No matter how talented a shutterbug you are, a dirty lens can detract from even the most amazing shot. DIY compendium WikiHow has drawn up a step-by-step guide on removing specks and other dust particles from your camera lens with a vacuum.
As the post notes, you’ll want to proceed with caution before cleaning off your lens with a vacuum (that means use more traditional methods first); the vacuum method should only be used as a last resort, since even the lowest vacuum power could harm your camera.
This trick involves getting rid of [dust particles] with a vacuum cleaner, when all else has failed and the costs of cleaning the inside of the lens are prohibitive compared to the cost of buying a new camera.
If you’ve run into some stubborn particles that you just can’t clean with traditional methods, the six-step cleaning process involves rolling up a plastic wrap (“forming a thin sausage and leaving a section unrolled”), then wrapping it around the opening.
Browse the full post for the remaining instructions, and if you have a safer lens cleaning method, let’s hear about it in the comments.
Even though your iPhone snaps pictures at pretty decent resolutions (2048×1536 from the 3GS, 1600×1200 on previous iPhone versions), your device automatically resizes photos to a measly 800×600 when you go to email them. Here’s how to fix that.
Panoramic software has come a long way toward making panoramic images child’s work. Great software or not, there’s no substitution for good source material. Take better panoramic pictures with these tips. Photo by 
It’s easy to forget these days that the internet started out as a place for academics and researchers to trade data and knowledge. Recapture the web’s brain-expanding potential with these free resources for educating yourself online.
Coding, whether on the web or on the desktop, is one of those skills you’ll almost never regret having. Coincidentally, the web is full of people willing to teach, and show off, programming skills. Whether you’re looking to knock out a modest 
“MBA programs don’t have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge: you can teach yourself everything you need to know to succeed in life and at work.” The 
Nobody’s pretending you can talk like a local without some immersion experience. But there’s a lot of resources on the web for honing an already-sharpened second language, or at least picking up some of the vocab and nuances. 
As Ramit Sethi put it in 
We have to guess that having a giant, searchable database of free academic lectures was just too good an idea for two different web firms to pass up. Academic Earth has been described as a Hulu-like aggregator for lots of major universities’ content, and offers the slicker and more navigable front-end for them, as well as allowing embedding and sharing with no restrictions. YouTube EDU might have a broader reach, and the player and format might be a bit more familiar to most. Both sites offer both individual lectures and full course series, and are definitely worth checking out.
Sites like 
If being dropped off at the music store/mall/piano teacher’s house wasn’t a memorable part of your childhood, you might dig the digital age’s equivalents a lot more. Guitar players, in particular, have a lot of places to turn for video, audio, and graphical teaching tools. Adam rounded a lot of them up in his guide to 
A huge number of colleges, universities, and other degree-granting universities are going all open-source these days—giving away the actual guts of their courses, while retaining their revenue stream by awarding degrees only to those who pay. In this day and age, though, programming, marketing, design, and other self-taught skills are pretty valuable, however you came by them. Whether you're looking to break into a field or just augment your skill set, dig into our guide to 
Airline seats can give you and your camera lens an amazing vantage point over new locales, but washed-out lighting and skewed colors seem to be the norm. A Photoshop pro offers step-by-step fixes for your aerial landscapes.
Windows only: JPEG & PNG Stripper an extremely small portable application that strips the metadata out of JPEG and PNG image files.
JPEG & PNG Stripper removes every bit of metadata, leaving just the unaltered image behind. Whatever your motivation for sanitizing your image, you'll know that only the image itself remains. The screenshot at right shows a read of some of the metadata for an image I scrubbed in testing and, as promised, the application ripped all the metadata out without altering the appearance of the image itself. JPEG & PNG Stripper is freeware, Windows only.
JPG Magazine, suffering in the current economic state, is boarding up the doors January 5th. Until then, they have all their back issues available for free.