Vacation time again. This time we are at the beach – a place I tend to stay away from to avoid tanning this hard wonned pale complextion. To top things off no wifi in the house we rented – I can’t even tap into anyone else’s network. So I thought I would be forced to enjoy the surf and sand — until I reviewed my NetNewsWire on my iPhone to discover that the team at Automatic has produced a WordPress application for the iPhone. Woohoo! New toy!
First the app is free! Thank you guys! However I would consider purchasing a tool like this. I installed the app from the AppStore on my iPhone. Even with the slow EDGE network connection, the app was downloaded, installed, and configured to work with my site in five minutes.
Obviously I’m using the app to post this blog entry. It’s pretty easy to use — the only challege being typing on the iphone screen. Don’t get me wrong, I love the technology behind the iPhone keyboard. The only issue is that I’m all bent over the phone to type. I feel like a teenager in an illicit text conversation on the phone.
Anyway more about this app later as I poke around.
Just finished this excellent book, “It’s Not News, It’s FARK“, by Drew Curtis, the founder of FARK.com. I was at Barnes & Noble the other night with my wife as she needed to pick up some new coffee table books and I NEVER pass up an opportunity to go the bookstore. It’s the bookworm in me. My wife had loaded up on a ton of books (literally) that I got to carry for her. Since I’ve finished my last book a couple of weeks ago (I’ve been sustaining by my reading appetite via online manuals and my magazine subscriptions) I quickly looked around for some new reading material. I found Drew’s book in the “Noted Books” section at the store. I took a chance on it after I read the tag line “How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News”.
Now, I’ve never heard of FARK or FARK.com until I read this book. My little corner of the Internet is quite homey and I don’t venture out of it much. So all of the material contain in the book was very new to me — and I laughed all the way through the book. It is a great book if you want a humorous look at current media practices. Drew has identified 8 different categories of basically ‘filler news’ and details them and explains how and why they are used. The overall delivery of the information had me in stitches.
Definitely a recommended book and I’ll probably have my copy loaned out by the end of the week. Sorry Drew – $13.00 bucks for a paperback is a bit steep for most people. Since I just added it to the coffee table book pile I was carrying, I didn’t realize how expensive it was. Rest assured that this copy will be well-read before it’s donate someplace.
(Yes I did visit Fark.com after/during reading the book. To be honest, I didn’t know how to navigate the site. I’ll give it another go when I have some down time.)
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last couple of months, you know that the new iPhone 3G is being released in the US and that older iPhones and IPod Touchs will be getting new firmware – v2.0. I’ve been reading articles all day about reviews on the newest applications, the early availability of the firmware, and the App Store in iTunes — I’m very excited.
I can wait the additional 12-16 hours to get my firmware officially downloaded — thus I’m not going to download and muck around with the ‘discovered’ version out there. (There are a lot of reports that it works fine and the owners have already downloaded and played with a lot of the applications.) However, I had to upgrade my iTunes to v7.7 as soon as it became available on Software Update this morning. Since then, I’ve been browsing the App Store for software that I want to get and play with immediately.
I have already downloaded these to my machine – can’t install them on my phone till I upgrade the phone to v2.0:
AIM – AOL’s chat client eReader – software to allow you to read eBooks Evernote – My favorite Note/Snippet application now has a ‘native’ client Google Mobile App – collection of Google’s tools Jirbo Arcade – Collection of kid games MixMeister Scratch – YES! application that will allow you to scratch to your own library of music. wicky-wicky.. Mobile News Network – News aggregator of some sort MotionX-Poker – dice game – see below for link NearPics – See if anyone has posted any pictures based on your location. Not sure how well this will work on the older iPhone NetNewsWire – my favorite news aggregator has a native client People – white pages lookup application Save Benjis – application to do online shopping/comparison – useful when you are physically shopping and you want a quick cost comparison. Shazam – application that tell you what song is playing by listening to it over the iPhone mic. Spinner Prologue – maze game Travelocity TravelTools – tools from Travelocity – flight arrival times/delays, etc. WHERE – application to give you a map of popular places like all the nearby Starbucks. Zenbe Lists – List application
The only one I purchased was MotionX-Poker. Check out the video here and you’ll buy it too.
I wasn’t very productive today as I’ve been reading all these articles and applications. I suspect that tomorrow will be the same.
My super dependable Linksys WRT-54G (v1.1) finally gave in. I spent an entire morning last week with my cable provider troubleshooting my Internet outage as I couldn’t believe that it could the one device that hasn’t caused me any issues for years. I only upgraded the firmware once to version 2.2 and ran fine for a very very long time. Strangely enough I think I may have cause the device to fail as two weeks before hand I had did decide to upgrade the firmware to 4.21.1. Don’t ask why – I really don’t know why I did it. The latest firmware had QoS abilities, etc. but nothing I really needed.
In any event, it ‘died’. I did ‘argue’ with the cable companies tech support as they had me changing out the cables and splitters and whatnot. C’mon! when was the last time a cable went bad on you? whatever.
So it was time to upgrade. Since I switched the entire household to Macs, I figure I’ll pay the extra premium, drink a little more kool-aid, and buy the Apple Airport Extreme Base Station. Since I have a house filled with people who cannot live without the Internet, I had to run over to the local Apple store at the mall. Pretty fast transaction – I like that they have those hand-held checkout devices so that you don’t have to live in that never-ending line at the Genius Bar.
So you can read all about the Airport Extreme Base Station in the link above. I’ll just give you my impressions and why I bought it.
Reasons to buy it:
1) it’s pretty – since the device will be located in my office, I didn’t want/need to see a device that look technical like the old styled Linksys devices. If Apple does one thing right it’s packaging.
2) 802.11n-level wireless – although it’s still yet to be passed as a standard, I really wanted to jump in on the 802.11n wagon. I didn’t want to run into any problems with trying to use 802.11n-level wireless with the MacBooks and the new device. If I go with Apple, chances are I won’t have a problem. In addition, when the standard is passed and there are any updates, since I stuck with one vendor, I shouldn’t have any issues.
3) Gigabit switch and wan – not too many vendors offer both a gigabit switch for the local area network AND a gigabit port for the WAN side. I maybe dreaming here as I didn’t do a lot of research here, but I don’t recall seeing too many.
4) USB port – many routers have this. However, the Apple version is rumored to allow you to use any harddrive connected to that port to be used as a Time Machine device. Something I may do in the future if I don’t want to continue to run the Leopard Server.
At the end of the day, reason 1 and 2 are the big reason for me buying a much more expensive device than I needed to.
Here is something they don’t tell you about the device: YOU CANNOT CONFIGURE THIS THING VIA A NETWORK CABLE. or at least it’s not apparent. I had to use the MacBook Pro to set up the device. Another nugget – you have to install the Airport utility in order to configure the device! No built in web-server! What a pain!
Since I was using a new wireless device, I decided to upgrade my security protocol to WPA2 Personal instead of WEP. So I had to go to all the machines in the house and reconfigure them. Wasn’t as bad as I thought.
What struck me as a surprise was the number of ways you can configure the device. You can used it not only be your wireless network – but you can also configure it to extend an existing wireless network (provided you are using another AirPort Extreme.) You do have the ability to configure quite a lot of settings – more than I thought a company as controlling as Apple would let you do. For instance, you can configure the strength of your wireless signal so that you can limit the range of the network. At 100%, it doesn’t give me any more than my WRT did — but its cool to see that you limit the size of your broadcast.
Believe it or not, this router was the hardest thing I’ve ever bought from Apple to configure. I guess because of the flexibility of the device and the huge variances of networks out there made the wizard-led configuration process more challenging. I assume that it was the best that Apple could do – but I was actually wanting something more dumb-down that would allow me to manually make these changes rather than having being led through my choices.
Another thing that struck me as odd – the internal firewall on the device. You don’t hear much about it. Is it stateful? or what? How can I change it? etc. Apple does mention on their website that the firewall is there – but I can’t find much information on it. There is a configuration page in the Airport utility that allows you to change some of the firewall settings (port forwarding, etc.) But I feel that I have to put my faith in Apple’s hands here and that Steve knows better than me.
In any event, the router works. All the MacBooks are blazingly fast -even with the upgraded security protocols. I’m pretty happy with the purchase. I do want to get my hands on the Airport Express Basestation – I should be able to keep that one upstairs to further strengthen the network connections there – or take it on the road and make that hotel room wired access wireless.
I started the summer thinking that I would be taking a lot of photographs on my Nikon D80 – the truth of it is that I haven’t found a ton of time. The few opportunities that did pop up, I either didn’t have my camera on me, or the conditions weren’t exactly right (major downpour, etc.) However, none of this has prevented me from buying more stuff for my camera!
Going into the July 4th weekend I thought I would try my hand at some taking some shots of fireworks. My family was invited to spend the 4th watching some fireworks put on by the local township. We attempted this last year, but we arrived after the local township had closed off the roads. In any event, to prepare for the event, I had went ahead and purchased a Nikon MC-DC1 Remote cord. I picked it up at Amazon and while I was there, I decided to pick up a Nikon ML-L3 Remote Control.
The Nikon MC-DC1 Remote cord is a relatively simple device. You don’t really need to read the instructions! (well.. yes you do.) I did read the instructions and it does say that you should not plug the cord into your camera while the power was on. Easy enough instructions to follow. The cord has one button on it with a slider attached to it. The slider will allow you to keep the button depressed until you unlock the slider. Keep in mind if you do this you may want to go full manual on your camera and set the shutter speed to Bulb – otherwise, it’s not very helpful.
The Nikon ML-L3 Remote Control was a impulse buy, but I thought it would nice to have instead of relying on the timer function of the camera. I hate using things like that – it reminds me of cheesy movie scenes. “Hey everyone get ready for the shot!” And then Dad runs around to join the group, etc. I rather be the cool guy with the remote. The remote basically has one button on it. To prep it, you basically pull the plastic tab that allows the battery to contact the remote. Then set you camera up for remote control and viola! instant remote.
The setup of the remote control makes me curious of how many people accidentally set off someone else’s camera at popular tourist locations. I recently went to Walt Disney World and the most popular camera I saw there was the Nikon D80 with the 18-200mm VR zoom lens. I think there were more of the D80s than point and shoots!
In any event the devices seem to work well. I haven’t been able to used them for any real shooting as the July 4th fireworks were under a constant drizzle/rain. So I was too chicken to break out the camera. oh well.. next time.
