help key

I like my Retina MacBook Pro, in part because I have the option to switch to extremely high-resolution display modes when I’m way from my home Thunderbolt monitor and want…

HDTV is probably the greatest thing to ever happen to the human race. It’s too bad then that a lot of us are ignorantly watching poorly set-up HDTVs. You owe it to…

Gather round, everyone. Gather round. I’m going to show you a trick that 98% of you will never use. But for the 2% of you that actually use the information…

It wasn’t the LP albums or redesigned look that got me excited when Apple announced iTunes 9. Nope, it was the function called Home Sharing that touted the ability to…

The analog shutoff date of June 12 is right around the corner. It will be here before you know it. The transition from analog to digital has been riddled with…

Your brother just got a new digital camera. Your mom got a GPS device. Your grandfather got a Falcon Northwest gaming rig with six cores and a graphics card that…

Just an interesting little tidbit: there is a system test built into the EFI on MacBook Airs and MBPs – most Alu MBs with an Intel processor. If you hold…

I’m just full of helpful hints this week. This one comes after seeing a comment on my other site, WristWatchReview about the BR02, a 1000M diver with a fairly striking…

With the launch of multiple DSLRs including today’s Nikon D3X, camera manufacturers are ready and waiting for you to buy their wares. But should you?

Every morning I wake up to the sound of my backup drive churning away like a damn chop saw and I suffer a huge performance hit for the first few…

Encryption scares a lot of people – me included – because it’s based on really complicated mathematics. Thankfully, the state of encryption software has advanced sufficiently in the last couple…

This was originally posted in April but I’m putting it here because I know some of you guys are going to try to upgrade and will begin crying once the…

If you have a .Mac account you can easily add your me.com account to your mail reader right now. Create a new IMAP account and follow these steps:

With so many portable devices in our homes, we use a lot more batteries than people think about. After many uses, though, many rechargeable batteries can suddenly fail, rendering the…

This has come up a few times in the past couple days with folks trying to install pwned and failing. What happens is that the firmware doesn’t flash correctly and…

Help-Key is a column I write for CrunchGear that has hacks and how-tos so you can live a better life. I know, I’m an altruist. But sometimes I find someone…

The Dev Team, a dedicated team of iPhone hackers responsible for most Jailbreaking methods, has released a tool called Pwnage that was announced a couple of weeks ago. Pwnage does…

[photopress:Picture_51.jpg,full,center] I’ve been keeping up with jailbreaking the iPod Touch here on the Help-Keys, and I know its helped a lot of people to open up their hardware. Make no…

For Help-Key this week (now on Thursday’s, just like LOST), I’d planned to show you how to Jailbreak a 16GB iPod Touch, the one thing the automatic Jailbreaking apps can’t…

[photopress:msnbc.jpg,full,center] We’re all news junkies. That’s what the Internet has done to us. You can sit at your desk and watch all the feeds and refresh, but we still like…

[photopress:eback.jpg,full,center] It’s tempting, isn’t it? You know you just really want to do this. And I can’t think of a reason why not. I’m considering it for my home router,…

http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/1080629/sexy_secret_book.swf I am a single blogger. I have no girlfriend or even anyone I’m actively dating, so this Valentine’s Day I’m going to be drinking whiskey at a rock show…

[photopress:appletv.jpg,full,center] At the Stevenote a couple weeks ago, Steve mentioned that within “a couple weeks” those of us with Apple TVs would have the ability to rent movies directly from…

Well that was quick! A few days after 1.1.3 hit the proverbial streets it’s been cracked wide open for general consumption. To that end, we’d like to discuss a few…

[photopress:macworld.jpg,full,center]With The Keynote (that Keynote) at 9:00 tomorrow morning, we’re not sure who exactly would buy into a Macworld Keynote Drinking Game other than college students, but it’s an exercise…

Many car stereo houses are pushing car decks this holiday season that have built-in iPod integration. There’s a dock connector, and most let you view and control the content on…

After much deliberation I have decided to just swap out the hard drive on the MacBook rather than letting the existing 60GB drive crap out. I also now don’t feel…

This last holiday weekend, I was at my mother’s house and, just as I do every Thanksgiving, I spent about an hour un-doing the damage they’d done on their PC.…

The biggest problem I had with the iPhone, some readers will recall, was the actual phone portion. I thought it was a fantastic Web device and a super iPod, but…

Computers are evil, vile machines. They’re smarter than they let on, and they like to mess with us lesser humans. That’s why they pick the absolute worst times to crash,…