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Between crowded airports, winter delays, and luggage loaded with gifts, holiday travel can be stressful. But with a little planning, you can make your trip a little easier from start to finish. So rather than gathering up a collection of apps that help you book flights, we decided to make a different kind of travel collection.… Read more

Windows Firewall and other free firewalls do a pretty good job of keeping threats away from your computer, but many users prefer the extra security and support of a premium firewall. Emsisoft's Online Armor is a shareware firewall suite that offers strong protection against malicious programs, hacker attacks, and other privacy and security threats, but it's also designed to be as unobtrusive as possible while doing it. Its real-time protection means no lengthy scans; instead, Online Armor evaluates each program as it runs. The program has plenty of configuration options, especially in its Advanced Mode. For instance, you … Read more

HipGeo Travel Blog and Trip Journal (free) lets you tell the story of your vacation with images, videos, text, tags, and more all tied to your geolocation. You start by signing up through Facebook or Twitter, then you can choose people to share your travels with. If you just want to see the app in action before you take your trip (and see best practices from other users) you can use an explore button to check out blogs of popular or featured users, or look at posts from near your location.… Read more

Right when you launch AutoRap, you can get started by tapping your screen and speaking. The app immediately records your speech until you tap the screen again to stop it. After a few seconds of "rappification" (AutoRap's proprietary syllable-mapping technology), the app will replay your recording, autotuned, timing-adjusted, and laid over one of its generic rap beats.

Off the bat, you get two free beats to play with: Turkey Burgers and OneOneOne (I've never heard of them either). You can use these as many times and as often as you like. If you want more beats, … Read more

NEW YORK -- The sun has just come up outside the hallowed Apollo Theater in Harlem, and Lord "Black Jesus" Harrison is doing what he often does on Saturdays: selling CDs of his rap group, Harlem 6.

"We're distributing online and on the streets," Harrison said in a baritone voice on the awakening street. "People got to know who you are... all the greatest did this: NWA, Wu-Tang Clan, this guy 50 Cent."

As his eyes scan the street for potential buyers, Harrison is talking piracy now, and his rapid-fire speech slows to … Read more

To get in the mood for this one, I've put on an old favorite, a deep bass track by Dead Prez. It turns out the song's title, and main refrain--"It's Bigger Than Hip Hop"--applies to the power of music in a very literal sense as well.

The acoustical vibrations that are particularly pervasive in the heavy bass lines of hip-hop penetrate our bodies and can then be captured and stored as electricity to power implanted medical devices. Researchers out of Purdue have built a device, which they are unveiling at the IEEE MEMS conference in Paris … Read more

If you love sharing your travel stories and photos, road-tripping app HipGeo recently got a redesign that lets users document and share their experiences with remarkable ease.

The free iPhone and iPad app from Los Angeles-based HipGeo passively records your location as you travel. It can then mash your pics and comments into an animated map and travel diary for sharing.

The app tags photos, adds captions, and pinpoints its location on a map. You can share by logging on to the HipGeo site and clicking on "create and share trip." Dead simple. … Read more

The bottom line: Back from the nearly dead, or at least the un-updated, ESET returns with high-level security that's light on your system. For a basic antivirus suite that's light on your system and tough on malware, NOD32 gets a yes from us.

Review:

The last time ESET updated its two security suites--the antivirus and anti-malware-only NOD32 and the more feature-heavy alternative Smart Security--it was a different computer security world. It was March 2009: Anonymous barely existed, Stuxnet hadn't gone public, and ransomware was the stuff of science fiction.

Version 5 of ESET NOD32 is a solid, … Read more