Category: Technology

While watching the Godfather marathon yesterday, I saw a commercial for T-Mobile’s new HotSpot @Home service, and I have to say, it looks incredibly promising. Basically, when a wireless Internet connection is available, these phones are able to make calls over the Internet without using your regular plan minutes. When you are out of range from the wireless Internet connection, the phone automatically switches over to the cellular network and you keep on talking. What’s nice is that you can also use any T-Mobile HotSpot to make calls as well. I also assume that using any open wireless network would be possible. The price for all of these calls over the Internet is $9.99/month.

This seems like the perfect solution for a household like mine. We have all of the wireless infrastructure in place to really take advantage of the service. My wife and I could use our Wi-Fi/Cellular phones as our only phones assuming that 911 service works. We could finally get rid of our home phone for good and potentially save some money with a Family Plan. I will definitely be keeping an eye on this new service to see if it will truly fit our needs. For anyone out there that has a high speed wireless Internet connection at home, I would say T-Mobile’s HotSpot @Home service could be a potential money saving option for you.

I have turned into quite the TiVo fan since we bought one about nine months ago. It seems that I’m not alone based on all of the blogs and discussion boards focusing on everything TiVo.

We had used DVRs from our cable companies in the past, but the TiVo is so much more than just a DVR. When you hook your TiVo into our home network, it opens the door to all sorts of Internet-based content and becomes a bridge to the photos and music on your computer. The ability to listen to Internet radio is really nice especially when the TiVo is connected to a home entertainment system. You can also subscribe to audio podcasts if you’re into that type of thing. I have also taken advantage of TiVo’s partnership with Amazon to download movies directly to the TiVo. The movies look and sound great, and you don’t have to drive to the store or wait for a DVD to arrive in your mailbox.

My favorite feature of the TiVo is the ability to play the music that is stored on my Mac through the TiVo. This is very similar to the Apple TV although the TiVo cannot play music bought through the iTunes Store. There is another downside to all of this insanely cool functionality. The TiVo can only natively play files in MP3 format, and I have a mixed iTunes library of MP3 and AAC files.

This weekend, I finally decided to do some research to see if there was anything I could do about this shortcoming. Surely, other people are in the same boat as me. I am happy to report that there is an undocumented feature in the TiVo software for the Mac that provides the ability to translate AAC files to MP3 files on the fly. Apparently, the functionality has been there for a couple years, and I’m kind of mad at myself for not reading about this earlier. The TiVo software has code that calls a program called LAME. LAME is an open source MP3 encoder and is freely available. All I had to do was install LAME, and the TiVo software recognized it immediately. At last, all of my non-iTunes Store tracks could be seen and played through the TiVo. I was so excited that I had music playing all day yesterday.

I am still annoyed that Apple and TiVo have not gotten together to allow iTunes Store tracks to play on the TiVo. It would just be considered another computer that would need to be authorized. Of course, now that Apple has the Apple TV, I don’t really see them licensing other companies to basically do the same thing, but it sure would be nice.

Like most tech-savvy families out there, my family has an abundance of digital audio, video, and photo files on our computers. Early on, I decided that my Power Mac G4 should be our digital hub, and all of our files are stored on that computer. This does cause a bit of a problem for me as far as storage space goes. I’ve replaced the hard drive before, and it’s about time to add a larger drive again. I don’t mind replacing my drive from time to time because it is relatively easy to clone a drive. My biggest problem is with my backup drive.

A couple years ago, I went with Apple’s Backup as my backup solution. It is incredibly easy to use and basically runs all by itself without any interaction from me as long as my external drive is powered on. I bought a drive that was twice as big as my Mac hard drive so I wouldn’t run out of space, but a couple weeks ago, something interesting happened. I ran out of space on my backup hard drive. It seems that over time, the incremental weekly backups had been so large that they had filled the entire drive. To resolve the issue, I deleted my backup files and ran a full backup that fit very easily on the drive. My biggest question is if a full backup fits so easily on my drive, why are the incremental backup files so large?

When Mac OS X Leopard comes out later this year, one of its features will be a backup solution called Time Machine. It will automatically backup every file on your system, and you can basically go back in time to find the version of a file that you need. This sounds like a great new feature, but how large will the backup hard drive have to be in comparison to the Mac hard drive? If my experience with Backup is any indication, it’s going to have to be huge, but I am going to withhold judgment until Leopard hits the streets.

I read a post in TechCrunch today that really drove me nuts. They were commenting on an absurd post in CNET’s News Blog regarding possible liability Apple might face because the iPhone has the ability to play YouTube videos. Like TechCrunch, I feel there is no way Apple will ever be found liable of anything relating to YouTube. Really, how in the world did CNET think this was worth posting? If you take the same logic and relate it to web browsers, every software vendor that has ever shipped a browser capable of playing embedded YouTube videos is liable for the content of the videos. Now that just doesn’t make any sense, does it. Surely CNET has something more interesting to write about than this. I really used to rely on CNET to help me decide what electronics to buy, but they’ve really gone down hill. There are so many better options now for technology news and reviews.

I use a web conferencing product at work called iLinc to do demonstrations and training from remote locations. iLinc makes it possible to provide visual presentations instead of boring old audio conference calls. Like most applications made specifically for business communications, iLinc has not been available for the Mac. Until now, that is. With iLinc 9, meeting presenters and attendees will be able to use Windows or Macintosh computers to connect to meetings.

I don’t really expect to be able to use my Mac for work meetings very often, but I would love to be able to use Apple’s Keynote to show slide presentations. It knocks the socks off of PowerPoint any day of the week. I also have coworkers that need help with their Macs on occasion so it will be nice to be able to see the problems they’re having instead of just guessing what might be wrong.

I have been very impressed with the Windows versions of iLinc. Let’s see how good they are at making software for the Mac.

OneTrip is a great little shopping list application written by Neven Mrgan. It works great in Safari on my Mac, and will presumably work on the iPhone when it comes out at the end of this month. It is a very good example of what is possible when you combine the latest web standards with high quality visual design. If OneTrip is the start of things to come, I’m going to need to figure out how to justify to my wife that I need an iPhone. Great job Neven!

From Digg.

For anyone who has read my blog for a while, you know I usually write about how great Apple’s latest and greatest hardware and software are because in most cases, they usually are truly great.

Yesterday’s release of the Safari 3 Public Beta made me take a step back and really think about the quality of Apple’s Windows applications. I installed it on my Windows XP and Windows Vista machines with no problems, but the performance is sluggish at best, and there clearly needs to be some performance tuning before Safari is officially released in the fall.

The thing that really bothered me about Safari was the blatant disregard for Windows development standards. The user interface matches the Mac version of Safari instead of taking advantage of the look and feel of Windows XP and Windows Vista. Apple did the same thing when they released iTunes for Windows. If they truly want to create the best Windows programs available, they need to embrace and take advantage of the underlying technologies in the platforms in which they develop. Just imagine the uproar that would occur if Microsoft released Office for Mac using the Windows Vista look and feel. The Mac community would go crazy for good reason. Oh wait, this happened already with Office 6.0, and the Mac community did go crazy.

I am lucky enough to have both Mac and Windows machines at home to play with, but if I were purely a Windows user, I would be confused and frustrated by the iTunes and Safari user interfaces. They would seem foreign and sluggish to me. The applications clearly take a performance hit by trying to look like a Mac program in Windows.

It is time for Apple to recognize that if they really want to be in the Windows applications business, they need to embrace the platform and make the best looking, easiest to use, and fastest applications that take advantage of the foundation that Microsoft provides. Why try to reinvent the wheel? Apple needs to create Windows applications that look and feel like Windows applications.

RapidWeaver is a great web design tool for Mac OS X. I have been using it a long time for my personal websites and will continue to do so because it is, by far, the best web design software I have ever used. The only thing that I don’t like all that much is the blog functionality. After much debate, I finally switched over to WordPress so I could take advantage of the latest and greatest blogging technology. I did this in spite of my desire to keep the look and feel of my site consistent. I know I could always create a template in WordPress that would match my RapidWeaver site, but quite frankly, I don’t have the time to spend on something like that.

Now, it looks like Dan Counsell and crew over at Realmac Software are working on a nice update to the blog features in RapidWeaver. Just looking at the image posted on their blog, I can’t wait to check out the new version. The only bummer is that you can’t post to the blog remotely. That is a big thing for me because I use multiple computers and I have to travel for work.

What I would really like to see is some kind of integration with a mainstream blogging application. It would be cool if Realmac would integrate WordPress in some way. What might be even more impressive is if they would integrate Blogger by using the Blogger API. Users could take advantage of the great look and feel of RapidWeaver while still having the opportunity to use Blogger to post remotely. Now, that would be the best of both worlds. Dan, if you’re listening, put this on your list of things to do.