Saturday, February 2, 2008

Online backup

A couple of ways you can do this.

Use gmail, save files as attachments. There is a handy download utility that will mount you gmail as a network drive on your pc. This allow you to drag and drop files to your gmail account. Mac , PC

Buy an .mac account. Comes with up to 10gb of storage, depending on how much you allocate to .mac mail. This cost $99/year, however there are a bunch of other services included with a .mac account.

mozy - 4.95/month and you get 2gb of encrypted storage. 30 days before older versions are deleted. - Good if you need to go back to an old copy of a file.

carbonite - 49.95/year, for unlimited space. Data is encrypted and they only keep recent copies.

OLED Displays

The next generation of displays shown at 2008 CES is the OLED displays with a 1,000,000 to 1 contrast ratio compared to 15,000 to 1 with current LCD and plasma. This is going to make the current LCD and plasma technology obsolete in a couple of years. Sony is shipping an 11" OLED TV, 3mm thick, in first generation.

HTC Touch - Youtube on Window Media Player Mobile

If you want to play youtube video's on an HTC touch cell phone, which has Window Media player.It is not straight forward like on the Apple iphone. Apple put a special player on the iphone to handle the stream from youtube. To get around this limitation on the HTC phone, you can download this HTC Media player and install in your HTC touch and allow you to play the youtube videos in explorer.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Spyware

I get asked this question a lot. What can I use to help with Spyware and virus's. I usually say they should get a Mac. But if you on a PC and need something and don't want to spend any money. Try the following for spyware:
Lavasoft Ad-Aware, http://www.lavasoftusa.com/. When you install, you will get a drop down asking for a registration key, just skip this to install the free version.
Malware Sweeper

For Virus:
AVG
Avast

If your using Firefox, you should download SiteAdvisor from McAfee. This little plug-in will tell you how safe the sites are that come up in your searches. Very very useful.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Flock

Trying out this cool browser called Flock. Integrates a lot of the social sites, media and feeds that I am subscribed to. Will keep you updated. This might the the ticket to keeping the blog going. I doing this post from blogger within the flock browser.

Http://www.flock.com

Saturday, January 5, 2008

Ringtones for iPhone

The iPhone is really cool with all the applications that you can download and use, from a Super Nintendo emulator, Sudoku and the NY city location finder with subway map (alway had to carry the map when in NY). With all this free stuff, how can you get ring tones into the iPhone.

Disclaimer: do at your own risk, I am not endorsing the methods or programs listed in this post. This method worked for my iPhone.

This is what I have discovered. Goto http://tonefm.com/

There are other sites, but this one has a good number is a number of different categories. They are also in mp3 format. You'll notice that if you play the tone, it only plays and doesn't download. In actual fact when something plays to a browser, it is actually downloading onto your computer (exceptions are a stream, but there are ways around that). To actually get the mp3 tone, I used Firefox and downloaded the free plug in called Download Helper. This is a free plug in will capture the tone and allow you to save the file to a folder.

Once you have the mp3 files, you need to download them to the iPhone. The easiest way is to use a piece of software called iToner (Mac only) available at:
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/itoner/

You can use it for free for a limited time or just purchase the program it is very cheap and well worth it. This program will sync to your iPhone and all you need to do is drag the mp3 into the iToner window and press sync.

To get your favorite song as a ring tone will require a bit of work or you can use iTunes and pay the 99 cents. If you want to do it yourself. Get a copy of Audacity at: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ , the program is open source and free.

This program will allow you to take a segment out of your favorite song. Most ring tones are a total of 24 seconds or less. Once you get this 24 second segment, you can save it to a audio format for download. I won't go into how this program works, you can read up on it once you download it.

I have not looked to see if there are equivalent or easy ways to do this on a PC. I am sure there are programs that will allow you to do this. I use both platforms but found it very simple with iToner. There are other ways like using sftp to get to the ring tones directory to get your ring tones loaded, but the method is for the more technical person. You can search the internet for the directions on this. You actually need to do this to load the NES games.

Friday, December 28, 2007

Converting Outlook email to Apple mail

If your using Outlook as an email client to handle all of your email and want to convert the mail, contacts, calender to Apple iCal, Mail and contacts. The easy way to do this is to use a program call O2M (it cost $10, http://www.littlemachines.com), it makes the conversion easy. It converts the Outlook mail, contacts and calendar entries into corresponding files need for import into Apple mail, iCal and contacts. I had half a million messages in a lot of different folders and it kept all the folders intact with attachments. Well worth the 10 bucks. The reason I converted was to get the better integration for my iPhone.