Evernote: All your notes, wherever you go.

dJay: Try it to believe it, dual deck djaying, mixing and recording in the palm of your hand.

iMovie: Awesome movie making app.

TuneIn Radio Pro: A Radio App, which does everything you need a radio app to do, find/ listen to/ buffer and record;  live broadcasts, past podcasts, internet streams, songs, by location(!), tags, content, or any method you can think of. Airplay what you find to whatever Airplay device is nearby.

Funny how the normalcies of yesterday are becoming the luxuries of the future.

Multiple languages – iPads keyboard changes on the fly to most any language you’ll need.

Speech recognition – iPad has a wealth of excellent speech recognition apps, that, because they use the cloud for processing, work better than what we’ve seen on the desktop for years.

Battery life – the iPads battery is phenomenal.

Portability – iPad is incredibly light.

Apps – WordPress makes a beautiful iPad app, something they don’t do for macs or windows pcs, Bank of America, Evernote, and others are making apps that are nicer than their desktop counterparts, more functional, and are far less expensive to boot. Incredible. ]]> http://www.auburncom.com/2011/12/02/774/feed/ 0 http://www.auburncom.com/2011/11/14/itunes-matched-has-launched-what-to-do-if-your-library-is-over-25000-songs-and-needs-trimming/ http://www.auburncom.com/2011/11/14/itunes-matched-has-launched-what-to-do-if-your-library-is-over-25000-songs-and-needs-trimming/#comments Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:26:11 +0000 admin http://www.auburncom.com/?p=770 iTunes Match launched today along with iTunes 10.5.1 for Macs and Windows computers. It will deliver a great experience for folks who have collected, and carefully acquired music that they love.

For me, who bought an Album a week regularly through my life since being a teenager, this is great news, instead of a vault of songs on a hard drive at my home(or office), that vault is now in the cloud, accessible anywhere iTunes can run, or an any iOS device.

iTunes Match even upgrades the CD rippede files I made ten years ago, at what was then high quality(due to storage constraints) (128kbps por 160kbps) to very high quality 256kb AAC.

The one caveat? your iTunes Library must be under 25,000 non iTunes purchased songs. This is not a small amount of music, 25000, songs is about 2,500 Albums, I’ve known almost no one that owned that many physical albums in the days of Albums, it’s an unmanagebake amount of Physical media, so for the limitation to be 25,000 songs, and no limit on purchased through iTunes songs, that’s alright by me.

Time to clear out some of the dusty albums in the iTunes Library, here’s how:

Smart Playlists.

Smart Playlists are lists generated by iTunes based on Criteria you provide.

You can start with a playlist, for example, that includes songs you’ve skipped twenty times (that’s right, iTunes has been recording everytime you played, skipped, or otherwise interacted with a song the last ten years, so you can easily now ask iTunes to show you, songs you’ve never listened too, songs you’ve skipped, and myriad combinations of these, say, songs from the 90′s by U2, that I’ve skipped six times)

This will let you find what you may not be playing much anymore, and also, will help you find great stuff you forgot you have, hat you can now put in a playlist or smart playlist along the lines of, “must hear this”

Smart Playlists, like Siri for your iTunes collection. (without the AI, that’s presumably coming soon!)

Because, there’s times you hand your phone to a friend or family member or client, to review some files, and you’d like to know they won’t accidently see text messages, financial details or other private files.

What’s to be done? For now, Apple doesn’t offer any case by case locking feature for apps on the iPhone, so all you can do, is choose Apps that protect your data in a safe and secure way.

Mint for example, which watches your bank accounts and alerts you to important things, like large deposits or withdrawals, fees and the like, requires you to use a passcode lock to opne the apps itself, a brilliant move.

Gv Mobile+ by Sean Kovacs, as of today offers the ability to lock that app in a similar way, so that all communication inside your google voice account is locked to prying eyes, this is an example of a third party app offering more functionality, than the native app (Apple’s Phone App) which offers no privacy at all (hand your unlocked iPhone to someone and they can peruse allyour call history and text messaging). This fact, that a third party app can provide more functionality than the built in App is a great feature of the iPhone, and the iPhone clones that have come out since, and worth a discussion all of it’s own.

Learn more about it at http://www.apple.com/iphone/find-my-iphone-setup/

It’s a great way to feel secure about the data you’re storing on the iPhone, it’s readilying becoming the computer that people use most of the day: http://mg.siegler.usesthis.com/

Russ Steele, 72, a retired Air Force officer and aerospace worker from Nevada City, Calif., says he spends up to three hours a day seeking interesting topics and writing about them for his blog, NC Media Watch, which covers local issues in Nevada County, northeast of Sacramento. All he wants is to have a voice in the community for his conservative views.

Although he signed up for Facebook this month, Mr. Steele said he did not foresee using it much and said that he remained committed to blogging. “I’d rather spend my time writing up a blog analysis than a whole bunch of short paragraphs and then send them to people,” he said. “I don’t need to tell people I’m going to the grocery store.”

2. Verizons iPhone will be a mobile wifi hotspot for 5 devices

3. There’ll now be the potential for twice as many (or more) iPhone users in the US, which is good for developers, and therefore good for users.

Via: Apple Forums

Re: Spotlight disabled – and Indexing and searching disabled – solution
Posted: Apr 18, 2008 7:22 PM in response to: John Christiansen
Helpful

This tip is useful, but a way too complicated way to do this. A better and simpler solution is as follows:

1. Login in to your server as an administrator.

2. Open the Terminal application (in your /Applications/Utilities folder)

3. Type the following exactly as written in to the Terminal:

sudo rm /.metadata_never_index

It will ask you for your password. I have never seen this file, so you may get a “file not found” error – in which case move on to step 4 anyway.

4. Type the following in to the Terminal:

sudo mdutil -i on /


5. Spotlight in the right corner of your server login should indicate it is indexing, and before long will start working.

I don’t believe editing of hostconfig is required at all, and you don’t need to do all this stuff with making invisible files visible since you are already in the Terminal anyway.

Hope that helps.

Since they know your friends, automatically those will rank higher in visibility than messages from unknown people, sounds pretty cool.

But how does this work for businesses? Businesses thrive on incoming communications from new people, or leads? It seems that SalesForce combined with Twilio is more and more likely to be the businesses version of FaceBook, who seem completely focused on the home/student user.

How about you, do you agree/disagree?

That’s becoming less true.

Firstly, iPhones and iPads, now have the capability to erase their contents if a thief trys to guess their passcode ten times in a row.

The most recent development on tools to retrieve information from a locked phone appear to have petered off, I’m not aware of anyone outside the inner workings of Apple who can software hack a locked iphone.

That leaves Hardware level hacking and compromise to retrive the data off an iPhone. Which, since the iPhone 3GS is solved by Apple’s always on AES 256 bit encoding.

Encryption
iPhone 3GS offers hardware-based encryption. iPhone 3GS hardware encryption uses AES 256 bit encoding to protect all data on the device. Encryption is always enabled, and cannot be disabled by users.

So, to surmise, any iPhone (let’s include other iOS devices) since the 3GS have hardware encryption to protect data from hardware disassembly and hacking to retrieve data. And additionally, have soft and hard passcode entry mechanisms to prevent a thief from accessing your data.

Meanwhile, A Macintosh, being an older style machine has much more sensitive security. By default, a Mac bought in the Apple Store, will have no user password, no hardware level protection, and no encryption technology enabled to protect your data.

So the average user, takes their Mac home, builds some love letters and spreadsheets, and should someone take the computer can see everything.

Here’s how you solve this:

1. Set a secure user account password.

This’ll mean someone who steals your computer won’t automatically see your desktop when they turn it on (from Off state)

2. Set your Mac to require a password on wake from Sleep or Screensaver.

This’ll mean someone who steals your computer won’t automatically see your desktop when they try to wake it from sleep(which happens when it’s lid is closed but it hasn’t been “turned off”

3. Turn on the “Firmware Password Protection” from Apple detailed here: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1352

This’ll prevent someone who steals your Mac resetting your Password using a reset disc, a OS X install disc or many other methods.

4. Turn on Filevault.

Filevault is built into every Mac, and since OS X 10.5, will encrypt your home folder (or folders you choose), with 256 bit AES encryption, meaning that even after the thief has tried the three above methods to access your data, and failing, has decided to extract the physical drive from the Mac and connect it to another computer to attempt to access the file, will be greeted by a securely encrypted File system.

And that’s how to make your Mac as secure as possible.

Apple Mac

Apple iOS devices

Toggl

Quickbooks(?)

HiTask

Salesforce

FaceBook

Twitter

Yelp

HuffDuffer

Google

Fever

Instagram

For Linux, Windows, and Mac, there has most always been an equivalent app for accomplishing something no matter which platform you’re on.

But where are the other desktop versions of “Air video”, “Mobile Mouse”?

Simple, besides the excellent hardware quality, and the incredible free software that comes bundled with the Mac (OSX, arguably the greatest OS in the world with great tools like Mail, iCal, Safari, and iLife 11, a really awesome media management suite). It’s that it can run Linux, Unix or Windows as well as it’s native OS X.

Really, it’s true, it means that if you HAVE to run a certain piece of windows software, you can run Windows under Bootcamp (or Parallels) to get your work done, than switch back to the Mac side for your reliable and fun computing.

But, when you are running Windows, you have to be aware that you need to secure it just as tightly as when it’s a standard PC, this means installing all the updates it usually needs, as well as good antivirus software.

Microsofts SP (or Service Pack Updates) are one of the most important updates to do to Windows and that’s what this tip is about:

Installing SP3 onto a Windows XP Professional install on a Mac can result in an error message like this:

C:\WINDOWS\$NtServicePackUninstall$ to install Service Pack 3 Setup requires an additional 4 megabytes of free space or if you also want to archive the files for uninstallation,Setup requires 4 additional megabytes of free space. Free additional space on your hard disk and then try again.

If you’re getting this error, give us a call to fix the registry keys in your system, you can come to our office, or we can do a remote fix.

tizi has arrived!

Today we are celebrating a real premiere: tizi has arrived. The first and only mobile TV Hotspot for digital TV in Europe. tizi receives TV programmes (DVB-T/TNT/ DTT) and broadcasts them directly to your iPad or iPhone over WiFi. Enjoy at home and on the go with ease.
Wireless entertainment

tizi keeps it simple. It works without cables or adapters: Just turn it on, connect to the tizi wifi network and start the app – that’s it.
Strong signal
The latest in TV chip technology makes tizi one of the best DVB-T receivers available, giving you a crystal clear picture in brilliant digital quality.
A bundle of energy
Enjoy up to 3.5 hours of mobile TV. The robust lithium-ion high capacity battery lets you watch your favorite blockbuster on screen.

Lightweight and capable
The handheld device weights only 70g and fits in every trouser pocket. tizi fully supports multitasking under iOS 4.
Get mobile TV on your iPad or iPhone with tizi

Sit down, switch on and start watching. You can get tizi now in the equinux Online Store for just €149.95 (plus shipping). What are you waiting for?

Everyone knows how incredible these last few years technology has been, but please please, in the midst of creating great videos, shooting thousands of pictures of your kids, and sharing and connecting all your great stuff, remember to backup your data, using Time Machine, Super Duper, Jungle Disk, BackBlaze or any solution that works well.

For a scare, and to understand why I wrote this, read:
Liz Castro Upgraded to iPhoto 11 and Lost Her Entire Photo Library

and Johns Quote:

“She’s OK, because she had a full backup and was able to revert to iPhoto 09.

Everyone who reads Daring Fireball performs full and regular backups, right? Get a big external hard drive or three and use Time Machine or SuperDuper (or both). Drives fail, software has bugs. If you don’t have good backups you will eventually lose something precious”

But overall, after a couple of years where the iPhone and iPad, combined with the web have started to seem like they’re all we need. Today’s presentation reminds me how powerful and great a Macintosh is.

The new “Mission Control” feature in fact, shows how the Mac fit’s into your digital lifestyle going forward, it’s your Master Console, your Mission Control Station, that you maybe only need to see for an hour a day, but it absorbs all your Pictures, Videos, Texts, Apps and Information, be that messages, emails, news, that lets you manage and distribute extremely effectively.

Can the iPhone distribute a video to Youtube? Yes. Can you send that video to CNN? a little awkward.

Can you track where and when you sent videos, and what feedback you got on those, as well as all messages sent in the last twenty years? Nope. The iPhone is a portable powerhouse, but not the amazing control and distribution center that the Mac showed it is today.

Absolutely astounding!

What:
Live video stream of Apple’s September 1 event

When:
Wednesday, September 1, 2010, 10:00 a.m. PDT

Where:
www.apple.com

Live Video Streaming

Apple® will broadcast its September 1 event online using Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards. Viewing requires either a Mac® running Safari® on Mac OS® X version 10.6 Snow Leopard®, an iPhone® or iPod touch® running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad™. The live broadcast will begin at 10:00 a.m. PDT on September 1, 2010 at www.apple.com.

http://mailplaneapp.com/

More efficient Gmail Web View (But still has threading and UI of Gmail)

http://www.google.com/chrome

Chrome is (probably) the best web browser to use for accesing Gmail (It supports dragging attachments in and out of messages)

A survey by lifehacker showing Gmail to come up higher than Outlook/Thunderbird/Mail for satisfaction (For Balance), NB, Busy people don’t answer surveys!

http://lifehacker.com/5457495/best-email-client-gmail

A snippet from the excellent Michael Gartenberg on the iPad as a productivity tool:
Text Entry and Editing: While most modern smartphones are designed with mobile email in mind, I find that they’re best used for email triage — they’re great to quickly check what’s important, what requires an urgent response, and what to delete. Emails that require long responses, however, don’t work well for me on phones. Likewise, while I’ve written in the past on small screens, editing and creating long documents on a phone is a challenge. For my tests, I used the iPad’s email client along with iWork for creating as well as editing text. The large 1024 x 768 display made a huge difference in the way I was able to work. I was pleasantly surprised by the enhanced email views which made it easier to mange and mail and how the large screen facilitated writing long email responses. The larger screen made seeing and editing documents much more pleasant. I found the onscreen keyboard acceptable for both editing and moderate text entry, but when it came to writing long documents, I found it much easier and more productive to use the iPad with either the keyboard dock or a Bluetooth keyboard. (I had no issues with using both Apple’s Bluetooth and keyboard and old Stowaway foldable keyboard.) Verdict? The iPad can be used for long document creation and editing with the onscreen keyboard — but if I’m doing it on a regular basis, I’d want an external keyboard with me

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/03/entelligence-the-ipad-as-a-productivity-tool/

Finally, my last word is that the future is picking excellent web based services, be they, Gmail/Hotmail/FastMail(Which is the BEST Email service I know of), and then local tools to interact with those services, in some cases the local tools made by the same companies will be best(as in Google Mail with Android phones), and in some cases not(as in Amazons Kindle service being a better product on the iPad)

Hope this is helpful.

Brendan

That’s it.

The iPad, iPod, Mac and iPhone, glide you to the tool or service you want to use with as little distraction as possible, and providing services that make repetitive tasks easier, and often taking things away that you don’t use.

Re: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/08/06/siracusa
UPDATE, A FEW HOURS LATER: It occurs to me that we should be able to test Siracusa’s thesis, by comparing Android and iPhone market share in countries like the U.K. and Japan, where the iPhone is already available on all the major carriers. Is that data available?

The country to run this test is in the uk, where they’ve had the iPhone on the four big carriers for a while.

But why even think about it?

The fact that the number one vehicle for commuting in the world is a bicycle doesn’t stop BMW or maserati waking up to make the best, and often (for them) most profitable way to get around. Right?

I mean three years ago, you could say nokia had 90% of the market, or maybe that was motorola.

Well android takes those percentage points because it gives anybody who wants it a free OS

So of course every phone from the $0 phone to the $300 phone has a very good chance of getting android on it(less dev costs for motorola etc), and those phones have a good chance of making their way into consumers hands. 

Why? Same reason that people still “buy” plain nokias at cell phone stores, because they’re free.

So, lets say every single free nokia/motorola/htc in a year has a flavor of android on it.

That puts android at 99% of cell phones global.

Does that matter?

There’s a good chance it doesn’t, because, as reports show, cell phone usage is actually declining. And apples business is not cellular phones, it’s mobile computing. And there may be some like dan benjamin or leo laporte who says an “android” phone on verizon is the best “phone” but there’s not many on the planet who can’t admit that the iPhone is not the best pocket computer.

Pocket computers are just beginning, and using an android device as a pocket computer feels limited in so many ways.

Meanwhile, look to your left and you see the trifecta of iPhone/iPod touch and iPad, building momentum as the most useful mobile computing platform around, stable, full of apps, and with an environment of purpose built accessories for them, from the new “apple peel” which adds 3G and wifi to an iPod touch(here’s hoping the new iPod touch has 3G built in), to the Clear IOS device, to car mounts, iPod docks in planes, and so on.

It’s mobile computing, and with an ios device you feel empowered, with an android device you feel “I can make phone calls, and maybe a few other things”

So let android be the bicycle of the communication world, because mobile computing, facebook, Twitter, email and Skype are the rising waters of human communication and the IOS devices d these things marvelously. 

Have you tried it?

Nope? Then listen up.

Home sharing allows you to let you and your roommates, lover, spouse, kids or friends make a little sharing group between their Mac and yours, really simply.

Just turn on Home sharing in iTunes on all your Macs(or even PC’s!) in your household, while all the computers are on the same network, and voila, they’ll see each others iTunes Libraries.

You can copy Music, Videos, Apps or any iTunes content from any computer to another, and even set Home Sharing to Automatically sync new music/video/apps as they are added to your housemates computer.

Isn’t that cool?

iTunes Genius takes that collection of three hundred to three thousand to thirty thousand songs that you have in your iTunes library, and plays it for you in an amazing way that makes you rediscover your music.

Try it, you’ll find that iTunes will match your first pick with twenty four other songs from your library that really fit in amazingly well. Most people upon trying it for the first time ask “Do I own all these songs?”, Yep, they’ve been lying in your collection untouched and iTunes Genius surfaces them.

To my eyes, it’s an updated Blackberry, with a large (though quite low resolution screen) and better app support.

For all there efforts to make a spectacle, this story hasn’t hit the front page of nytimes.com or sfgate.com, like the every years new iphone does.

But kudos to them for trying. And I think their new Blackberry may have a place at the table over the coming months (People who currently use Blackberries seem to be happy with them).

Blackberry torch, can it compete with iPhone?

Update: Details are coming out like this from Nilay Patel: RIM just put out a flagship cellphone in 2010 with a 624MHz processor. Oops.

Apple and Android Cell phones have 1Ghz processors

I may be the first to go on record to say this, but I think there’s a really high possibility that this falls iPod Touch gets a 3G connection option. If so, stand back and watch these iOS devices dominate the way the iPod did.

Update: Looks like Sprint is creating a sleeve for the iPod Touch that empowers it with 3G connectivity, and y’know, Apple has a habit of beating people to the punch just when it’s unexpected, and is there anything more unexpected for this years iPod than 3G?

Apparent iPod Touch 3G Case

I continue to point you to John Gruber and his astute observations on the iPhone and competitors, also Andy Ihnatko for excellent birds eye perspective on the world of technology.

Firstly, Johns made a great point in the last 24 hours, saying that there is no guarantee or neccessity for the Cell phone market to be like the PC market in the 90%Windows Machines/8%Macs/2%Linux Paradigm, John points out that the mobile market could easily become like the game console market with three to four systems each taking 30-40% of the market, that’s a good point, in the face of the “iPhone-killer” and “Android will be the windows of the future” gibberish that is making the rounds with some pundits.

Once it’s agreed that there can be several flourishing systems, it’s much easier to look at the mobile market objectively, and I hope that’s the perspective I give to you.

The Tmobile store at 17th and Valencia is in a neighborhood that leaving working activated phones on those tiny security cables, as such, there’s a huge benefit, they have a completely functioning, untied, not locked down Galaxy S that they’ll hand you so you can feel exactly what it’s like to hold.

Again, I’ll tell you, that it’s very nice feeling. (I can now agree that the plastic back does actually feel a little chintzy in the age of steel backed and now glass backed iPhones (forgive Apple’s temporary plastic phase)). But I’m a productivity guy, I’m about doing things, implementing and recommending the tools that enable businesses and individuals to do more with less work. Whether that tool is plastic coated or diamond coated matters not as highly as whether the plastic tool can slice butter twice as fast.

So what can you do?

Well, the truth is, that the modern computing world is not about Specs anymore, the answer to what can it do really depends on what Apps are available, right?

I took a look at the Android Marketplace, and searching for Speed test got me the same awesome simple Ookla speed test app available for iPhone. Good, then I searched for Skype, I got a list of apps, none of which was Skype.

Then, I redid my test from the other day, made a call and tried to open the camera to take a picture, didn’t work, so i went to the Market and found a camera app, installed it, and guess what, good news, it works, so that solves that, but finding that camera app on the market was not easy.

Then, I tried to find a video camera app so I could test if i can record video, searching and searching found me no good results, but worse than that, I found an App called “Qik Video for EVO”, why am i seeing that? If my mom uses this phone, finds that App, downloads it, runs it, and it says, you’re not on an EVO, goodbye, what kind of experience is that?

Contrast that experience with the App store experience:

Avis are running ads saying “use our iPhone App to reserver your car”
Chase are running TV commercials saying “Use our iPhone app to deposit your checks”
OmniFocus just released OmniFocus for the iPad and it looks like the most marvelous way to organize your to do’s
and today i found out about Moms With Apps, a website devoted to Mom Apps, it’s incredible, they’re highlighting Apps that help moms find parks, find activities, keep track of rewards, goals, and anything that a Mom might care about.

I think all of this shows the power of the Apps, they’re creating their own niches “Mom Apps”, “Guy Apps”, “Travelling Apps”.

Meanwhile Androids Marketplace is a hodgepodge of “pretty cool”, “sorta works”, not “This lets me do more with my day!”

And I think that’s one more key differentiator of the iPhone world.

Also for people who care about continuity, it might be fun to note, that after some bad guys spill beer on the girls MacBook Pro, she brings it to a computer mechanic who says “I can save your hard drive”, but when she asks about the computer, he holds up a broken Mac, not a MacBook Pro, nor even a PowerBook, but a TiBook, that’s the Titanium PowerBook from 2001, obviously the directors weren’t silly or willing enough to dismantle a nice new Mac, and instead broke up a TiBook. That’s still a waste to my mind, hopefully they put it back together afterwards.

Note to future directors: It’s pretty straightforward and almost easier to open the newer MacBook pros for “shock” value in your next scene, the older Macs were harder to open(and put back together again)

Walt Mossberg Reviews New Samsung Galaxy S Android Phones ★
Walt Mossberg:

I’ve been testing the first two Galaxy S phones, the T-Mobile Vibrant and the AT&T Captivate, both of which cost $200 with a two-year contract. Neither has all the features of Apple’s latest model, like a front-facing camera for video calls or an ultra–high resolution screen, but they are worthy competitors. They have some attributes the iPhone lacks, like bigger screens and better integration of social networking.

They sound like good — maybe the best? — Android phones. What I find interesting is that “Galaxy S” is Samsung’s branding, but the phones aren’t called that. Each carrier gives them their own names. How many real people will know that the T-Mobile Vibrant and AT&T Captivate are pretty much the same phone from different carriers? And “Android” doesn’t get mentioned at all. The word “Android” doesn’t get much play from the carriers, either. There’s just one mention of “Android” on AT&T’s web page for the Captivate, and it’s near the bottom in the small print section

John Gruber, author of the most excellent daring fireball, comments above on Walt Mossbergs review of the new Samsung Galaxy phones.

I had some time Sunday to go peruse phones at Verizon, Tmobile and Sprint, and because I did, I am able to make some comments on the above.

The Samsung Galaxy S on Sprint, is far and way the best android handset I’ve used so far, it is truly excellent.

How so? Well the interface is the smoothest I’ve seen on android, possibly equal to the nexus one, but I think smoother. The screen is beautiful, the thinness is lovely, and best of all, probably to convince iPhone people to switch, they’ve made the applications appear in a horizontal page by page grid a la iPhone instead of up and down endless like all other androids I’ve seen. I’m not sure if that only makes me happy, or if it will work for all iPhone people, but I can tell you scrolling up and down the general android apple list feels Frey alien, whereas the samsungs feels nice.

Not only that, but in my surveys of android phones over the last few months, they all stutter when swiping or moving ui elements around in comparison to even my original iPhone. But the Galaxy S? It’s smoother and faster than my iPhone.

Pretty sweet, huh? More responsive than my iPhone(not than an iPhone 4 of course), beautiful screen, open android and so on, lovely.

So let’s get one right? Wait, it costs the SAME as an iPhone. Like exactly the same, monthly, plus up front, it’s all the same.

Well, I guess it better do all the same stuff then, let’s see.

No video camera for face time.

That’s a deal breaker for most anybody.

But let’s say I’m a geek who wants google voice, or more openness. How would I choose?

Well I’m a geek with a l ot of international friends so I’ll go to the android store and get Skype. Oh no Skype on the store? Okay

Well, android has built in tethering, that makes up for no video camera or Skype right? Oh tethering comes with froyo 2.2, which could take a month or six months to arrive, who knows, and will Tmobile charge an extra $30 per month for it? Who knows? And Tmobile aren’t saying.

So nothing killer selling me on this phone, but it is slick. So you could call it a tie.

But then, take in the factors that nobody counts. Take in iTunes U and it’s awesome amount of university education that is built into every iPhone for free, and doesn’t technically even require ATT, you could just sit in starbucks all day learning and learning on your iPhone.

Then take Siri, the absolutely mind blowingly artificial intelligence app for iPhone, that will never be available for android because apple just bought it.

And toss up the above and decide which phone is worth your $200, and $70 monthly.

One more thing.

I had a nice Sony Ericsson phone before the iPhone came out, I was happy with it, it was a Walkman, made great calls, and took good pictures, I wasn’t dead certain I needed the iPhone over this Sony. Then I was walking down the street one day and listening to some songs, I saw a beautiful view and took out the phone to take a picture, opened the camera app and took a picture, know what happened? The song paused(not gracefully) while the camera presumably buffered and saved the image, then the song resumed a millisecond before where it had stopped(horrible).

I went to the apple store, started playing a song on the iPhone, opened camera, took a picture, the iPhone didn’t miss a beat. Why pay $70 a month for a phone that’s going to bug me every time I’m listening to a song and want to take a picture? And I got the iPhone and loved it.

Nobody notices this, nobody.

People buy stuff all the time, and it doesn’t do perfect everything, normal people don’t rant and rave like i do about this, normal people just continue their lives, buy a canon to take pictures along their Sony and continue.

But iPhone buyers, normal people, are listening to music, taking pictures, chatting on the phone simultaneously in the playgrounds with their kids, while Sony Ericsson, motorola and nokia owners aren’t. Can their phones not do all these things at once or do these people not wanna do it? I put it to you that it’s that their phones can’t do it and they just don’t think a second thought about it. Well listen to this, that galaxy s that we began this discussion about, go try it out, go marvel at its beauty at how slick it is, comparable it is, awesome it is, then make a call on it and open the camera app.

Yknow what you’ll see? “camera can’t be used while on a call”

These are the things that matter, people don’t notice them, but when everything is perfect and aligned, they don’t have to, they just get used to cup holders, and niceties, and while samsung catch up to make their camera app work while a call is happening, apple are steaming ahead with iOS 5, which will have built in Siri, who can book you on a flight, reserve you dinner, your hotel, and, take a photo while doing all that.

Now Cupertino, please make it so I can shoot video while on a call, iPhone 4 doesn’t do that, and why not?
.

I hear it often, as of July 17th 2010, my answer remains:

iMac or mac mini, any specifications. Best home computer, no question. My parents love theirs, I got them for them four years ago. Windows PC’s(hp/Dell/Sony) all more or less the same, software (windows) the biggest factor, virus, problem vulnerable, (without tech support) try em out at best buy. They carry both. But apple store transfers your files for free from your old pc.

That video was by a guy who signed off the video using his real name, his Twitter nameHandle, and I believe that’s all.

While Twitter, YouTube, and perhaps facebook are without question the places to be discovered, easily shared and publish yourself. Don’t forget to begin with your own space.

That is to say, get yourself a piece of the web, the new frontier, (yes it’s still new), being able to still buy billsawesomesite.com, is like coming to California in 1850 and being able to grab an acre of land for a house(in my humble opinion). And once you get that land(webspace), build your content on it, put your pictures, video, text and art on it, and redistribute from their, ensure that the highest quality native original format of your creation exists solely in a secure location(like a local backed up hard drive), put your web quality version of your art on YOUR own webspace, be that a rented shared server space like DreamHost, yahoo, your own server sonnected to the web, or big stuff like dedicated server or collocated servers.

And from that location, spread your content in other formats, YouTube720P, vimeoHD, twittervid, facebook etc, and on and on, always preserving the link back to yourdomain.com, or your personal webspace whatever it may be. Because Twitter and YouTube are hot today, but they’re not forever, just like country borders change, web properties change ownership, priorites and more. So put your content somewhere your grandkids can look back and say, “wow check out these emails from grandma to grandpa back in 2011″ as opposed to Twitter who only keep your last 12000 tweets or some such arbitrary number.

Contact me to learn more, but at the moment I heartily still endorse DreamHost. Click the link to the right “green hosting” to learn more about them.

P.s. Gmail only gives you access to your email for about six months if you stop logging in. Personally in like the idea of my email inbox being there for my grandkids to look at. You?

Create a new “MailBox”

Give it a name:

Go into Mail Preferences

Click Rules

Click Add Rule

Fill in the criteria you wish to filter (e.g. addressed to info@yourdomain.org), Select the folder you want the message placed in

Click Ok

And Then Click Apply

Bingo, you’re all set.

But one thing that is hard, is figuring out how to use your numeric keypad, the answer to that question is posted below, courtesy Brent V.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Numeric Keypad does work in Parallels

Well, to be fair the numeric keypad does work in Parallels, but it takes a little knowledge. What I found out is that when I run Windows XP in Parallels it looks to see if the num-lock is turned on or off. Just like a regular PC running Windows, the numeric keypad moves the cursor instead of typing numbers if the num-lock is off.

I guess the Mac OSX doesn’t really have a concept of num-locks (at least when using the Apple keyboard). So, Parallels changed the clear key (near top left of numeric keypad) to be the num-lock toggle key. All you have to do is hit the clear key while in Windows XP (under Parallels) and you can toggle your num-lock.

Not very intuitive, but hey, what do you expect when you mix Mac and Windows together.

Posted by Brent V at 8:52 PM

No Space needs to be taken on your MacBook Hard Drive

Downsides:

Lock outs if you send over 500 emails in a day.

Incorrect sender tag resulting in your mail being flagged as spam or the dreaded “sent on behalf of” message.

8GB Limit for your Mailboxes
Dreamhost is Unlimited

25MB File size limit for sending or receiving
Dreamhost is 40MB

MobileMe

iLife

iWork

Transmit

Teamviewer

Transmission

Acorn

Hazel

Automatic

XCode

Billable

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