Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle

"How do I tether my BlackBerry to my laptop so that I can use my BlackBerry data plan to connect to the Internet on my laptop."

Cell phone carriers have made tethering laptops to a BlackBerry varying degrees of hassle, because they don't really want you to use their data network unless you pay for a laptop data plan. As long as you can install an app on your BlackBerry, you can get around this hassle with the help of a really great app for both Mac and Windows users.

"How do I edit Google Docs on my iPad? I know I can view Google docs in Safari and there are a bunch of apps that read Google Docs, but I can't find a Google Docs editor for iPad. Any ideas?"

Safari for iPad currently lacks some necessary features for editing Google Docs on an iPad, although reading them looks pretty great. My favorite PDF editor for iPad, ReaddleDocs, also works great as a Google Docs reader, but doesn't support editing. In fact, to date, I can only find one app that actually works acceptably for editing Google Docs on my iPad.

"How do I transfer data to a new iPhone from my old iPhone? I just purchased an iPhone 4 and want to transfer data from my iPhone 3G to my iPhone 4. I have hundreds of contacts, a bunch of music, and apps I purchased on my old iPhone. I'd hate to have to start all over."

Apple makes it fairly easy to transfer all your music, settings, contacts, photos, and other data from one iPhone to another iPhone, but they don't make it very obvious how to do it. Following the steps below you should be able to quickly and easily get all your data from your old iPhone to your new iPhone.

"Can I play normal discs on Blu-ray drive in my laptop?"

Blu-ray laptop drives vary by manufacturer, so there will be some differences between the Blu-ray drive in a Sony Viao laptop and an HP laptop, for instance. Generally speaking all Blu-ray drives found in portable computers offer additional playback options for playing both DVD media as well as playing back CDs. You would need to check the specifications on the Blu-ray player in your laptop to determine which types of discs it supports, but there are several common configurations.

"I have a Flip Mino HD. I need to email video in MPEG-4. Flip records in this but the problem is that the file must be reduced. How do I do that?"

Sending video in an email is always a tricky proposition because email programs don't work very well for sending large attachments. Most video tends to be well over the email attachment threshold and if you want to email HD video, you are definitely going to be outside the acceptable size for an email attachment. A better solution is to put the video somewhere that the person you email it to can download from.

I want to take text messages from my iPhone and save them on my computer. Is it possible to save iPhone SMS text messages to my PC?"

Each time you backup your iPhone, text messages are stored by iTunes just in case anything happens to your iPhone and you want to get them back. For some reason, Apple doesn't make these readily available for viewing on your computer (and if you use secure backups they are encrypted). Fortunately some industrious software creators have come up with software that takes those SMS text messages from your iPhone and makes them available in a readable format on your computer.

"Is it better to get a computer monitor with a 400 nits brightness rating or a 400 cd/m² brightness rating?"

If you are comparing two computer monitors and one lists its brightness in nits while the other lists cd/m² brightness, you're in luck. Nits and cd/m² are the same thing. Nits is a term that has gone out of favor for measuring the brightness of electronics, but it is fundamentally the same measure of candelas per square meter represented by cd/m².