Posted by: Dave in iPhone
So Friday, July 11th has come and gone. It was a busy day in the ‘twitterverse‘ and there was both joy & frustration to be had at Apple and AT&T stores everywhere. Upon waking up that morning I anxiously awaited the arrival of 8AM Pacific time for the official release and of the iTunes 2.0 firmware. I update my iTunes the night before and while there were versions of the 2.0 firmware floating around, I wanted to wait and get it officially from Apple via iTunes. My hesitation? I was leaving for vacation the following day and the LAST thing I wanted to happen was a to be left with a bricked iPhone.
Since I purchased my 1st generation iPhone last year I, like so many others, have become quite dependent on it. Not having wanted a smartphone previously I find myself using it quite often for checking mail, SMS, web browsing, using the Google Maps and posting twitter messages
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Posted by: Dave in iPhone
Its been earily quiet on the Mac news front. Kind of like the quiet before the storm or the recession of the water before the big tsunami. Or is it more due to the utter lack of excitement over the new iPhone 3G?
Last year at this time the internet was abuzz about the pending release of this remarkable phone. Yes, there are people lined up again at Apple stores around the county, but it just doesn’t feel the same. Maybe because there really isn’t alot to be hyped about. Personally I’m not even remotely interested in the new phone. GPS and 3G are nice, but nothing I can’t live without. Last year’s addition to the iPhone software to include a pseudo-GPS feature in the Google Maps has actually been quite useful for the few times I’ve used it. But I still don’t find myself needing it too often. And certainly not often enough that I’d want to get a new phone, pay new contract fees and potentially drain my battery use over.
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Posted by: Dave in Web Tips
Recently my daughter asked me for a web site. Something simple so her and her friends can post their silly youtube videos to. I had a site from my wife’s now closed business, but the new site had less requirements. So off I went to search for a simple, basic plan that would satisfy my requirements yet let me put up a decent site for my daughter to play around with (and for me to manage).
Web Hosting Geeks is a site that offers consolidated web hosting reviews. They break down their list of site reviews by categories such as Best Budget Hosting, Best Blog Hosting, Best PHP Hosting and many more. Most of the sites listed are budget friendly (under $10/month) and give breakdowns on features such as POP Email accounts, MySQL databases and multi-domain support.
While I haven’t purchased a hosting plan yet, they’re certainly providing me ample research information to point me in the right direction.
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HRB.com has created a very interesting and intriguing concept allowing you to rid yourself of mouse & keyboard by leveraging a webcam to capture gestures for site navigation.
Using a webcam (works great with the new Apple laptops), you use your hand to gesture where on the site you’d like to go. While this is far from ready for production sites, it is an interesting demo on where sites can go.
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Have a new idea? A product or service that you want to advertise? Well before you start handing out flyers, putting ads in local papers or posting signs around town, make sure that you have a domain name.
At this point in time a web presence is absolutely essential. Most people, if even remotely interested in what you have to offer, will look you up online. Ads, flyers, promos and such are quite limited to the amount of space you can use to describe your idea, but a website is virtually endless. But once you have that website, how do you protect your brand?
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Ever go out to dinner and not know what drink to order with your food? Lately I’ve started trying to pair my drinks with the food I was planning to order. Since most restaurants take your drink orders first I usually go with whatever I’m “in the mood” for that night and then as I peruse the dinner menu try to pair food to go with it. Its sort of a reverse-pairing.
But quite often you know roughly what you want to eat when you go out. After all, you’re not likely ordering the glazed duck at a steak house and if you’re in an Italian Restaurant you’re likely ordering some sort of pasta dish.
So if you know what you want to eat, what wine should you order?
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My 6 year old son played soccer for the first time this spring. Well technically he was signed up to play when he was 4, but he spent a few weeks standing around picking grass before deciding he didn’t like soccer. This year was different. This year, he wanted to play.
My wife signed him up and after receiving a few emails from the league begging for help from the parents to fill coaching, assistant coaching and team parent roles for teams, my wife decided that between us we can certainly help out and assist. Neither one of us had any experience "coaching" before but we’re both active and figured that as long as there was a coach on the team we’d do our part to help. Well that turned into us being the Coaches without any prior knowledge or experience. And then the "us" turned into "me" being the Coach while my wife assumed "Team Mom" responsibilities … until she started to work.
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Admittedly this is from the “oldie, but goodie” department. The more I look around for different unique applications the more I always seem to end up coming back to basics. The same holds true for WiFi applications. I’ve looked through a number of sites and at a number of applications for just the right WiFi utility and yet when all is said and done, I keep coming back to iStumbler as my favorite wireless network discovery tool.
iStumbler, the OSX cousin of Netstumbler, is a great utility for finding AirPort networks, Bluetooth devices and Bonjour services with your Mac. This is always the first app I launch when in a new environment with my Macbook Pro to scan the surrounding WiFi hotspots. Most recently I used this in my new house to see how many other WiFi connections there are within the vicinity, how strong their signals were and which channels they were using. All of this information is quite important as I plan the layout of my home network including my wireless access points. A quick scan told me that there were a handful of access points around, the strongest coming from the rear of my home and most of the channels were either 6 or 11. Which meant I should go on the lower end of the spectrum for my network to avoid possible interference. All with one simple look at iStumbler.
Yes, there are other apps out there (like KisMac) which offer some great features, but with limited support for the Macbook Pro’s Airport Card, this wasn’t a viable option.
For most needs, iStumbler is definitely the app to have.
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I’ve heard Andy Ihnatko talking about his “Internet Pants” before and while he’s not exactly the fashion icon, he does know technical. He had mentioned these technical pants before and curiousity got the best of me. I’m a sucker for gadgets and a pair of pants that can easily hold my keys, wallet, iPhone and nearly anything else I can come up with without overloading myself? Well that just took the cake.
5.11 Tactical Pants are the pants of choice for Federal, State and local law enforcement. But if that’s not enough, they seem to have the backing of tech pundit extraordinaire, Andy Ihnatko. And for me, that’s good enough to give them a try.
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Need to download a BitTorrent? I’m not talking about searching for them, but actually having a file and simply needing it to download? Transmission BitTtorrent Downloader for OSX is absolutely the program for you then. Its simple, lightweight and still quite powerful. Its also simple to use.
Transmission strikes a good balance between providing useful functionality without feature bloat - excessive features that slow the program down. It also features some Powerful Torrent Management that gives you the ability to queue your torrent downloads (if you have a few going at once) or throttle their speed. Transmission has support for Growl notifications and dock badging on OSX so you can get back to your work and still be kept in the loop on your download progress.
Best of all Transmission is Open Source and is available not only for OSX, but Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD and BeOS as well.
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