If you own a D700 or 5D Mark II, their miraculous sensors make it incredibly easy to shoot at night without extra gear. But what if you own a $500 DSLR? Photography Bay has some basic reminders for night shooting.

Their tips for shooting with a lower-end DSLR without carrying gear like a tripod can be boiled down to cranking up your camera's ISO—your camera's light sensitivity—but not too much. Like ISO 400 for older entry-level cameras, up to ISO 800 on newer ones like the D90. Then minimizing camera shake using the breathless technique—squeeze the shutter at the moment you've exhaled all the breath in your lungs, kind of like a sniper. It helps even more if you've got your elbows tucked at your sides. Or you can cheat against not having a tripod by setting your camera down on something so it's immobilized—jackets are good for this—and setting a slightly longer exposure time to let in more light. (A fast lens with a low aperture settings helps.) There's also this cheap, disposable stabilizer that fits in your pocket. You'll get a cleaner image that way, with a lot more light in cityscapes (like Times Square). Oh, and shooting after it rains is great since the water reflection increases the amount of light flooding into your camera. But above all, you need to know what your camera setup is capable of doing.

Those are some barebone basics for a kind of shooting everybody wants to get right—what's your favorite night photography tip? [Photography Bay]

Starting this fall, all new planes will be required to have heartier seats that can withstand 16x gravity without popping out of place. Plus, they'll be getting airbags in select areas.

As of now, plane designs that were certified before 1988 are permitted to have seats that can withstand just 9x gravity. And airbags are pretty much only found in cars. But beginning October 27, newly manufactured planes with these old designs will need the incorporate the new seats and airbags in places like first/business class where seats are far apart and exit rows where passengers can simply hit a wall.

So do these standards actually matter, or do they just placate nervous fliers? We'll let this particularly humorous passage from the NYT answer that question:

In some airline crashes, the strength of the seats is irrelevant because the crash is not what the engineers call "survivable." In other crashes, still violent but not as much so as exploding in midair or breaking up in flight, the passengers' survival depends on suffering little or no injury in the first phase of the accident, as when a plane runs off the runway, and then getting out of the plane quickly to avoid a postcrash fire.

Ahh, those witty engineers. [NYT]

Skype's finally dropped a brand new version of their app for Windows Mobile. Three dawt oh brings file sharing and SMS texting, for free. Weeeeeeeee. [Skype via jkontherun]

If you're going to haphazardly strap a camera to your handlebars, helmet, rear-view mirror or belt buckle, you may as well do it right.

Brando's $11 Camera Action Mount reflects a special kind of product design—one that doesn't get bogged down too much with practicality, logistics, aesthetics or forethought. Instead, Brando sees a need—perhaps not a widespread one, but a need nonetheless—and just fills it. For as long as there have been cheap portable cameras and camcorders, shows like America's Funniest Home Videos, and Break.com, people have been lashing their hardware to all manner of makeshift mounts using only their own ingenuity.

In that sense this strappy mess, which essentially hangs a few Velcro tethers from your camera's 1/4-inch tripod mount, is a public service, both to those of us with the inexplicable urge to hurt ourselves on camera, and for those of us who just love to watch. Thanks? [Brando]

Sony's will soon start slapping their new seal, seen at left, onto approvied third-party peripherals for their game consoles. This could mean a) more vetted, decent accessories b) nothing at all, except higher prices and some new stickers. [Kotaku]

The Lenovo T400 series, aside from its occasional tussles with heavy machinery, doesn't immediately stand out in the mid-size, high-end laptop crowd. That is, until you try to type on one.

What Lenovo has done sounds like a smaller deal than it actually is: on the T400 series, the delete and escape keys are about twice as large as normal, taking an odd, long vertical form. As anyone who has used international keyboards can attest, even a little layout or proportion change can throw your typing off. Now why in the world would Lenovo go and do that? USA Today explains:

In designing the new ThinkPad, [Lenovo] installed keystroke-tracking software on about 30 employees' computers (They volunteered). On average, they used the "Escape" and "Delete" keys 700 times per week, yet those were the only "outboard" keys, or non-letter keys, that hadn't been enlarged.

As you can see, this is probably a practical change. The most fascinating thing about this kind of change, though, is how rare it is. Nearly everything about modern keyboards harks back to the early days of the typewriter, from letter spacing to key layout. This anecdote from the article sums up the problem fairly succinctly:

Tom Hardy, who designed the original IBM PC of 1981, said companies have tried many times to change the sizes of keys. That first PC had a smaller "Shift" key than IBM's popular Selectric typewriter did, and it was placed in a different spot, in part because the industry didn't think computers would replace typewriters for high-volume typing tasks.

IBM reversed course with the next version to quiet the outcry from skilled touch-typists.

When we're all living on Mars, our spacepods will still have Model Ms. [USA Today]

The Pirate Bay has been (effectively) acquired by a gaming company called Global Gaming Factory X, who is plunking down nearly $8 million for the privilege. Their grand, surprising plan for the Pirate Bay is to pay content providers. Seriously.

Global Gaming Factory X is, in their words, the "biggest network of internet caf

Doom Resurrection, the first properly new title in the Doom franchise since Doom III, has finally landed in the App Store, and it's not cheap. But is it sufficiently Doom-y? Dark? Graphically lush? Good?

As the first trailer seemed to promise, yes, this is a very impressive game. Graphics and sound are top-notch and the production as a whole befits its price. The main issue with Resurrection is the control scheme: even though other iPhone FPSes have pulled of decent free-movement control systems—including id's own Wolfenstein port—this game is, strictly speaking, on rails.

To be honest, this can be frustrating, especially given how well the environments are rendered. I mean, they're right there, in full, detailed 3D, and you can't explore them. The gameplay's saving grace is accelerometer support, which at least lets you aim and shake off zombies in an intuitive way.

As for the claims that this is a totally new installment in the Doom franchise, they're technically true: the story is fresh, and so are the levels. But aside from the new story meat and new gameplay dynamics, Resurrection borrows liberally from Doom III, looking, sounding and, to an extend, feeling like its 2004 predecessor. Impressive? Sure. Worth $10? If so, then barely. [via Will Smith's Twitter]

This past Saturday, an entire apartment building in Shanghai collapsed. To be fair, the building was under construction and thus unoccupied, but it's still a minor miracle that there was only one fatality.

Sounds like there was a problem with some nearby flood prevention walls at the Dianpu River, but there's no hard evidence as to why this huge building simply fell over. Anyway, here are some sweet pictures of the architectural carnage. [Cellar.org via Twitter]

This past Saturday, an entire apartment building in Shanghai collapsed. To be fair, the building was under construction and thus unoccupied, but it's still a minor miracle that there was only one fatality.

Sounds like there was a problem with some nearby flood prevention walls at the Dianpu River, but there's no hard evidence as to why this huge building simply fell over. Anyway, here are some sweet pictures of the architectural carnage. [Cellar.org via Twitter]