Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

Back in April, I wrote an article about QR Codes and the post exploded with comments. I have some pretty intelligent readers out there! I wanted to gather all the information from these informative comments and present them here in a concise format so we can all find the information quickly and easily. Ways You Use QR Codes In my article, I asked if readers were already using QR Codes in their businesses

Microsoft's Steve Sinofsky showed off Windows 8 at AllThingsD's conference Wednesday night . It's all flashy and color, with Windows Phone 7-like dynamic homescreen "panels" from its Metro UI which contain updating information available at a glance from the apps they relate to.

A Japanese miner climbs onto the stage, his helmet light bobbing and a pickax slung over his shoulder.

With a few supplies and some careful cutting and pasting, you can build the gravity-defying structure that won the 2010 Best Illusion of the Year Contest . Created by Japanese mathematical engineer Kokichi Sugihara, the magnetlike slopes illusion is cleverly designed to make marbles roll "uphill." It's a trick of perspective: The slopes actually tilt downward, but they are supported by leaning columns that look straight when viewed from a specific vantage point. Sugihara discovered the illusion accidentally while feeding 3-D line drawings of "impossible" objects into a computer program designed to interpret them as solid structures

Emboldened by the Arab Spring and social media, Syrian protesters are taking to the streets over smuggled YouTube videos that appear to show a 13-year-old boy who was physically and sexually tortured while in government custody. A graphic video of the corpse of a 13-year-old boy who appears to have been sexually and physically tortured by Syrian security officials has sparked international condemnation and riots across the country. The video (see still pic above) shows Hamza Ali al-Khatib, a resident of the southern village of Jiza, and appears to have been filmed by his family after they retrieved his corpse.

It's been partly hidden for months, hotly anticipated since HP bought Palm and ditched its plans for a Windows tablet, and now here it is via a seemingly

Since he was hired in the '70s by Saudi prince Mohammad al-Faisal, French engineer Georges Mougin has tried to figure out a way to tow freshwater icebergs across the Arctic. Now, with 3-D tech, declassified satellite data, and tugboats, he might have cracked the way to quench the world's thirst

In Springfield, Oregon, a mother to be went into labor while her soldier husband was stationed across the country in North Carolina. As Beth Ford reports, the couple used the video chat service Skype to celebrate the birth of their son together over the internet.

Hands on surgical training (HoST) actually helps move the hands of surgeons in training to help them experience what it's like to make the cut. But are they actually learning? A teaching method that allows novice med students to instantly move with the same dexterity as the world's most seasoned surgeons sounds like the kind of science fiction quackery that'd get patients killed.

NASA's revealed plans for manned human spaceflight, centering on the four-seat, conical Orion capsule. NASA's plans for manned human spaceflight are salvaged from the wreckage of the Constellation program

Today, Comcast finally upgraded its mobile app, Xfinity TV, and now offers roughly 6,000 hours of On Demand content to subscribers who own the iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad. The top players are all present--HBO, Showtime, Starz--making streaming premium content on your mobile device a cinch

Once again, science is confirming what we have always suspected. This time, after years of referring to Apple's customer base as the "cult of Mac" or "cult of Apple", a group of UK neuroscientists have been able to demonstrate that when you compare the brain MRI's of Apple fans versus those taken of people who consider themselves "very religious", well guess what

Sick of hearing that climate change doesn't exist from people who haven't studied the matter, climate scientists get together to fix the problem the only way they know how: hip-hop. There is nothing more amusing than incongruous people rapping (Andy Samberg has built a career on this notion), and there is perhaps no more incongruous rappers than Australian academics

The gadgets and gizmos to get you from door to destination, and the travel fiends behind them. The lightweight construction of the Tumi Vapor Extended Trip Packing Case takes a beating beautifully; its metal exterior cleverly conceals scratches and dings.

It's amazing how quickly technology changes.