Author: Chris Dodds

  • How to stay secure on public Wi-Fi

    Credit card numbers? Check. Website logins? Check. “Private” chats between cheating spouses? Double check. Spend ten minutes in a coffee shop snooping on the “Free Public Wi-Fi!” and you’ll see all these things and more. Airports, libraries, parks? Same situation. Hotels are a little different, though. All the bandwidth is being taken up by people […]

  • Three steps for taking better smartphone pictures

    If there’s anything that photo sharing apps like Instagram have taught us, it’s that there are a lot of people who are really bad at taking pictures. Never before have so many poorly-lit, out-of-focus, over-filtered images been shared to so many people. In all likelihood (and backed by a statistical sampling of Instagram), you’re part […]

  • Getting stuff done with Remember the Milk

    I have many titles. Chiefly, I am the King of Procrastination. As I get older, I’m also becoming the Duke of “Sorry, I Forgot All About That”. It’s not necessarily because my memory is getting worse, although that’s likely. It seems more to do with just having a lot more to keep track of than […]

  • The fanboy wars are over: everyone lost

    Android vs. iOS. Apple vs. Microsoft. Linux vs. everyone. These are the battles fought in blog posts, comments, and forums across the Internet. Pundits (both amateur and professional) stake their ground and declare that whatever company or product they’ve picked is better than the competition. Everyone who picked the competition is not only wrong about […]

  • Game Review: Hundreds, a puzzle game with some new tricks

    Puzzle games are delicate creatures. They require a careful balance of difficulty: too easy and players get bored, too hard and players get frustrated. To grab the largest audience possible, most puzzle games steer towards “too easy”. Partly because the tuning is difficult, it’s rare to see new puzzle concepts (the other big reason is […]

  • Get back into comics with comiXology

    Growing up, I was never a big comic book fan, partly due to limited options. The small towns I lived in didn’t have comic book stores, so I would only occasionally get a copy of X-Men or Batman at one of the local gas stations when they happened to have them. The writing and stories […]

  • Game review: Jamestown, an arcade shooter for the modern age

    The recent explosion of indie game development has produced a ton of amazing games and has revived several older game styles like the side-scrolling platformer (VVVVV and Braid being good examples). Unfortunately, those of us who were fans of arcade shooters like R-Type and Raiden have been left mostly in the cold. Jamestown:Legend of the […]

  • Review: Steed, an attractive file transfer client for Windows

    Utilities like text editors and FTP clients may not scream “sexy!”, but for us geeks who perform actual work with our computers, they’re critical tools. Unfortunately, these tools get so entrenched and build such strongly opinionated followings (people still use vi, for Pete’s sake!) that few developers try to build new, better tools. A brave […]

  • Game review: Bastion comes to iOS, and brings style with it

    I’m always worried when developers port their games from the original platform to a new one. Console to PC, PC to Mac, console to mobile; whatever the case, the results usually suck (especially Mac ports). The new platform rarely gets the same support or attention as the original, and the ported game usually runs much […]

  • Game review: Zombie Tsunami puts you in charge of the zombie horde

    Of all the benefits that technology has gifted us, an excuse to ignore our families during the holidays is perhaps the greatest. Historically, we relied on the warmth and cheer *cough* of our families and friends to get us through the cold winter season. But no more! Now we can bask in the warm glow […]