Friday, April 30, 2010

Great job, Jobs.

What a letter!
If Adobe were smarter, they'd start developing products that not only helped/enabled HTML5 developers, but they'd also start selling a converter application to move Flash movies to H.264 so mobile phones could display them.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Ah Geek Squad... how I love you.

An undercover/hidden camera story produced by KPTV in Oregon about different computer repair shops and the honesty/integrity levels of each. Take a guess how Best Buy did. What's really surprising is what they did after this story ran.

I guess just like a Moody's or S&P rating, grades from the BBB can be bought as well.

A great guide to privacy on Facebook

Update: May 2010: Wired has a great and incredibly thorough article on Facebook privacy here.

Stop hiding everyone and use FB's privacy settings to their fullest potential. Personally, I just made a custom news-feed list and I pick and choose who's updates get displayed. But, like everything, there are a bunch of different paths to the same solution. Ars Technica did a great piece on the in's and out's of Facebook's privacy features. What's your favorite?

iPhone battery life

I wanted to know if leaving the Bluetooth setting On all the time was an extra drain on battery life, even if the BT earpiece was turned off. According to Apple, it's a small tax on the battery, but many user comments on the forums I read (and my own personal experience) was to the contrary. Regardless, this is a useful article-

"Paying attention to just a few commonsense pointers will pay off with a longer battery lifespan and battery life for your iPhone. The most important thing is to keep your iPhone out of the sun or a hot car (including the glove box). Heat will degrade your battery’s performance the most."

-From Apple's iPhone battery info page.

Turn your favorite songs into iPhone ringtones

Very easy and useful tutorial if you imported a song into iTunes from a CD and you want to use it as a ringtone for your iPhone.

iPhone tips, tricks, apps, and rants

I know this info is already out there. And I can already hear my tech-savvy friends with iPhones complaining about how this info is so 2009. But whatever, this is a blog for my not-as-savvy friends, clients, and family too...

My favorite iPhone app right now, aside from Bebot, is Dragon Dictation. It's a (free) speech-to-text app that does what it advertises- simply. Initially I had some privacy concerns, as it scans your Address Book contacts so that it can better recognize names when you speak them; it also sends information back to its HQ upon doing so. In a rare move for this blog, I'm going to link to another blog because they have great comments, and an in-depth article on this already. After a little digging (and consideration of my long history with Dragon's desktop dictation/speech-to-text software, Naturally Speaking), I feel great about using this app. It allows me to compose longer sentiments quickly without having to type on that annoying iPhone screen-keyboard.

[APPLE: GIVE ME BLUETOOTH KEYBOARD COMPATIBILITY ALREADY!
Supposedly this feature is coming in iPhone's OS 4.0 this summer, but no mention of it on Apple's page.]

I'm also a big fan of the Tie-A-Tie, Sleep Cycle, White Noise, and pUniverse apps.

Most of you probably know about shake to undo (and shake again to redo), but did you know you can double-click in the top-most menu bar (by the clock) while you're say, in Safari or scrolling through photos and iPhone will fast scroll to the top of whatever you're looking at? OK so you probably knew that too, but here's a nice MakeUseOf article that covers some iPhone tips you might not know about.

Apple grounded me for swearing too much. I just want to be able to edit my iPhone's auto-correct database... guess it's another thing to add to the list of stuff I can't wait to do with a jailbroken iPhone.

Mac laptop batteries

A nice how-to on calibrating the battery on your Mac laptop.
(iBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook, PowerBook, MacBook Air)

And for those more technically inclined, check out this great widget that gives you a profile of your battery life, among many other things.

[Special thanks to Chris R for the tip!]

TS2377: an Apple recall involving MacBook Pro

You should be aware of this recall if you have a MacBook Pro and are experiencing any of the following:
  • Distorted or scrambled video on the computer screen
  • Kernel panics/inability to boot
  • No video on the computer screen (or external display) even though the computer is on
If your MBP fits the mold, you can bring it in to any Apple store for a quick test of the graphics adapter (the part that's under recall, made by NVIDIA). If it fails the test, they will replace your logicboard free of charge, essentially providing you with a new computer CPU. This applies even if your Mac is outside of the service warranty/contract. See this document for more information.

[Sorry, non-Apple Store repair businesses are not allowed to do the test, even if they are an Authorized Apple Service Center. Of course, ComputersWTF will be glad to handle all this for you if you aren't able.]

the good old days

When I was young(er), one of my favorite Washington, DC sites was the Smithsonian Museum of American History's Information Age: People, Information and Technology exhibit. I wish I had more personal photographs to post for you- it was spectacular (as far as I know it's no longer there, although I haven't visited since graduating from American University in 2000). The exhibition took you through the history of computers and technology, and went backwards through time- you started out in the present with small laptops and walked through until you were in a room at the end with ENIAC- where practically the entire room was a computer.

They had an early XEROX copier, first introduced in 1959, weighing 650lbs:

I was lucky enough to grow up with computers- my grandfather worked in the security industry. Gramps started a central station which monitored alarms and dispatched the appropriate service (police, EMT, fire, etc). King Central had a room filled with headset-donned telephone operators, and all the calls were routed by and recorded to rows and rows of computers in a back room. When I was a kid, we had computers in the house. My uncle Glenn was an early Apple adopter, and at my house over the years (from gifts and hand-me-downs) we had an Apple IIe, IIc, IIGS, and Commodore 64. We even had some early Radio Shack Tandy models. (Not this one, but one like it, which couldn't handle lower-case letters!)

I used to take them apart, look at all the parts, and put them back together. I remember doing this on the kitchen floor at my grandparents' house and my grandfather coming home from work in dismay thinking I'd broken it. But he realized soon that it wasn't just playing for me- I had a knack, and he was smart enough to foster it.

Monday, April 19, 2010

Is it only a matter of time?

...before every aspect of our culture is available "on demand?"

As it is now, with a MacBook feeding a digital video and audio out to HDMI and attached to my stereo and television, I can stream movies and shows from Hulu, YouTube, and Netflix (and many others), not to mention streaming my music wirelessly via AirTunes.

But how long before *any* television show, book, magazine, film or album/song is instantly available at a click? The capability is there- it seems like it's only a matter of time...  how will our artistic output be affected by a culture of free (or is it value-less?) culture.

I still haven't found any truly good books on the history of the world wide web (recs anyone?). I have found some good books (like Where Wizards Stay Up Late- not the best writing but great information) on the history of the Internet as it grew out of the military, ARPANET, Eisenhower and Xerox PARC, but nothing specifically on the earlier days of the WWW as BBS's were on their way out.

I'm striving to better understand the wave of the web- more like a tsunami- plowing through cultural commerce, news, entertainment, artistic output. [I know, I should have been at some SxSW panels this year.] In the earlier days of the web, when I was in high school (92-96) everyone who was online seemed to share EVERYTHING- documents, pics, music, anything you could wait for to transfer over the dial-up. Now that EVERYONE is online (the term itself is in decay- as everyone is increasingly "becoming" online) entire industries are collapsing under the weight of shared culture, the cloud, and the hive mind. If you're into these ideas, check out Jaron Lanier's You Are Not A Gadget.

Google: Let us send later!!

Contrary to widespread popularity, this early AOL-adopted mail feature still isn't available with GMail. Despite massive requests of Google for the ability to save messages for later sending, presently we are still prohibited from time control.

GMail Hacking

I just learned about hacked and hijacked GMail accounts, thanks to a friendly lady named Jill who was unlucky enough to have her email account hacked on her birthday. I'm going to wonder aloud now whether purchasing a premium service for email from Google ("WTF?" I can hear you saying, "Pay for GMail???") would present one with more secure email options. As it is now, if your GMail account has been hacked and someone's sent spam from it, all you can do is change your password, then wait 24 hours (as Google limits each account to a sent-message maximum of 500 per day) to send your hack notices/apologies. Or you can use Facebook or Twitter, like this blogger did.

If your account has been hijacked, and you are locked out of it completely, you should read this and this.

The Big iPhone Wishlist post

Things I want to should be able to do with my iPhone:
  • Edit the auto-correct database 
  • Bluetooth keyboard 
  • Play audio (iTunes, Pandora, Safari, YouTube, etc) wirelessly via Airport-connected speakers
  • Use other browsers like Fennec
  • Edit Google Docs
  • Utilize all the features of Google Voice
  • Leave AT&T
  • Pay less per month (currently paying just under $150/mo for unlimited talk, text, data)
Sadly, the device is completely capable of performing or allowing most of these items. Does this mean I just need to get a jailbroken iPhone?

I've been tossing around the idea for a while now to get a 2nd iPhone (to jailbreak), on which I can test new apps and functionality. I know there's a lot of information out there about jailbroken apps, but I'm specifically interested in utilizing mobile web functionality to streamline my tech-based business. I have very little paperwork as it is (my filing cabinet is two-drawer and mostly empty, save for receipts), I can get to everything from any computer or phone with a net connection, and I can route information/calls/documents/etc to any device no matter where I am with cloud-based utilities like Google Docs, Voice, etc. I want to be able to edit Google Docs, launch a Google Voice app, and work on a wireless keyboard- just imagine the ability to create spreadsheets & edit invoices online from a hotspot, with only a BT keyboard and an iPhone.

It exists, set it free.


[This post–like several others here–will be added to over the coming months, especially until iPhoneOS 4.0 drops this summer.]