Jun 12
adminApple, Tech, iPhone .Mac, Apple, iPhone, Mobile Me, MobileMe
The day apple released the iPhone, and in the process, provided only minimal support for its own .Mac service – I was perplexed. What the heck were they thinking? Every other Apple solution allowed for total syncing of Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks, and more. Why didn’t the iPhone? In the age of ActiveSync, Blackberry Enterprise, and other solutions offering full sync of at least email, contacts, and calendars it makes no sense. The iPhone seemed a perfect match for .Mac services, and therefore a point of discontent as a .Mac user. More
Jun 03
adminMedia, Tech Apple TV, AppleTV, CNET, Crankygeeks, Diggnation, Geekbrief, HD Video, Internet TV, Revision3, Tekzilla, Video Podcast
I don’t know about you, but I am a big video podcast consumer. I subscribe to a long list of video podcasts, from various publishers, and stream them to my 50″ TV (Apple TV style). It works great, and I am slowly moving away from viewing “traditional” TV.
I have been doing this for a while, and have noticed some things.
First, I am surprised how few podcasts do HD, or at least higher-than-iPod quality streams. Second, I am surprised at how few of them are well produced. Third, very few of them offer an array of options, designed to meet the modern consumer where they are, irrelevant of platform.
What I have also noticed, is how well Revision3 seems to be tackling all of these. More
May 29
adminTech horde, imp, open-source, RoundCube, squirrelmail, webmail
Do you host your own domain(s)? Do you host your own email, too? If so, this might be of interest to you.
I have been long searching for a clean, efficient, functional, and pleasant open-source solution to a webmail front-end for my email. My particular hosting provider has SquirrelMail and Horde options built in. However, I have never been thrilled with either. They work (and Horde has many features), but in my opinion, they are old and not user friendly.
Recently, my provider gave its users access to SimpleScripts, which automates the install of various web solutions, such as RoundCube. More
May 29
adminTech Bill Gates, BillGates, Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, SteveBallmer, Vista, Windows 7, Windows7
Microsoft has experienced less than ideal response with their newest desktop operating system, Vista. What is interesting in this, is that Vista is not a bad operating system, and there are many positive aspects to its design (security, backups, explorer improvements, etc). It seems that the problems for Vista are twofold. More
May 10
adminTech 3.0, Beta, Native, Open Office, OS X, Sun
Have you been watching the progress of Open Office the past few years? Yea, me too. They have been working on an ever-improving alternative to Microsoft’s dominant solution. While the development has steadily moved forward, those of us in the Mac community have been frustrated with the non-native support. You could run it on OS X, but it required the X11 window environment. While this may not seem like much, it is. It means slow performance at the very least, and excessive use of ram memory.
Things have finally changed in the world of Open Office. More
Apr 06
adminApple, Tech Lots of apps, Maximum Applications on OS X, OS X
I read an article today on Gizmodo (actually, It was more of seeing a screenshot), about someone claiming to have 150 applications going on their Macbook Pro with 4GB of ram. They included this screenshot to “prove” it. Several commenters pointed out that there weren’t 150 different apps going, and not even close to that number of things actually showed in the dock.
I thought to myself, “I wonder what this little laptop can do?”. More
Apr 02
adminApple, iPhone Fix iPhone, iPhone, iPhone Broken, Jailbreak iPhone, Recover iPhone
I have had my iPhone since the product was first released. I have really enjoyed it, and I have always been interested in the updates Apple brings. I have also played around with the “Jailbreaking” process, which allows you to apply 3rd party applications and modifications to the iPhone.
For a while now, Apple has been secretly working on the iPhone 2.0 software. Not secretly in the sense that nobody knows, but secretly in the sense that there is no real detail about it, short of some screenshots.
Tonight, I did a search online for iPhone 2.0 beta. For the first time, there was a copy of the new beta firmware out. “SWEET”, I thought. I downloaded the file. More
Mar 22
adminApple, Tech Apple TV, Apple TV Problems, Apple TV Take 2, Apple TV Take Two, AppleTV, AppleTV Take 2, AppleTV Take Two
I’ve had an Apple TV for quite a while. It has always worked pretty well, but the new features offered in the “Take 2″ release, have made it that much better. However, I have some minor issues showing up with this update, that make me hope for “Take 2.1″ to be released.
First, I have seen my Apple TV lock up. This never happened to me in version 1, and it has happened twice for me in version 2. I just unplug it, plug it in, it reboots, and I am good.
Second, today for the first time, I had a problem that when I tried to play any video content on the Apple TV, it would just show a white screen. It acted as though it was playing video (noted by the progress bar on the bottom), but it was only play a white screen with no audio. This happened with TV shows and movies. I rebooted it, no luck. I tried to stream video from iTunes on another computer, no go.
I went to the apple support discussions, and found others having the same issues showing up in Take 2. Nobody has identified an official solution, but some have contacted Apple about it.
My fix was simple. I did a factory restore, which takes it back to v1. I then ran the update to v2 again, and then re-paired to my iTunes library. All the content is synced again, and working fine. I am hoping this problem doesn’t reoccur.
It seems as though the number of people starting to see issues in this update are growing. User beware.
Mar 20
adminTech Free Firewall Software, IPCop, IPCop Firewall, Linux Firewall
It has been quite a while since I took an old PC, and loaded one of the various “Linux” firewall solutions. I had been using a Cisco Pix 506E firewall for a very long time, but it finally pooped out on me. As a stop-gap solution, I hooked my Airport Extreme directly to my cable modem, and worked from there.
While the basic functionality was ok, it lacked some features I wanted. I wanted to track bandwidth usage, I wanted a decent Intrusion Detection System (IDS), and I wanted better control over port forwarding, etc. This threw me back into the world of free, linux-based, firewall solutions that run on a PC. More
Mar 10
adminApple, Tech, iPhone Beta, iPhone, iPhone 2.0, iPhone Enterprise, Popular
“Isn’t the iPhone already big?”, you ask. Well, sort of. In the smart phone market it is beginning to see a decent percentage and is in second place to Blackberry. That’s good news, and is a good sign for us early adopters, who from day one hoped that Apple’s first attempt into the cell phone business would pan out.
While the news is good around the iPhone, I dare say it is going to get a lot better (and I don’t say it because I own one). More
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