We’ve covered Windows 7 from rumor to golden master. Now—as we wait for its Oct. 22 arrival—it’s enchilada time: Here’s everything of value that we learned about Win 7, packed in a complete, easy-to-read guide.

Table of Contents

Intro

What It All Means: Windows 7 Review
So much anticipation has led up to the arrival of Windows 7, aka The Redeemer. But does it live up to the hype? Here we pass judgment, and then, because we like you, we give you a super-quick tour of its best features and tips.

Chapter 1

The Real Cost of Upgrading to Windows 7
Now that prices are announced and it’s time to think about upgrading, here are all the different considerations you’ll have to make. It’s as smart a Windows upgrade as there ever was, but do your homework!

Chapter 2

How To Use Windows 7, or Why The New UI Is So Great
Windows 7 is Microsoft’s biggest user-interface overhaul since Windows 95. It’s no surprise, then, that even Windows veterans could use a crash course on how to use it.

Chapter 3

Device Stage Hardware Fun, Plus More Productivity Tips
Device Stage, the instant recognition of cameras, printers and other peripherals, is candy for the gadget-addicted, but knowing what works and what doesn’t definitely matters.

Chapter 4

Windows Media Player and Media File Compatibility
Music and movies—not only are they more important than they were when Vista came out, but they also come from more sources in more formats. Windows 7 attempts to master them all.

Chapter 5

Couch Tricks: New Features for Windows Media Center
Our favorite “10-foot” media software shows up in Windows 7 with loads of new features—if you haven’t yet seen why Media Center makes even TiVo look dated, you better pay attention.

Chapter 6

Important Changes to Networking and Security
When it comes to life online, there’s no way to underestimate advances in networking and security. Windows 7 is full of them, and it pays to know what they are and how to use them.

Chapter 7

Natural Interfaces: Pen, Touch and Multitouch
Windows 7 comes of age at a time when the keyboard and mouse are giving way to newer more instinctive controls—luckily, it’s got many of those controls built right in. Bonus: Here’s a first look at the fun Surface-like Windows 7 Touch Pack which may soon be available on all touch PCs.

Chapter 8

Got Troubles? Here’s How To Shoot ‘Em Down
Even a good operating system can be bad once in a while. During the Beta test, we had our share of issues. Here’s a discussion of many of the problems that can be solved, and a few that can’t.

Is there something missing, a discussion you were hoping to have but aren’t seeing here? We want to be thorough, so let’s have it. Go ahead and hit us up, either in direct emails or to our tips line, with the subject “Windows 7 Guide.”

Our friend Leander at Cult of Mac just released the “expanded edition” of his great book, Inside Steve’s Brain. Here’s an excerpt from the new chapters, dealing with Apple’s work ethic in the event of Steve’s departure or death:

The most important difference this time around is that Jobs has turned his personality traits into Apple’s business processes. This process is known as the “routinization of charisma,” a phrase coined by German sociologist Max Weber in a classic study of the sociology of religion.

Weber was interested in what happened to religious movements after the passing of their charismatic founders. Most religions begin with prophetic leaders, such as Jesus Christ, Mohammad or Buddha, who attract followers with their magnetic personalities and, often, their anti-traditional messages. But after those leaders pass, their charisma and message must be “routinized” if the movement is to survive. Their teachings and methods must be institutionalized, becoming the basis of new traditions.

In business, the routinization of charisma is the process of turning a charismatic business leader’s personality traits into a business method. One widely cited study by management experts J. Beyer and L. Browning focused on Sematech, a semiconductor consortium based in Austin, Texas.

Established in the mid-’80s, Sematech was an organization of 14 US chip makers who joined together to help the American computer industry catch up with the Japanese in chip-making technology. It was led by Bob Noyce, a Silicon Valley legend who had helped invent the integrated circuit and co-founded the chip giant Intel. Sematech had an exceptionally collaborative culture, a feat difficult to achieve among so many rivals in the fiercely competitive chip business. According to Beyer and Browning, the collaborative culture was a direct consequence of Noyce’s exceptionally collaborative and democratic leadership.

Significantly, this ethos survived well after Noyce’s untimely death from heart failure in 1990, because it had become so entrenched in the organization’s culture. Beyer and Browning concluded that if a leader’s traits become routine, they survive as company traditions. They become so deeply ingrained, they characterize the way a company does business. The “cooperative and democratic practices survive Noyce’s death and still persist,” they wrote of the company.

Other examples studied by academics include Alcoholics Anonymous, whose charismatic founder, Bill Wilson, codified his personal experiences overcoming addiction in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, which lives on as the famous twelve-step program. IBM and Walmart are also often cited as examples of companies that successfully routinized their charismatic founders’ ways of doing things.

At Microsoft, president Steve Ballmer studied Max Weber’s writings before taking the reins from founder Bill Gates. “I went out and I dusted the book back off,” he said. “And you see a lot of great institutions that have managed to routinize after charismatic leaders…You can have great things happen after great leaders, but you’ve got to think about it and be explicit about it.”

At Apple, Jobs’ characteristic traits—his obsessiveness, his focus and his passion for innovation—have been turned into distinct processes that will ensure Apple delivers a steady stream of hit products, with or without him.

Jobs’ perfectionism and attention to detail, for example, have been routinized into the company’s prototyping culture. Where Jobs once used to throw substandard work in people’s faces and call it “shit” until it was done right, Apple’s staff now create and test new products over and over until they meet the highest standards. In short, Jobs’s ceaseless pursuit of perfection has become its own process that is used throughout the company and will continue to be, no matter who is in charge.

The prototyping culture can also help Apple ensure that Jobs’ incredible knack for innovation continues. Products like the iPhone never sprang fully formed from Jobs’ imagination. Rather, they were “discovered” through the creation of hundreds of prototypes. Most of the major products at Apple were started over from scratch when engineers found themselves at the end of a false path. Apple’s prototyping process has turned into a method for fostering innovation as well as quality control.

This is a system that does not rely on Jobs alone. Jobs has his input, of course, but so do his engineers, designers, and programmers—and it’s possible to imagine the process operating just fine without him.

“Steve Jobs‘ spirit has been institutionalized,” wrote AppleInsider, reporting an investor note from analyst Shaw Wu, of Kaufman Bros. According to Wu, Jobs’ spirit and drive has been instilled in thousands of Apple employees, especially the executive team. “We believe Apple today has a deep bench and its culture of innovation and execution or ‘spirit’ has more or less been institutionalized,” he wrote.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster made the same point about Apple’s executive team. “While Jobs is the irreplaceable face of Apple,” Munster wrote in an investor note, the company’s innovation comes from the entire organization, especially the executive team. “This management team, along with Steve Jobs, has been responsible for Apple’s product innovation.”

Excerpted from Inside Steve’s Brain (Expanded Edition). Published by Portfolio. Copyright Leander Kahney, 2009.

Tech standards are important. They’re, well, standards. They shape the way the world works, ideally. So if you wanna influence your little world, you probably wanna shape (or maybe even create) standards. Take Apple, for example.

They Call It “Open” For a Reason
One of the more excellent aspects of Snow Leopard, actually, is its full-scale deployment of OpenCL 1.0—Open Computing Language—a framework that allows programmers to more easily utilize the full power of mixes of different kinds of processors like GPUs and multi-core CPUs. (Much of the excitement for that is in leveraging the GPU for non-graphical applications.)

OpenCL lives up to its name: It is a royalty-free open standard managed by the Khronos Group, and supported by AMD/ATI, Apple, ARM, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, among others. Interesting thing about this open industry standard is that it was developed and proposed by… Apple.

What Is a Standard?
By “standard,” we’re talking about a format, interface or programming framework that a bunch of companies or people or organizations agree is the way something’s going to get done, whether it’s how a movie is encoded or the way websites are programmed. Otherwise, nothing works. A video that plays on one computer won’t play on another, web sites that work in one browser don’t work in another, etc. With increased connectedness between different machines and different platforms, standards are increasingly vital to progress.

Standards can range from open (anybody can use them, for free) to open with conditions (anybody can use them as long they follow conditions X, Y and Z) to closed (you gotta have permission, and most likely, pay for it). Some companies view standards strictly as royalty machines; others don’t make much money on them, instead using them to make sure developers do things the way they want them to. Apple falls into this latter category, by choice or possibly just by fate.

Kicking the Big Guy in the Shins
Of course, OpenCL isn’t the only open standard that Apple’s had a hand in creating or supporting that actually went industry-wide. When you’re the little guy—as Apple was, and still is in computer OS marketshare, with under 10 percent—having a hand in larger industry standards is important. It keeps your platform and programming goals from getting steamrolled by, say, the de facto “standards” enforced by the bigger guy who grips 90 percent of the market.

If you succeed in creating a standard, you’re making everybody else do things the way you want them done. If you’re doubting how important standards are, look no further than the old Sony throwing a new one at the wall every week hoping it’ll stick. Or Microsoft getting basically everybody but iTunes to use its PlaysForSure DRM a couple years ago. Or its alternative codecs and formats for basically every genuine industry standard out there. To be sure, there is money to be made in standards, but only if the standard is adopted—and royalties can be collected.

Web Standards: The Big Headache
The web has always been a sore spot in the standards debate. The web is a “universal OS,” or whatever the cloud-crazy pundits call it, but what shapes your experience is your browser and in part, how compliant it is with the tools web developers use to build their products. Internet Exploder shit all over standards for years, and web programmers still want IE6 to die in a fiery eternal abyss.

Enter WebKit, an open source browser engine developed by Apple based off of the KHTML engine. It’s so standards-compliant it tied with Opera’s Presto engine to be the first to pass the Acid3 test. What’s most striking about WebKit isn’t the fact it powers Safari and Google Chrome on the desktop, but basically every full-fledged smartphone browser: iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, Symbian and (probably) BlackBerry. So WebKit hasn’t just driven web standards through its strict adherence to them, but it has essentially defined, for now, the way the “real internet” is viewed on mobile devices. All of the crazy cool web programming you see now made is made possible by standards-compliant browsers.

True, OpenCL and WebKit are open source—Apple’s been clever about the way it uses open source, look no further than the guts of OS X—but Apple is hardly devoted to the whole “free and open” thing, even when it comes to web standards.

All the AV Codecs You Can Eat
The recent debate over video in the next web standards, known collectively as HTML5, shows that: Mozilla supports the open-source Ogg Theora video codec, but Apple says it’s too crappy to become the web’s default video standard—freeing everyone from the tyranny of Adobe’s Flash. Apple says Ogg’s quality and hardware acceleration support don’t match up to the Apple-supported MPEG-4 standardized H.264 codec, which is tied up by license issues that keep it from being freely distributed and open. (Google is playing it up the middle for the moment: While it has doubts about the performance of Ogg Theora, Chrome has built-in support for it and H.264.)

Apple has actually always been a booster of MPEG’s H.264 codec, which is the default video format supported by the iPhone—part of the reason YouTube re-encoded all of its videos, actually—and gets hardware acceleration in QuickTime X with Snow Leopard. H.264 is basically becoming the video codec (it’s in Blu-ray, people use it for streaming, etc.).

Why would Apple care? It means Microsoft’s WMV didn’t become the leading standard.

A sorta similar story with AAC, another MPEG standard. It’s actually the successor to MP3, with better compression quality—and no royalties—but Apple had the largest role in making it mainstream by making it their preferred audio format for the iPod and iTunes Store. (It saw some limited use in portables a little earlier, but it didn’t become basically mandatory for audio players to support it until after the iPod.) Another bonus, besides AAC’s superiority to MP3: Microsoft’s WMA, though popular for a while, never took over.

FireWire I Mean iLINK I Mean IEEE 1394
Speaking of the early days of the iPod, we can’t leave out FireWire, aka IEEE 1394. Like OpenCL, Apple did a lot of the initial development work (Sony, IBM and others did a lot of work on it as well), presented it to a larger standards body—the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers—and it became the basis for a standard. They tried to charge a royalty for it at first, but that didn’t work out. It’s a successful standard in a lot of ways—I mean, it is still on a lot of stuff like hard drives and camcorders still—but USB has turned out to be more universal, despite being technically inferior. (At least until USB 3.0 comes out, hooray!)

Update: Oops, forgot Mini DisplayPort, Apple’s shrunken take on DisplayPort—a royalty-free video interface standard from VESA that’s also notably supported by Dell—which’ll be part of the official DisplayPort 1.2 spec. Apple licenses it for no fee, unless you sue Apple for patent infringement, which is a liiiiittle dicey. (On the other hand, we don’t see it going too far as industry standard, which is why we forgot about it.)

That’s just a relatively quick overview of some of the standards Apple’s had a hand in one way or another, but it should give you an idea about how important standards are, and how a company with a relatively small marketshare (at least, in certain markets) can use them wield a lot of influence over a much broader domain.

Shaping standards isn’t always for royalty checks or dominance—Apple’s position doesn’t allow them to be particularly greedy when it comes to determining how you watch stuff or browse the internet broadly. They’ve actually made things better, at least so far. But, one glance at the iPhone app approval process should give anybody who thinks they’re the most gracious tech company second thoughts about that.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about standards, things that are open other than your mom’s legs or Sony Ultra Memory Stick XC Duo Quadro Micro Pro II to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

Snow Leopard is finally reaching the masses. As much as we like it, though, the interface feels awfully similar to its predecessor. Here are 15 tricks to check out that are undeniably new—and even a little exciting:

Gallery haters take note, clicking here will take you to a giant list of the tips.

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

Sync Contacts with Gmail and Yahoo: No longer just for syncing with the iPhone and Mobile Me, the Contacts app can now talk to your Yahoo and Gmail address books, and pull down your contact info. It’s as simple as going into Contacts preferences and hitting the Accounts tab.

Show Date In Menu Bar: If, like me, you’re too lazy to click on the clock, or launch widgets, or just make use of your God-gifted memory, you can now set the clock to display full date in the Menu Bar, just go into Date and Time Preferences and adjust.

Smart Text Formatting and Correcting on the Fly: Snow Leopard has a number of text-based enhancement for apps like Text Edit, iChat and Mail including spelling auto-correct, and text substitution, which lets you use shorter macros in place of longer words and phrases. The spell corrector is limited to commonly misspelled words, but the text substitution is yours to define. Just control-click in the text entry field for any of the aforementioned apps to toggle the features on or off, and visit the Text section of the Language & Text system pref for tweaking.

Password Log-In Delay: If you have password protection enabled for when your computer goes to sleep, you can now choose how long your computer snoozes before the password requirement actually kicks in. This means you can more easily have the privacy of a darkened monitor without the pain of having to key in your password every time you step away. These settings are under the Security preference pane.

Google and Yahoo Support in iCal: iCal is now much easier to add calendars from Google and Yahoo. No hacks or third-party software necessary. You just add a new account under preferences and select your service of choice. (Suit-wearers take note: Exchange support is here as well.)

Edit Videos in QuickTime X: QuickTime Pro users have long been able to edit and convert videos without launching the heavier movie apps. With QuickTime X, Apple has done away with that nasty fee. Yep, Pro is dead. Now everyone can trim and save, with a visual navigation timeline for easy edits, not to mention that other pro perk, viewing movies in full-screen.

Upload to YouTube From QuickTime X: Now you can upload directly to YouTube from QuickTime X. Just open any video file then go up to the menu bar and click Share. That same menu lets you upload movies directly to MobileMe, and convert movies to iProduct-friendly formats to send to iTunes.

QuickTime X Video Capture: How much do we love QuickTime X? It now also has video capture direct from the iSight camera, any FireWire video camera or any audio input. Better still, it can record the action happening on your screen, and save that as a movie too. A riveting one, to be sure.

Smarter Drive Eject: Half bug fix, half user enhancement, Snow Leopard now tells you exactly why it can’t eject a drive that’s in use. Instead of saying it’s just busy, it tells you what app is using it. Apple also promises ejecting in general is just “more reliable.”

Recover Trashed Files: If you accidentally sent an item to the trash that you want to replace, you don’t have to go in and then drag it to wherever you had it before (if you even remember). Now you just control-click on the trashed item and select “Put Back.” Problem solved.

Airport Signal Strength: Windows users have long been accustomed to this, but when you’re looking for free wi-fi to steal and wanna get an idea of what’s most reliable, you can now get an idea before you connect. It really took Apple this long to add this?

Automatic Time-Zone Detection: If you’re jet setting around the world with regularity, you can allow Snow Leopard to detect your location using Wi-Fi hotspots, and adjust the time zone—and clock’s time—accordingly.

Preview a File Inside Its Icon: If hitting the space bar for a “quick look” is too much for you, try the in-icon previews. Just roll your cursor over a video or audio file and a play button will appear. PDFs show arrows, letting you leaf through their pages. In most folders, there’s a slider that lets you scale icons up to a massive 512×512 pixels, presumably to make this file preview seem in any way rational.

Annotate This!: The increasingly useful Preview now has a bar at the bottom of the window full of various annotation tools, such as shapes, highlighter, memos, underline, strikeout and hyperlink. Useful for the bookworms out there who are deal with texts in digital formats. Perhaps it also hints at the Apple Tablet’s Preview app, because a device that goes up against a Kindle would need something like this (along with, you know, a five-day battery life).

Chinese Character Input: This isn’t really a feature the majority of us will use, but rather a demo of what’s possible with Apple input technology. You can use the trackpad to write Chinese characters and have them appear as computer text, just hit Ctrl-Shift-Space Bar. Pretty neat idea, and perhaps something else that might come in handy with a tablet.

There are, of course, even more tricks and new features. If you have any good ones you want to share, you know how to do it.

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

Ever wonder how war photographers survive out there? We’ve enlisted Teru Kuwayama—a photographer who has covered conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and other hotspots for Time, Newsweek and Outside—to explain the perils of working in a war zone.

Among military planners, there’s an aphorism that states: “Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.”

The daily mechanics of photographing in a “war zone” don’t have much to do with photography—mostly it’s about getting from point A to point B without getting your head cut off, then finding a signal and an outlet.

I’m probably not the right person to be give advice on war photography, since I don’t even count myself as a war photographer—but for one reason or another, I’ve spent the better part of the last decade in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. I was a young photographer when these wars began—I’m not anymore, and from all indications, the “long war” is just getting started.

For what it’s worth, here’s some advice for first timers heading out to the badlands.

Wear Your Seat Belt
I get questions on a daily basis from journalists heading for Afghanistan—most of them are about body armor—but it’s the traffic that’s most likely to kill you. The stretch of Islamist insurgency that arcs from Southern Philippines to Somalia hasn’t produced exceptional snipers, but it’s home to some of the most lethal drivers on Earth. On my last trip to Pakistan, I flipped a car four times within 72 hours of arrival. My bulletproof vest is still wrapped in plastic somewhere in Islamabad.

Learn How To Say “Hello” and “Thank You” and To Count To Ten
Most tourists wouldn’t go to France or Italy without packing a phrasebook, but a surprising number of photographers set off to Iraq or Afghanistan without learning how to make the most basic conversation. I recently found myself explaining to an “experienced war photographer” that Afghans don’t speak Arabic.

Stop Looking For the “Front Line”—It’s a Mirage
The awkwardly named “global war on terror” might be the undeclared World War III of the 21st century, but it doesn’t play out like WWI and WWII, and counterinsurgency isn’t done in trenches. In modern military parlance, the “battlefield” has been replaced by the “battlespace,” an all-encompassing realm that includes not just the landscape, but also the “hearts and minds” of a “human terrain,” and the airwaves and webspace across which an “information war” is being waged.

Equip Yourself With the Right Gear
War zone propeller-heads can talk endlessly about their toys, so here, in bullet points, are a few tips:

• Avoid the faux-commando stuff – An entire paramilitary equipment industry has emerged, selling “special operator” products ranging from “tactical flashlights” to mercenary-chic cargo trousers. Private military contractors love this overpriced war-schwag, but since you are not a highly paid, heavily armed, former Navy SEAL, it’s probably best that you avoid dressing up like one. When you’re on the side of the road, getting shaken down for your money and/or your ID, you really don’t want to pull it out of a camouflage passport holder that says “Operation Iraqi Freedom” all over it. (It won’t make you especially popular in the airport in Paris or Dubai either).

• Bring plastic (not your credit cards) – In places like Iraq and Afghanistan, you will encounter an unimaginable variety of dirt, dust, sand and, in the rare event of rain, mud that falls from the sky. These abrasive, corrosive, gear-choking forces are probably more destructive than any known insurgent militia, and they will eat you and your expensive toys alive. Zipties, ziplock bags, crazy glue and plastic packing tape will help you patch it together. Skip the army-navy outfitter, and go to Home Depot and the 99-cent store.

• Pack your go bag – AKA, your grab bag, jump bag, snatch bag, bug-out bag, etc. Since you’re out there looking for trouble, be prepared to find it. Your go bag is the essential kit, packed in advance, that you head for the door with when things get hectic. Beyond your go bag, keep an ultra-light bare-bones survival pack—and keep it strapped to your body. When things go bang, you may be semi-conscious, crawling out of a destroyed building or a wrecked vehicle, and even your go bag may go sideways. Military bases and hotels with foreign guests are natural magnets for missiles and explosives, so expecting to be blown out of bed is not necessarily an irrational thought. Similarly, you are exceptionally vulnerable when traveling by road, and in the event of an accident or an ambush that you are lucky enough to survive, you won’t get a time-out to collect your stuff.

• A look at my general kit:
notebooks
passports x2
sim cards -af, pak, india, thuraya,usa
2 x mini waterproof case – credit cards, cigarettes, etc
ziplock bag – currency – af, pak, indian, euro, pounds sterling,
dollars canadian, USD, UAE dirhams
IDs – press cards, military embed badges, etc
med pack + personal hygiene
batteries – AAA, AA, 123
power strip/surge protector – universal/multi port for regional power plugs
steel cable/TSA locks X5
AC/DC car power transformer – cig port to US power socket.
box o’ electronic shit – chargers, adaptors, usb cables, etc
zip ties, ziplock bags, packing tape, contractor grade heavy duty garbage bags
protective cases with camera memory cards
laptop
mini-pelican case with 3x 500GB external harddrives
2x headlamps w/red gel

• I keep my shooting gear in a big Pelicase:
2x Holga
2x Widelux
2x Leica (M6, M8.2)
1x Canon G10
3x batteries for G10 and M8.2
2x charging units for G10 and M8.2
light meter
audio recorder
gps navigator
folding stereo headphones
mini screwdriver set
knife
2x multi-tool (large with wire cutters, small w/scissors)
2x mobile phone (US + overseas)
film + memory cards + video tapes

• Plus I carry…
body armor (level 4 stand-alone rifle plates, carrier harness + kevlar helmet)
boots, trainers, local sandals
ultra light sleeping bag + bivy sack + all purpose dhoti/sheet
waterproof river-rafting bag
survival blanket/camping tarp
compression straps, rope/cable
clothing – western + local

Embedding Has Both Perks and Consequences
For better, and for worse, the military has provided training wheels for rookies. On the upside, embedding takes care of the serious logistical challenges of transportation, shelter, security and food and water. There’s not a lot of bed-and-breakfasts to be found in Fallujah or Kandahar, so that’s not a small consideration. On the downside, embedded reporters operate on a very short leash with ever-increasing restrictions from their military handlers. Independent reporting is critical for getting an accurate view from these places, but it’s dangerous, difficult, expensive, and it’s being done less and less by the international press. Embedding provides a particular but extremely limited view of the battlespace. You can spend an entire deployment embedded with the US Marines in Diyala or Helmand, but don’t fool yourself that you know anything about Iraq or Afghanistan—what you’ve seen is the inside of an armored bubble.

Get In Shape Before Deploying
If you’re going to hang out with the war jocks, get in shape. No one expects you qualify for Special Forces school, but if you’re an overweight chain-smoker, you’re not going to inspire a lot of confidence in the infantry unit you want to tag along with, and you’re likely to get left back at base (for your own good, and theirs). I’m 5’6″, 140 lbs, and 38 years old, which means I should probably be behind a desk somewhere, but somehow ended up living in mountains and deserts with soldiers and marines who are literally twice my size, and half my age—while I’m hauling a backpack that’s more than 50% of my body weight. Those are unsympathetic mathematics that destroy knees, spines and ankles. Do whatever you can to rebuild your most basic equipment—running, lifting, swimming, wall-climbing, yoga, whatever—just do it, and don’t wait till the week before you ship out.

Fixers: The Tour Guides of War Reporting
Sometimes they’re local journalists, sometimes they’re taxi drivers or doctors who speak English and know how to get things done. If they were American or European, they’d have more glamorous titles like “field producers” or “media consultants.” But in Iraq and Afghanistan, they do journalism’s heavy lifting for a $100 a day, and they’re left back in the shit when their clients are telling war stories back at home. Respect them, their knowledge, and the risk they face to make your work possible—but don’t trust them blindly. Some of them are shady, and all of them are winging it, just like you are. I avoid fixers because so many of the ones I’ve worked with are dead now.

Don’t Follow the Pack
For most of the last eight years, Afghanistan was the “Forgotten War”, and Iraq was the “Central Front”. The US government has now reversed gears, and the US media is now falling over itself to relocate all the balls it dropped. As mainstream journalists are beginning to grapple with the complexity of Afghanistan-plus-Pakistan, special operations are quietly moving on to the Horn of Africa. Try to think outside the extremely cramped box—by the time it’s “news,” it’s pretty old.

Read. Think. Ask questions – and triple check before you start believing.
Some suggested reading:

Descent into Chaos – Ahmed Rashid
The Gamble – Tom Ricks
29 Articles – David Kilcullen
War and Anti-War – Alvin and Heidi Toffler
The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell – John Crawford

Visit Lightstalkers.org
Five years ago, while I was working in Iraq, I teamed up with my brother, a web developer, to launch a web-based data-sharing network of people who do inadvisable things in sketchy places. When you have a bizarre question that no travel agent can answer, try our site, lightstalkers.org. Someone out there will have advice for you—heed it at your own peril.

Teru Kuwayama has made more than 15 trips to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir, traveling both independently, and as an embedded reporter with US and NATO military forces, as well as Afghan, Pakistani, and Indian armed forces. In 2009 he received the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor award for his work in Pakistan, and a fellowship from the South Asian Journalists Association.

He is a 2009-2010 Knight Fellow at Stanford University, a contributor to Time, Newsweek and Outside magazines, and a contract photographer for Central Asia Institute, a non-profit organization that builds schools for children in remote areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He is also the co-founder of Lightstalkers.org, a web-based network of media, military, and aid and development personnel, and the curator of Battlespaceonline.org, a traveling exhibition of photographs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A special thanks goes out to Teru. Immediately after sending Gizmodo this piece, Teru returned to Afghanistan and Pakistan.