This and That

Are You Still Reading on Paper?

2009-06-05T21:53:00.002-04:00

A few years ago if you asked me what books I had read in the last 15 years, I could tell the title of two I had read. I have since moved to a city that allows for public transportation. I began reading to pass the time while on the train, but soon got hooked. I did get annoyed pretty quick about how much room books take up in your house as well as your bag to and from work. Another thing that was really difficult was standing on a bus or train that is packed with people, and trying to flip the page without falling over! This lead me to begin my research on the eBook readers that people have been talking about.

There are really two brands of eBook readers that are ready for prime time, the Amazon Kindle, and the Sony Reader. I did my research and I finally decided to go with the Sony Reader PRS-505.

The two main reasons that went with the Sony PRS-505 over the Amazon Kindle are:

The Sony is thinner than the Amazon Kindle. This is a huge benefit for me as I like to travel with the least amount of bulk as possible.
The Sony allows you to load it up with PDF's, TXT files, Microsoft Reader files, and Open eBook files.

The question I am asked every time I am on an airplane, is "how do you like reading on that thing?" Well let me tell you. I LOVE IT. The e-ink technology that it uses for the screen is amazing. It actually looks like you are reading paper rather than a computer screen. I was extremely worried about this as I often find it difficult and straining on the eyes to read long papers on a typical computer screen. I can (and have) read for hours without my eyes becoming strained at all!

I recommend the eBook reader 100%

ÜberTwitter Beta-3 Almost Ready!!!

2009-06-05T20:52:00.002-04:00

As you know, I am a huge proponent of ÜberTwitter, which is why I am extremely happy by this news from the folks over at ÜberTwitter.

ÜberTwitter Beta-3 is being readied for release. This release deepens support for Twitter features and takes further advantage of the capablities available in your BlackBerry device.

Just a few of the new features/updates are:

Cleaned up and modernized the user interface
Greatly reduced battery drain!
Ability to delete one of your tweets
Merge of both @Replies/Mentions as well as Direct Messages into your timeline
Integrated BlackBerry Maps when viewing a Tweet, works just like the myloc.me web site. This will view the location of the tweet if it includes a 'myloc.me' or 'mypic.me' or 'myvid.me' URL, OR will use the location in the profile if it includes a latitude/longitude pair. This includes support for the iphone twitter clients which routinely put the geolocation in the Twitter profile location field!
When viewing a tweet which contains a latitude/longitude pair in the location field we will now provide the 'human readable' address of that location, also works for iPhone geolocations in the Twitter profile location field.

To Learn more visit the ÜberTwitter website. www.ubertwiter.com

WeFollow.com a User Powered Twitter Directory

2009-05-27T10:16:00.004-04:00

What is WeFollow.com? Kevin Rose, founder of Digg created the site WeFollow.com which is a user-powered twitter directory.

I have to admit, i did not stumble upon this myself. @JimNorton (my favorite comedian) mentioned it in one of his tweets. OK that is all fine, but what in the world is a user-powered twitter directory? Well from what i gather it is a very nice search able directory of twitter users. These users are categorized by different tags or categories. The user-powered part comes in by the fact that you have to add yourself to this directory.

You sign-up and give yourself up to three tags (example is Blogger, Tech, Radio, Celebrity, etc) and you will be placed into those categories. This site is a real nice way to search out more people to follow in your area of interest.

The one downside to this site is however the tags are self-assigned, so I could say i am a rockstar, celebrity, and author. I however am none of the above, but i would show up there. I guess we just need to trust that people won't do something like that. haha.

None the less, I have found this site to be a very good idea and helpful in finding like-minded people, or groups.

I would love for you to check it out and leave some feedback on your thoughts!

http://wefollow.com/

What does your Blackberry Tweet with?

2009-05-26T08:21:00.005-04:00

Unfortunately, there are not a whole lot of options when it comes to using twitter via a blackberry device. The main client that seemed to have the majority of the users was TwitterBerry. That name is used so often, that i think a lot of people just use it by default. However, I am here to tell you that a new product has arrived, and it is only in beta right now. ÜberTwitter is a great product that delivers a fully functional twitter client for the Blackberry. ÜberTwitter is not just another text based twitter updating client, it allows you to actually use twitter as twitter was intended.

some of the features are:

Integrated ability to upload pictures to a site dedicated to serving ÜberTwitter users
Ability to optionally update your Google Talk status with your last tweet, making your tweets reach a wider audience then just people following you on Twitter
Automatically update your location based on the cell tower information provided by your phone, no GPS hardware required, click here for an example
Send videos embedded in your tweet
See everyone who is tweeting near you

If you are interested in downloading the client, point your BlackBerry browser to http://www.ubertwitter.com/bb/download.php. The ÜberTwitter client supports BlackBerry devices running 4.2.1, 4.3, 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7.

Which App do you use?

Link Your Existing Facebook Account with OpenID

2009-05-19T14:13:00.001-04:00

If you have or haven't heard yet, Facebook has become an OpenID relaying party. To learn more about OpenID visit their website at http://www.OpenID.net. The down and dirty of what it means is that if you are already logged into a website like Google, Yahoo, Myspace, you will not have to login to Facebook. I had a few people ask me how to utilize this if they all ready had a Facebook account.

It is actually quite easy, just follow the following steps.

Log into Facebook as normal.

Click on Settings ~ Account Settings.

Click on Linked Accounts.

Select your type of OpenId account. (Google/Yahoo/Myspace/Vidoop/Myopenid)

Enter your credentials to allow facebook to link to this account.

Select another account if you would like to link more than one, or your DONE now go on about your day.

Upgrading Portable Ubuntu

2009-05-19T13:35:00.000-04:00

Portable Ubuntu comes with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) installed. While this is a perfectly acceptable version, I am the kind of person that wants the latest and greatest. I have been to multiple forums on how to upgrade Ubuntu, but I have not found any that completely worked for me. I will not guarantee this will work for you; however it did work 100% of the time and on multiple machines for me.

Increase the System File Size
The first thing that you will need to do is to increase the size of the file system. Portable Ubuntu comes with a 2GB file system, and that is not enough to even upgrade to 8.10.

1. Make sure you do not have Portable Ubuntu open

2. On your Windows machine, open a windows console.

3. Navigate to the Portable Ubuntu folder you downloaded and then go to images folder.

Example: c:\portable_ubuntu\images

4. Create a new image file by typing the following:

fsutil file createnew more_space.img /size in bytes/

For example, if you want to add 4Gb more (giving you 6Gb total):

fsutil file createnew more_space.img 4294967296

5. Join this file with the root filesystem image by typing the following:

copy /b rootfs.img+more_space.img rootfs_.img

6. Next, you need rename rootfs_.img to rootfs.img

7. Now run Portable Ubuntu by running the run_portable_ubuntu.bat

8. When Portable Ubuntu is ready, type in a terminal:

sudo su *default pwd is 123456

resize2fs -f /dev/cobd0

Upgrade Ubuntu

1. From inside of Ubuntu, go to System ~ Administration ~ Software Sources

2. If you would like to you can change the location from where you will download from the first tab

3. On the updates tab you need to select “Normal Releases”

4. Close down the Software Sources Window

5. Go to System ~ Administration ~ Update Manager

Above the updates it will show you that there is a new version available.

6. Click Upgrade

* Note you can only upgrade one version at a time, so you will have to upgrade to 8.10, and then begin these steps again to upgrade to 9.04

How to cache your Slacker stations

2009-05-18T19:48:00.000-04:00

If you are reading this, it is either because you have slacker and want to learn more about it, or you have a blackberry and you asked me how to cache your music. The more likely reason is that you asked me for help, and I got sick of repeating myself so I told you to go here for instructions!

The main reason that I have come to love Slacker over other streaming music services is the fact that you can cache your stations (if you have a blackberry) So, the down and dirty to what that actually means is that slacker will actually download music onto your phone to allow you to play it directly from the media card, rather than having to wear your battery down and eat up your data plan by streaming the music over the internet. Go a head, I dare you to try and play Pandora while in an airplane or on the subway, etc. That is why I love slacker so much.

There are many other features that slacker give you over other services, but I won’t get into them here. You can check it out yourself from their website. http://www.slacker.com/

How to cache your slacker stations onto your blackberry.

(I am assuming you already have slacker installed before you begin this process)

You need to make sure you have a memory card installed in your blackberry and that it has at least 500MB or more of available space.

Verify that your BlackBerry’s memory is set up to support Mass Storage Mode Support. (that is in Options/Memory)

Start up the BlackBerry Slacker application.

Begin to play a station that you would like to cache.

Press the BlackBerry menu button and select “Cache Station” You will then get a message telling you that you have successfully cached the station, and next time you connect via USB, the music will download.

Plug your BlackBerry into the USB port of your computer.

After your computer recognized the phone it will show up in My Computer as a new drive. Double click to open up the drive, and then run the synclauncher.exe file.

Slacker will begin to download your stations onto your memory card.

After you have download the music, start up the BlackBerry Slacker application

You will now have a category called Cached Stations. Click on that category and you can now listen to your stations “internet free”...

Portable Ubuntu

2009-05-18T11:29:00.000-04:00

I know I can not be the only one who is torn between liking Ubuntu Linux , and not having the time or the resources to fully convert over. When I am at home I just confuse the wife and children on which computer they can use, which they will know how to use, and which one they will screw up if they use. I came across what has quickly become the answer for my needs. What I also found out is that not too many people know about this product, so I want to share my thoughts and experiences with it. I hope that if it gets a bigger following, then maybe we can improve on its abilities, versions, etc.

Many people have come up with ways to run linux inside of windows utilizing some type of virtual install, or separate install on a flash drive that you have to boot into. I have done this in the past but my issue is that, at work I need to be productive and my work environment is strictly windows. I also prefer to stay away from installing too many things on the company computer. The answer is Portable Ubuntu!

Have you ever been on a computer that was not yours and you needed to get some work done. Maybe you didn’t have permission to install software on it, or you didn’t feel comfortable installing new software on someone else’s machine. Have you wished you had the ability to quickly edit a photo in gimp, or log into pidgin for some chatting, maybe create or open a document in open office that you have been working on without the hassle of installing software to just get some work done? The answer is Portable Ubuntu!

Ok, enough marketing and product promotion… I am not trying to become the next “Sham Wow” guy here.

Portable Ubuntu for Windows is an Ubuntu system running as a Windows application. Now the cool thing here is that this is not a virtual instance. All Ubuntu applications appear as a window on the Windows desktop. All of the applications you have open or use show up in the windows task bar just like any other program. If you open up Firefox to do some surfing, you would have a hard time remembering that is wasn’t actually installed on the windows box. Portable Ubuntu even allows you to copy and paste between Ubuntu and Windows applications.

The beautiful thing about this product is that there is no lengthy install. I can explain the install process inside of one sentence (and not one of my typical extremely long, run-on sentences either). To install Portable Ubuntu on a windows computer, you simply download the self extracting file off the web, extract the files, and double click on the run_portable_ubuntu.bat file. Ok so that was a little long, but you get the idea. Extremely simple, there is absolutely no installing of this product. It all runs inside of the extracted folder, which means that you can also copy Portable Ubuntu to your thumb drive and carry it with you.

Once you start up Portable Ubuntu, you are running Linux. You can do just about everything you can in a typical install. If you want to upgrade to a new version, install software, install updates, you can. There are no restrictions (except for the initial 2gb virtual hard drive) on what you can do.
If you are still interested in learning more about Portable Ubuntu, I plan to post a few more things showing tips and tricks that I have learned while using this product over the last few months.

To just go ahead and download the thing, visit Portable Ubuntu’s website at http://portableubuntu.demonccc.cloudius.com.ar/

First Blog

2009-05-15T15:17:00.001-04:00

Alright, so here we go, my first blog!

I have been in the technology business for the last 13 years. Wow that makes me old, or actually still young concidering how early we are getting into technology these days. I absolutly love new technology when it comes to gadgets, however i am usually pretty slow when it comes to the online trendy things. I just got on the twitter bandwagon recently, facebook just a year ago, and linkedin (how long has that been around anyway?)

I plan to use this blog to talk about random items in my life, my job, and anything else i decide i want to write about. So check back everyonce in a while, you may find something of interest!

Evernote

2009-05-15T15:11:00.000-04:00

At work, home, on the go, etc I am constantly looking for a good way to take notes. I have had a "smart" phone for the last 4 years or so, and believe it or not, there has not been any note taking software that stands out. Open door, step in Evernote! Well finally we have something that stands out. I finally found software that helps in note taking that is worthwhile.

A quick definition straight off of Wikipedia

Evernote is a software application that allows users to capture information of various types, including text notes, mobile phone snapshots, printed and handwritten text within images, web clips, and digital ink. All data added to Evernote are run through a series of recognizers that make any text within the various note formats searchable. The application uses a continuous "roll of paper" metaphor for its user interface. Additionally, users may create folders, categories and notebooks. Users can also tag notes.

While that definition is a nice one, I want to clarify on one small fact. Evernote is not just a typical ?software? application. It is a PC application,Mac Application, a Web Application, and a Mobile application. The exciting thing about this application is that it effortlessly syncs your notes no matter which of their applications you are connected to. Once you have created a FREE account, you are good to go. Just start taking notes/ screen shots, web clippings, etc and boom your notes follow you where ever you go. Come on now, this is the age of technology; you don?t need to remember anything anymore! Ahhh, being lazy :wink:

I myself have a Blackberry Storm, and am extremely happy that Evernote just came out with an app this week. I have been using it nonstopsince I discovered it. The Blackberry app allows you to create standard text notes; photo snapshots, voice recordings, and even regular file attachments. After you create your note, it is automatically uploaded to the Evernote servers allowing you to access it no matter what application you are using! *Note if you have a blackberry you can download this app through BlackBerry App World in the Productivity & Utility > Personal Organization category.

As I am sure youcan guess, Evernote also has an app for the iPhone. I cannot tell you from personal experience that the app works as well as the BlackBerry version, but if I know Apple, itdoes. The app can be found in the App Store as well. What I read online, the iPhone version does all the same things as the BlackBerry version, except it has onenice feature that I wish the BlackBerry version had. There is an option that says you can ?Select notes for offline viewing? . When you try to look at an existing note on the BlackBerry, you are automaticallyc onnected to the internet and looking at your notes that are stored online. Being able to select notes for offline viewing would be extremely helpful for times when you are going to be traveling via airplane, or in areas known for little or no phone coverage. (maybe it is because of the wonderful AT&T coverage that Evernote put this option in).

Yes like anyother note taking software (cough cough, Microsoft OneNote) you can click onthe program and start typing away, but Evernote allows for so much more. Just a few of the nice features that you can do with Evernote are:

(stolen directly off of Evernote.com)

Create new notes using desktop, web, and mobile versions of Evernote
Take a snapshot using your camera phone or webcam. We'll even recognize thetext in the image.
Clip entire webpages, screenshots, and just about anything else you cancopy
Drag and drop content into the desktop clients for Mac and Windows
Email notes directly into your account using your personalized emailaddress
Scan receipts, recipes, tags, brochures, and anything else into Evernote
Record audio wherever you are and listen to it whenever you want
Send Twitter messages into Evernote

I have found Evernote to be extremely helpful in both my daily tasks atwork, but also in my personal life too. You never have to try to remember what items you needed to buy at thegrocery store again. I can either typeup a shopping list, or take a picture of the one that the sitter puts on thefridge!