Ramblings Of An Old Geek

I came across this the other day when I was doing my daily reading of blogs. This is a great article on how to protect yourself if you use Google services:

http://www.labnol.org/internet/gmail-and-google-apps-hacked/11799/

There are many options to adding an iPod to a mini.   The most expensive way is to install the iPod kit from mini for several hundred dollars.   That wasn’t an option for me.

The mini car stereo has an aux input which allows for direct connection of the iPod to the car .  I could have gone simple with just a male to male cable but that wouldn’t have charged the iPod as well.

My first attempt was with the Griffin Tuneflex Aux.   What a miserable product this is.   After a week it could not hold the iPod up straight and after a month, the left channel disappeared.   Run away from this guy!

So a few weeks ago I bought a Monster iCarCharger 1000 for iPod and iPhone so far I’ve been really happy with this device.   I’ve tried it in a couple of cars now and the only problem I can see with it is that I cannot figure out how to adjust the output level.

Anyway, I’ll let you know how this turns out.   If you have any suggestions for me, please let me know.

Thanks,
matt

I’ve been an avid iphone user for over a year now and always have 10 pages of apps on my phone.   I find that unless you download and try them, you have a hard time finding the really good ones.   Here are a few of my often used favorites:

Amazon Mobile

This is an incredible application.   I was doing some shopping last weekend at Cabelas and ran across a lock you could use to secure the tailgate on a pickup.  I took a photo of the lock in the Amazon app and in about 5 minutes, a person at Amazon looked it up and presented it in the app with pricing (10 dollars cheaper).   If I so desired I could have clicked on the item and ordered it.  This is wild; expect merchants to start banning smartphones in their stores very soon.  By the way, it’s free.

Evernote

Where would I be without Evernote?  I have mentioned this before here on my blog, but Evernote is one of the very best note taking applications ever written.   One of the coolest things it does is support multiple platforms; you can write a note on your iphone and then modify it on your Mac or PC in a native client or even on your Linux box using the web interface.   Absolutely amazing and it’s free.

Facebook

Okay, we all have to have guitly pleasures and Facebook is mine.   I’ve connected with several old high school friends and keep in touch with my current friends vis this application.   The iphone version is very well done and allows mobile uploads of pictures you may take with the iphone camera and it’s free.

Tweetie

If you use Twitter, this is becoming the standard for iphone Twitter apps.  It has every feature you may need including automating the mobile picture upload process.   It is $2.99.

Maps  (Google Maps)

I know that this is a native iphone app, but it is still one of my absolute favorites.   And they have enhanced it on the 3GS phone with compass integration so you can turn your phone and the maps will orient correctly based on your position.  Very cool.

Accuweather (webapp)

The iphone has spawned a whole new class of web based applications that are build to function and look good on the iphone.  One of my favorite ones is Accuweather.  It has a really nice interface for radar and long range forecasts.

Craigsphone

Craigslist has built a klunky yet usable iphone application for searching their site.  It has few issues, but all in all it makes the process fairly painless.  It is free.

Sportacular

This app was one of the first real time sports score reporting applications for the iphone and I am still using it today.   It provides updates for all major sports including pro and college.  It is free.

7 Chords

This has been a guitar playing lifesaver for me.  It has about every chord you can physically play on the guitar listed with easy lookup.   I’ve tried a bunch of these iphone apps and this is my favorite.  It is $1.99 and is well worth it.

1 Password

Now if you are not a Mac user you may not be excited about this application but if you are, it is one of the very best password vault applications I have ever used.  It does a great job of syncing your passwords between your mac and iphone as well as even completing web forms on the iphone with the passwords.  It is $4.99 on the iphone, and $39.95 on the mac.

Later,
matt

Very rarely do I run across some new technology that I can recommend to my friends without any worries and I know it will make them happy.

That is the experience I have had with Eye-Fi. My son was getting married a couple of months ago and I needed a new SD memory card for my camera. I’ve heard about the Eye-Fi card and I really didn’t believe it could do what it’s advertising promised, but I thought now would be a good time to try. It ended up being absolutely amazing!

This card actually uses your or any other configured wifi network to upload the pictures stored on it to your favorite web picture site (Fotki, Shutterfly, dotPhoto, webshots, phanfare, Picasa Web albums, flickr, TypePad, Wal-Mart, snapfish, VOX, smugmug, facebook, photobucket, Kodak Gallery, and Sharpcast). It can also use it’s built-in wireless to use a wireless network to upload to your laptop or PC if you so desire.

A funny experience I had the first time I used the card happened on my son’s wedding day. The girls were getting their hair done upstairs at my house and I thought it would be cool to get pictures. I gave my wife my camera with the Eye-Fi card installed and off she went. I was sitting in the den on my laptop watching the pictures magically appear on my Picasa site. It blew me away.

So if you have a digital camera that uses an SD card; run, don’t walk and go get one of these cards.   You can find the one I bought on Amazon Eye-Fi Share Wi-Fi Wireless 2 GB SD Flash Memory Card EYE-FI-2GB

Later,
matt

Last Saturday in a bit of geek hastiness, I went and upgraded my iPhone 3G to an iPhone 3GS.  Why did I do it?  Well, my son was looking at buying an iPhone and this gave me a good excuse to upgrade and I am a geek .  I didn’t have to wait in line at the Apple store for two hours like last year, only about 45 minutes this time.   I think it took that long because the store wasn’t dedicated to just selling phones like they did before.

Things you notice right away with this iPhone is it is truly faster.  Much faster.   No more lags when launching apps and even surfing the web seems faster.  Email, everything, is much faster.

But the camera is why you will want the upgrade; it is great.  I finally have a nice slim auto focus still and movie camera in my pocket.  My normal camera is a Canon Powershot SD that I have almost worn out and the pictures I get out of the iPhone are pretty good compared to the Canon.  I may not even carry the Canon anymore.

Voice control is wild as well.   My old Kryocea palm phone had voice dialing but the iPhone has voice commands; you can tell it “play songs by alison kraus” and off it goes playing those songs.   Real cool.

But the biggest hangup I have (pardon the pun) is the way AT&T is so sloooowww to adopt the new phone features.   This phone has MMS, but AT&T won’t commit to it till the fall.   This phone supports tethering, but AT&T just says they plan on supporting it.  Thank God that the Apple-AT&T exclusive arrangement is over next year because we all know that competition is a good thing!

Later,
matt

Folks who know me know how much I love Dunkin Donuts coffee;   I have a large in my hand every day.  So I was out of town the last few days and craving a Dunkin Donuts coffee, so I said what the heck, I put the words “Dunkin Donuts” in the search feature of the iPhone maps application to see what would happen.  It found 3 locations and charted a course to one only 9 miles away averting a major catastrophe.

The other problem I had on  this trip was that I’m a very loyal Penguins fan and my niece did not have Versus in her Dish network plan ( I still love her just the same).  Thanks to iheartradio, I made it through.   It is an application that streams over 750 radio stations live to your iPhone and is a free download at the iTunes store.  I was able to listen to the local station that has the incredible Mike Lange doing the play by play; it was like I was there.

Thanks again iPhone.

A good friend of mine asked me the other day “Why is everyone talking about Twitter?  What is it?”.  I had a hard time answering her and thought I would put a blog post together to give a better explanation.

First, let’s discuss physically what Twitter is.   It is simply a way to post short (140 character) messages on to a web site and allow other folks to read the message.   That is Twitter in it’s simplest form.  Twitter inherited the 140 character limit from text messaging on cell phones.  To be able to speak to someone about twitter you also to understand some Twitter vocabulary definitions:

Tweet – The act of posting a message on Twitter.

Follow – You can subscribe to another person’s Twitter posts (tweets).

If you wish to find out who has the most followers on Twitter, Twitterholic can help you out.  Now the first time you look at this, it may make you sad since the #2 on the list for the most followers is Brittany Spears but don’t be discouraged, there are people and companies doing really cool stuff.   For example Fox and CNN are on Twitter tweeting news headlines, Boxee is tweeting the current status of their Hulu service, and John Dvorak is usually recommending a good wine or hot tech news.

Many messages you see on twitter now are not that profound; you may see messages about what people are eating or doing, but don’t be discouraged, most folks (like me) use this technique to start to understand how to use Twitter.  Twitter  feels unnatural to the average person because we are not used to putting small bits of our thoughts out to a bunch of folks.  We usually are good one-on-one, but one to many is not normal for most of us.

I’m have to admit that I’m still working thru what I want to tweet and not tweet.   I hope one day to get to the point I can be putting nothing but important information there, but I guess I’m still getting accustomed to the service.  You can follow me on Twitter and my tweets also show up on the front page of my blog.

I heard of an interesting use of Twitter a few months ago where some folks from a local church were going on a missions trip to India and they decided that the method they were going to use to communicate back to people who were interested was Twitter.  They would tweet messages about what they were doing or where they were going; it really made you feel like you were there since tweets occur in real time.

If you decide to start using Twitter, please use some common sense since your tweets will be very visable.   Do NOT tweet personal financial information, home address, phone numbers, etc. because once it is out there you can’t take it back.  You never know who will be looking at your tweets so read them a couple of times before sending them and make sure you would be comfortable if anyone would read it whether they be your friend, enemy, mom, or dad.

Later,
matt

I’ve been working on a project at work for several years now and about 4 years ago, I started looking for a good note taking application instead of trying to remember which tablet I took a note from which meeting.   At that time there was this new company, Evernote,  that thought you should take your notes in a chronological fashion because that is how you remember things.  Their product was in it’s infancy and really didn’t have that many features.  So I ended going with Microsoft One Note.   Now don’t get me wrong, One Note has tons of really nice features; especially if you are using the entire Office suite.  It has great Outlook, Word, and Excel integration and still is my work note taking program.

I wanted to have a seperate application for my personal notes, teaching notes, etc. and for that I have chosen Evernote.  Evernote really has grown up; it has tons of very nice features but one of it’s best is the ability to run it on several different operating systems (including the web) and have all of your notes sync between the different systems.  They have clients for iPhones, OSX, and Windows.   This means you can write a note on your computer and be able to pull it up on your iPhone.  How cool is that?

They continue to improve the product and their goal is “to be your virtual mind for the rest of your life”.

I highly recommend this product and believe it will help you to move to the paperless world and by the way, it is free.

Later,
matt

To understand how cool OpenDNS is, you first need to understand DNS.

When the internet first started at DARPA, you would use the computer’s IP address to connect to it.  So you would need to remember a bunch of numbers to use another computer on the network.   Host files were then created that you could put lists of the systems in then and access each one by it’s name.   This worked well until addresses changed or you added a new computer to your network and had to update the host file on all of the computers in the network.   Along came DNS (Domain Name Service).

DNS allows you to look up the IP address for any system by name.   If you are looking for an address at google, for example www.google.com, the root servers of the internet tell you where to go to get google.com addresses.  You then contact the server for google.com and get the IP you are looking for.   This happens everyday when you use a web browser, email, etc.  Think of DNS as a big internet phone book.

Last summer there was a really nasty DNS exploit that would allow bad guys to hijack a DNS server and point users to a different server than they intended.  Many internet service providers were slow to patch there servers; for example Comcast took almost 4 months to fix the problem.

Your DNS is typically provided by the ISP from where you get your internet access.  So if you were a Comcast customer, you were exposed for several months last year.

OpenDNS is a free internet service that provides bug free DNS.  Since DNS is their only business, they patched their servers as soon as the bug was discovered last summer.  You can use OpenDNS instead of your providers DNS and it is fairly easy to setup your home network to take advantage of this great service.

To start using OpenDNS, simply go to: http://www.opendns.org and click on the “Start Using OpenDNS” button.

One of the cool benefits of OpenDNS, is that it provides URL filtering.  This is great for keeping your kids away from porn, etc.

Later,
matt