​The best hatching tips for Pokemon Go – CNET

Get rid of low milage eggs as fast as you can.

Alina Bradford/CNET

Many are reporting that some Pokemon in Pokemon Go are region specific. This means that if you want to catch them all, you need to start traveling to faraway places, right? Wrong, don’t book that plane ticket just yet.

Incubating and hatching eggs is your ticket to getting those region-specific Pokemon. Hatching is also important for evolution, as getting duplicates of rare Pokemon through hatching gives you a cache of candy you can use to evolve them.

Don’t just randomly stick eggs into incubators and hope for the best, though. Here are some tips to maximize your time and incubators.

How to get eggs and incubators

First, you need eggs and incubators. Everyone starts off with an infinity incubator, but the rest takes work.

Additional incubators can be bought from the PokeShop. You also get incubators when you level-up or by visiting PokeStops, though they’re somewhat rare.

The only way to get eggs is by visiting PokeStops. The type of egg you get seems to be random, but there are three types — 2 mile, 5 m and 10 m eggs (or 2 kilometer, 5 km and 10 km for those in countries other than the US). The mileage means that you have to walk that distance while the eggs are in incubators to get them to hatch.

You can buy incubators in the PokeShop.

Alina Bradford/CNET

Use your incubators wisely

Now that you have what you need, use them with a little strategy. The orange infinity incubator can be used, well, infinite times, while the blue incubators can only be used a few times. However, the limited-use incubators hatch eggs quicker than the infinity incubator.

Typically, you get way more 2 m and 5 m eggs than 10 m eggs. The higher the mileage, the better chances you have of hatching a super rare Pokemon. You can’t just ignore your 2 and 5 mile eggs and hatch 10 mile eggs, though, because you have limited space and the smaller mileage eggs will fill your bag up quickly. You only get nine egg spaces, after all, and eggs can’t be deleted.

So, you need to get rid of those lower mileage eggs as quickly as possible to make sure you leave room for 10 m eggs. Since it takes more time to hatch a 10 m anyway, pop those in your infinity incubator. Put your smaller mileage eggs into the limited use incubators and get them hatched and out of the way.

Low mileage eggs have been known to grow rare Pokemon too, so you’re not hatching them for nothing. Plus, every egg hatched gives you experience and candy.

Hatch when you’re tired

Not everyone has time, or the energy, to walk 10 miles to hatch their eggs, but there are other solutions. They’re technically cheating, but they’re options.

One great way to hatch your eggs is to keep the game open while you ride the city bus. The bus typically goes slow enough that the game thinks you are walking, and you should be able to even turn some PokeStops along the way.

Pro tip: No need to scream that you need to get off the bus when passing a Snorlax or a Pikachu. Just quickly tap on the Pokemon to draw it into battle, slide the AR toggle switch in the upper right-hand corner and start battling. This will turn off the AR and allow you to catch the Pokemon without stopping.

You can even lay your phone on a record player or tape it to a ceiling fan to rack up distance, but be careful doing this. It may crack more than just some eggs.

Why your eggs just won’t hatch

Sometimes, no matter what you do, your distance doesn’t seem to be counted and your eggs just don’t hatch.

The number one reason your egg probably isn’t hatching is server issues. While you’re walking around, make sure the white PokeBall isn’t spinning in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. This means that the game is loading or has an error. If the spinning loading ball doesn’t disappear, stop walking and shut down the game. Restart it and see if the loading ball is gone. If so, continue your walk.

Another problem is that you may be going too fast. If the game feels like you’re going too fast, around 20 m (32 km) per hour, it won’t register your distance. So riding along in a car that’s going down the highway won’t hatch your eggs.

Finally, make sure your screen is on the entire time you walk. If you let your screen shut off, the game will stop registering mileage.

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Get a Flareon, Vaporeon or Jolteon easily in Pokemon GO – CNET

Renaming your Eevee will make it evolve into the type you need.

Alina Bradford/CNET

You want to catch ’em all in Pokemon Go , and you also need a variety of Pokemon types to own gyms. Evolving your Eevees can be an effective and simple way to get three different, strong Pokemon while adding three new numbers to your Pokedex.

You can evolve an Eevee into a Flareon (a fire type), a Vaporeon (a water type) or a Jolteon (an electric type) just by changing your Eevee’s name.

To evolve an Eevee into a Flareon:

Collect enough Eevee candies to evolve your Eevee
Tap on your Eevee
Tap on the pencil icon beside the name “Eevee”
Rename it Pyro
Tap on the Okay button
Tap on Evolve and your Eevee will evolve into a Flareon

To evolve your Eevee to a Jolteon, name it Sparkly.

Alina Bradford/CNET

To evolve your Eevee to a Vaporeon, use the same steps, but name it Rainer instead of Pyro. To evolve your Eevee to a Jolteon, name it Sparky. Sparkly is another name that also works to create a Jolteon. This is actually something of an easter egg, with these being the names of three Eevee trainers in the Pokemon anime.

Tried the steps and it didn’t work? Sometimes this trick fails because of glitches in the game. To get around the glitch you’ll need to rename your Eevee, shut down the game and open it back up before evolving your Eevee again. It’s a pain, but I’ve had success every time with the shutdown method.

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Like Pokemon Go? You’ll like these games, too – CNET

To call Pokemon Go a phenomenon is to call this year’s presidential election mildly controversial. The game is all anyone’s talking about (thank goodness, something other than the election!) and all anyone’s playing.

Of course, there are reasons for that. For most players, it’s their first taste of augmented reality (AR): Game content overlaid on real-world images as displayed on your phone. There’s also the fun of actually getting outside to do something, to say nothing of the fitness benefits that come from walking, running and/or biking to your next destination. (Please, please don’t drive a car while chasing monsters. The life you take could be my own.)

Thankfully, Pokemon Go isn’t the only AR game in town. Whether the “kiddie” nature of Go doesn’t appeal to you or you’re just ready for new challenges, there are lots of other AR experiences worth trying.

If fitness is your goal

BallStrike (iOS)

Think AR is new? BallStrike has been around since 2012. This exercise game (arguably better on an iPad than an iPhone, as a bigger screen is easier to see) puts you in front of the camera, where you jump, twist, kick and hit virtual balls as they appear. It’s a free game, though the full version costs 99 cents (about $1.30 AU and £0.80).

The Walk (Android|iOS)

From the creators of Zombies, Run!, The Walk aims to gamify walking, or give you non-monster incentive to get up off the couch. It’s really a phone-based fitness tracker, but with a plot that unfolds as you go. Every time you walk, you unlock more of the story. Want to find out what happens next? Go for another walk. The app is available for $3, AU$4.50 and £2.30.

If you think Pokemon are for kids

Ingress (Android|iOS)

Ingress shares DNA with Pokemon Go, but it’s a decidedly tech-ier experience.

Niantic

No list of AR games would be complete without Ingress, which was arguably the single most popular AR title until Pokemon Go came along. No surprise there: The developer of the former also created the latter! Ingress is all about getting out and exploring the streets, this time with the fate of the world in your hands and two factions battling for supremacy. Think Risk, with the world as your game board. Ingress is free, with in-app purchases available.

SpecTrek (Android)

Tired of hunting monsters? Hunt ghosts for a change! That’s the goal of SpecTrek, which operates very similarly to Pokemon Go — move around the real world to catch ’em all — but with ghosts as your prey. When you hold your phone parallel to the ground, you see a map to guide you. Raise it up and the camera kicks in for ghost-busting AR goodness. The game sells for $2.49 U.S. (about $3.30 AU and £1.90).

Warp Runner (Android)

This clever puzzle game turns your desk (or any other flat surface) into a mini-arena, where you collect objects and work to guide your robot to the exit. Warp Runner has little in common with Pokemon Go, but it’s very cool — and free to boot.

Zombies Everywhere (iOS)

If there’s a better use for AR, I haven’t found it. Zombies Everywhere is exactly what it sounds like: Virtual zombies that appear in the “real world” when you point your phone’s camera all around. Luckily, your armed with virtual weapons as well. The game sells for 99 cents (about $1.30 AU and £0.80).

How to watch the Democratic National Convention 2016 from anywhere – CNET

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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will officially accept the party’s nomination for president this week in Philadelphia. The Democratic National Convention will include appearances from President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, former Clinton rival Bernie Sanders and a handful of others.

The event will begin on Monday, July 25, and run through Thursday, July 28. Clinton is expected to accept the nomination on the final night.

Here are the many ways to tune in:

• The convention will be broadcast live on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and C-SPAN.
• There will be nightly coverage on CBS, ABC, NBC and PBS.
• You can also view the live coverage online at CBSN. Like with the RNC, CBSN is partnering with Twitter to stream the convention live on the social network. The Twitter feature page includes the live stream alongside curated tweets.
• YouTube, Twitch and Bing will also have a live stream.
• If you’re on the go, the DNC app for iOS and Android includes a live stream.

Want to follow along or contribute to the conversation on social media? Use the hashtag #DNCinPHL.

How to free up space on your Android phone or tablet – CNET

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James Martin/CNET

You know the old saw: You can never be too rich, too thin or have too much storage on your phone.

The first two are folly. But the latter can prove all too accurate when you find yourself with no more room to install apps, take pictures and download music.

Some Android phones and tablets provide an easy fix: Pop in a microSD card. But what happens if there’s no expansion slot? Are you going to have to buy a whole new device?

Maybe someday, but not today. There are ways to free up space that you might not have considered. So before you start deleting precious family photos, try these strategies.

Audit your apps

Apps are cheap and plentiful, which is why people tend to stock up on them — even ones they seldom use. So ask yourself which apps you really need, and which ones you can live without. Remember: deleting an app doesn’t mean it’s gone forever, just for now. You can always install it again later if you really need it.

Games tend to be the biggest apps. So if you’re done with, say, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, clear it out and reclaim a whopping 2.4GB of storage.

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Screenshot by Rick Broida/CNET

Want to know which apps consume the most space? The Android operating system will tell you, but it takes a little drilling to get there. Venture into Settings, then look for Storage (which may be listed as Storage & USB on some devices). Finally, tap Apps and wait for the OS to calculate the storage numbers. Now you can make some decisions as to which apps should get the heave-ho.

Offload photos and videos

The more snapshots and movies you capture with your phone’s camera, the bigger the dent in your available storage. After a year or two capturing life’s important moments (to say nothing of countless selfies), it’s not uncommon to face a storage crisis.

Solution: offload the older or less important stuff to another location. This could be the hard drive on your PC (a fairly straightforward drag-and-drop affair) or a cloud service such as Dropbox or Flickr. The latter is a solid choice, as it offers a whopping 1 terabyte of free storage for photos.

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Screenshot by Rick Broida/CNET

Of course, Google Photos gives you unlimited storage for both photos and videos, the only limitation being that photos must be smaller than 16 megapixels and videos 1080p or less. Just as awesome, it can automatically delete from your phone those items it has already backed up to the cloud, potentially freeing up gigabytes of space.

To access that feature, just load the Photos app, tap Menu > Settings, and then hit Free up device storage.

Switch to streaming

As we’ve already discussed, media eats an inordinate amount of space on your phone or tablet. There’s the stuff you create yourself, of course, but the even bigger culprits are the music, podcasts and videos you download.

But unless you have a specific need to keep a library of that stuff on your device — you’re taking a long trip, for example, and won’t have easy or reliable access to Wi-Fi — don’t store it, stream it instead.

Take music. If you’re accustomed to the old-school approach to MP3s — copying all or part of your library to your device — consider switching to a music-streaming service instead. That way you’ll still have access to all your favorite tunes (and them some), but you won’t have to keep the files in memory.

Don’t want to pay? Turn your PC into the music-streaming “service.” All you need is media-server software — Plex is a popular option — that can sling all your music (videos, too) to your mobile devices. That’s really powerful, because it means you have access to your mammoth desktop hard drive and don’t need to store anything on your limited mobile drive.

Wherever and whenever you can, stream instead of store.

Add external storage

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SanDisk

It feels a little cruel that the Android software supports memory expansion cards, but not all devices have expansion slots. That means if you want to offload photos and videos or carry around a large library of music and movies, you’re sunk. Right?

Wrong. You can indeed add extra storage to just about any Android device — it just has to be external. This can take the form of a plug-in drive (not unlike a USB flash drive) or a wireless media hub. Each has its own pros and cons.

Take the SanDisk Ultra Dual USB Drive 3.0, which sports a standard USB connector at one end and a Micro-USB connector at the other. The latter plugs into your phone or tablet and gives you anywhere from 16-128GB of extra stroage. The only catch: Your device must support OTG (thankfully, most do).

That’s a great and really inexpensive solution, one that’s plug-and-play simple and doesn’t need to be charged. Drives like these, however, stick awkwardly out of the bottom (or possibly side) of your device. If you don’t want that added bulk, consider a wireless media hub. Same idea — onboard or memory-card storage — but with a Wi-Fi rather than Lightning connection.

The Western Digital MyPassport Wireless, for example, comes in 1TB and 2TB flavors. It can back up your photos and lets you access music, videos and other media. But prices start at around $150, AU$200 or £130, and it’s a bit too bulky to carry in a pocket.

If you want a more mobile-friendly solution, check out something like the Ravpower Filehub, a wireless SD-card and USB-drive reader that sells for $30-$40, AU$90 or £30. As an added bonus, it’s also a Wi-Fi hotspot and mobile charger.

Just take note of a key limitation with all these options: You can’t play DRM-protected music or videos, of the kind you might purchase from Google Play or download from Spotify. External storage works only with your own media.