Why iBooks is a better file manager than e-book reader – CNET

The iPad isn’t my favorite e-book reader. After all, if you stare at a computer screen at work all day, the last thing you want to do when you get home is read a book on a glossy iPad screen.

But iBooks isn’t just for e-books. It can also be used to store PDF files, especially for reference documents like owner’s manuals. (If you haven’t done so already, it’s time to toss your paper owner’s manuals.)

Here’s how to download PDFs to iBooks on your iPad or iPhone and how to organize, rename and sync your PDFs.

How to save PDF documents to iBooks

The iPad is a great PDF viewer, but you can also use it to download and save PDFs. You likely come across PDFs in iOS as email attachments or on the Web. With the Mail app or Safari, it takes only a few taps to download a PDF to iBooks.

In Mail, tap a PDF attachment to download and then tap to open it. With the file open in Mail, tap the share button in the lower-left corner and then tap the Copy to iBooks button.

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Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

In Safari, tap on the PDF you are viewing to bring up a banner at the top with Open in on the left side and Open in iBooks on the right. Tap the latter and you will download the PDF to iBooks.

Create a folder (aka Collections)

If you begin to use iBooks to collect PDFs, you’ll eventually reach a point where you’ll want to bring some order to iBooks’s shelves. You can organize your PDFs into folders, which iBooks calls Collections.

To create a Collection, tap All Books at the top and then tap New Collection and give it a name. This new Collection will then get added to the list.

The current collection you are viewing is listed at the top of iBooks, which includes four default collections and any you created. In fact, one of the default collections is titled PDFs, which automatically pulls in any PDFs you save to iBooks.

Add PDFs to a Collection

To move a PDF to a collection, go to the All Books view where all of your files in iBook are listed and tap Select in the upper-right corner. Next, tap the PDFs you want to move and then tap Move in the upper-left corner. After tapping Move, you can then choose a destination for the files you selected.

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Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

How to rename PDFs

The ability to rename PDFs is useful because the thumbnails iBooks are too small to see what each PDF is, especially on a small iPhone screen. And if you switch from the default grid view in iBooks to the list view that shows the file names of each file, it’s not that helpful because many PDFs have useless file names that give no clue to their topic or content.

To rename a PDF, you need to be using the list view instead of the default grid view.

• From the main Library view of iBooks, tap the button in the upper-left corner to toggle between list and grid views.
• Choose list view and then tap Select in the upper-right corner.
• Tap a PDF’s name from the list to call up the onscreen keyboard to rename it.

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Sync your PDFs across all iOS devices

If you use iBooks on multiple devices, then you can sync iBooks between your iOS devices and Macs so your PDFs are available no matter which screen you’re staring at.

To sync iBooks across your Apple devices, first make sure each is running the latest version of iBooks. Also check to see that you are using the same Apple ID for each device.

With iBooks up-to-date and the same Apple ID used, you need to make sure iBooks’s sync settings are enabled. In iOS, go to Settings > iBooks and make sure Select Sync Collections and Sync Bookmarks and Notes are both turned on. On a Mac, open iBooks, go to iBooks > Preferences, and make sure the box is checked for Sync bookmarks, highlights, and collections across devices.

Now that I’ve started a collection of owner’s manuals in iBooks, I’m finding it’s useful for storing other PDFs as well, from school-related docs for my kids to work-related docs of my own.

Five tips to speed up your Mac – CNET

The only place I like seeing a beach ball is at a beach or in a stadium during a baseball game or concert. The one place I least like to see a beach ball is on my aging MacBook Pro, where the spinning beach ball has become an altogether too familiar a sight. If your Mac has become frustratingly slow, there are a number of ways you can speed it up again.

Before you engage in any maintenance, I would urge you to take caution and back up your data. For Macs, it’s easy: grab an external drive and run Time Machine. With your Mac’s drive freshly backed up, you may proceed.

1. Replace your Mac hard drive with an SSD

Moving from a traditional spinning hard drive to a solid-state drive (SSD) is the single best thing you can do to improve the performance of an aging MacBook. Follow Sharon Profis’s instructions on how to upgrade your MacBook Pro with an SSD. You’ll be shocked at not only how easy it is to do but also at the huge impact it has on performance.

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I just performed the maneuver myself, replacing my 2011-era MacBook Pro’s 500GB hard drive with the 500GB Samsung 850 EVO . The Samsung SSD and a SATA-to-USB cable kit cost me just north of $200 on Amazon. And the whole procedure took less than an hour (not counting the half a day it took to clone my MacBook’s hard drive to the SSD).

Really, the hardest part of the whole thing was tracking down a size 6T torx-head screwdriver for the four torx screws that help hold the hard drive in place.

2. Add more memory (RAM)

While you have your MacBook opened to replace its hard drive, take the opportunity to add more memory. Like the replacing a hard drive, adding more memory is a straightforward, simple process.

First, you need to find the right type of memory for your specific MacBook model. The brand doesn’t matter much, just be sure to buy the right amount, type, and speed. Apple has a handy support page that shows the memory specifications for a variety of models, along with an illustrated guide to replacing the memory.

In my case, my early-2011 MacBook Pro has two DIMM slots, each of which is occupied by a 2GB module. Since I don’t have any free slots, I will need to replace those two modules with two 4GB modules. I need DDR3 memory with a speed of 1,333MHz.

After finding the right RAM for your MacBook, follow the photos below to install the new memory.

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3. Clean your Mac’s hard drive

Sometimes, all your MacBook needs is a data clean-up. Over the years, you’ve probably cluttered your Mac with files and applications you no longer use or need.

Uninstall old Mac apps

To get started, let’s look in the Applications and Downloads folders. If there are apps in there you can’t remember installing, odds are you can live without them. Move them to the Trash to reclaim some hard-drive space.

There are files associated with every application you install, however, and they are left behind when you simply move an application to the Trash. Since Mac OS X doesn’t have a built-in uninstaller, AppZapper can uninstall apps and the related files. It’s free for the first five zaps, after which you’ll need to pay $12.95.

Clean up applications you still use

Next, let’s clean up the applications you are keeping. When you install an app on your Mac, the piece of software arrives as part of a package of files, including permissions that tell OS X which users can do what things with specific files.

Over time, these permissions can get changed, resulting in your Mac lagging, freezing or crashing. Repairing these disk permissions, in the most basic terms, amounts to reshuffling and re-dealing these permissions so that they return to their rightful place. To address this, OS X has a built-in tool called Disk Utility that does just the trick.

Read my previous post on how to repair disk permissions for a step-by-step guide.

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

Find out which apps are using the most resources

If your Mac acts like it needs a nap every afternoon, when you are at the height of multitasking, there is an easy way to see which of your open applications is using the most system resources. Open the Activity Monitor.

The numbers are constantly fluctuating, but they show you the amount of CPU and memory resources each app is using. After watching the Activity Monitor for a while this morning, I see that Firefox generally takes up more CPU resources and more than triple the memory resources. Perhaps it’s time for me to abandon Firefox and use Chrome exclusively. Also, I found that the sluggish iTunes isn’t nearly the resource hog I thought it was. My apologies, iTunes.

Delete big, unused files

Now that you’ve paid some attention to your applications, it’s time to look at the files cluttering your drive. You can use Finder to search for huge files. To do so, open Finder and select the volume you’d like to search. Next, choose File > Find (or hit Command-F). Click on the Kind pull-down menu and select Other. When the Select a search attribute window opens, check the box for File Size, uncheck any other boxes, and click OK. Change the “equals” pull-down menu option to “is greater than” and then change KB to MB. Enter a minimum files file size such as, say, 100MB. You can then delete any files that show up on the list that you no longer need — or move them to an external drive at the very least.

4. Reduce login items

If your Mac is slow to boot up, the problem may be that there are too applications to open at startup. It’s likely you never set them to launch at startup — they launch by default.

• Go to System Preferences > Users & Groups and then click on the Login Items tab to see a list of the apps that open when you boot your Mac.
• Highlight the apps you don’t want to open at startup and click the minus-sign button below the list of apps.

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

5. Keep current with OS X

Apple releases new versions of OS X as free upgrades, so there is no reason not to stay current. New versions of OS X contain performance enhancements and security improvements to keep your Mac running smoothly and safely.

Check in periodically with the Updates tab of the Mac App Store for OS X updates and don’t ignore notifications of updates that are ready to install.

Five things to consider before buying LED bulbs – CNET

Forever LED Light’s ine of bulbs have a lifetime guarantee. Apparently, that’s a first.Indiegogo

As your incandescents burn out, it’s a good time to consider switching to LED bulbs.

LEDs have an impressive lifespan (20-something years!) and are very cost-effective.

Now’s the right time to switch to LEDs. These bulbs have made significant advances over the last few years, finally delivering the warm light incandescents have comforted us with for decades.

Because there are so many LED varieties, choosing an LED is entirely different from picking up an incandescent. Before you head to the store, find out what you need to know about choosing the right LED bulbs.

Lumens, not watts

Forget what you know about incandescents — your watts are no good here.

When shopping for bulbs, you’re probably accustomed to looking for watts, an indication of how bright the bulb will be. The brightness of LEDs, however, is determined a little differently.

Contrary to common belief, wattage isn’t an indication of brightness, but a measurement of how much energy the bulb draws. For incandescents, there is an accepted correlation between the watts drawn and the brightness, but for LEDs, watts aren’t a great predictor of how bright the bulb will be. (The point, after all, is that they draw less energy.)

For example, an LED bulb with comparable brightness to a 60W incandescent is only 8 to 12 watts.

But don’t bother doing the math — there isn’t a uniform way to covert incandescent watts to LED watts. Instead, a different form of measurement should be used: lumens.

The lumen (lm) is the real measurement of brightness provided by a light bulb, and is the number you should look for when shopping for LEDs. For reference, here’s a chart that shows the watt-lumen conversion for incandescents and LEDs.

Sharon Vaknin/CNET

As you can see in the chart above, an incandescent can draw up to five times as many watts for the same number of lumens. Get a sense of the brightness (in lumens) you need before heading to the store, and throw away your affinity for watts.

Choosing the right color LED

You can always count on incandescents providing a warm, yellowish hue. But LEDs come in a wide range of colors.

Candace Lombardi/CNET

As shown off by the Philips Hue, LED bulbs are capable of displaying an impressive color range, from purple to red, to a spectrum of whites and yellows. For the home, however, you’re likely looking for something similar to the light that incandescents produce.

The popular colors available for LEDs are “warm white” or “soft white,” and “bright white.”

Warm white and soft white will produce a yellow hue, close to incandescents, while bulbs labeled as bright white will produce a whiter light, closer to daylight and similar to what you see in retail stores.

If you want to get technical, light color (color temperature) is measured in kelvins. The lower the number, the warmer (yellower) the light. So, your typical incandescent is somewhere between 2,700 and 3,500K. If that’s the color you’re going for, look for this range while shopping for LED bulbs.

You’ll pay more for an LED bulb

LED bulbs are like hybrid cars: cheaper to operate but pricey upfront.

When switching to LED bulbs, don’t expect to save buckets of cash. Instead, think of it as an investment. Luckily, competition has increased and LED bulbs have come down in price (like this $5 LED from Philips), but you should still expect to pay much more than an incandescent.

Eventually, the LED bulbs will pay off, and in the meantime, you’ll enjoy less heat production, longer bulb life, and even the option of controlling them with your smartphone.

Bottom line: unless you’re replacing many incandescent bulbs in a large house, you won’t see significant savings in your electricity bill.

For a detailed breakdown of the cost-effectiveness of LED bulbs, check out this useful post.

Watch out for non-dimmable LEDs

Because of their circuitry, LEDs are not always compatible with traditional dimming switches. In some cases, the switch must be replaced. Other times, you’ll pay a little more for a compatible LED.

Most dimmers, which were likely designed to work with incandescents, work by cutting off the amount of electricity sent to the bulb. The less electricity drawn, the dimmer the light. But with your newly acquired knowledge of LED lingo, you know that there is no direct correlation between LED brightness and energy drawn.

This guide explains why some LEDs will hum, flickr, or buzz when tied to a dimmer.

If you’d like your LED to be dimmable, you need to do one of two things: find LED bulbs compatible with traditional dimmers, or replace your current dimming switch with a leading-edge (LED-compatible) dimmer.

When shopping for LEDs, it helps to know what kind of dimming switch you have, but if you don’t know (or would rather not go through the trouble), simply search for LED bulbs compatible with standard incandescent dimmers. To make things easier for you, we tested a slew of them to find out which LED bulbs work best with dimmers.

Not all light fixtures should use LEDs

Knowing where it’s OK to place an LED will ensure that the bulb won’t fizzle ahead of its time.

You probably know that LED bulbs run dramatically cooler than their incandescent cousins, but that doesn’t mean they don’t produce heat. LED bulbs do get hot, but the heat is pulled away by a heat sink in the base of the bulb. From there, the heat dissipates into the air and the LED bulb stays cool, helping to keep its promise of a very long life.

And therein lies the problem: the bulb needs a way to dissipate the heat. If an LED bulb is placed in an enclosed housing, the heat won’t have anywhere to go, sending it right back to the bulb, and sentencing it to a slow and painful death.

Consider where you’d like to place your LED bulbs. If you have fully or semi-enclosed fixtures you need to light up, look for LEDs that are approved for recessed or enclosed spaces.

LG ordered to pay $3.5 million in damages to Core Wireless over patent violations

Core Wireless, a company which holds numerous patents for 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE network technologies, has been awarded $3.5 million in damages after a jury found the LG violated two patents owned by the company. The patents concerned smartphone user interfaces, and the jury awarded Core Wireless $0.10 in damages per unit.

From Core Wireless:

Core Wireless alleged that most of LG’s recent smartphones, including its leading LG G4 model, infringe two Core Wireless patents. The jury determined that the patents are infringed and not invalid and awarded Core Wireless past damages based on a reasonable royalty of $0.10 cents per unit, or $3.5 million.

Additionally, Core will ask the judge to order LG to pay a $0.10 per unit royalty on all future sales on infringing smartphones for the life of the patent, which ends in 2027.

Android Central 280: Virtual porn, real issues

This week on the Greatest Android Podcast in the world we take on Pornhub’s arrival to 360-degree video and mobile VR. (For those of you who listen with kids around, that’s not until the back half of the show, and there is good warning beforehand.) Plus, HTC’s finally almost nearly ready to eventually show us its next flagship smartphone — and we answer more of your questions on air!

And coming up next week: We’re planning an all-Q&A show. So record your question and send it to podcast at androidcentral dot com — or just do a traditional email if that’s your thing.

Thanks to this week’s sponsors!

• Harry’s: Start shaving better today and save $5 off your first purchase with coupon code AC.
• Mailroute: Get 10 percent off spam-free email from a company that keeps its focus on what matters — stopping the spam!

Podcast MP3 URL: http://traffic.libsyn.com/androidcentral/androidcentral280.mp3

The Honor 7 gets its Marshmallow update in the EU

Honor has announced that the Android 6.0 Marshmallow update is now available over-the-air for Honor 7 owners in the EU. The update comes a few weeks after Honor originally expected, but it’s good to see that it’s actually rolling out now.

From Honor on Twitter:

Finally folks. The Marshmallow update for Honor 7 is out from today forward via OTA. #honor #forthebrave pic.twitter.com/H33b0FNxL2

— HonorEU (@HonorEU) March 25, 2016

Because the update is just starting to roll out, it could be a little while before it’s pushed to your device. You can always head to Settings, then select About phone to check for the update manually.

Your smartwatch still sucks as a boarding pass

Air travel is stressful enough as it is. Don’t make it worse by nerding it up in a setting that’s still not ready for it.

There are two kinds of folks who fly. There are those who do enough to know how to make it as painless as possible. We’re the ones you don’t see crowding around the gate long before it’s time to board, not stressing over which seat we’re in (having taken care of that long before we got anywhere near a plane), and who appreciate that every little thing you do to not slow down the process can make a big difference when you multiply that buy a couple hundred other meatsacks schlepping behind.

And then there’s everyone else.

But even with the gate lice and the power recliners and dude who just has to have a Bloody Mary at 6 a.m., it can still get worse.

You could try to get your watch involved.

Back in August 2014 — just a couple months after the first Android Wear smartwatches became available — I first took a look at using a smartwatch as a boarding pass. “Anything but first class” was the headline. A year and a half later, has anything actually changed?

Face-down scanner, face-up watch. What’s a nerd to do?

From a hardware perspective, it’s funny to look back on that original report. I was wearing an LG Watch — essentially a display on your wrist. There was virtually nothing about it that looked like a watch, design-wise. Hell, you’d be forgiven if you mistook it for the Apple Watch, which didn’t come out for a good nine months after LG’s first offering. There’s just not a lot going on there. But it served its purpose in this case — show a mobile boarding pass on the screen, to be read by the same scanners in airports worldwide.

The problem was — and still is — the scanners themselves. In many instances they’re simply not in a convenient position for shooting an upward-facing QR code. They’re great for giving gate updates while you’re running between terminals — I can’t say enough for not having to take my phone out of my pocket in that instance. But they’re lousy once you get there. If you have to place the QR code face down, then your watch has to be pointed down — on the underside of your wrist. For some, that’s fine. Our Apple Watch-wielding pal Rene Ritchie at iMore had no problem with this.

Since I knew how the scanners worked, and didn’t want to distort my arm, I loosed the Milanese Loop, spun the watch to the inside of my wrist as I was walking to the checkpoint, and then gentle placed it over the scanner.

That’s fine, I guess, if you’re using the magnetic Milanese Loop on an Apple Watch. But that still means you’re essentially taking off your watch in order to get it to do something. And that makes absolutely no sense from a functional standpoint. Might as well use any other mechanism to get onto the plane. Your phone — which can be more easily turned face-down or face-up, seeing as how it’s not attached to your arm. A paper boarding pass — which has the added advantage of not having a display that can dim right as you go to scan it. Or needing to be charged.

That the smartwatch sucks as a boarding pass still isn’t the watch’s fault. Nothing’s really changed in the time since I first gave it a go. When it does work without a hitch you generally find a look of surprise on the face someone nearby. “Cool!” And they’re right. Despite my misgivings, it is cool. When it’s not too awkward to use.

Mostly it has to do with the scanner. They can still be awkwardly placed at TSA for a phone, never mind for a watch to be able to reach. In February I transited PNS, ATL, SFO, LAX, CDG and BCN over the course of a couple weeks. That’s a lot of people in a lot of lines. It’s a crapshoot at the gate whether the scanner’s going to be looking top-down, or bottom-up. If it’s the latter, don’t bother.

But more important, don’t muck up the works. Don’t get to the gate only to find you have to take your watch off. If you’re going to use your phone as a boarding pass, make damn sure it’s on and open and ready. Your fellow fliers and I thank you.

Microsoft’s gigantic Surface Hub pen display is finally shipping

Microsoft is finally shipping to business customers its interactive whiteboard replacement, the Surface Hub. Unveiled at the Windows 10 launch last year, the collaborative machine was delayed last year. But it looks like its about to find its way into a corporate meeting room near you.

The mega display runs Windows 10 and like its tinier Surface Pro cousins, supports multi-touch. It also has a marker-sized pen so you can annotate all your awesome PowerPoint presentations. The giant computer comes with Skype for business and supports all your favorite Office applications.

You can hit up your CFO for either the $22,000 84-inch 4K model or the more reasonable $9,000 55-inch HD display.

Microsoft is keen to make sure you know the Surface Hub is for teams. In a statement about today’s news it said, “we are not just releasing a powerful device. We are releasing a team-empowering solution that will make meetings more productive, modernize workflows, and let people engage with data much better.”

Source: Microsoft

HoloLens TED Talk shows what augmented reality can do

If you think you have a sense of what Microsoft’s HoloLens headset can do, you’re in for a pleasant surprise. The company’s Alex Kipman recently presented a TED Talk on HoloLens that included multiple fresh demos illustrating Kipman’s vision of an augmented reality future. He showed off virtual caves and forests, and a space where you could watch TV at one moment and talk to family in the next. The highlight, however, comes near the end: Kipman talks to an avatar of NASA’s Jeffrey Norris standing on a recreation of Mars. Suddenly, Star Wars’ holograms aren’t so far-fetched.

A question-and-answer session after the presentation also helps explain how Microsoft produces the holographic effect for an external camera at an event. While HoloLens normally maps environments in real-time, Microsoft pre-maps the stage so that it can maintain the demo even when the WiFi invariably bogs down. Also, while the outside camera uses a fisheye lens to create an extremely wide field of view, Kipman is quick to note that the points of light in a given area are identical — the experience is fundamentally the same. In short, you’ll probably feel like you got your money’s worth if you dared to drop $3,000 on the developer HoloLens unit.

Source: TED, Microsoft Devices Blog

LED-lit fishing nets save sea turtles from getting caught

Sometimes, it’s the simplest tech that makes the biggest difference. University of Exeter researchers have crafted fishing nets with evenly distributed green LED lights (one every 33 feet) that warn sea turtles away without spooking fish. While scientists have yet to nail the exact reason the lights steer the turtles clear, one researcher tells Tech Insider that it’s likely just a matter of visibility — the turtles stand a better chance of seeing the net in time to avoid it. It’s not only quite effective in early tests (it reduced green turtle deaths by 64 percent), but relatively cheap at $100 to cover a giant 1,640ft net with 50 lights.

The scientists want to verify the results with larger fisheries, and to experiment with different colors. If they find continued success, they could make a lasting impact on wildlife conservation. Thousands of sea turtles die every year due to accidental catches, many of them from endangered species. If the LED-augmented nets can save at least some of those unwitting victims, they could increase the chances that these species will survive or even bounce back.

Via: Tech Insider

Source: University of Exeter