Category Archives For Techie
Technology Marches On
First off, I’d like to offer my congratulations to our friends Jeremy and Angela on the official start of their new computer business, TrueTech. I wish them well in their endeavor!
Although we haven’t built anything as massive as the Biggses new HTPC, technology still marches on here in the Wood household.
By Peter | 01.18.2008 | 07:34 PM | Permalink | Categories: Techie | 1 Comment
iPhone
I’ve been flattered, over the past week, to have several people ask me whether I would be buying or whether I had bought an iPhone — flattered that people thought I might possibly have the financial wherewithal or budgetary flexibility to buy one. However, with our recent house purchase, all the usual monthly bills, and the continuous challenge of supporting a family of three on one income, it simply hasn’t been a possibility.
Sure, I’d love to have one. If Apple is listening, here are some things that would make me more likely to buy one:
- Offer the iPhone for Sprint customers. I’ve been a Sprint customer for seven years, and have no desire to switch to another carrier, particularly AT&T, Apple’s partner, since I’ve heard some pretty bad things about AT&T/Cingular’s service. However, Apple’s deal with AT&T is for five years, so there’s always the possibility they could offer a Sprint plan after that.
- Offer the iPhone for $300 or less, without subsidy. That’s about the price of a new iPod, and being an iPod user, I can conceive of wanting to buy a new one within a few years. $500 is just a bit too much for me to pay for a pocket-sized device, especially when I get a new cell phone for free every two years.
- Make the iPhone work better as a phone. From all of the reviews I’ve read, the phone functionality is one of its weakest points. I don’t want to spend all that money and be stuck with a phone that’s a pain to use.
- Offer more storage. If this thing is going to replace my iPod, it’s got to have at least 20 GB of storage space.
In the meantime, however, I’ve come up with what I think you’ll find is an elegant workaround. It has many of the features of the iPhone: it has some of the features you’d expect from an iPhone: high quality audio playback, cell phone and contact manager functionality, web browsing, and a digital camera. It even has some features you won’t get in the iPhone: 20 GB of storage space, a five-megapixel camera with 4x optical zoom and flash, and the ability to run on the Sprint network.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the MyPhone.
By Peter | 07.02.2007 | 09:48 PM | Permalink | Categories: Apple, Techie | 5 Comments
Get Started With Newsreaders!
If you’re a regular reader of our blog, and you’re not currently using a newsreader like Google Reader, or you don’t even know what that is, I would love for you to head over to CommonCraft and watch this awesome video explaining what a newsreader is, and why you should use it.
Then, come back and use your newfound knowledge to subscribe to our blog!
By Peter | 06.09.2007 | 11:22 AM | Permalink | Categories: Techie | 4 Comments
Redbox
I’d noticed a shiny new red vending machine in Stop and Shop a few months ago, and I finally stopped to check it out. The machine is managed by a company called redbox, and it is essentially a DVD rental vending machine. For $1 per night, plus tax, you can rent a DVD from their selection. Get it back before 7 p.m. the next day and that’s all you pay. After that, it’s another $1 for each additional day, and after 25 days without returning it, the DVD is yours to keep (and you just paid an outrageous amount to buy a movie).
The selection is understandably limited by the physical size of the machine. They do have some of the day’s more popular titles, and it is stocked with new releases on a weekly basis. There is no membership to sign up for - you just provide a credit card at the time of rental. The touch-screen on the machine allows you to browse the inventory of DVDs, make your selection, and pay. The DVDs themselves are vended mechanically from a slot on the side of the machine. They come encased in hard plastic. To return the DVD, simply go to any redbox kiosk and put the DVD back in the slot. Presto! You can also browse the selection of your local redbox kiosk from the website, and place your order there. Then, just go to the kiosk to pick it up.
You can get a free one-night rental if you visit the website and provide your email address. We did so a few weeks ago, and last night I stopped by to pick up a DVD. The whole process was as simple as could be, we enjoyed our movie, and I returned it today with no hassle.
It certainly won’t replace Netflix’s breadth of selection or nifty feature set, but it can’t be beat for simplicity and price. At some point, they’ll probably enable the kiosks to download any movie you want, and then burn it instantly to DVD… then Netflix will have something to worry about!
If you’re interested, find the nearest redbox location and check it out!
Nope, I’m not getting paid anything for this post, I just think it’s really cool.
By Peter | 11.12.2006 | 04:22 PM | Permalink | Categories: Movies, Techie | No Comments
DDR
Several weeks ago, Becky and I finally joined the crowd and bought DDR (if you don’t know what that is, read about it over at Wikipedia). Specifically, we bought Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix 3. Also, since we didn’t have a video game system to play it on, we bought a used XBOX, and of course some dance pads to use for playing the game.
Becky poses in a DDR move
We had heard about DDR a while back, I believe on the Today show, where there was a segment on kids who lost weight while playing DDR. Then our friend Jenny mentioned using it as part of her excercise regimen, so we thought it sounded intriguing. We finally got a chance to play on Martha’s Vineyard, when the Lyttles had it in their cottage. They had the Xbox version, which has some really great songs. Later on, we went up to Jenny’s apartment and tried her version, on the PS2, with the workout mode. After that, we decided that we had to get it. 
We ended up going with the Xbox version because we felt that it had more enjoyable songs, and that is key in our enjoyment of the game. Since we didn’t have any video games already, we didn’t have a particular loyalty to a gaming platform. Surprisingly, I was pragmatic enough to let slide the fact that the Xbox is manufactured by Microsoft. It certainly works well enough to play DDR, which is the only thing we have plans to use it for.
The game is really a lot of fun, and it is, as best I can tell, a very good workout. We have workout mode turned on, which is a game-wide mode that tracks calories burned during any type of game play. You input your weight, which it uses in a fairly simplistic calculation to determine calories burned. After you complete each dance session, your calories burned are summarized. You can also track your daily calorie burn record in the main Workout Mode menu. It draws a pretty graph, and it also charts your weight over time (assuming that you edit your weight in the game as you take the measurements on your own).
There are a few areas where DDR is weak. It doesn’t take your body through a full range of motion, particularly in the upper body. Also, although it does raise your heart rate, it doesn’t keep it up, which is key to developing good cardiovascular health. In addition, there is no stretching, warm-up, or cool-down built anywhere into DDR. You can get that on your own by changing difficulty levels and doing stretching beforehand, but that can be easy to forget. Finally, it is a fairly high-impact excercise. The jumping and foot stomping can be pretty hard on your joints.
We haven’t been doing it for long enough yet to see any solid results in one way or another, but we are both definitely feeling better, and it’s a heck of a lot better way to spend our time than watching TV in the evenings. We are certainly getting more excercise this way than we ever did with our gym membership!
If anyone’s in the area and wants to come check it out, let us know. We’d be glad to have you over.
By Peter | 09.18.2006 | 09:02 PM | Permalink | Categories: Health and Fitness, Techie | 5 Comments
Bloglines Reboot
Shortly after Catherine was born, I came to the realization that I had far too many subscriptions in my Bloglines account. I think the number was somewhere around 324… yikes. Most of the subscriptions I had, I rarely read in detail, and most of them weren’t about things for which I cared very deeply. The simple fact that the subscriptions were there, waiting to be read, weighed on my psyche, and the fact that I wasn’t giving the attention I had originally intended was what David Allen would call ‘breaking an agreement I made with myself’. At some point in the past, I had made an agreement (consciously or subconsciously, it doesn’t really matter) that I would read all of the items in these very interesting Bloglines subscriptions. As time went by, and I kept adding more subscriptions, the practical reality of being able to keep up with all of them ended. I had broken my own agreement, and that brought along with it bad feelings and an overwhelming sense of delinquency.
So what I did was renegotiate the agreement. Rather than reading every single blog that I thought would be vaguely interesting, I decided that what I would do is only follow those blogs that I really cared about in some meaningful way, something that was more or less directly related to me. True, this meant that I would stop reading some blogs that contained interesting techie news, and that I might miss a few pithy sayings from some internet personality or another, but in reality, it simply meant that I would be using Bloglines to keep track of the stuff I really cared about.
Basically, this was a sort of ‘de-toxing’ process that involved several steps over a period of weeks:
- I deleted all subscriptions from my Bloglines account.
- I deleted all links to Bloglines from all of the web browsers I used. This included Chad’s excellent Bloglines Toolkit.
- I did not use Bloglines at all for one week. This part was tough, as I had developed a ‘tic’ to check bloglines any time that I stopped thinking about the task at hand. Bad habit, but it’s gone now. I did check a few of my favorite websites occasionally by just clicking through from our blogroll.
- After I had broken my habit, I went through our blogroll and picked out the blogs that I really did care about and felt that I really could benefit from reading. I’ve got them organized into three folders. One is called “People I care about”, which has all of my friends whose blogs I really do want to keep track of. The next one is called “News that pertains to me.” This one has news feeds about things that directly impact me. For example, news feeds for software that I use, so that I can stay up to date with any important updates or security issues. The final one is called “Current Projects”. That’s where I put feeds that are related to something I’m currently working on, but may not want to read in the long term. I regularly review this folder and take out anything that I don’t have any current use for. The list is currently a very reasonable 72 feeds - 40 to 50 of which are in the “People I care about” category, most of which are for friends who don’t blog all that much (and hence don’t generate that many items for me to read).
- P.S. I am using your toolkit again, Chad… just to keep track of only the blogs I care about. P.P.S Your blog happens to be one of them.
I feel like I’m paying a lot more attention to the blogs for people I care about, and a lot less attention to stuff that really doesn’t require my attention. Sure, I’m probably not up on all of the latest rumors on Mac or techie stuff, and I don’t know about every event that’s going on everywhere in the world, but I am keeping track of the things that matter most.
By Peter | 08.05.2006 | 02:25 PM | Permalink | Categories: Techie | No Comments
Backup Scripts
Here are the scripts I mentioned in Backup Strategy.
By Peter | 07.13.2006 | 09:19 PM | Permalink | Categories: Code, Techie | 3 Comments
Backup Strategy
Somewhere within the first two weeks after Catherine was born, I found the time to implement a (mostly) comprehensive backup strategy for our website data and our home computer data. We’ve actually been operating without any type of backup for a while now, living dangerously as it were. So I decided that with all of the changes we’ve been going through recently, and the exponential increase in the amount of data we’ve been collecting (web and email content, images, video, etc), it would be smart to implement a good method for backing everything up.
If you’re interested in how I set it up, please read on.
By Peter | 07.12.2006 | 10:15 PM | Permalink | Categories: Techie | 3 Comments
Recent Acquisitions
Things wear out, things stop working. So I’ve recently made a couple of acquisitions.
First, new shoes: Hi-Tec Multiterra 2 Sport (color as pictured), for everyday and summer excursion wearing. They have a system of criss-crossing shoelaces that allow me to tie them up tight. And they have squishy rubber soles to minimize bone-crushing impact when I am walking. They also have convenient pull-tabs on the heels to make it easier to put them on. Finally, they are made of a breathable material so that my sweaty feet do not suffocate as they would in, say, a sealed neoprene sock. Oh, the wonders of modern footwear.
Second, a new cell phone: Sanyo RL-4930. Towards the end of last week, my trusty Sanyo SCP-8100 suddenly lost its ability to receive a signal. I took it over to the Sprint Store, and they said that they couldn’t fix the problem (their first question was “Did you take it out of the country?” Um…. nope! It was sitting on our counter one night, and all of a sudden it stopped working!) They offered to give me a reconditioned replacement SCP-8100, which would cost me $50. The other option was to get a $150 rebate on a brand new phone, so I decided to take that. I liked the RL-4930 because it was small, rugged, and feature-packed… it does cool stuff like recording up to 130 minutes of voice memos, speech recognition (you can say “Dial Number 555-1212″ and it will dial it), and speakerphone (not a groundbreaking feature, but a feature that I’ve never had on a cell phone). Also, should I ever decide to sign up for Sprint’s “ReadyLink” push-to-talk feature, this phone is compatible. (Anybody have Sprint ReadyLink?) It continues to have the excellent user interface that I have come to know and love in Sanyo phones. It doesn’t have a camera, but that’s okay… I’ve never met an affordable camera phone that I liked. I ended up paying $30 for this new phone. Good deal!
By Peter | 07.05.2006 | 02:52 PM | Permalink | Categories: Randomness, Techie | 1 Comment
Better Living Through Email
A while back, I read an article in the Christian Science Monitor entitled, “It’s all about me: Why e-mails are so easily misunderstood“. In this article, contributor Daniel Enemark writes, “In a world where businesses and friends often depend upon e-mail to communicate, scholars want to know if electronic communications convey ideas clearly.” The scholars in question conclude that email doesn’t adequately convey emotion, which leads to emails being misunderstood. While I do agree that an email doesn’t contain all of the same visual cues, vocal tones, and subtleties that face-to-face or telephone conversations possess, I don’t agree that this is the primary reason emails are so easily misunderstood.
By Peter | 06.27.2006 | 07:59 PM | Permalink | Categories: GTD, Techie | 1 Comment