I'm 43. I love to swear. And even when I'm talking casually to people I don't know well, a well-chosen F-bomb can indicate a) I'm being candid with you so pay attention, b) I like you and trust you enough to speak freely, c) please do the same if you'd like to.

I manually downloaded iTunes 10.5.1 so that the iTunes Match option would appear. When it did, I purchased it. I have a pretty modest music library—about 5 gigs, 850 items—so it only took 10 minutes for Apple to scan my library, match things up, and upload the non-matched leftovers. Everything appears now on my…

But the words 'better' and 'cheaper' are also used. It's better and cheaper than... what? The only thing that springs to mind is Applecare+. Which it clearly isn't.

Wait, what? You think "only" 20% of Fire users will "root the device"? I think you may be a little high. Like 10X too high. And also...high.

Leave a message ONLY if you're going to tell me something more than "hey it's me, call back when you can." Unfortunately, a lot of people do not understand this. The fact that our phones all have missed call counts telling us who called and when seems to escape them. They believe we need to consult our voicemail to…

Cuban Black Beans

Cuban Black Beans

The weirdness here is that the article presents this app saying "it requires a jailbreak" instead of "a jailbreak requires IT." That is, you want this if you have jailbroken your phone, and NOT you want to jailbreak your phone so you can have this.

So basically owners of non-jailbroken iPhones who want an easy-to-use backup (that's gotta be 99.9% of iPhone users) should use something other than the software you've selected as "best."

I'd go 17-55 because you may be called upon to take some pretty wide shots with lots of people in them. Going to 1/60th isn't as hard as you might think. The flash essentially freezes the primary subject. The lengthy shutter is just to let the room behind them bleed in and not be totally dark. Go any slower than…

You should always be using autofocus unless you're doing macro or product shots (tripod, lightbox, etc.) Never shoot anything below high quality, max pixels jpeg. Auto white balance is usually pretty good and often highly fixable in post—don't change white balance unless you have to. The things you change most would…

Try this for a start: [lifehacker.com]

Lightroom is worth every penny IF... you take a lot of pictures AND you're not a Mac user. If you have a Mac, get Aperture instead. It's every bit as good and only $80.

I've been shooting weddings for years, but I started out like you. I'm not too worried about the lack of 200mm telephoto. I shoot weddings all the time using two lenses just like yours: an 85 and an 18-55. The only difference is, my zoom is f/2.8. I'd be terrified with a 3.5-5.6. It's not bright enough. I work…

I agree: the 85mm f/1.8 is like magic. But if you want to go cheaper you can always get a 50mm f/1.8. They're like $125 or so.

Don't forget the oldies but goodies right here on LH! [lifehacker.com]

Which of these services will be around in three years?

The hardest thing for my students is when I tell them to use a blank slide. Next hardest is to use a slide with just one word on it. I try to emphasize that often a good slide deck is often completely meaningless without the presenter. "I missed your presentation, can you email me your slides?" becomes a completely…

That gigaom article is not only poorly written, but highly misleading. Apple isn't changing anything. You bought it with DRM, it still has DRM. Do sites like gigaom deliberately write crap like this to get a lot of angry hits on the article? It's hard to imagine they're truly that incompetent. The word "beta"…

Neat idea. Myself, I just carry a plain sheet of white paper in my camera bag and unfold it whenever in a tricky light situation.