News flash: if you’re a video gamer, your activity of choice is not well respected. Another news flash: if you’re not a gamer, chances are you should respect gamers’ activity of choice a bit more. Both of you, however, will have to take responsibility if this is to change. Everyone can agree that video games have made some large strides, but what remains to be settled is whether or not they have attained the same level of art as movies–or in other words, if they have reached a point where they are an acceptable or even constructive use of your time.. Regardless of which of the aforementioned groups you come from, the answers may surprise you! Video Game Creation: A New Visual Art I find it interesting that when CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) made its way into the film industry, nobody questioned the artistry behind it. Viewers were wowed and amazed with each new CGI film to come along…so why not the same public reaction with video games as their graphics get better and better? The an...

Here’s a little tip every Windows user should know about. Maybe you got a virus, maybe the power went out during an update, maybe you were tampering with your system, or maybe space aliens are to blame–at any rate, things go bad, and then things go really, really bad. If you find yourself with a Windows installation suffering from corrupted or missing system files, you may be surprised to find out that one of your best shots at making repairs is not found in a pricey piece of do-it-all software. In fact, as long as you’re running Windows XP or newer, all it takes to fix a good deal of these issues is a single command. SFC (that’s System File Checker) is a nifty little command-line utility built right into all recent (and even not so recent) versions of Windows. As its name implies, the program will check system files for problems, and if it finds any, it will attempt to make repairs. The program’s success rate is surprisingly high for being so relatively unknown and easy to operate, an...

Aside from the artificial limitations placed upon the iOS software by Apple, my biggest frustration with all iPods, iPhones, and iPads has been that they’ve born the very frustrating physical limitation of far too little RAM to comfortably run a good deal of intensive apps, or alternatively to run a healthy selection of simpler apps simultaneously. Although jailbreaking can solve the majority of software woes, in the process it only contributes to this hardware problem by adding more processes for iOS to handle in the background in order to run all of the essential tweaks. Thankfully, while there is no true solution to this issue aside from Apple finally waking up and adding sufficient RAM to complement their OS, there is something of a workaround for jailbroken iDevice users that can significantly increase stability in situations where a lack of RAM might result in heavy lagging or an outright app crash. Better yet, the solution is free, and you probably won’t even need to install any...

Despite getting an update only a few months ago to improve the look and functionality of their personal homepage service, Google has just announced that it will be closing the book on iGoogle for good as part of its ‘spring cleaning’. If like me you’ve been a loyal user of the service for a few years now and aren’t sure where to turn, don’t worry too much; you’ve got until November 1, 2012 to figure out a new solution. However, there’s no point in procrastinating and putting more stock in a service that’s on its way to the grave. Check out the full post for a few tips on how to deal with this change. If you’ve been keeping up with Google’s activities as of late, the move to get rid of iGoogle should come as little surprise. A number of the Mountain View company’s less popular services have been getting the axe since last fall, such as Buzz, Wave, and Video. The difference this time is…people actually used iGoogle as their personal homepage. Sure, the site could have been better in a lo...