You can easily uncover some of the tricks to extend the keyboard's capabilities by peeking at the iPad's general settings and opening the keyboard options.

However, some of the other tricks are truly hidden. If you've never held down a vowel for an accent character or successfully found the symbol for the … Read more

The iPad's hidden shuffle

The iPod music app on the iPad is an odd crossbreed of Apple's iTunes interface and the playback capabilities of the iPhone and iPod Touch. In some ways, it excels beyond either interface, delivering a lightening-fast version of iTunes or a more jukebox-like version of the iPod experience.

But when Apple spliced the DNA of iTunes and the iPod to create the iPad's music player, it buried one of the most useful features of both products: shuffle.

It seems a little odd that Apple would turn its back on a playback feature so popular--the company named a product … Read more

View blocked Web sites with a proxy

Hulu is a great service, unless you don't live in the U.S., in which case it's blocked.

BBC's iPlayer rocks, unless you don't live in the U.K., in which case it's probably blocked, too.

Using a proxy can get you around these blocks and give you access to the video services. Proxies take all your Internet requests and relay them from their location, so you appear to be in that location.

For instance, a proxy address for a London server would make it look as if your computer was in London, and the … Read more

How to find free e-books for your iPad

There are a lot of advantages to the iPad as an e-reader, chief among them its capability to be a true multiformat product supporting Kindle, ePubs, PDFs, and others.

One little difficulty remains: finding ways to get free books.

Sure, Apple and others don't exactly want you to stock up on free literature if they can help it, especially in the case of books that aren't public domain. Still, we have to try, don't we? Here are the best (legal) ways not to pay.

The iBooks Store does have over 30,000 free books, mostly from Project … Read more

How to turn a hardcover book into an iPad case

As you already know, there are lots of cheap, DIY ways to create a stand for your iPad. (Personally, I'm partial to the one made out of Tinkertoys, but you gotta like the stand built by David Carnoy's 10-year-old nephew, too.)

But what about a case? Surely the MacGyver wanna-bes out there have figured out how to turn ordinary household objects into cool, practical, rugged, inexpensive iPad carriers?

Yes, yes they have. A guy over at Carrypad just posted illustrated, step-by-step instructions on how to turn a hollowed-out hardcover book into an iPad case. He calls it the &… Read more

Speed test: Netbook versus Apple iPad

Apple's new iPad has legions of eager fans who attribute chameleonlike qualities to it, promoting the tablet as an ideal media player, e-book reader, gaming console, and even a Netbook replacement for basic computing chores.

Most often cited is the iPad's speed, and it indeed feels very quick and responsive, and generally comes off as a powerful tool compared with a standard Netbook, which can feel sluggish even when performing the most basic tasks.

Yet under the hood, it's obvious that a typical $299 Netbook has much more powerful hardware. It's Atom N450 CPU runs at … Read more

Add a camera to the iPad

One complaint about the iPad is that there is no built-in camera.  Thanks to the enterprising Yusuke Sekikawa, those of you with iPhones can add a wireless camera to the iPad.  Here's how.First, on the iPad go to the App Store and search for the app Camera-a. It's 99 cents, so this whole thing has to be worth a buck to you. If it is, buy the app and download and install it.Then, on your iPhone, search and download Camera-b.  This app is free, since it's useless without Camera-a on the iPad.… Read more

Use Flash on the iPad

One big complaint about the iPad is its lack of support for Adobe Flash. This means many Web sites, especially video and gaming pages, aren't accessible in the Web browser.One way around that is using a VNC app. VNC stands for virtual network computing. It lets you show and control one computer from another.With this app, you can use a computer that does support Flash to view the content in a VNC app on the iPad.For my example I'm using Desktop Connect. It currently costs $12 in the iTunes App Store. Though there are cheaper … Read more