Whether you pronounce it “jiff” or “gif,” sending a GIF to a friend via your iPhone’s Messages app is a fairly straightforward process.

First, make sure your iPhone is running iOS 5 or later. Then, go to a GIF archive—Reddit and Imgur are good sources. Copy the GIF you want to send to your camera roll.

Then message a friend who you know has an iPhone—- select from camera roll and then send. It will look static in your roll until it’s sent when it will start animating again.

If you’re an Android user, there a few apps you can use to share GIFs, though you can’t text them back and forth as easily.

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Blurry photos are generally a bad thing. But although it's true that—with rare exception—no one likes camera shake in their photos, sometimes blur is intentional, such as when you shoot a photo with shallow depth of field so that the subject is sharp and the background is out of focus.

Within the blurry background, you often have lights or reflections—especially at night. In fact, the quality of the background on those highlights is something that photographers consider when taking the shot, and you can affect the look of your photo by tweaking that blurriness. There’s even a name for this effect—it’s called bokeh, and it comes from a Japanese word meaning “blur” or “haze.” Here's what I'm talking about; consider this detail from the background of a photo.

In a nutshell, bokeh refers to the visual properties of blur. But before I go any further, first, some simple science: Where are the blurry dots coming from? Without getting too technical, I can say that bokeh happens when light rays pass through the camera lens and diffract around the lens aperture. As a result, the shape of the aperture gets repeated all over the background of the image. Often, the blur is not quite round, because the aperture isn’t perfectly round; typically it’s made from seven or nine metal blades—small metal surfaces that open and close inside the lens like a diaphragm—that approximate a circle. But if the aperture is shot wide open at the smallest f-number, then the blur will be a perfect circle.

So how do you shoot to get this effect? The most important thing you need is a scene that includes fairly small lights or reflections. The lights of a city at night, Christmas tree lights, or bits of light reflecting off leaves are all good candidates. Large lights or reflective surfaces won’t work if you shoot them too close.

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“Wow...so they’re like Luke Skywalker’s binoculars, as seen in Episode IV?”

This was the reaction I got from friends every time I explained Sony’s new DEV-50 Digital Recording Binoculars. And it’s an accurate description. Sony has reconceived a familiar recreational accessory by taking a passive optical instrument and turning it into an active digital video device. The DEV-50 even sort of resembles the boxy, button-studded gizmo that helped Luke to scan the horizon for his AWOL R2 unit.

Remaking something simple as a digital gadget is an obvious motive for creating a new product, if sometimes a risky one. Who wouldn’t love to have a functional version of that Star Wars prop? Something that doesn’t simply magnify what you see, but enhances the viewing experience?

While gutting something old that works to turn it into something new and digital isn’t automatically a win, and the DEV-50 stumbles in a side-by-side, feature-for-feature comparison with conventional binoculars, you’re still left with an attractive, easy-to-use product.

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Want to get more out of Instagram? Here are a few basics on using the photo-sharing service.

First, the news feed: To “like” someone’s photo, don’t bother finding the little heart icon—just double tap the photo twice. The same goes for replying to someone’s comment—just tap and hold their username, and select Mention User.

Starting earlier this month, Instagram users can tag other users in photos. Go to your own photo, hit the dots in the bottom corner, then Add People.

You get more followers who might care about your photos by using relevant hashtags. The bread photo in the above video was tagged as #carbs, which brought me plenty of comments from other Instagram users.

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Composing a compelling photo can be a challenging artistic endeavor; after all, what looks great in real life can be flat and uninspired when captured as a photo. It’s not enough just to capture what you see with your eyes; you need to reinterpret the scene for the medium that we used to call film.

Thankfully, photographers have had almost two centuries to codify successful compositional techniques into a set of rules. You almost certainly know the most common rule of composition, the Rule of Thirds: Divide what you see in the viewfinder into thirds, like a tic-tac-toe board, and arrange your subject at one of the intersection points. And most cameras–including the iPhone–let you turn on a grid or guide lines to make the scene easier to frame.

Many other rules of composition are less well known, but they’re easy to apply and will add a lot of variety to your photos. Here are the top five to try out in your own photos for whatever camera you use.

Framing: Wander through an art gallery or museum, and you’ll see that artists have traditionally liked to surround their images with fairly ornate frames. Even though frames have gotten simpler in modern times, framing is still important—it helps set the subject off from the physical world. It sets boundaries. And that same technique is actually quite powerful within the photo itself. Study photos with a critical eye, and you’ll find that pros use many elements in their work as natural frames to surround and isolate the key subject in a scene.

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It’s hard to believe today—especially since you can just look up at the sky and see our crater-covered moon with your naked eyes—but there was a time when people weren’t intimately familiar with what the surface of our nearby neighbor looked like. Before the Renaissance-era invention of the telescope, the moon was generally thought to be a perfect, unblemished sphere. These days, with even a moderate telephoto lens, you can photograph the moon and see the surface details for yourself.

What you’ll need

To shoot the moon, the technique is the same whether you have a compact digital camera or an SLR model—the only caveat is that no matter what kind of camera you choose, it should have a manual exposure mode, in which you dial in the aperture and shutter speed separately. So although many compact cameras will work just fine, if your camera is a true point-and-shoot with just a bunch of scene modes to choose from, you won’t have much luck shooting the moon.

Something else to keep in mind: The bigger your zoom, the more dramatic your moon photos will be.  After all, your subject is 250,000 miles away, so a wide-angle lens will have a hard time capturing the scene. If you’re lucky enough to have more than 400mm, that’s awesome. That might sound like a mighty big lens, but keep in mind that many common “megazoom” compact cameras can reach up to 1000mm—it’s almost like having a telescope nailed to the front of your camera.

If your camera doesn’t reach quite that far, don’t worry; you can still get a great photo, and you can crop it afterward to put more emphasis on the moon.

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Cameras are very good at freezing moments in time. Browse through your photo collection, and no doubt you’ll have lots of examples in which a fast shutter speed captured an instant and preserved it, seemingly in amber. What’s missing from photos like those, though, are any sense of drama. If you’re shooting moving subjects—at a car race, a sporting event, or an airshow, for example—then you might want to preserve some of that action. You should learn to pan your camera.

Panning is a technique that lets you capture the essence of motion in a photo. By shooting with a somewhat slow shutter speed and tracking the action as you take the picture, you blur the background while freezing the subject. With a little practice, the results can be striking.

Unfortunately, panning does require a little practice. It’s unnatural and a bit counterintuitive; for as long as you’ve been taking pictures, you’ve probably tried to hold the camera as still as possible. Now I’m asking you to move the camera while you take the shot, albeit in a careful and controlled way.

Choosing the right camera settings

Let’s start with the camera settings. If you can control the exposure (like on a digital SLR or compact digital camera), you’ll want to slow down the shutter. Ideally, you want a shutter speed that’s slow enough to blur the background as you move the camera during the exposure, but fast enough that the subject you’re tracking will be fairly sharp.

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Aviva received a $50 Google Play gift certificate. How does Google's formats and DRM policy effect where she can enjoy the music, movies, and books she buys?

When you legally buy downloadable content, the company you buy it from often has veto power over where it can play. This is all part of the ugly truth of Digital Rights Management (DRM).  The publishers, in trying to keep you from sharing your content with others, make it possible for retailers like Google to completely control how and where you can watch, read, or listen to what you buy.

Google sells music, reading material (books and magazines), and video (movies and TV shows), and treats all three differently. I wish they sold books and movies as openly as they sell music.

[Email your tech questions to answer@pcworld.com or post them on the PCW Answer Line forum.]

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Portable electronics have the same Achilles’ heel as the invading aliens in M. Night Shyamalan’s movie Signs: water. It’s not a good idea to get your digital SLR wet. Taking photos in a rainstorm can end the life of your camera. So how do you protect your camera while taking pictures in a spring shower or a summer deluge? Dress your camera in a rain cover—usually, waterproof fabric that keeps water away from the lens and body, while leaving both the business and control ends open for business.

The good news? There's a surprisingly wide variety of covers to choose from, and many come in a number of sizes to fit various lens lengths and flash attachments. I tried each one with my Nikon D7000 and a variety of lenses.

AquaTech Sports Shield

AquaTech’s Sports Shields (both the Professional and Basic varieties) are made of lightweight waterproof fabric that folds up quite compactly. Installing it (I tried the Basic design) is reminiscent of putting a sweater on a dog; you unzip the Sports Shield’s two zippers, pull the lens through, drape it over the camera body, and zip everything up. To keep water from leaking in the front, a Velcro strap tightens around the lens hood.

In addition to the cover itself, you’ll need an eyepiece that replaces the one that comes with your camera. AquaTech sells models for most popular digital SLRs for $30. The Sports Shield stretches around the eyepiece for a watertight fit there as well.

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Mother’s Day is May 12th. That’s a Sunday. You don’t have that much time to get your act together. Luckily, Apple’s Cards app for iOS can help you send your mom a lovely photo card, printed on 100 percent cotton paper, using that fancy shmancy letterpress technique you love so much.

Here’s a quick walkthrough.

Launch Cards—and remember, though the app was once iPhone and iPod touch-only, it now works on the iPad, too. Cards offers numerous templates, but you’ll probably want to start with the flower tab for Mother’s Day. There are 34 templates to choose among. Find one you like, and tap on it.

As it turns out, Cards doesn’t think you should send mom a picture of some other woman and child. You’re prompted to add your own photo instead. Tap on the empty photo spot, and either snap a photo with your iOS device’s camera, or choose one from your library.

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All great debates are framed by at least two compelling, often contradictory choices: Mac vs. PC, Beatles vs. Stones, oatmeal raisin vs. chocolate chip. If you have a digital SLR or an advanced compact camera, you can make just such a choice when it comes to what format in which to save your photos. Most cameras default to the common JPEG format (and if you have a smartphone or very basic point and shoot, that’s probably your only choice). There’s a good chance your camera also offers a Raw option as well, though. You’ve probably heard that it is a higher quality option than JPEG, but comes with tradeoffs of its own. Should you take it?

There’s no one right answer; it depends upon how you tend to edit and use your photos. It might be helpful to take a step back and discuss the differences between the two formats.

The difference between Raw and JPEG

First of all, Raw isn’t a single, universal file format. Raw is a general term that describes a file that saves all of the “raw” data from the image sensor without processing or discarding anything. Every manufacturer has its own proprietary Raw format and it can even vary from model to model. Nikon’s Raw format is called NEF, while Canon uses CRW and CR2. Raw files pack more color information than JPEG; typically capturing 12 bits per color, that’s a lot more data than JPEG’s 8 bits per color (it’s the difference between 4096 and 256 color variations of each red, green, and blue pixel). And that’s not all; Raw files contain all of that color information, while the JPEG format compresses and strips out some data on the way to saving it. JPEG is, after all, a “lossy” file format, and it makes smaller files by discarding color data that is considered less important. Anytime you re-save a JPEG file and use the compression or quality slider in a photo editing program, you’re re-compressing the photo by asking the computer to discard even more color information.

On the other hand, JPEG files have some advantages over Raw. While Raw files are unprocessed, your camera optimizes JPEG image for sharing with the assumption you’re not planning to edit it afterwards. JPEGs get color balanced based on the camera’s white balance reading, and the images are sharpened as well (you can usually tweak how strongly photos are sharpened by adjusting the camera’s settings).

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This time of year tends to slow down my progress whenever I’m outdoors; my wife, it seems, can’t pass a flower without taking a picture of it on her phone. Indeed, no matter what kind of camera you own—SLR, compact, or smartphone—spring is a great time to take photos of flowers, insects, and other small details of the natural world.

Macro mode

You can get some really nice close-up photos (technically referred to as macrophotography) with almost any camera by remembering a few rules. So what do you need to know?

For starters, every camera lens has a minimum focusing distance. You can’t cheat the laws of optics; get too close to your subject, and the result will simply be blurry. The iPhone, for example, has a minimum focusing distance of about 2 to 3 inches. That’s great, especially since you don’t need to do anything special to trigger close-up mode.

Many compact digital cameras, on the other hand, won’t automatically focus once you get within a foot or so of your subject. In order to take a macro photo just inches away, you’ll need to turn on the camera’s macro mode, which is usually a button or menu setting with a tulip symbol. The macro mode rearranges the camera’s optics to focus very close up, but remember to turn it off when you’re done—a camera in macro mode won’t be able to focus sharply on subjects that are at a normal distance.

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It's trendy to complain about Twitter being overwhelming, and to say that whatever value the social media site once had has been drowned in a sea of incorrect, boring, or fatuous tweets. While the first reply to these complaints is, "Learn how to pare down your Twitter streams," sometimes that can be tougher than it seems.

For example, in your job you might be expected to follow all of your coworkers’ work-related streams, and dropping an annoying coworker might be seen as slacking off. Or your cousin who tweets incendiary political sayings 50 times daily also happens to be the guy who freaks out the minute his follower count drops, and you have no doubt he'd make a scene at Thanksgiving over you unfollowing him. You're a fan of employment and/or your aunt's pumpkin pecan pie, so your Twitter stream stays cluttered with tweets that make you roll your eyes. What to do, what to do?

Nobody's here to judge you on why you don't just unfollow certain accounts on a social media platform in which participation is completely voluntary. (And if you are here to judge, take it to the comments.) We're here to tell you how to handle your overfull, irritating Twitter stream.

To reduce your frustration without reducing the amount of useful, informative, or entertaining messages in your feed, try these three strategies.

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In the days before digital photography, seemingly every corner store had rack upon rack of film on display. Each roll of film was marked with a speed—measured in ISO—such as 100, 200, or 400. Higher-speed film was handy for low-light photography, but it had a serious disadvantage: grain.

Film grain was every photographer’s nemesis. Instead of smooth, natural textures, grain put ugly blotches all over a photo. And though the days of grainy photos are far behind us, digital photos have a similar problem: digital noise.

You’ve undoubtedly seen noise in your own photos. On the plus side, noise tends to be very small; and when you view a many-megapixel photo on a computer screen, pixel-size noise is so small that it usually disappears into the background. You might look at a very noisy photo and not even know it. Noise becomes apparent, though, when you zoom in—if you crop it down to a small detail, for example, or if you attempt to make a large print. Let’s learn how to control noise.

The science of noise

Noise is an appropriate term, because it describes what happens visually in a photo: Tiny, fairly regular but unintended splotches of color mar the photo. The source of the problem is “noisy data”—unreliable or contaminated data. And that’s what is going on here.

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In springtime, people’s fancies may turn to love, but their to-do list turns to cleaning. Make this the year that you finally recycle all the ancient MP3 players, toner cartridges, ethernet cables, and bulky monitors out of the closets, garages, and spare rooms where they’ve been lurking. Your home will feel more modern, and you’ll be doing your part to boost the 27 percent electronics recycling rate in the U.S.—just in time for another spring constant, Earth Day.

Why recycle at all?

Sure, it would be easier just to dump all your old, unwanted electronic stuff in the trash. However, old computers and their related peripherals contain a lot of heavy metals—lead, cadmium, mercury—that are bad for people’s health when they get into the soil and water. In addition, when old electronics hit the trash heap, they’re out of a recycling stream that can cut the energy costs for production of future electronics.

But if the environmental concerns don’t grab you, consider the business benefits to recycling electronics: According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, compared to disposal, computer reuse created 296 jobs per every 10,000 tons of material disposed of each year. The Electronics TakeBack Coalition estimates that the U.S. generates approximately 1.7 million tons of electronic waste annually—so imagine the job potential that’s still there. And if those arguments don’t sway you, maybe the long arm of the law can: It’s illegal in 25 U.S. states to simply trash your old electronics.

Now, don’t you want to avoid breaking the law? Don’t you also want to employ people and keep the planet clean by recycling your old stuff? Of course you do, so let’s get started.

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The line separating reality and science fiction continues to blur. Whereas 40 years ago, cameras that focused themselves were unfathomable, auto-focus lenses have been a routine part of photography since the 1980s. Fast forward to today, and you can purchase the Lytro camera, which does away with the idea of focusing entirely: You can change the focus of Lytro photos after they’re taken. The coolest part? I’m going to tell you how to simulate Lytro photos with the camera you already own.

What is Lytro?

But first, some background. The Lytro is a game-changing camera. If you haven’t yet seen Lytro images in action, prepare to be amazed—the effect is truly stunning. You can click anywhere in a Lytro photo, and the place you clicked snaps into sharp focus. That means you don’t have to decide on your composition before you shoot the photo. Lytro calls this “light-field photography,” because the camera doesn’t focus all the light rays to a single point, like a traditional camera, but captures the entire light field, recording data about every ray entering the camera.

For what it does, the Lytro is surprisingly affordable (the 8GB model costs $400), but it's more limited than a traditional DSLR: You can’t change its single 8X optical zoom lens, for example, and it only works with a narrow range of PCs (64-bit Windows 7 and Windows 8 and Mac OS X). There’s no flash. It doesn’t even look like a camera; it’s a featureless aluminum tube that's reminiscent of a futuristic kaleidoscope.

Want to experiment with the Lytro’s variable focusing abilities? Check out the interactive Lytro photo gallery.

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Tablets, smartphones, and PCs look different on the outside, but on the inside they rely on the same components: a processor, a GPU, memory, and a storage volume that holds an operating system, device drivers, and applications. Your phone and tablet have smaller screens and fewer peripherals than a typical PC has, but you still end up tapping and clicking your way through your data before pulling out a keyboard—albeit a virtual one—to get real work done.

And like a PC, a mobile device can become clogged with orphaned apps, boatloads of images or personal files, and other random bits of junk data. When that happens, the device may slow down, run out of storage space, or behave erratically. To deal with these problems on an Android tablet or phone, you have to know how to monitor and manage resources, move or delete data, and repair or remove obstreperous apps. Here’s how to handle those tasks.

Assess the situation

Like PCs, Android devices may behave unpredictably as they run short of storage space or memory. Symptoms that this may be happening on your device include apps that randomly crash or won’t load at all, and an inability to save new pictures or videos. To see whether you’re running low on space or memory, open the storage and system monitors built into Android. (Note: The menus I refer to may differ cosmetically from those on your device, depending on the version of Android you’re running, but accessing them should be similar.)

First, bring down the notification shade or open your app drawer, and tap the Settings icon—it usually looks like a gear. Scroll down the long list of settings until you’ll see a menu item labeled ‘Storage’. Tap the Storage icon, and you should see an informative list that details the amounts of storage space currently occupied by the device’s applications, pictures and video, audio files and ringtones, downloads, and miscellaneous files—along with entries indicating the device’s total storage space and its remaining available space.

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You probably don’t think about the legality of taking photos very much, but it’s more important than ever to be aware of your rights and responsibilities as a photographer—even if you aren’t shooting covers for Time magazine. It’s certainly true that the U.S. Constitution recognizes a formidable array of rights and freedoms; but when it comes to taking photos, in a lot of situations your rights aren’t so clear-cut.

There’s a lot you can do

First, the good news: Most people, most of the time, can simply take pictures and not worry about what is legal and what isn’t. As a general rule, you can use a camera to take photos in public—on streets, on sidewalks, and in public parks—without restriction. As Aaron Messing, an attorney at OlenderFeldman LLP, puts it, “What can be seen from public can be photographed.”

In fact, you can even take a picture of private property from public property—so if you were in front of Nicolas Cage’s house, for instance, you could point your zoom lens over his gate and take a picture of the Batmobile, which (I presume) is parked in his driveway. That said, you need to be careful on this front. Matthew Harrison, senior partner of the Harrison Legal Group, says that if you have to climb a tree to get a peek at the Batmobile, it might qualify as intrusion, and that’s a no-no. The bottom line? Don’t attempt to violate anyone’s privacy, and you should be okay.

It’s worth noting, however, that your right to take pictures in public is not unlimited. Some municipalities have rules for managing photography in public spaces. Police in New York City, for example, can prevent you from setting up a tripod—which can get in the way on Manhattan’s notoriously busy streets—without a permit. How do you obtain a permit? Contact City Hall. How do you know if the community has any special rules about photography? Contact City Hall.

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Have you ever wondered why still photography is thriving even though it's so easy to capture video with our smartphones. I’d say it's because there’s something endearing in the knowledge that a photo has captured a moment in time. Still photographs depict a slice of some action, and you can convey that action in a lot of different ways. Let’s take a look at how to freeze action with your digital camera.

Role of shutter speed

If you’re really interested in experimenting with action photos—whether it’s sports, cars, or even just your dog romping around the yard—you should have a camera in which you can dial in the shutter speed yourself rather than relying on an automatic setting or an “action” scene mode. The Shutter Priority mode works well; this lets you select the shutter speed, and the camera picks the right aperture to deliver the right exposure. Many cameras also have a Program mode, in which the camera appears to select aperture and shutter automatically. But by using a dial or arrows on the camera, you can shift the shutter speed to be faster or slower, and the camera adjusts the aperture—almost exactly like the Shutter Priority mode.

Why is the shutter speed so important? That’s easy: This setting determines how long the sensor is exposed to light. A fast shutter speed tends to freeze the action, while a slower shutter is more likely to cause blur.

Freezing action

If you find yourself with a camera in hand at some sort of action-oriented event, it’s hard to go wrong with a fast shutter speed. The faster your shutter, the more likely you’ll be able to freeze the action. A fast shutter helps you in two ways: Not only does it freeze the action, but it minimizes the effect of a camera shake, which happens if you’re hand-holding the camera without the support of a tripod.

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You can energize a conversation with photographers in innumerable ways. You could, for example, try to build a case for Nikon over Canon, or perhaps argue that sensor size doesn’t really matter. Or you could advocate using protective filters on all of your lenses.

I find the third topic intriguing, for both advanced shooters and newcomers alike. What filters, if any, do you need for your lens? Several appealing options in a range of prices are available.

Let's start with the different types of filters. I recommend three to consider: protection, polarizer, and neutral density. In the world of protection filters, those commonly used are clear, UV, Skylight, and Haze. Here's a quick overview.

UV—Typically, this filter is very pale yellow to virtually clear. In the past, UV filters helped protect your image from the negative effects of atmospheric ultraviolet radiation. But thanks to the improved high-tech coating on today's lenses, these filters don't have much impact on image quality at lower altitudes. Some effect may be noticeable at high altitudes, however. Their primary use today is to protect the lens itself.

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Back in January I wrote about the "inconvenient truth" of trying to charge your iPad from a USB port: there's not enough juice.

My recommendation at the time was Digital Innovations' ChargeDr, a USB dongle that allows tablets and other devices to charge more quickly. It works (quite well, in fact), but it's a $30 solution.

If you fancy free workarounds instead, check out Asus Ai Charger. This free utility promises to charge iPhones, iPods, and iPads up to 50 percent faster using your PC's existing USB ports.

That's a pretty lofty claim: software that can boost the effective power output of hardware? It sounds almost impossible, but I'm here to tell you: it works.

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While Apple users have iCloud, and Android fans have Google Drive, Windows Phone devotees have SkyDrive. SkyDrive is Microsoft’s free online cloud storage service and every Windows Live account automatically receives 7GB of free storage space, which can be accessed from any device with an Internet connection—including, naturally, Windows Phone 8 handsets.

There are a couple of different ways to use SkyDrive with your Windows Phone 8 device. Windows Phone 8 has some basic SkyDrive integration built in so you can save and backup files to SkyDrive, even if you don’t want to download the SkyDrive app from the Windows Phone Store.

SkyDrive is integrated into Windows Phone 8 mainly in the Photos, Office, or OneNote apps. For example, when looking at a picture in the Photos app, you can save that picture to your SkyDrive by tapping the More button (three ellipsis in the lower right corner) and then 'save to SkyDrive.' You can also set up your Photos app to automatically save photos and videos to SkyDrive, by going to Photos > More (...) > Settings > SkyDrive and turning automatic upload “on.”

Likewise, when you save a document or spreadsheet in the Office app, you can choose to save it to SkyDrive by tapping the 'save as' button and choosing “SkyDrive.” You can access these SkyDrive documents (even if you don’t have the SkyDrive app) by going to the Places screen in Office and choosing SkyDrive. The OneNote app automatically syncs with your SkyDrive account, saving a copy of any notebooks and notes that you’ve made on your phone to the cloud. To manually sync your OneNote notebooks, open the OneNote app, tap the More ellipsis button, and tap 'sync.'

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The Internet has no shortage of places offering streaming music these days. Pandora, Spotify, Songza, Rdio—the list goes on and on. But few digital music destinations offer the unique selections you can find on SoundCloud.

SoundCloud bills itself as a “social sound platform”—meaning that people can post audio they create and then share it with fans on other sites, like an artist’s blog or Facebook page.

But SoundCloud’s site and apps for iOS and Android can also offer inquisitive listeners some real gems. Many musicians post live and experimental tracks that you can’t find elsewhere. The trick is knowing where to look within the vast selection.

What’s playing

Sounds come in all forms, and SoundCloud welcomes them all, from composed masterpieces to random snippets of conversations. But music dominates the site.

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Courtesy Robin Arnott

[Editor's Note: By day, Robin Arnott is a sound designer based in Austin, TX. But he is best known as the creator of Deep Sea, a highly immersive game that our Cassandra Khaw describes as an "experiment in sensory deprivation." It simulates the experience of a diver exploring the pitch-black ocean floor, trying to avoid becoming the next meal for a sea monster.

Although Deep Sea requires a computer, it's more than just a computer game. It uses a repurposed gas mask to physically simulate the claustrophobic feeling of wearing a diving mask, and groping around the ocean floor. Robin was gracious enough to share how he put together Deep Sea with TechHive, and to provide a tutorial so you can make a version of the game for yourself.

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The 2013 Major League Baseball season is here, and tech-savvy fans have more ways than ever to stream high-quality video and audio at their command, whether it’s pulling out your iPad on the train home, checking your Android phone at the gym, or using your Xbox 360 for more than just late-night gaming sessions.

MLB continues its successful multi-tiered subscription model, albeit with a slight uptick in prices. The pricing structure is simple to grok. The mobile app version, called At Bat or At Bat 13 (depending on the platform), is $20 across the board (there’s also a $3 monthly option on iOS); one purchase works across all like-minded platforms. So $20 on your iPhone also gets you the iPad version. Android users can pay $20 for access on their compatible Android phone, tablet, and Kindle Fire. (There are also BlackBerry and Windows Phone versions of the At Bat app.) Every app purchase comes with real-time scoring updates and unlimited home/away radio streams throughout the season. This year, purchase of MLB mobile apps also includes audio streaming on Macs and PCs.

For those who also want unlimited video streaming, there are two subscription tiers. For $110 (or $20/month), you get the basic home team video feed on your Mac or PC for each game that isn’t blacked out. (Basically, you won’t be able to watch local in-market games, since they’re theoretically being offered on a TV channel in your area. Red Sox fans in Boston, for example, wouldn’t be able to watch the Old Towne team on their computer.) That’s all you get.

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If you’re planning to sell or give away your iPad, then it is essential that your personal information and data be erased from it. If it’s running sluggish after a few years, sometimes backing up your data, erasing it from the tablet and restoring it might improve performance.

First, you need to make sure that you have the most current version of iTunes.

Once you’re up to date, plug your iPad into your computer. On the iPad screen click “back up now.” This may take some time depending on how much data and applications you have on your tablet.

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Life is full of compromises. One example in photography involves shutter speed and aperture: To achieve the right exposure, slower shutter speeds must be offset by smaller apertures. A similar balance exists between ISO and digital noise.

Making sense of ISO

ISO is a measure of your camera’s sensitivity to light. Aside from some extremely simple point-and-shoot models (like the iPhone), most cameras include an adjustable setting for ISO. Your camera may have an ISO button on its body, or the setting may be hidden away in a menu on the LCD display.

A low ISO number (ISO generally starts at 100) indicates that the camera’s sensor is relatively insensitive to light. Every doubling of the ISO (such as from 100 to 200, or from 200 to 400), doubles the camera’s light sensitivity. It’s comparable to a “one-stop” change in exposure. Suppose you were going to take a photo in dim light, and the camera was set to 1/30 second and f3.5. You might not be able to open the aperture any wider—f3.5 may be as far as it will go—and 1/30 second is too slow to take a sharp photo at that aperture setting. But if you double the ISO from 100 to 200, you can take the same photo at 1/60 second; and at ISO 400, you can take the same shot at 1/125 second.

Best of all, this technique works in most of your camera’s exposure modes, including Program; so you don’t have to work with your camera set to manual to take advantage of ISO. If you have the camera set to Program and you get a slow-shutter-speed warning—generally a little shaky hand in the display—you can manually crank up the ISO to take a sharper picture. Most cameras don’t let you change any settings in full Auto mode, however, which is a great reason to shun Auto and use Program instead.

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Building the perfect home theater PC is easy enough—if you have the right guide. Setting up the perfect software front end is equally straightforward, but picking that software isn't so easy. You'll need first to consider the specific hardware inside your HTPC, and what you'll be asking your machine to do once it's sitting inside your living room.

A wide variety of HTPC media player applications is available, and this variety is both a blessing and a curse. After all, plain old Windows can run your machine, assuming that you are willing to deal with the inconvenience of controlling your entertainment center with a mouse and keyboard. But if you'd rather have a single application with a TV-friendly interface and the power to organize all of your photos, music, and movies for easy viewing, then dedicated HTPC front-end software is a much better option.

With that in mind, I rounded up a few of my favorite front-end utilities. Some are meant to run within Windows. Others have a low-impact operating system of their own. But all of them excel in specific situations. By the end of this article, you'll know which one is right for you.

Windows Media Center

We can't discuss media software without considering Windows Media Center—it's been a staple of home theater PCs for more than a decade. Windows Media Center was initially released in 2001 and came bundled with most editions of Windows from XP all the way through Windows 7. But everything changed with Windows 8 when Microsoft chose to unbundle our beloved Windows Media Center from most versions of the operating system, and instead distribute it as an optional download.

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Your camera lens has much to do with how you capture the world. So when it’s time to add a new optic to your kit, how do you decide which one?

You have many things to think about: sharpness, distortion, durability, focusing speed, and cost, just to name a few. All of those factors are important. But before you get to the technical aspects, here are five considerations that might help you narrow down the list of candidates.

Perspective

Stand at the corner of the busiest street in your city, and shoot ten frames with a 9mm, 24mm, 50mm, 200mm, and 500mm lens. Each group of images will tell a different story.

At 9mm, you’ll capture asphalt, people, cars, buildings, and sky. Narrow the perspective a bit to 24mm, and you may have to choose between the street or the sky. At 50mm you’re beginning to gather more information about a subject—maybe a particular person approaching you, or a passing car. At 200mm the details begin to dominate the story, and the background becomes less important. And when you mount a 500mm lens on your DSLR in a busy city, you probably become the focus of attention as people wonder what you’re doing.

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Animated GIFs are winning over the Web with silent, looping visuals that uniquely capture a slice of time. Here’s a roundup of apps and resources that will help you make your own.

Desktop

A desktop app gives you the most flexibility and control for creating an animated GIF. You can determine the contents of each frame of your animation, as well as the frame delay and color matching algorithms. Each frame in a GIF animation is assigned a frame delay, which determines how long that frame is held before advancing to the next frame. The delay need not be the same for each frame, so the first frame in your animation could be held for two full seconds, while next five might be held for just 1/20 of a second each. This is drastically different than traditional animation and video, which adhere to a consistent frame rate.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 ($100, OS X/Windows)—Adobe’s consumer-focused image editor offers a basic approach to making GIF animations. Just place each frame on a different layer; then, when you export the file, those layers are compiled into an animation. A single export setting allows you to control the delay for all frames.

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