Geek

Today is my weekend and I am using the occasion to do something I haven’t done in a very long time: go for a road trip. I’m exploring the roads of Upstate New York in the Acura, letting the summer wind blow through my, er, beard as I stick to the back roads the best I can. So far I have been within a stones throw of three revolutionary war era forts, two nuclear power plants and an international border. ‘Tis a pity I didn’t being my passport along. I’ll have to stay in the states.

Just as I find my zen when I’m riding my bike, I find a zen, albeit a different flavor of it, when I’m riding the back roads in my car on a beautiful day. It doesn’t always have to be sunny, in fact, sometimes I thunderstorm or a twister can keep it interesting, but today’s mix of sun and clouds with the feeling of a storm coming on later today is keeping it right where I want it to be. This exercise is giving me the opportunity to purge my head of extraneous thoughts and get my mind where I need to be to kick some ass at my job for the rest of the week, plus fully comprehend the joy of last week’s passage of the marriage equality bill. Earl and I are actually talking about our honeymoon and coming up with a timetable for our celebration of marriage.

I’ve filled up on some Panera food, at a very nice version of the popular chain, I must add, so it’s time to get back on the road. I’m one of those annoying people that checks in on Foursquare, so if you go to the Foursuare site you can figure out where I’m going and where I’ve been. I think I’m iMachias on there.

Happy motoring!

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Last week I told you about switching from an iPhone 4 to the HTC Thunderbolt 4G phone from Verizon. The HTC is quite a nice looking phone, however, about three days into the gig it started rebooting. Randomly. And if got bored with rebooting it would just go to sleep and not wake up. Pressing the power button would do nothing. It’d just sit there, dead.

So last night after work I raced to the mall and took advantage of Verizon Wireless’ “15 Day Satisfaction Guaranteed policy”. I switched back to an iPhone. No questions asked. There was a small restocking fee of $35 for the HTC, but to make the switch back was worth it.

When the VZ associate asked why I was switching, I told him of the issues i was having with the Thunderbolt. He said that while he hadn’t experienced the issue, he had heard of others having similar problems. He said that they were either completely devoid of trouble or they were plagued with a lot of them, there didn’t seem to be an in-between.

This morning when I went to use the Personal Hotspot feature of my iPhone, I found that it made itself scarce and was no longer available for me. I called VZ support and they were able to fix the problem pretty quick.

I’m back in business. AND back on Instagram. 🙂

I guess once you go Mac, you never go back.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

One of the really bad jokes that is omnipresent in the Manor is how much money I spend in iTunes. It’s really pitiful if you think about it. Having worked in radio for 15 years, I tend to remember every one hit wonder that hit the Top 40 stage anywhere from the mid 1980s to the mid 2000s. I have this habit of remembering a song, getting it stuck in my head and subsequently buying it on iTunes. Then I’ll play it a dozen times and forget about it completely, the ear bug having been completely squashed. It can be (and is) an expensive habit and something that I needed to rectify. There was the Great Zune Experiment last year, where I bought a Zune and used the Zune monthly subscription service to satisfy these musical needs. The Zune is a nifty little device, but it seemed like every track I looked up on the Zune Marketplace would show the album cover, artist and everything and then come with a little note to the side “Not Available.” Why show the damn thing if you’re not going to make it available?

I have mentioned before that I follow several tech podcasts (net casts) from the TwIT network, more specifically iPad Today, MacBreak Weekly and This Week In Google. I will admit that I am a little hard to deal with in the morning and this mood doesn’t usually dissipate until 11:00 or so, but I have been finding it hard to get through the MacBreak Weekly episodes lately, especially since there are screeching Edith Bunker impersonations (no one but Jean Stapleton can do Edith Bunker), hosts that have apparently not prepared for the episode and are subsequently asking repetitive or downright moronic questions, instances of ultra hamming it up with needless accents and carrying on more appropriate for a Top 40 Morning Zoo show and singing and dancing to a song called “Rat Hole”.

But I digress as I just had to get that little venting out of my system.

The reason I bring up the music consumption habit and the podcasts in tandem is because amongst all the inane chatter I got through this morning, the always lovely Veronica Belmont brought up the fact that she has moved away from using iTunes altogether over the past six months and is now using a service called Rdio. She mentioned that she has used Pandora and a couple of the other alternative music services. Like me, she mentioned that Pandora seems to play the same songs over and over again. (I have an additional problem with Pandora in that as the playlist progresses the tempo gets slower and slower and slower until I am snoring through a suicide inducing track that is suspiciously part of what should be a 70s disco love fest).

Again, I digress.

Rdio is brilliant. It is a subscription service that lets you stream music through a web browser, to a whole assortment of mobile devices or through native applications built for your favorite computing platform. Well, not entirely native, some apps are written through Adobe Air, but that’s better than nothing.

The best part of Rdio is that you can store tracks on your mobile device for offline listening, perfect for those that are copping some wifi in the office and lose connectivity once in a while. (I don’t know who would do that).

There are a couple of subscription price levels. I believe the most expensive is $9.99 per month for unlimited offline music downloads, which is far less than what I was paying for Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace and a hell of a lot cheaper than my monthly iTunes habit.

An added bonus for Rdio is that it has social networking features built in, much like the Ping service on iTunes. So I can see what my Twitter followers are listening to if they use Rdio and then try those songs out. In fact, I took a look at what Veronica Belmont was listening to and discovered Foster The People, which is an awesome band that I highly recommend. They had me bopping in my cubicle this morning. I even downloaded the Scissor Sisters, which I haven’t done on iTunes because they keep getting moved to the back of the “purchasing agenda”.

I think everyone will hear a sigh of relief from my husbear when I settle on using Rdio for my music listening needs. If I find anything that breaks the deal I’ll be sure to share my findings here, but I have a good feeling that this service is going to be a keeper for my musical needs.

Now, if I could just find a way to avoid the bad stand up routines on the TwIT podcasts.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

So I have had a couple of people ask how the CatCam works. Here’s the short version of it.

In the kitchen we have a MacMini acting as our kitchen television. This allows us to stream internet content, Netflix, Hulu, etc. to a new 19-inch display, which is a vast improvement over the 13-inch television that used to sit in the corner. The remote included with the MacMini allows us to move around the FrontRow software, much like you would on an original Apple TV. The MacMini isn’t really anything exceptional; it’s several years old and is the first incarnation of the Intel-based MacMinis. In fact, it’s not even a Core2 Duo, I believe they call it a “Core Solo”.

Since the MacMini is a full blown computer, it can do a whole lot more! We had an original firewire iSight camera that was left over from my old PowerMac G4 from back in the day, so I decided to hook it up and see if it works. It works beautifully, as you can see.

I found a nifty piece of software called EvoCam. EvoCam has a bunch of features that I haven’t even begun to explore yet, but I like it because it has motion detection and timestamping. It also has the ability to upload pictures to the webhost that serves up jpnearl.com. The cam is always active, looking for some sort of motion in front of Tom’s food and water bowls. When it senses motion, it snaps a picture and overwrites the previous picture on the server. That way, I can easily display it using one line of HTML code on the webpage, instead of having to accommodate different filenames.

The motion sensor is looking at a particular spot, so from time to time you’ll notice that one of us walking around in the kitchen will trip the sensor, even when Tom is somewhere else in the house napping or whatnot. I have reminded everyone of this fact so that everyone can make sure they’re properly clothed when passing through the kitchen (Tom included). So far the system is working pretty good. The software is currently on a 15 day free trial. I’m going to mess around with it a little more before deciding if I want to plonk down the money to buy it or try something else.

The things we do on a rainy day.

I’m a geek. I added a new feature to the sidebar. It’s down near the bottom. It looks something like this.

This is a test blog entry via the iPad. I am trying a new blogging app called Blogsy, as recommended by Andy Ihnatko on the latest episode of “MacBreak Weekly” on TWiT. It has pretty cool integration with Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Google Images and the iPad photo library. I must admit that I find the inter fact rather confusing.

I should probably read the tutorial.