Category: Tech

Palm Pre: iPhone Killer or Dud in the Making?

The Pre is hitting shelves at Sprint stores on June 6th.

Yes, I really did say Sprint. Sprint, with its shrinking customer network. Sprint with its crappier than Verizon customer service. Sprint, with its “cheap” calling plans. Sprint with its cellular coverage that is so poor that it’s the reason that Verizon, AT&T and T Mobile are the taking the carrier world by storm in North America. Sprint had its chance. I’m surprised they’re still in business and admit it, so are you.

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Every Tweeter’s Nightmare: Scheduled Down Time

So… here I am. Twitter is down for scheduled maintenance and I have nothing to do. I feel like I used to in the days when our Internet access would go out because the phone company was working on the lines in the area. Naked, useless, listless, alone and worst of all…

…I am so bored that I think my head is going to start spinning.

In order to keep myself entertained, I had planned to clean the house, but for some reason I am glued to my mac. I can’t seem to get the motivation to get away and pick up socks out of the family room floor because well… twitter’s down and waiting for it to come back up just seems like THE thing to do! I mean after all, there are people that @replied to me just before Twitter went offline and dammit! I have to answer them! I MUST!!!

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E-Reader Debate Decided: Why I Hate My New Kindle

My wonderful husband chose to get me a Kindle 2 for our anniversary this year. I felt so shocked. I hadn’t quite made up my mind on what was the right e-reader for me, he had spoken out harshly against the Kindle, but when I opened the box, I just stared at it, sort of numb. Of course, I kissed him a lot and truly appreciate the gift. I immediately slid my new Kindle into its cover and downloaded some books from Feedbooks and went to town. So if you see my “reading list” page expanding rapidly this month… you now know why.

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Life is Different in Mac Land

A dear friend of mine, and I call him that in spite of all the arguments we’ve had lately, has been considering the idea of getting a Mac. I think part of the appeal to him is that Macbooks are lightweight, versatile and well, he’s probably heard more than a bit from me telling him to just dive in and drink the kool-aid, but we’ve run into a few problems that have caused him to drop names at me like, “Mactard” and this drives me insane, and oddly enough, he finds this amusing. I think the guy gets a kick out of seeing me get passionate about the things I love.

When I first got my mac, I was confused about some things. My macbook is the first mac I have ever owned. I’ve used a couple, but those were always in school labs because Apple donated computers to public institutions for years. I had never had to seriously live with Mac OS before and I didn’t understand how to do very simple things and once I was told how to do it, I felt like a complete idiot because it seemed so obvious to me afterward.

One of the first issues I ran into was installing software.

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Kindle App v. Stanza: Round 1!

I’ve been reading ebooks with Stanza on my iPhone since early January. I had never honestly entertained the idea of reading ebooks, until I hit a huge reading phase and realized that as I’ve gotten older, it’s gotten harder to hang on to hefty hardbacks. After a while, it makes my hands hurt to hang onto a paperback in such a way that I don’t crack the spine, which, as all good readers know, eventually causes the pages of the book to fall out.

For eons, Stanza has been the de facto standard for e book reading on the iPhone, and I was very happy with how it worked. Text colors and font sizes were completely customizable to make reading easier on the eyes. Tapping to either side of the screen advanced pages forward or backwards. Accessing the menu was done through a simple tap in the center of the screen. There was also the advantage of having direct download access to the entire width and breadth of the Gutenberg project without having to sign into an account. Stanza is just incredibly intuitive to iPhone users. It works like an iPhone user expects an iPhone app to work. So pitting yourself up against something that just plain works is a pretty brave thing to do.

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Johnny and the Popcorn Popper

The world has become an interesting place over the last 15 years. I didn’t know what was going to happen when I looked at the world and wondered what amazing changes were going to take place in my lifetime, but if I had to pick one… I’d say it was the internet.

It has really changed everything that we do and the way we think about doing it. Thus begins the story of Johnny and the Popcorn Popper. I’d like to preface the story by saying that any similarities to persons living or dead, is purely coincidental and almost assuredly, this story was not inspired by people that I follow on twitter or their escapades in the newsroom. Absolutely nothing to do with it. Definitely not.

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Top 10 Reasons I Won’t Give You a Twitter Followback.

For those of us that tweet, getting new followers is a bittersweet event. There is that moment when you think, “Wow! Cool! Look at this! I’ve picked up ten followers in the last 24 hours! That’s great! People really care what I have to say!” and then you go to look at the people that followed you and you find that most of them are places like JimBob’sShoeShack, or Kedida’sLovelyHandMadeHandGunSales and you know… you have been plagued by the vague, but ever present.. twitspammer.

I’m sure that top 10 lists like this abound on the internet, and every blogger that tweets has written one, but I felt that for the sake of my sanity, I had to write mine as I blocked and reported ten spammers to twitter admins today alone. One of whom, only tweeted links to his ebay sales page… and somehow thought I would be interested in an xbox 360 controller, even though there is absolutely no mention of the console on my user info, or in my tweets.

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Smartphone Experts HD Skin Case

SEHDSkin1 Shopping for a case for my iPhone 3g has been a nightmare. I really enjoyed my case for my previous gen iPhone, the Inno case by Seidio. That case had everything I wanted. It was a hard sided case with a grippy texture to it so that the phone didn’t slip out of my hands. It was felt lined on the inside, so it didn’t chew up my phone and it fit around the bezel of the phone so that it could be used without peeling up a screen protector.

I know that’s a tall order for a case, but Seidio performed the job beautifully and then they brought out the Inno II for the iPhone 3g, which I honestly don’t like as much. There’s a hole in the back of the case to expose the apple on the back of the phone, which to me just screams dust and scratch magnet, and then there’s the fact that they’ve introduced new colors and I’m not really a fan of any of them. It’s just not as nice a case from my perspective on things. So here I am, shopping for something that I like as much as the Inno and so far, I’ve been disappointed.

But I think I’ve found something that may have changed my mind, just a little bit.

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The Internet Should be Platformless

It’s not hard to notice that the local news media outlets and their outdated websites has become one of my pet peeves. I suppose I should be a bit more honest about why this is a pet peeve of mine though. You see, it really boils down to the fact that I have a satellite dish and they charge extra for access to local TV stations, and signal for the local TV stations where I live is laughable. I suppose that’s the way of things when you live on the side of a mountain, but you would think that these things would improve with time as technology advanced. Here, they don’t. I’ve lived in this town for over a decade and I have never lived in a part of town where you could get good local television signal. When I first moved here, cable didn’t offer the local stations as part of any of their packages and then, when they did add them, you had to pay extra for them. So we just sort of gave up on network television and moved on to other things because we were broke then.

Now that we’re not, we honestly don’t see the point in paying our provider an extra 15$ a month to have something that we should be able to easily get over the airwaves for free, if the signal were decent enough for us to view it up here without special signal boosting equipment on our house, I’d watch, but since it’s not… we don’t. I’ve learned to deal with it, but I compensate for not being able to watch the news, by visiting the local news sites from the web.

I don’t know how many homes are like mine, but I do suspect that the number isn’t small.

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i Love Katamari!

I just got word that Bandai Namco released i Love Katamari for the iPhone on the App store.

It’s 7.99$ and the word on the ground is, the thing was optimized for the iPod Touch, which has a faster processor than the iPhone, but still… Katamari crack for iPhone lovers!!! WOOHOO!

I might have to go drop 8$ on this ridiculous little game.

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