Category Archives: Internet

Things I have come across on the net that I find interesting.

Google Sync

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Shortly after my last post, about moving to the cloud, I found Google Sync. With it, I’m able to sync GMail, Google Contacts and any editable Google Calendars to my iPhone. Because of all of this, I don’t plan on renewing my MobileMe account in a few months. I signed up for MobileMe because I liked the idea of instantly updating my Outlook contacts/appointments when I add/change a contact/appointment on my iPhone and vice versa. Ever since I got my Windows 7 PC, MobileMe hasn’t been syncing as well as it did on my Windows XP machine, especially with the calendars.

 

Moving To The Cloud

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In an effort to consolidate as much information as I can, I’ve decided to move everything over to Google. I’ve been using GMail ever since you needed an invite to open an account. Because of the experience I’ve had using GMail, I’ve decided to do more “stuff” in the “cloud”. All of my contacts have been imported into Google Contacts. All appointments and dates are now kept on Google Calendar, even though I have a few issues/complaints. Even though Google creates a separate calendar for my contacts’ birthdays and anniversariesevents, there is no way to view this calendar on my iPhone. I can only view my default calendar. Even though the calendar is named “Contacts’ Birthdays and Anniversaries”“Contacts’ Birthdays and Events”, it only displays birthdays.
I’ve even begun storing some spreadsheets on Google Docs. As I get more accustomed to it, I’ll store non-sensitive documents there also.
I’ve stored some photos on Picasa but still prefer Flickr instead. If Google allowed me to use some of the 7GB of storage they currently give me with GMail to store photos instead of allocating a separate 1GB for photos. For $25/yr, I get unlimited uploads and storage on Flickr. For $20/yr, I only get 80GB of storage on Picasa and I’m not even sure if I can upload videos to Picasa or if they only allow photos.
Once I get all this figured out, I plan on using Mozilla Thunderbird and Lightning to synchronize my email, appointments, etc to/from my home PC.

 

Web-based File Storage Services

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Lately, there has been a lot of talk about cloud computing, where most of the work is done on the Internet. One of the first uses of cloud computing has been web-based file storage services like Dropbox and FilesAnywhere. There are three main choices, that I know about right now, when it comes to online file storage (if you don’t count typical FTP/SFTP file servers, etc) – Box.net, Dropbox and FilesAnywhere.
Box.net offers 1GB of storage for free with a 25MB file size limit. For $10/month, you can upgrade to 5GB of storage, and a 1GB file size limit. You also have the ability to view the previous five versions of a file, with the paid membership. Right now, unfortunately, Box.net doesn’t have a utility to upload/sync files to their storage from a Windows, Mac or Linux computer, but they do have an iPhone app.
Dropbox offers 2GB of storage for free. Files uploaded to Dropbox via the desktop application have no file size limit. There is, however, a 300MB cap on files transferred via the website. For $10/month, you can upgrade to 50GB of storage; or for $20/month, you can upgrade to 100GB of storage. Dropbox keeps snapshots of every saved change in your Dropbox folder over the last 30 days. If you upgrade to one of their paid versions, they offer a service called Pack-Rat, which keeps an unlimited amount of previous versions and deleted files. Dropbox also offers an iPhone app.
FilesAnywhere offers 1GB of storage for free, and doesn’t appear to have a file size limit for uploading, but free accounts have download limits of 10MB per-file and 25 downloads/day.
I have an account with all three services, but if I had to choose only one, I would choose Dropbox. They even offer a way to get up to 3GB8GB of storage for free by getting other people to sign up. They add an extra 250MB of storage to both my account and the person who signed up, when they use a referral link.

 

Lack of Updates

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My recent lack of updates to this blog are mostly because I have been micro-blogging on Twitter. You can read my Twitter updates in the sidebar or click on the link to follow me. I wanted to make this post to make sure I had at least one post for May 2009.

 

Rudder vs Mint

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After reading about the money management site Rudder in an article on Lifehacker, I thought I would check it out and see if I liked it more than Mint. I’ve been using Mint to track all of my finances for quite some time now. I tried Quicken Online when it became free but, at the time, it didn’t have all of my financial institutions listed. I recently logged in and they have added the places where I have accounts which had been missing when I first joined. Like Quicken Online, Rudder doesn’t have all of my financial institutions listed. It, however, is only missing one, whereas Quicken Online was missing two. Rudder also can’t track loans. It can only keep track of checking, savings, and credit card accounts right now. When I gave it the info for my American Express login, it only returned two of my three Amex cards. An unreleased feature, which I would like to see on Mint, is Goals. They don’t give much information about it but, if I had to guess, I would say you would provide how much money you want to save towards a goal (first home, car, emergency fund, etc.) and when you would like to reach that goal, and it would tell you how much money you have to save each month to reach that goal. Nowadays, with automatic scheduled transfers, anyone can do that if their bank offers it.

 

Jailbreak

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I bit the bullet today and jailbroke my iPhone 3G using QuickPwn. I’ve been thinking about it for a while so I could record video and stream video to the Internet using Qik. Qik is supposed to have an approved app for the iPhone but Apple as yet to approve it. Some other neat things I am now able to include:

  • Themes
  • Five icons in the dock
  • Five columns in the springboard
  • Tethering – so I can surf the Internet on a regular computer using the connection on my iPhone

If Apple ever does finally release a firmware for the iPhone that includes video recording and/or approves the Qik app, I might switch back to an unjailbroken iPhone.

 

TwitterFon

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About three months ago, I was using Twitterific as my default Twitter client on my iPhone. I liked it except it didn’t separate incoming tweets from @replies and direct messages. TwitterFon has separate areas for each of these and it also shows the latest tweets since the last time you ran the program. When Twitterific updates their program, I may give it another chance even though the free version is ad supported.

 

New Digital Camera

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A few weeks ago I bought a Canon PowerShot A590IS digital camera from Newegg.com to replace my aging HP Photosmart 720. The HP was only 3MP, which was fine since I didn’t print many of the pictures I took. The Canon is an 8MP camera so I have the flexibility to print any photo I take. I wish the camera had GPS built-in so when I upload pics to Flickr, it would already be geotagged. I was thinking about getting the Eye-Fi Explore but I’m not too sure how accurate it would be only using WAPs. I wonder how long it will be before all cameras come with GPS built-in. If my iPhone can have GPS built-in, I don’t understand why camera manufacturers can’t find the room to put it into their models.

 

Twitterific

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In September of 2007, I signed up for Twitter but I hardly used it. In March of this year, I installed a plugin called Twitter Updater, in order to increase the number of tweets I made. This still didn’t get me into Twitter that much. I even signed up for a service called HelloTxt, which allowed me to update my status on multiple social networking sites at once. I hardly used this service too. After I got my iPhone, I installed an app called Twitterific which allows me to tweet using my iPhone and read tweets from the people I’m following. It wasn’t until about two weeks ago that I really got into Twitter. I used to block random people that were following me. Now, I’ll let anyone follow me, and if they seem to post interesting stuff, I’ll follow them in return.