Tip | The "Break it Down" Blog

Are You a Chronic Almost-Achiever or a 95% Kind of Person?

Friday, July 18, 2008

Introduction The purpose of this post is to take a look at a phenomenon I saw in my life and I think some of you might see in yours: chronic almost-achievement. The ability to give every task 95%, but avoid giving anything 100% like the plague for fear of failure and self-disappointment. Outline What’s a 95%-er? Why is 95% Bad? Why [...]

Securely Formatting / Erasing an iPhone

Thursday, May 22, 2008

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With the news getting around that pre-owned iPhones are actually shipping with previous-owner personal information on them, cops recovering data off of iPhones and word that AT&T is ramping up their pre-owned iPhone plan, learning how to correctly wipe your iPhone so all traces of personal information are gone is important. Luckily Securosis put together a [...]

How to REALLY Repair Your Xbox 360

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

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This is an excellent tip, and having gone through the Microsoft Xbox support channel twice (Xbox support disaster #1, Xbox terrible support #2 and a friend) and wanting to die before I do it again, a very applicable point (oh yea, and also cause their hardware has a 30% failure rate). 1. Call 1-800-4-MY-XBOX 2. Demand your [...]

Circuit City Secret HD-DVD Trade-In Plan

Thursday, March 6, 2008

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Let’s face it… you jumped the gun and got an HD-DVD player and now you hate your life. If you got that player from Circuit City within the last 3 months however, they are quietly offering a trade-in program to re-apply the full purchase price to that of a Blu-ray player. Not too shabby… thanks Engadget!

Finding a Comprehensive List of New & Future Video Games

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

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NOTE: This article may invoke feelings of “No Shit Sherlock” in some of you, I’d encourage you to post those feelings as comments… maybe even a “You are a FAG!” would help… those are always appreciated and helpful to everyone reading. This tip is a little obscure, but it’s one that has driven me crazy for [...]

Watch Higher Quality YouTube Videos

Monday, March 3, 2008

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It seems that YouTube is slowly rolling out support for higher quality videos. All you need to do is append the argument &fmt=6 to the URL to enable the high quality video. Here’s an example: Low Quality http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQzUsTFqtW0 Click here for High Quality NOTE: Not all the videos have been converted yet… there are like a billion of them, so [...]

Review: SpinRite 6.0

Sunday, February 24, 2008

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A friend this week had her laptop give her the dreaded blue screen every time she booted. After a trip to the Theif Geek Squad who told her if would be $1500+ to recover the data from the drive, I gave SpinRite a try first. I booted to the disk and ran a [...]

Solution: iPhone Randomly Vibrates or Beeps

Monday, February 18, 2008

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So I just got an 16GB iPhone (generous courtesy of SmugMug) and besides it basically being dead-sexy and giving me “Oh… goddamn that’s nice” moments about once an hour when it comes to UI polish, I did notice it randomly vibrated or beeped for about 1/2 of a second randomly throughout the day. I hit up [...]

10 Cool Telephone Tricks

Monday, February 11, 2008

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I ran across this post a while ago and forgot to share it, it’s essentially 10 cool tips to use with the phone that you may not know. My favorites were: Using GOOG 411 for free information Calling 1-800-4PAYPAL to send money immediately using your PayPal account Use GrandCentral to centralize all your different phone numbers Using 7 or # [...]

Speeding up your WordPress Site: PHP Speedy and YSlow

Saturday, February 2, 2008

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Grant Gochnauer just sent a link over to a sweet little PHP-site optimization piece of software called PHP Speedy from Acid Drop. The premise of the software is that once installed, you walk through a very nicely polished wizard-based setup telling PHP Speeding which things you want it to optimize: At the last stage of the wizard [...]

$1 Image Stabilizer for Any Camera

Thursday, January 31, 2008

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Saw this over on Metacafe, it’s a very cool trick using: A 1/4″ bolt that will screw into the bottom of your camera About 6′ or so (depending on your height) of nylon string or another relatively stiff string A large washer You basically screw the bolt into the bottom of your camera, tie the string between the bolt [...]

Windows Install Recovery Tips (Not a Reinstall)

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

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Following up with our previous tip about keeping windows from “rotting”, Grant Gochnauer sends in another great tip from the ShippingSeven blog for recovering a really fuck-up Windows install without reinstalling. There are actually two tips, and they are: Try logging off, then back on instead of rebooting. Try backing up your data and then erasing [...]

10 Lesser Known PS3 Tricks

Monday, November 26, 2007

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Digital Home put together a list of 10 tricks to do with the PS3 that “Sony doesn’t tell you about”, while some of them weren’t that interesting or ground-breaking, there was 1 in particular I had no idea you could do: 4) Download game saves Chances are someone out there has already beaten that boss for you [...]

Gmail Tip: Finding Unread Emails

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

5 Comments

For the life of me I cannot figure out why Google doesn’t just add a stupid button to Gmail for this, but anyway… The tip here is how to find all your unread emails in Gmail. Let’s say you aren’t interested in the label on the mail, who it’s from or anything… you just want a [...]

Upcoming iPhone Update Bricks Hacked Phones

Monday, September 24, 2007

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Grant Gochnauer sends in the news that if you hacked your iPhone to work on another network, or just because you are hardcore, keep in mind that the next software update from Apple will likely brick the phone (read: “kill it”). Apple’s reason? They are saving baby seals and fighting terrorism with locked iPhones, or this: “Apple [...]

Getting your iPhone Credit

Friday, September 14, 2007

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Matt Young just sent this in… you can now request your $100 in-store credit from Apple (because of the $200 price drop of the iPhone 2 months after it came out, and a lot of pissed off people). Click here to start the process of identifying your iPhone and requesting your credit.

The “Break it Down” Blog

Tag Archive | "tip"

Are You a Chronic Almost-Achiever or a 95% Kind of Person?

Securely Formatting / Erasing an iPhone

How to REALLY Repair Your Xbox 360

Circuit City Secret HD-DVD Trade-In Plan

Finding a Comprehensive List of New & Future Video Games

Watch Higher Quality YouTube Videos

Review: SpinRite 6.0

Solution: iPhone Randomly Vibrates or Beeps

10 Cool Telephone Tricks

Speeding up your WordPress Site: PHP Speedy and YSlow

$1 Image Stabilizer for Any Camera

Windows Install Recovery Tips (Not a Reinstall)

10 Lesser Known PS3 Tricks

Gmail Tip: Finding Unread Emails

Upcoming iPhone Update Bricks Hacked Phones

Getting your iPhone Credit

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