PostPoints tip: Silence your camera's beeps

Most digital cameras are noisy creatures out of the box--they beep when you turn them on, change a setting, focus a picture and take the actual shot. This soundtrack may help you get used to their controls, but it's distracting and rude in a lot of social settings. (Especially weddings.) It's also worse than redundant. Not only does this computerized cacophony fail to tell you anything that you can't learn from the symbols on the camera's screen, it usually provides less information. The beep that reports that the camera has focused on a subject doesn't indicate what subject it's selected, unlike the green rectangle on its display. On most cameras, you'll find an option to silence its audible alerts only a tap or two away from its Menu button; a new Canon model, for example, had a "Mute" setting as the first item under its system-tools menu.