Humphrey Cheung

Digital cameras can take spectacular pictures, but how can you easily add some extra pop to an otherwise boring landscape or product shot? High dynamic range photography - photography that combines multiple exposure shots of the same scene - is the latest craze in photography and has made some incredible shots of cityscapes with bright skies and glowing city lights.

Citing Wikipedia in your school projects and papers is now a big no no at Middlebury College in Middlebury Vermont. The History department in the small liberal arts college has banned citing the popular online encyclopedia. Students who continue citing could face reduce grades or even failure from the class.

The days of playing simple games like Pac-Man and DigDug on your mobile phone may be over with Imagination Technologies' new PowerVR technology. At the recently completed Consumer Electronic Show, the company showed off several game demons on their upcoming SGX 535 technology which will power upcoming graphics chips for mobile phones and PDAs.

Pittsburgh resident Andrew Warshaver has found a more modern and possibly very lucrative way of looking for a summer job. Warshaver, who is also a Carnegie Mellon computer science student, is auctioning off his programming skills on eBay. While this may sound like a joke, so far there have been four serious offers hitting $5500.

Samsung says it will sink $1.9 billion dollars to increase DRAM memory production in its factories in South Korea. The company will upgrade 14 existing plants in addition to building a 15th factory. Samsung believes DRAM demand will increase by more than 75 percent and hopes to increase DRAM shipments by 30% versus last year.

Electronic books or E-books could take off if Google has its way. According to the Times Online, the Sunnyvale-based search engine giant will expand its Google Book Search to include more books along with downloadable content to mobile devices.

Dolby, the company known for making the insanely loud and vibrant movie sound intros, has developed a fix for inconsistent audio levels in home theatres and television sets. Most couch potatoes have clutched the remote control to raise the volume on quiet television shows only to be blown out of their sofas with a surprisingly loud commercial.

A-Data, a Taiwanese memory and peripheral company, has shown off prototypes of an upcoming solid-state drive for ExpressCard, IDE and SATA interfaces. Mainly built for notebook computers, the drives have capacities of 32, 64 and 128 GB.

The Japanese space agency is canceling its long awaited moon mission. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is recommending canceling the Lunar-A project which would have planted probes into the moon's surface. Japan had been planning the mission for more than a decade and even built the mothership, which is falling apart from neglect.

Most booths at the Consumer Electronics Show are pretty bland, but Spectra International's booth stood out with several walls of eye-searing pink Hello Kitty electronics. The cat face with its trademark missing mouth, a symbol of international cuteness, was plastered on everything from phones to USB sticks. There were even Hello Kitty toasters and hair dryers on display.

The One Laptop Per Child project is inching towards final production: Prototypes are currently on display at the Consumer Electronics Show and we have used the opportunity to play around with the devices shown by Marvell, which provides the wireless chips for the device. Get a close-up look at the $100 laptop in our slideshow.

Shuttle is known for making small form factor computers, but the City of Industry-based computer company is now developing a tower-sized machine. Company officials showed off a red and black paneled case that used much of the same air guide and heat dissipation technology as the SFF Shuttle computers.

You probably have computers with gigabytes maybe terabytes of pictures, songs and videos, but how do you manage it all? In his traditional CES opening keynote, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced the Windows Home Server and explained how the technology automatically backs up your data and makes it available through the Internet.

Samsung rolled out a bunch of new products one day before the official opening of the Consumer Electronics Show. At the press conference we saw the company's new LCD TVs with a contrast ratio of up to 10,000:1 as well as the the firm's second generation Blu-ray player and the iPod Nano competitor K3.

You trust your hard drive to always serve up your data, but how do you keep the data away from the bad guys? Seagate seems to have an answer with an upcoming drive with full disk encryption. The drive works by signing data with encryption keys and by injecting additional code into a compatible Trusted Platform Module computer.

CES Unveiled is the first official event for journalists who want to get an early peek at what will be on display on the CES showfloor. We took our camera and were dazzled by the array of new products - including the new generation of UMPCs, Asus' external graphics station, 16-core computers, interactive toys and - remember, it's CES - new LCD TVs.

One of the first major events at CES 2007 was the Storage Visions 2007 Conference, which focused not only on hard drive technologies, but featured an interesting exhibit as well: Join us to see Hitachi's Terabyte hard drive, Seagate's hybrid hard drive, Sandisk's solid state disk, HP's external HD DVD drive and a very effective disk crusher.