So you forgot your power cord on your way to an important meeting or the coffee shop. We’ve all been there. There’s nothing you can do to stop your battery drain, but you can do a lot to slow its inevitable demise.

If you’ve got a laptop with a really old battery that drains in a few minutes after a full charge, there’s not much you can do to make that old thing last much longer—you’ll probably want to replace the battery before you do anything else. For everybody else, these tips can help you keep your battery working at peak efficiency.

What Drains Your Battery?

In order to help maximize your battery life, it’s important to first understand what drains the power from your laptop battery, and in a modern laptop it’s pretty simple—the LCD panel is the biggest culprit by far. Microsoft’s Windows 7 Engineering blog has put together a very useful chart that helps show you exactly what percentage each component will drain, which helps us know where to start when trying to maximize the battery life.

The one thing this chart doesn’t point out are add-on devices like flash drives, USB mice, and especially PC Cards—which are known to kill your battery very quickly. If you’ve got an unpowered hard drive plugged into your laptop through a USB port, it’s going to drain your battery more quickly than if you had a powered one.

Tweak Your Power Plan Settings

The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that you have a reasonable power plan selected for when you’re rolling on battery power. The high performance plan is always tempting (you’re a high performance user, after all), but you’ll burn through your battery a lot more quickly, so select the Power saver or Balanced plans, and make sure it’s set to turn off the display quickly after inactivity, since that’s the biggest power drain.

Next, you’ll want to dig further into the Advanced Power Plan settings, and make sure that the On battery settings are set to maximize battery life—change the plan to turn off the hard disk quickly, use the low-power mode for your wireless adapter, processor, and especially your graphics card. The System cooling policy setting allows you to specify whether the laptop will rely on fans for cooling, or slow the processor down when the temperature gets out of hand, and can definitely help your battery life, though at the cost of some performance.

Adjust the Screen Brightness

Since we’ve already shown that the LCD screen is the biggest drag on your battery life, the quickest way to save your battery life is to use your laptop’s hardware buttons to control the screen brightness—most laptops require holding down the function key and using the brightness keys, and turning it down as far as you can (while still visible) is a good idea. It may seem like an obvious choice, but it’s worth emphasizing at the top of the list for one reason: Of everything you can tweak to improve your battery life, this one change alone is at the top of the list of tweaks that can dramatically improve your battery life.

Make sure that your power plan is set to turn off the display quickly when your laptop is idle, and don’t use any fancy screensavers that overuse the graphics capabilities of your laptop. Many web sites tell you to disable Aero to squeeze more battery life, and it’s true that you might get a very small bit of extra life, a couple of minutes at the very most—you will be much better off adjusting the screen brightness and using aggressive screen blanking settings.

Optimize Your Hardware for Power Consumption

Does your laptop have a Bluetooth adapter that you aren’t using? What about IR? Each of these devices consumes power just by being enabled, and if you aren’t using them, you may as well disable them to save a little bit of battery. If you’re using your laptop on the plane, train, or somewhere without a wireless hotspot, use the hardware button to disable the Wi-Fi adapter if you have one, or just disable it manually in Control Panel.

Try to avoid using a PC Card adapter, as they can drain your battery quickly, and make sure that your USB devices are set to allow Windows to shut them off to save power—you can find the settings in device manager’s Power Management property pane for the device.

You’ll also want to make sure that your laptop has enough RAM—if Windows has to constantly thrash the disk because you don’t have enough RAM to keep everything in memory, you either should consider upgrading your RAM or running fewer applications at once.

Kill Background Processes and Services

Runaway system processes can do more than just kill your PC’s performance—they can also kill your battery as well. You’ll want to make sure that you close any background applications you don’t need to be running while you are on battery power, and disable any automated updaters, scheduled tasks, and especially search indexing.

Prime targets for removal are things like Windows desktop gadgets, and all of those applications that hide themselves in your system tray. It’s time for a cleanup, so disable or uninstall any application running in your system tray that you don’t actually need. (Only uninstall if you’re still plugged in—no use wasting extra battery life on that now.) It’s not just good for your battery life, it’s a good practice in general.

If you want an easier way to toggle settings on or off, you can use previously mentioned utility Aerofoil to help you automatically disable Aero Glass, switch between power plans, mute the sound, and even disable the sidebar, all with a tiny, lightweight icon sitting in the system tray.

Use Hibernate Mode When Possible

Using Hibernate mode instead of Sleep allows your laptop to completely power down and use zero power, so if you aren’t going to be using your laptop for another hour or more, put it into Hibernate mode instead of sleep mode, which still uses a trickle of battery life to keep everything in memory.

One of the other benefits of using Hibernate mode that many people don’t consider is that there are any number of ways that your laptop can be accidentally woken out of sleep mode—for instance, a scheduled task for an application that pulls your laptop out of sleep mode to do backups, or just an unruly device that triggers the laptop to wake up. If you are using Hibernate mode, nothing can wake the laptop other than the power button.

Take Care of Your Battery by Avoiding Heat

Laptop batteries are always going to slowly lose their ability to charge over time, but when a laptop is constantly overheating or used in a very hot environment, your battery is going to die very quickly. Photo by JustinLowery

Today’s laptops use Lithium batteries instead of nickel, but there’s a lot of incorrect information out there about how to charge or drain your batteries, so let’s set the record straight: Nickel batteries required being fully drained before a recharge to optimize your battery life, but Lithium batteries are the opposite—you do not need to fully discharge it before recharging, and in fact, if you fully deplete a lithium battery and don’t recharge for a while, it can become incapable of holding a charge.

You’ll also want to make sure that your battery is not always fully charged—Wikipedia points out that if your lithium battery is fully charged all the time, you will lose up to 20% of your capacity every year, no matter what you do. Make sure to discharge the battery sometimes, and if you spend most of your time plugged in at a desk, you would be better off running the battery down to half, and then simply removing the battery and storing it in a cool place. You can use Hibernate mode to save exactly what you were doing while still shutting down the laptop completely.

That Nintendo announced the 3DS was not a surprise — that they had a couple-dozen of these things to try out, that was. We elbowed our way to the front of the line to try one out, and the effect is actually not bad. It’s not great, but the 3.5-inch screen on top certainly gives a firm illusion of depth without resorting to glasses — or eye crossing. The feel is definitely reminiscent of those 3D cereal box prints, and as soon as you turn the device from left to right to try to look around anything the effect is immediately lost. You need to stare at the screen for a moment for your eyes to adjust and then not move around too much. If you do you’ll need to adjust again. But, stay reasonably still and it’s a compelling effect.

The new analog slider on the left feels a lot like the PSP’s analog nub, but larger and without the texture. It’s a bit easier on the fingers, and comfortable. Overall the device feels just like a current DS or DSi, though we couldn’t get a good feel for the weight thanks to a bulky tether attached on one end to the device, and on the other end to the row of ladies who were surely told to not let the gadgets out of their hands or face certain doom. The only thing we could do here is rotate along a still frame — Pikmin in a field, for example — and play with the 3D slider.

It is a pretty convincing effect, but it’s hard to tell at this point if it’s at all compelling — it wasn’t anything more than novelty in this demo, and we still don’t know how it stands up to fast-moving footage. Actual games were promised to us for the show floor, so we’ll hit that up later today. We snagged a few pics before getting elbowed out of the way, so check ‘em out!

You’ve packed your things and made it to the airport—now the real fun begins. Want a better way of protecting your stuff, getting online, and cutting through red tape? Try these 10 tips for a better air travel experience.

Photo by B Rosen.

We’ve previously written top 10s for productive travel, driving and travel, and vacation planning, but those were written with a wider focus on planning a trip or working on the go. This guide is all about the actual spaces you’re stuck in when flying from place to place. Enjoy!

10. Ignore the Food for Better Sleep

It’s tempting to take the airline up on its offer of a “free” meal on a long flight—you did, after all, pay what seems like a steep price for the privilege. (Even as more airlines charge, having something to eat can seem appealing.) But if you want to actually sleep and arrive at your destination something other than wiped out, do as frequent flier John Graham-Cummings recommends and skip the in-flight meal. Tell the person next to you, and the attendant, that you don’t want to be woken up, and concentrate on getting into a state where you can get some shut-eye. Photo by viralbus. (Original post)

9. Buy a One-Day Lounge Pass for Better Service

Flight get canceled? Luggage get lost? Got a really long layover on an important flight? Do as the Wall Street Journal suggests (link is dead, unfortunately) and buy a one-day pass to your airline’s premium/platinum/gold/whatever club or lounge. You’ll get a great seat, almost certainly nab a charging port, and the airline agents working these spots are usually the most friendly and knowledgeable—so they’re the best place to turn when you need to rebook, re-schedule, or otherwise work out the kinks. Photo by joiseyshowaa. (Original post)

8. Ship Your Bags for Less Cost and Better Protection

Not only is pretty much every airline charging you these days for the privilege of checking luggage, or even bringing a single bag on-board, but getting reimbursed for lost, damaged, or stolen bags and goods is a Kafka-esque time sink. AsKiplinger points out, you not only get better assurances (and insurance), but you can track your packages online, ship and check some items that airlines would hassle you over, and have one less big thing to run through the airport with. Photo by cliff1066. (Original post)

7. Pack a Starter Pistol (or Actual Gun) to Protect Valuables

Some savvy photographers have been using the tip that security expert Bruce Schneier suggests: pack a starter pistol in the same bag as your professional camera or other valuable equipment. You’ll have to sign a card and declare the pistol, which counts as a gun under TSA regulations, but your firearm—and the other gear with it—gets some extra-special attention and storage during the flight. Now, a few huge disclaimers here—buying a firearm, even a starter pistol, is nothing to take too lightly, and if you’re in a rush, it’s probably not the most efficient way through security. But if you’ve got valuables you have no other way of transporting, it’s worth looking into. Photo by Vince Alongi. (Original post)

6. Load Your Laptop Bag and Make It Checkpoint-Friendly

If you’ve already got a good laptop bag or bag-toting backpack, stick with it, but consider adding some of the crucial laptop bag gear of your editors. If you’re on the lookout for a new travel case, consider what theTSA calls checkpoint-friendly bags—generally those that open quickly to a full view. And if you’re on the cutting edge of hip travel tech, consider that security officials have already declared the iPad, and likely future tablet devices, able to be kept in their bags during the super-awesome security line run-down. (Original post)

5. Use a Checklist

Unless your life resembles that of George Clooney’s inUp in the Air, living out of your suitcase and shuttling between cities isn’t a smooth, fluid, second-hand motion for you. The way around that is to use a checklist to pack everything, arrive on time, move quickly through the hoops, and smooth out your plane experience. Adam’s assembled one heck of a Power Traveler’s Checklist in two parts: one for pre-flight planning, the other for the day you travel. You might have newer, better ticket sites you use, or better alert and management systems—like, say, TripIt—but the checklist itself remains worth a run-through.

4. Find a Charging Port in Your Airport

Everybody’s got something to charge these days, be it a phone, laptop, iPad, or the life-saving portable DVD player for the kids. Once the slim “official” charging stations fill up, hit up Jeff Sandquist’sAirPower Wiki and find your hub’s hidden ports. Some might be in less-than-ideal spots, or might not have a seat nearby, but there’s a lot of power lurking around, if you know where to look. For another option, log in to Foursquare (or just visit the site) and check out the “Tips” for your airport. The ultra-social tech hipsters love to share their power finds, even if you’re not sharing yourself. Photo by D.L.. (Original post)

3. Find the Best Seats with Good Leg Room in Coach

Not all airplane seats are built the same, but even the best seat can stink if you get the wrong kind of fellow passengers next to you. So go ahead and find an aisle seat near the back. You’re more likely to get a seat with nobody next to you, which is about the best thing you can hope for. Want a better look at the actual seats and which have the most leg room? Try TripAdvisor’s SeatGuru tool. Photo by Robert Scoble. (Original post)

2. Neon-Wrap Your Luggage for Foolproof Identification

Technically, your cynical assumption is correct—if everybody started wrapping their luggage handles in neon paracord, as MAKE suggests, than your unique (and extra hand-friendly) luggage wouldn’t be so easy to spot. But look at the luggage the next tie you’re picking up—how many standard black Samsonites are still in use? It’s going to be a while until the rest of the world matches up to your sky-blue identifiers. (Original post)

1. Get Wi-Fi, One Way or Another

You shouldn’t pay $10 for Wi-Fi you can only use for an hour, anyway. It’s a rip-off, and cheap got-you-where-we-want-you airports should learn a lesson. Gina’s covered some great tips on scanning, finding, and getting into Wi-Fi networks, in airports or elsewhere, with her definitive guide to finding free Wi-Fi. Beyond that, we’ve read about the savvy finding success by asking for freebies at gift shops, and having occasional luck with aURL hack. While you’re on the lookout, though, be sure to avoid the seemingly generous “Free Wi-Fi” offers that are actually rogue snoopers and scammers and protect your connection. (Original posts: asking, URL hack, rogue Wi-Fi, protection).

Microsoft rolled out its free Office Web Apps earlier this week, introducing a free, basic Office suite for the web. How does it compare to Google’s own Docs offering? Here’s a rundown of each webapp’s strengths and weaknesses.

Where Office Web Apps Excels

Yeah, yeah, that’s a pretty bad pun. But it’s actually the first descriptor that came to mind.

Microsoft Office Compatibility

As you’d probably expect, when it comes to uploading a complex Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document to the web, and having it look the same there as it does on your desktop, Web Apps takes the cake. Until our little test, though, we didn’t realize by just how much.

We uploaded a few different Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files to both suites, and relied on our past experience with Docs. To show you the difference, here’s a heavily formatted corporate-style newsletter-pictures, sub-headings, margins, you name it. We opened it in TextEdit on a Mac, and placed it next to both Google Docs and Office Web Apps.

First, here’s how it looks in Google Docs, compared to the original in TextEdit. (Click the image for a larger view):

Not the same, but you might also think, not too bad, right?

Compare that to Office Web Apps’ version:

Honestly, until I saw the online Office version, I didn’t even know there was supposed to be an image at the top. There’s a larger argument to be made about open data formats, along with the sub-argument about rigidly formatted newsletters sent out as Word documents. But if tricky Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are a regular part of your online life, Office Web Apps has it all over Google at the present moment.

Font Selection (on Windows)

Another undiscovered quirk of online office suites until today: font selection. When you load Google Docs in any browser on any OS, you get a fairly small but standard set of fonts to choose from, shown here.

Load Office Web Apps on a Windows system, though, and you seem to get full access to all the fonts installed on your system, for both content creation and reading documents with specialized fonts. (Click the image at left for a larger view). That might not matter to everyone, but for those to whom fonts are a pretty big deal, Office Web Apps seems like a more convenient framework.

Storage Space and Access

Where Google offers universal access and constant iterative features for its online apps, Microsoft competes with raw storage space. 25 GB to store whatever you need—including pictures, audio, and video for use with your docs and presentations—is nothing to sneeze at. And a number of crafty coders have devised ways ofmounting SkyDrive to make it just like any drive. Suddenly, Google’s heretofore generous 1 GB of Docs upload space doesn’t seem quite so impressive.

OneNote

If your life feels incomplete and disconnected without Microsoft’s powerful note-taking, doc-organizing, and life-arranging tool, then you’re going to want to get into Office Web Apps. It’s not the full-scale version, but you can add, view, and edit your OneNote data in fairly clean form, so that’s something you’re going to either love or not quite understand what the fuss is about. Jason loves OneNote, and gets things done with it. You might feel the same.

Where Google Docs Still Rules

Google’s Docs offerings have been on the market a good four years now, so they’ve had more time to learn what users want and need in an online suite. It shows in the design and function of Docs for day-to-day users.

Interface and Organization

Not that either webapp is particularly pretty, but Google’s system of nested folders, tags, and powerful search takes the cake over Office Web Apps, which is deeply tied into the Live.com ecosystem, laid out a bit like Hotmail, and generally harder to get around if you’ve got a lot of projects. Simply adding some color coding would help out Office’s layout quite a bit, instead of relying on the beige folder icons that are the norm of Windows apps.

On top of that, Office Web Apps’ landing page usually sticks an ugly ad in the lower-right corner, one you’re probably used to seeing on the sites of newspapers that have lost touch with their advertisers, blogs hungry for monetization, and other hey-whatever ad sections. It’s less than appealing, especially when the design seems to blend into the beige-ish focus of Live.com’s design. (Note that you can change your Live.com theme, but the ad doesn’t ever go away).

Sharing and Collaboration

In terms of real-time collaboration, Google wins hands-down, because Office offers none. You can share documents for editing and viewing, and the controls are actually quite good for doing so (as discussed further on). But Office is heavy-handed when it comes to editor lock-in—switching between laptops in my own house, I was often locked out of documents because Office considered one “Open in another account,” even when I’d shut down the other computer. Google Docs, on the other hand, has recently added Wave-like, real-time collaboration, one my wife and I have used to plan a vacation together on a single document with surprisingly few conflicts. Both apps tie their document sharing into emailed requests and grouped contacts on the Google/Live.com servers; Google’s implementation feels a little more easy to grasp.

Speed

Google Docs feels pretty fast when you’re editing, uploading, loading new documents, and even editing presentations with images. Office Web Apps constantly bugs you to install Silverlight for a “faster experience,” and doesn’t exactly churn and crank after you do install it. Google’s certainly got the lead in cloud-based architecture and coding.

Google Integration

Let’s face facts: Far more people are enthusiastic Google users than Live.com fans. That wouldn’t matter so much, except that among your friends and coworkers, it’s more likely forthem to be enthusiastic Google users, and have a Docs account, and know how to edit a Docs file, than they are likely to have a Live.com account and know their way around Office Web Apps. It’s a first-mover’s advantage, and an issue of scale, but it’s still there, and worth noting.

Where Docs and Web Apps Tie

For some types of users, a difference between the two webapps won’t be a win/lose item, so much as a difference in taste.

Access Control

Google does a decent job of letting you choose exactly who can view and edit your documents. Office does a surprisingly similar good job, but with a different tool—a sliding scale for each document, setting it to totally public and open, only available to you, available to groups, particular friends, and other stops in-between. If your life is loaded into Gmail and Google Contacts, Google’s contacts and groups might work better, but Office Web Apps has a good system, too.

The Interface

We’d love to be so sophisticated as to call a winner here. But in all honesty, both Docs and Office Web Apps have pretty utilitarian interfaces, and whether you like one or the other is going to depend on which camp you fall into: the minimalism and keyboard-friendly realm of Google, or the ribbon-ish look of Office, where everything is a button. Neither web tool is meant for all-inclusive utility, and both seem to have stuck to the basic functions of font, spacing, and layout in their buttons.

You probably know what Photoshop disasters look like, but your photos can benefit from more subtle and elegant touch-ups. With these tools and techniques, you can sharpen, texturize, re-contextualize, and remove tourists, among other problems, from your shots worth saving.

Photo by Jase The Bass.

10. Create Your Own Bokeh

Bokeh is a cute name for something you’ve noticed before, but probably never really pinned down—the gauzy, creamy light points that appear behind the subject that’s in drastic focus in a picture. Photo site DIY Photography explains how to harness and control bokeh effects, using a photo lens like a 50mm F/1.8 and creating a small lens cover with just the right kind of hole cut out. Lacking for the right kind of digital lens? The Photojojo blog details an analog-to-digital lens adaptation, perfect for garage sale and eBay finds. (Original posts:Bokeh, DSLR lenses).

9. Make Pop Art from Your Photos

Some shots have great subjects, angles, or scenes, but just can’t be saved from bad lighting or other mistakes. When that’s the case, your saving grace can be Photoshop guru Melissa Clifton’s pop-art-style fixes. She’s shown us how to Andy-Warhol-Up photos, as well as makezoomed-in-comic-style, Roy-Lichtenstein-inspired pop art from photos both good and bad. If you’re not a Photoshop lover, or even owner, you can arrive at a similar bad-shot-as-art result by using Rollip to Polaroid-ize your photo, or use the Poladroid desktop software. (Original posts: Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rollip, Poladroid).

8. Convert to Black and White the Right Way

It’s easy to turn a color image into black and white on a computer, and sometimes that’s enough to rescue high-grain, fuzzy shots, like concert photos. Before you hit the switch, though, take Helen Bradley’s advice on black-and-white conversion, which can make your shot actually suit the specific strengths of grayscale coloring. Got a specific subject to highlight? Try adding a dash of color to give your shot unique appeal. (Original posts: concerts, conversions, color in b&w).

7. De-Pixelize Graphics and Small Photos

Resizing images is grunt work enough—having to deal with pixelated results is just torture. Free webappVectorMagic can make your graphic-style images into vector art that scales clean and smooth as it’s sized up and down. It works better with clean line drawings and small, icon-like photos than full-size shots, but if you can tolerate some loss of detail, it’s a lifesaver. (Original post).

6. Make Photos Look Like Miniatures with Tilt-Shift Tools

With tilt-shift photography, you can put being 50 rows back from the action to your advantage. A professional lens can run upwards of $1,200 for a very single-use tool, so try some DIY solutions. MAKE shows us a DIY lens that looks like it’s made from, of all things, a plunger. There are also two web-based software tilt-shift solutions: Tiltshift Maker and TiltShift—we prefer the latter for its options and control, but the mostly automated Tiltshift Maker also gets the job done in simple fashion. (Original posts: DIY lens, TiltShiftMaker, TiltShift)

5. Use Textures to Liven Up Flat Images

For whatever reason, perfectly fine photos can lack definition. Sometimes it’s tricks of light and lens, and sometimes it’s because Cousin Jeff wore a sweater that just turns out like a blob. Try adding textures to a photo with layering techniques. A scanned sheet of white paper, for example, saved an otherwise washed-out photo in Digital Photography School’s example. It’s not a save-all, and definitely has potential for abuse, but it’s a nice saving grace to have in your mental back pocket. (Original post).

4. Create Stunning and Realistic HDR Photos

High dynamic range photos are a world unto themselves, and difficult to pin down in a few sentences. A noble attempt: they make your brights brighter and darks darker, and give a more realistic look to photos. We’ve previously pointed to a few good guides to shooting and editing in HDR fashion: the Backing Winds’ beginner’s Photoshop tutorial, Gizmodo’s guide to realistic HDR, and a Flickr set by Leviathor that shows how unrealistic HDR can look, if you’re not careful with how you combine images. (Original posts: Photoshop, Gizmodo guide, surreal vs. real sets).

3. Sharpen Images the Smart Way

As we learned the hard way, giving your images a crisper look requires more than just leaning on the “Unsharp Mask” crutch every time. It does have its uses, though, especially ifdone the right way. But there’s also a more fine-tuned way to sharpen your images, as Cameron Moll explains in a blog post. (Original posts: Unsharp mask, Smart Sharpen).

2. Remove People from Otherwise Perfect Shots

Stupid vacationers! Always standing and gawking at the same thing you’re trying to capture just perfectly! There are ways around the herd’s tendency to wander into your shots. For one, take a whole bunch of images from the same position, with the same settings, and use Photoshop’s statistics and stacks tools to remove the people, almost entirely, from your shot. Online tool Tourist Remover does a similar task after you upload multiple photos. No luck with automated filtering? Try removing the background entirely and grabbing what you can from your perfect shot. (Original posts:people-free, Tourist Remover, backgrounds).

1. Craft Panoramas from Regular Shots

There’s nothing wrong with your run-of-the-mill digicam, but when you want to capture the sweep and scope of a big scene, its small lens can’t quite tackle the job. Don’t give up, though—switch to manual settings, take a series of shots, and stitch together a panorama with free software. Our own guide relies on the very adaptable and customizable Hugin software, but we’ve previously pointed at a few good packages for different levels of automation and customization: AutoStitch for the click-and-go method, You Suck at Photoshop’s PhotoMerge tutorial for the PS-loving set, and Microsoft’s powerful Image Composite Editor for another alternative. (Original posts: AutoStitch, Photomerge, Composite Editor)