tools

You need more kitchen gadgets. You can never have enough zesters, colanders, and cake molds. You might as well expand your horizons to include a gadget that gets in on the popular burger stuffing trend, the new Fully Loaded Burger Stuffer from Headchefs.

In case you've been skipping "Man v. Food" and don't subscribe to the Food Network, you may have overlooked the burger stuffing mania that has been sweeping the nation. As you would expect, it involves cramming items that would normally go on top into the innards of the burger patty.

This is easier said than done. Hand-forming a patty around contents like blue cheese, roasted red peppers, or chile (that's New Mexico chile with an "e"), can be challenging and counter to the laws of physics.… Read more

The trail of code leading to a unannounced and unreleased iOS 5 panorama photo capture feature has gotten a bit stronger, suggesting its inclusion in an earlier beta of the software was not a fluke.

9to5mac has pulled up a new bit of code from the latest beta of iOS 5 (which was delivered to developers on Monday afternoon) that now offers directions on how to use the feature that would let users take superwide photos of their surroundings using iOS' built-in camera app.

The code instructs users to move their phone from left to right, as well as keeping … Read more

Cats like iPads and laser pointers and can carry around their own tracking sensors. Dogs dig treadmills and have translator devices that turn woofs into words. Now fish are getting in on the gadget action, too.

Fish aren't yet ordering iPhones or hooking up HD television sets underwater, but a recent paper published in Coral Reefs, the journal of the International Society for Reef Studies, dove into some interesting behavior from an enterprising black spot tuskfish.

A diver at the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia observed a tuskfish breaking open cockleshells on an anvil to get at the tasty tidbits inside. A series of images show the clever critter in action. … Read more

Last week's Structure conference in San Francisco was fascinating to me on several levels. The conference centered much more on the business and market dynamics of cloud than pure technology and services, so there was significantly more coherence to the talks as a whole than in previous years.

Vendors had products and services, and customers had private and public cloud deployments; as opposed to previous years where the "vaporware" almost formed storm clouds.

Another key observation from the show was the change in emphasis this year from virtual machines (2009) and "workloads" (2010) to an … Read more

Office 365, announced today, gives professionals and small businesses a subscription service that lets them work from anywhere using familiar-feeling Web-enabled applications. Combined with hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync, Office 365 is designed to enable users to share, collaborate, and communicate in the cloud. In our testing during the beta, we found that the tools worked well across the board (with some hiccups), and expect that many people who use Office on desktop Macs and PCs will appreciate the familiar look and feel, which should help them get up and running quickly.

Obviously, Office 365 is going to … Read more

Allway Sync is a free tool that analyzes the contents of two folders simultaneously and updates both based on the latest content. Its bidirectional algorithm analyzes both folders for actual changes and synchronizes both based on your choice. An easy-to-master interface hides an extensive range of settings and options for manually and automatically synchronizing folders. Allway Sync works in 32-bit versions of Windows 2000 to 7; a 64-bit version is available, too.

Allway Sync's colorful interface displays source and destination folders in separate, identical fields. The program can access files and folders on removable drives, online sources, and other … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers. This week we answer questions about Mail forgetting account passwords, options for dual-booting OS X to maintain PowerPC support when Lion comes out, processes "mds" and "kav" taking up CPU time, and a question on Apple's Server Admin Tools versus OS X Server. We continually answer e-mail questions, and though we present a few answers here, we welcome alternative approaches and views from readers and encourage you to post your suggestions in the comments.

Question: Mail forgetting account passwords An … Read more

It seems that there is always news of accounts on certain Web sites being hacked, or being at risk for getting hacked. In general, though, any account that you have with a weak password could be at risk. To eliminate concern, there are free password-strength-checking tools available online. Below you will find three of the more popular ones available.

1. Microsoft's Password Checker. This is definitely one of the more well-known sites that allows you to check your password. Having the Microsoft name attached to it may make the user more comfortable to test their password strength here (… Read more

The latest member of Microsoft's Visual Studio family is one step closer to a final release.

Microsoft today is releasing the second beta of LightSwitch, a software tool aimed at developers who want to build business applications that run as both native and Web applications.

The new version, which becomes available MSDN subscribers today, and everyone else on Thursday, adds a handful of new features from the previous beta, all aimed at increasing what can be done with the software.

The first is support for publishing applications to directly to Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud services platform. This is … Read more