Apple Releases iPad!

This morning, I realized a little late that the State of the Union Address was today. For those of you that follow me on twitter, you might have noticed my tweet somewhere around 9 am this morning that read as follows: “LOL! comment on engadget: “I’m more excited about Job’s state of the union address than Obama’s… What does that say about us?” This was promptly picked up by the Obama twitter bot. The reality is that I realized that the state of the union address was today when I read that comment on Engadget.

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My Ten Essential iPhone Apps

Well… it had to happen sooner or later. I think I have posted one of these before, but it needs an update and I have a few folks on twitter asking me the question: What are your favorite apps?

Well, here they are. These are the apps I can’t live without. Post yours in the comments! I’m always interested in looking for a new app!

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The Morning Routine

The morning routine in this house doesn’t get deviated from, even on weekends. This is why I was up at 6:30 am this morning. Mugen must be let out, must have breakfast and must have a play time while I read my forums and drink my coffee.

It will take me 20 or 30 minutes to write this post in between sips of coffee and finding where Mugen’s lost his wubba this time and tossing it for him, but it wears him down so he will take a short nap in his crate while I shower… and then the fun begins.

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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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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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Smartphone Experts HD Skin Case

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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Netflix Silverlight Plugin for Mac is in the Wild.

Netflix announced that its silverlight plugin that allows Mac users to use the Netflix Instant Watch feature is available today, as in like.. right now. If you go to netflix from a mac, and click on “Watch now!” on any instant play title, it forwards you to a page where you can download the silverlight plugin.

However… I think I am going to wait a week and see how this one shakes out first. The early reviews from beta testers of the Silverlight plug-in were not at all positive and one guy complained that he actually had to reboot his mac. Given than I haven’t had to reboot my mac once in the last week or shut it down, I find there to be something inherently wrong with that idea… so I’ll wait.

What about the rest of you mac users out there?

Are you brave enough?

Apple Pulls Down Antivirus Support Page

I can’t blog 24 hours a day, and I saw the news late last night that Apple had pulled down the support page that I linked to yesterday, saying that the page was old and outdated and that OSX contained features which made it resilient against viruses and exploits.

Apple made several good arguments about why antivirus software wasn’t necessary and could be detrimental to performance on the mac because antivirus software tends to be fairly intensive and hogs system resources that users could be using to get things done.

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Apple Says: Get Antivirus Protection

And honestly, coming from a pc, I wondered how I was going to make that work. Even though the mac is less susceptible to viruses, and I think this is primarily because there are less macs out there, it still makes sense to consider security when you put a computer on the internet. Of course, from Apple’s perspective, this is a win win situation.

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