Danny Puff

By Alyssa Bereznak, Tech Columnist

Getting lost just got a little bit harder.

Google Maps is rolling out new features to its mobile Android and iOS apps that are meant to improve commuting by automobile, train, and even the Uber car service. The company announced the slew of updates meant to prevent "life's everyday hiccups" Tuesday morning in a blog post.

Here are five of its most notable features and how to use them:

1. When receiving driving instructions, the app will now tell you which lane to stay in or switch to.


One of the worst parts about early-day GPS was how little warning you got that it was time to exit. I can't count how many times I've been instructed by Maps to take a last-minute exit and missed it because it was too dangerous to swerve across three lanes in 45 seconds.

This new feature eliminates those frustrations and will make it both safer and easier to receive on-the-road instructions. There's no need to enable it. Simply search for directions from one location to the next, tap on the car icon, and the guiding slides will pop up.

On each leg of the trip, there will be a small white box in the upper-left corner of the screen, as you can see below.


It shows how many lanes are on the road, whether they're turn only, and — most importantly — which one you need to be in.

This may save all of us a little road rage.

2. You can save and search for certain areas of maps to access offline.


Technically you were able to do this prior to the update, but now the feature has been more prominently integrated into the design and made easier to use. You can also now label and store your maps in a designated location, so you can search for them while you're on the move.

To use this feature, search for a general location you plan to visit. It could be a entire city like "San Francisco," but it's probably better to choose a specific neighborhood of an area you're visiting.

Once the search loads, swipe up from the bottom of the screen to show the area's "location card."


From there, you'll see some basic info about the area, including the option to go straight into Street View. Beneath that you'll see a white box that says Save map to use offline. Tap it.


You'll be shown the map again. This time you can choose to pan around the area by dragging your finger on the screen, or zoom in and out by pinching. When you're all done, tap the Save button at the bottom.


From there, you can name the map or just go with Google's helpful automated suggestion. Then tap Save.


You may have to wait a few seconds for it to store the image, depending on how large the area is that you want saved.

If you want to access the map again, go to your main home screen, make sure your search bar is clear, and tap the person icon in the top right.


You'll see your Maps profile page, which includes your Home and Work locations, including locations you've saved, and recent searches. Scroll all the way down. At the very bottom you'll find your offline maps.


3. You can specify your departure and arrival times for public transit.


Anyone who regularly relies on a train or bus for transportation knows that service varies according to the time of day. Now you can search for specific arrival and departure times that fit your schedule. The app will take into account any timing factors and even let you know when the very last train or bus on a line is for that night.

To use it, search for public transportation directions as you usually would. When the routes come up, tap the small gray box at the top of the screen that says Depart at….


A box will pop up at the bottom of the page. From there you can choose the date and time. You can also specify if you want to depart or arrive at a certain time. Or simply pick Last to find out when the very final train on that route will come. Then press Done.


Notice that it'll specify the wait time between trains for the time of day you're searching.


Pretty helpful for any sort of late-night public transportation!

4. You can order an Uber ride from the app if that's your fastest option.


Sometimes the chance of catching a train is hopeless, there's not a cab to be seen, and you just need to get a car to pick you up. This is when the black-car service Uber can come in handy. In addition to being able to compare travel times among walking, transit, and cabbing, you can now see how long it'll take for an Uber to drive to the destination of your choice.

To use it, search for directions as usual. At the bottom of all your options, there'll be an one to Get an Uber. On the right of the box, you'll see the time it'll take for the Uber to get you to where you're going (no sign if this also incorporates the amount of time it takes for an Uber to reach you). The time will appear in green if it's faster that the route you searched for. It'll appear in orange if it's not as fast.


With a tap on the box, you'll be brought to your Uber app. Your current location will also be transferred.


5. You can search for businesses by filter.


Looking for a place to eat or drink on the go can be frustrating, because you're never sure about its pricing, whether it's disgusting, and if it's even open. Now you can search for locations around you with filters that include hours, rating, and price.

Just search for a "restaurant," "cafe," or whatever other thing you need to find near you. When the results populate the map, tap the three-lined symbol on the right of your search bar.


You'll be brought to a page of your search results. Tap Filter in the upper-right corner of the screen.


A page of controls will pop up, which allow you to look for businesses according to their rating and price. You can also choose options like Open now or From your circles, which mines suggestions from your Google+ friends' recommendations. When you're done adjusting the settings, tap Apply.


It's a cool feature, but it doesn't always have results to return.


This is particularly helpful if you just so happen to be out late and need to find the least-sketchy place nearby that serves tacos. Just sayin'.

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By Daniel Bean, Editorial Assistant


In this new society that we've all agreed to be a part of, your Facebook page is an extension of yourself. For this reason, it's not a good idea to post anything there that you wouldn't normally say, for example, to your boss.

The unfortunate folks below didn't get that memo. Here are 11 examples of Facebookers who weren't so careful with what they shared and, as a result, put their employment statuses in jeopardy because of it.

1. Broadcasting to your online friends how much you hate your boss is probably not going to help you stay employed, especially if your boss is one of those online friends. This embarrassing post (below) probably did a number on our poster's relationship with said boss.

Anonymous employee in hot water. (lamebook.com)

2. A Swiss woman in 2009 was playing what would normally have been a simple case of hooky, claiming that she had a migraine and could not work in front of a computer screen. Unfortunately, her employer noticed that she had signed in to Facebook that same day. Saying that this had "destroyed its trust in her," company management decided to let her go. In defense, the woman did claim to have been accessing Facebook from her iPhone, but she was fired (or sacked, as they say abroad), regardless.

We’re betting this old story still gives her a headache. (guardianlv.com)

3. A Georgia teacher was called into the principal's office in 2009 after a student's parent complained of finding pictures of her drinking beer and wine on her Facebook page. School administration said the images "promoted alcohol use", and the teacher was ultimately asked to choose between resignation or accepting a suspension. She chose to resign.

A picture from Georgia teacher Ashley Payne’s Facebook. (dailymail.co.uk)

4. Anyone who once thought that Facebook was a safe place to taunt or insult your comany's customers has probably found out the hard way by now that it is not. Take this Detroit power company employee, for instance. This impressive rant posted to her wall in 2013 (which you can read most of below) got her canned pretty quickly.

Rachel Burnett’s Facebook post. (The Blaze)

5. We can all agree that publicly posting something like this (below) will vastly limit your employability, right? How do you think his Monday morning meeting went?

Dope doing dope on Facebook. (lamebook.com)

6. A county school bus driver in Georgia was fired in 2013 for posting about a hungry student passenger who claimed he didn't have enough money to get lunch at school. "As a tax payer … I would rather feed a child than to give food stamps to a crack head", the driver wrote. School board officials didn't take the critique well, and in fact found no proof that the boy went without lunch. County school board policy stipulated that "disciplinary procedures" apply to employees who post on social networking sites and cause disruption to the instructional environment. The bus driver refused to recant and apologize, so he was fired.

Johnny Cook’s Facebook post. (inquisitr.com)

7. An intern in 2007, still learning the ropes, no doubt, was fired after his boss learned that the "family emergency" he had to miss work for was a fib. How was his lie sniffed out? The intern's co-workers found this Facebook picture of him attending a Halloween party the same day he blew off work. What's worse? The made-up story, or the fairy wand?

Our dear intern has much to learn. (mymodernmet.com)

8. When you've added those who employ you as Facebook friends, it's probably best to keep most thoughts regarding your terrible work habits to yourself, unlike what has seemingly transpired in this post (below).

Slacker employee exposed. (lamebook.com)

9. When a U.S. Marine posted a rant on his Facebook page in 2012 that included "screw Obama", he quickly found out that insulting your boss on social media, whether you're friends with him or not, won't end well when your boss is the POTUS. Needless to say, he was discharged from service.

Gary Stein’s apology. (The Sexy Politico)

10. This Tennessee KFC employee seems to have licked his last pile of mashed potatoes. A Facebook picture showing him doing just that (below) not only got him fired; the company also announced that it had retrained the entire staff of that KFC location. The restaurant said in a statement that the potatoes pictured weren’t served to any customers, but we'll go ahead and pass on eating at any of the Colonel's Tennessee locations anyhow.

Ewww. (NY Daily News)

11. And lastly, of course, don't forget that, yes, despite your better judgment, you did friend your boss on Facebook. Whoops.

Slipped my mind. (lamebook.com)

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Modern PCs don't require as much maintenance as they once did. But showing your hard drive some love now and then can make a difference in its speed and efficiency, especially if it's fairly full. Here it is: the non-techie's guide to optimizing your system using Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter.

Disk Cleanup

As you use your computer, Windows litters your hard drive with temporary files. Programs, utilities, and websites scatter disposable files everywhere. If you could see your hard drive's surface, it would eventually look like the floor of a minivan whose owners eat a lot of fast food.

To run Windows' built-in housekeeper program, the quickest route is this: Open the Start screen. Type "disk cleanup" and select Settings under the search box. In the search results, click Free up disk space by deleting unnecessary files. (Disk Cleanup is also available in the Control Panel.)

The Disk Cleanup program dives right in. If you have more than one drive, it lets you choose the one you want to work on; then it goes to work, inspecting your drive and reporting on files you can safely remove.

Left to its own devices, it will clean up only your files. But if you'd like to clean up all the files on the computer, including Microsoft's own detritus, click Clean up system files. Authenticate if necessary.


The Disk Cleanup dialog box shown above appears when the inspection is over. Turn on the checkboxes of the file categories you'd like to have cleaned out, and then click OK to send them to the digital landfill. It's like getting a bigger hard drive for free.

Disk Defragmenter

When you save a new file, Windows records its information onto the hard drive in small pieces called blocks. On a new PC, Windows lays the blocks end to end on the hard drive's surface. Later, when you type more data into a document (thus enlarging it), the file no longer fits in the same space. Windows puts as much of the file in the original location as can fit, but it may have to store a few of its blocks in the next empty spot on the hard drive.

Ordinarily, you'll never even notice that your files are getting chopped up in this way, since they open promptly and seamlessly. Windows keeps track of where it has stored the various pieces and reconstitutes them when necessary.

As your drive fills up, though, the free space that's left is made up of smaller and smaller groups of blocks. Eventually, a new file may not fit in a single "parking place" on the hard drive's surface, since there are no free spaces left large enough to hold it. Windows may have to store a file in several different areas of the disk, or even hundreds.

When you try to open such a fragmented file, the drive heads (which read the disk) must scamper all over the disk surface, rounding up each block in turn, which is slower than reading contiguous blocks one after the other. Over time, this file fragmentation gets worse and worse. Eventually, you wind up griping to your buddies or spouse that you need a new computer, because this one seems to have gotten so slow.

The solution: Disk Defragmenter, a program that puts together pieces of files that have become fragmented on your drive. The "defragger" also rearranges the files on your drives to make the operating system and programs load more quickly. A freshly defragged PC feels faster and more responsive than a heavily fragmented one.

(UPDATE: This advice, and this program, applies to traditional spinning hard drives—not the solid-state drives [SSDs] on some high-end laptops. For much more on the "defragging SSDs" issue, here's a good primer.)

Windows' disk-defragging software runs automatically at regular intervals, in the tiny moments when you're not actually typing or clicking. It's like having someone take out your garbage for you whenever the can is full. Slow-PC syndrome should, therefore, be a much less frequent occurrence.

Even though Windows defrags your hard drive automatically in the background, though, you can still exert some control. For example, you can change the schedule, and you can trigger a defragmentation manually when you're feeling like a control freak.

Start by opening the Disk Defragmenter main screen. You can get there via the Control Panel, or from the Start screen. Type "disk defrag" and select Settings under the search box. In the search results, click Defragment and optimize your drives.


The Disk Defragmenter window opens (as shown above). From here you can either adjust the schedule or trigger defragmentation manually:

• Adjust the schedule. Click Configure schedule. Authenticate yourself if necessary. A screen appears, showing that Windows ordinarily defrags your disk late every Wednesday night (at 1 a.m., in fact). You can use the pop-up menus here to specify a Weekly, Daily, or Monthly schedule, complete with day-of-week and time-of-day options. Click OK, and then OK again.

• Manually. Click Defragment disk; the defragmenter does its work. Depending on the size of your hard disk, your processor speed, and the amount of fragmentation, it will take anywhere from several minutes to several hours.

Tip: During the defragmentation process, Windows picks up pieces of your files and temporarily sets them down in a different spot, like somebody trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle. If your hard drive is very full, defragmenting will take a lot longer than if you have some empty space available — and if there's not enough free disk space, Windows can't do the job completely. Before you run Disk Defragmenter, use Disk Cleanup and make as much free disk space as possible.

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It has taken me years to learn specific techniques, and develop my skills as a makeup artist. Overtime there are a few tips I have picked-up that have taught me to be more effective in my application. I have learned that you don't have to be a professional to apply makeup that looks beautiful and natural. These tips and tricks will not only save you time, but will enhance your looks in the process.

1) De-clump Mascara I am a big supporter of replacing your mascara every month; however, sometimes all we have is that clumpy tube we keep meaning to replace. If you find yourself in this situation just put a few drops of Visine into your mascara. This will help break up the clumps, and your mascara will be working like new until you get the chance to replace it.

2) Business Card Eye Stencil I learned this trick in makeup school and I have been using it ever since. I use a business card to create sharper defined lines for my eye shadow when I am looking for something a bit more dramatic. This trick works great for creating a cat eye effect.

3) Tightlining In the everlasting pursuit for longer, thicker, and fuller lashes, there is a very easy makeup trick to help us achieve this. Often referred to as the invisible liner, tightlining is the method of lining your upper waterline instead of above your lashes to give the appearance of thicker lashes. The image to the right shows an eye without tightlining (top) and one with tightlining (bottom). While the difference is subtle the overall look goes a long way.

4) Eye Shadow That Pops Ever buy a vibrant color of eye shadow and when you apply it you notice it looks anything but vibrant? The trick is to apply a cream color base coat all over your lid before applying eye shadow. This base with allow for the truest color of the eye shadow to appear on your lid. I personally love the MAC Paint Pot in the color Painterly.

5) Airbrushing Without an Airbrush The beautyblender is a reusable makeup sponge that allows for even and effortless foundation application. It leaves you with similar effects to that of airbrushing and will never leave streaks in your skin the way a brush can. It is fast, effective, easy to clean, and goes strong for months before it needs replacing.

6) Heat Up That Lash Curler Blast a hairdryer onto your (metal) lash curler for no more than 3-4 seconds before using. Heating up your lash curler ever so slightly will have a similar effect on your lashes that a curling iron would have on your hair.

7) Powder on Lashes A little bit of baby powder on your lashes before you put on your mascara can transform the thickness of your lashes. Just a small dusting of powder before a couple coats of mascara will provide you with a noticeable difference in the thickness of your lashes.

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After a recent rumor suggested that the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 may be delayed because Apple is facing supply issues related to the phone’s battery, a new report now says that Apple will only manufacture a limited run of the bigger model. G 4 Games has picked up reports from Chinese media via Weibo that say that Apple will only make 10 million iPhone 6 phablets at launch. These iPhones will have a 5.44-inch display covered by Sapphire glass, which may be the reason only a limited number of handsets will be mass-produced.

Apparently, the Sapphire crystal on the bigger iPhone is a lot more expensive to produce than glass, and will drive up the cost of the handset. In China, the 16GB 5.5-inch iPhone 6 could cost as much as 8,000 yuan (around $1,285) unlocked, with the Sapphire screen supposedly costing Apple 1,743 yuan (around $280).

Earlier this year, Gorilla Glass maker Corning bashed Sapphire glass, saying that its high price makes it a rather prohibitive material for mobile device makers.

Apple has its own Sapphire plant in Arizona, where it has started producing small quantities of such glass. Previous reports revealed that Apple will be able to produce between 100 million and 200 million Sapphire displays per year at its Arizona plant, although that may only happen once the plant is fully operational.

The new reports from China seem to somewhat confirm an earlier report from Ming-Chi Kuo. The analyst said that the iPhone 6 phablet would be launched only late in the last quarter of the year, revealing that only the 64GB version of the 5.5-inch device would actually have Sapphire glass. However, the new report from China doesn’t single out any iPhone 6 phablet version, when it comes to Sapphire display use.

In the future, Kuo said, Apple will equip all its iPhones with Sapphire glass.

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This year was all about the bikini for a number of hard-bodied stars. Jessica Alba showed off her fit frame when she hit the beach in St. Barts earlier this year, while models Kate Upton and Gisele Bündchen rocked their assets in string two-pieces. Meanwhile, Julianne Hough got over her broken heart following her breakup with Ryan Seacrest by taking a girls' trip to Miami with pal Nina Dobrev. See all those moments and many more, including Kim Kardashian's pregnant bikini snaps and Kate Moss's swimwear-filled vacation, in our roundup, and make sure to check out all our best of 2013 coverage!



















































Source : http://www.popsugar.com/Celebrities-Bikinis-2013-32765898

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