Coffee has long been a big topic of discussion among a lot of people. Is it good for you? Is it bad for you? Can you drink too much of it? My coffee is better than yours, etc., the folks over at Wired have written a great article titled – What’s Inside a Cup of Coffee? go check it out to find out what you are drinking every morning.
[Photo courtesy of d u y g u]
I just recieved a Blackberry Tour today. I will be giving it a hard test drive over the next week or so and will post my full review in two weeks. Being an avid iPhone user and since my full time switch to the Mac, we’ll see how this goes. I reviewed the Blackberry Storm a few months ago, and the Tour is a lot different, so we’ll see how it goes. I haven’t even turned the device on yet as it came with no charge, so tomorrow will be my first full day with the device.
I know my posts are getting scarce, and I was posting daily for awhile, then my posts dwindled off. This isn’t because I was getting lazy, it’s because I am taking another look at my editorial calendar, and the direction of the blog, and want to give you good content, but not sacrifice the readers. So please bear with me over the next few weeks as I tweak the backend of the blog and try to decide what direction to take it.
In the meantime, I will try to follow my current editorial calendar and post a few times a week.
Thanks to the readers for sticking with me.
-Brian
About a week ago NY Times columnist David Pogue has began a quest against all cell phone companies because when you call someone’s cell phone you get their personal message, then you hear about 15-20 seconds of carrier canned messages. From his July 30th Column:
- * Sprint: “[Phone number] is not available right now. Please leave a detailed message after the tone. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press pound for more options.”
- Verizon: “At the tone, please record your message. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press 1 for mo re options. To leave a callback number, press 5. (Beep)”
- AT&T: “To page this person, press five now. At the tone, please record your message. When you are finished, you may hang up, or press one for more options.”
- T-Mobile: “Record your message after the tone. To send a numeric page, press five. When you are finished recording, hang up, or for delivery options, press pound.”
- (You hear a similar message when you call in to hear your own messages. “You. Have. 15. Messages. To listen to your messages, press 1.” WHY ELSE WOULD I BE CALLING?)
I am on board with him over this, I hate those messages, and by the way, the time we spend listening to that crap is taking away our minutes, so we are paying for it.
In part 2 of his column, he got a lot of responses and he has links to file complaints against the carriers themselves. I think everyone should jump on board and email their carriers and tell them they just want their message and the fracking beep, or there should be a way to turn it off.
Sprint already has this option, and iPhone users don’t have that issue when people call them probably because Apple and AT&T have some sort of deal in place.
If you want to bypass the canned messages altogether, right now here is the options for each carrier:
* for Verizon
1 for Sprint
#for AT&T
# for T-Mobile
So take back the beep and let your carrier know what you want.
So for the past week or so, I have had my posts scheduled, and they have decided to have a mind of their own and not publish on time, I just recently found out that they are transferring the website to a different server because they are having problems with the hardware on the one mine is hosted on, this should’ve happened months ago, but I am glad they are finally getting around to it. I’m sorry for the late posts, but bear with me.
-Brian
Besides all the iPhone 3.0 software and iPhone 3Gs announcements at WWDC this year, Apple gave customers of MobileMe a great new feature called Find My iPhone (it also works on the iPod Touch). You can see where your iPhone is on a map at me.com if you lose it, and it also allows you to send a message with a beep to the phone even when it’s in silent mode. If you don’t get your phone back, or someone nefarious gets a hold of it, you can remotely wipe your device from the control panel. This requires the 3.0 software update which will be released on June 17th, but I have tested it on my iPhone and Touch and it works great.
I went through this program and it has opened my eyes and helped me a lot, in fact, I plan on going through it again. It was written by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger, and I highly suggest if you are any type of blogger you get the workbook and go through the course.
Click the above button to buy the workbook, it’s a steal at $19.95
I have read a lot over the past year about the app store and the unknown approval process, when Steve Jobs first introduced the App Store in June of 2008, he laid out a simple set of rules for the store: no porn or malicious apps that invade your privacy. This sounds pretty straight forward and simple, but the fact of the matter is, it’s far from simple, the fact is, Apple’s approval process is shrouded in secrecy, and little is known how it works, and it’s largely inconsistent.
I love the app store, and have over 1,000 of them in my iTunes library, of course I don’t use all of them, and most of them have never even been transferred onto my iPhone or iPod Touch. I have to give credit to Apple for reviewing all apps and making sure they don’t contain malicious code, but the thing about the whole process is that they need to publish the rules, and make it clear to developers so they can work together to make better apps. I’d like to share a story with you about one app and a developer.
There was an app called Lyrics, which displayed lyrics for the songs in your music library, good app, I don’t have it, but I love having the lyrics for my songs, and use a good couple programs to pull them into the iTunes tags, but back to the story, everyone knows that some music contains bad words, and there is nothing we can do about it, Apple first rejected this app because of the songs that had bad words, so he installed a profanity filter and the Lyrics app got approved. Little to Apple’s chagrin, the developer installed an Easter Egg, and with a few smart swipes on the options screen, the user could turn off the profanity filter, I think that’s a good idea for the developer to do, but this could also introduce a bunch of issues in the app store.
This is just one story, a more prominent story is the NIN app, and the update that was rejected because of the song closer, and if you have been living under a rock for the past decade, you all know that song, Reznor followed up with a passionate response that included the facts that you could by The Downward Spiral on iTunes, with the profanity, he also said that anyone could by the movie Scarface uncensored, and what happens if someone swears in the forums on the app, they don’t have any say on what the users do, he also goes on to say that he just got some spam about f-ing hot Asian teens through the Mail program on his Mac, and he just saw some porn in Safari on his iPhone, and the final words “come on Apple, think your policies through and for f’s sake get your app approval scenario together”.
This is an ongoing issue, as I love the NIN app, but here’s one last example of an app that got approved, but shouldn’t have, and that’s the Baby Shaker app, where you got a crying baby on your screen, and had to shake it until it shut up. What the frack was Apple thinking when they approved that one, they finally pulled it after a bunch of public outcry, but again, if they would publish their approval standards and be consistent, maybe we would have some developers making apps that don’t consist of a fart app.
The last thing I would like to say is why don’t they just add an explicit tag to apps that may contain profanity or they deem explicit, then leave it to the parents to use the parental filters so their kids don’t download those apps, they do that with music and movies, why would it be so hard to do it with the apps. So I say to all the developers, keep making good apps, and I would love to help test and review any app, so please don’t hesitate to contact me. To the readers, please share your app store issues in the comments.
And just remember, that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Have you been trying to get rid of your crutch to Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL and start using Gmail. The only thing that was stopping you was the painful process of losing all your old email, well, now you can import your mail from those other services to Gmail.
New accounts will see a feature in their settings that will allow them to import their mail easily, just a few checkboxes and clicks and your contacts, old mail and even new mail for the next 30 days will come into your shiny new Gmail account.
This is a good option for users who have been wanting to make the switch, but still relied on their old accounts, and this will be available for existing users, but according to Gmail’s team, this roll-out will be slower than normal.
For the official word read the article on the Official Gmail Blog.
I have been a fan of RSS feeds for quite awhile now, and this past week I was listening to the Gillmor Gang podcast and they were talking about RSS being dead. I don’t really agree with that statement, but I can see their point. My personal RSS readers of choice are FeedDemon and NetNewsWire, both by Newsgator. I like them because they stay in sync wherever I get my feeds, on the iPhone, the desktop or the web.
RSS has changed the way we process information by brining a lot of sites to us in an efficient and easy way, before RSS I would have to go to all the sites and browse and read them, thus taking up all my time and missing articles because I didn’t go to that site one day, with RSS that made my work day more efficient, I open my reader and browse the headlines or read the article in the reader and everything is in one place.
Now enters the time of the real-time web with Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and people often get breaking news stories ahead of the broadcast networks and websites because people will tweet about them. Could I stop using my reader for good and just get all my news from Twitter or Friendfeed, I suppose I could, but I really don’t want to, and I will still push RSS to my friends who are always too busy to read an article link I send to them or don’t have enough time to catch up. That’s the one thing I really like about RSS, if I am on vacation and don’t want to be wired, when I come back I can browse the events of the time I was gone with my reader.
So is RSS really dead? In a way it is with more people getting their updates from Twitter and Friendfeed, but will it stop being useful, I don’t think so. So, in the words of Dennis Miller “Of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.”
A couple of questions to the readers:
1. Do you use a RSS reader? If yes, what’s your reader of choice?
2. Do you think RSS is Dead?
Answer in the comments.
