The Syncing Apple

Browsing the net I came across a great site that answered some questions I had about the new firewall in Leopard. Using it now on the company macbook, and it’s nice. Having the 4 gigs of ram helps also. My poor macbook was pushed to the limit with just 2. The site is worth checking out- there are lots of good Mac tibits.

$250, 16Gb flash drive, 512Mb RAM, 7″ LCD, 2 lb., full keyboard. Runs Linux. Has Firefox and Openoffice, Skype. 3 USB ports, VGA out, SD card reader, ethernet, wifi, webcam. Linux.

On sale worldwide in August from Asus. Is this going to be a hit or what? I’ll pick one up for that. It’s less than the Nokia 800, and it has a keyboard. For when I need to do more typing that I can stand on my iPhone.

Nice hands-on review and many pictures at Notebookreview.com

Our boss at Comcast Interactive Media, Amy Banse talks about CIM:

3:00 into the interview is talk of fancast.com

So the site we’ve been working on at my new job was announced yesterday, in conjunction with the larger announcement that CIM (Comcast Interactive Media) has purchased Fandango. Fancast has been consuming all my time since I joined Comcast back in September, and it’s going to be cool destination.

As you can see, the announcement has caused quite a stir so far:

Posts that contain Fancast per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

I think the net is ready for something like fancast- and with CIM’s weight behind it, its going to be a fun ride. If you are looking to work on something cool, and live in Philadelphia drop me a line- we’re hiring and we have a lot more work to do on this.

Normally, I don’t like little flash games. Even normal games, for me, require a delicate balance playability and strategy before I grow tired and bored with them. But I stumbled across DTD a few days ago and gave it a shot. A few hours later, I realized that DTD is so addictive, so engrossing, that it is nearly indescribable. There is a nice Tutorial that is worth reading, but the game is one of those dead simple games that can played over and over again. I’ve spent whole afternoons trying to best my score of about 5500.

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted here- but it’s nothing I’m sure you haven’t read on dozens of other blogs. I’m in a gadget deficit, and I switched jobs to one that keeps me much busier than I was before. I’m now working back in an office, for Comcast Interactive Media, and I enjoy being back that environment, having spent the last few years working from home. Luckily, getting to work is just a 15 minute Trolley ride from my houst in West Philly. Of course as soon as I gave up the work-at-home and started back at a corporate gig there has been an interesting upsurge in communal working groups- there is one here in Philly. But for now, Comcast is cool and it’s a small tight group, and we’re working on interesting web properties that will launch soon.

The big change is that I don’t have enough time or energy to mess with the pile of servers in my basement that have been hosting things for the past few years. And Comcast gives me free Cable & Internet, but I don’t get static IPs. So I’m canceling my trusty ADSL and my longtime DCAnet static ips…. and moving my web properties to Dreamhost. So far they have a really inexpensive pricing and a decent web-interface to manage Domain regs, DNS hosting and web hosting. I’m moving all my domains (regs) away from the horrible NSI to DH. I also moving away from keeping my DNS at DNSpark (they have been the target of a few DDOS attacks which have crippled them). Soon everything should be neatly located in one web-control panel. In can get 1 year of web hosting (unlimited domains and tons of space) for about $120, and there are cupons all over the web that give you $97 off the first year…. cheap. Moving over Domain regs is just $10 for a year. Way cheaper than NSI.

I have lots of postings floating around, and I’ll try to get them down. My biggest lust right now is the N800 of course, but so far I’ve been able to hold off, I hate to just get it because then I’ll never use my 770 again. I guess I’ll have to find someone to give it to.

The AppleTV looks cool, but I need to upgrade my old 4:3 TV and get a new HD LCD as soon as I can convince my wife we really do need it.

I’ve been with Sprint for a while, and have had good phones and bad phones… but now I’ve just grown tired of carrying around the big Treo 650. I want a small phone. With my new job I don’t need access to my email — they provide me with a BlackBerry. But I want a phone that is not a total piece of crap, that is, I want a small phone and one that will sync with my computer so that I have all my contacts on the phone– I’m not going to type them all in via the interface on the phone. Also, it has to have good reception, as Sprint (and almost all carriers) in West Philadelphia is sketchy at best. I expect to get calls to my cell phone in my house. Which is asking for a lot apparently, in Philadelphia.
I was very happy to read recently that the Motorola KRZR, the smaller version of the Razr is coming to Sprint in November. So I’ll wait for that. The current crop of Sprint phones leave much to be desired. They are probably fine phones, if all you want to do is make calls with them- but try attaching a Sanyo or Samsung phone to a Macintosh. Those two have never made any effort to provide connectivity with your PC- Mac or XP. All the Motorola’s have had built in USB (as least, all the RAZRS and KRZRS).

So I wait.

Want a really excellent web experience with your 770? Want 300 free megs to host your blog, pictures, email and probably more? Check out http://my.opera.com. You can sign up for a free account and get all that stuff- plus it looks perfect and feels responsive using the Opera Mobile Browser on the 770. It should of course, seeing how its Opera that’s coding it.

Check out my page: nokia dreaming. Not too shabby eh?

If you join, link to me as a friend– I’m dillera.

I’ve settled on Blix for now. I really like how it has its CSS layout- the first layout that actually made sense to me. I’ve modified it a bit to better fit into the SyncingApple style, and I’ll make further tweaks as time permits. I really love how it handles the code by wrapping long code into the extra area- saves that ugly overtyping from happening.

While Blix was designed a while ago for WP 1.5 it seems to be doing pretty well in 2.0. Too bad the author has abandoned it.

Don’t forget to grab 1.1 - it was just released yesterday and it is a welcome improvement.

So I felt bad about all the people who maybe were going to use IE no matter what, so I just upgraded to the new WordPress 2.0, and the new K2 theme from BinaryBonsai.

So things are going to be in flux as I begin to mess with and screw up the CSS for this new theme. Enjoy.

I just realized that this site looks ghastly in IE. If you are using that browser please come back here using Firefox. It looks much nicer.

I really got into reading ebooks with my Toshiba e805, one of the first PocketPCs that sported a near-VGA screen. Reading on it was pleasant and very easy on the eyes. So I’ve been anxious for the 770 to take over as my primary ebook device– the beautiful screen is certainly up to it. So far I haven’t been disappointed in the least.

We are lucky enough to have two options on the 770 - Plucker and FBReader. I’ve looked at both and FBReader is the clear winner for the 770. FB is super quick, supports plucker formatted books and has a deeper set of options on the 770 than does the current Plucker viewer. The killer feature is landscape rotation- just click the center button on the 770. It’s amazing how fast the 770 and FB render pages– this is the speed that I would like to see on the 770 for all applications.

There are a few good places I’ve found for content.

• Plucker Books - get your books already plucked
• Mobile Read’s E-Book Resources Forum - this is a great place to watch for newly released works
• Manybooks
• 
  Project Gutenberg
  can now dynamically create plucker formats!

There was an interesting, passionate letter written by Roger Sperberg to Nokia- wherein he addressed many salient points regarding the 770 and ebookery, namely, that Nokia should be working on pre-loading a ebook reader app (FBreader) and free ebooks with the 770.

Fbreader and Plucker screen shots.

This is my first test from the Macintosh version of the OPML editor. Dave released a new version of wp.root yesterday and it seems to support catagories on your blog. So I’m trying it out. I read about it over at Nomadic Coder.

Wow, I didn’t realize that the editor understood a link- it just swallowed up that last href I typed out.

So while TomTom is cool for driving around and getting where I want to go, what about a real GPS? To really play with things like Google maps (by getting your own lat/long), for hiking and boating using TomTom on a Treo does little– if anything at all. So I got a Garmin Etrex Vista, which seemed like a nice balance of size, battery life (it’s not color) and function. So far I’ve been very happy with it. I used it to plot the boundaries of the local neighborhood, then plot the addresses of all the current members using the new Google Maps API. I’ve also used it on my jetski, and it’s been invaluable with the addition of the Garmin Blue Charts- the navigational charts that you can buy (rip off alert– plan to spend over $100 per chart– and you get less than you think- each chart is just an _area_ of the US for $100) and download onto the GPS. It is nice to have them however, when you are zipping along the water on a jetski or better yet something that can actually get stuck, like say a sailboat.