One of my favorite commercials of all time was on a local radio station in Austin.  ”It’s summer,” it begins.  ”And if you want to float down the Colorado on an inner tube with your butt in ice-cold water while holding a beer, that’s your right because this is Texas!” Yes indeed; in summer, one’s thoughts turn to cooling off, wearing less clothing–as little as possible, honestly–and drinking cool, refreshing beverages.  Beer is one of my favorites–I’m much more of a beer person than a wine person.  And Molson is On The Case with their new app: The app enables you to collect virtual badges on Facebook or through your smartphone (including, Blackberry, Android device Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Steve Jobs took the stage this afternoon to address the growing perception that the iPhone 4 has a fundamental flaw that can only be remedied by a recall. He took a multi-pronged approach and, in the process, turned lemons into some delicious lemonade. First he showed real examples of other smartphones displaying the same phenomena as the iPhone 4. Wrapping up he said that phones aren’t perfect and this is a flaw in many phones. It is just that the iPhone 4 marked the spot externally thanks to the thin black line separating the antennas. Then he used something that we don’t see nearly enough of in the world today… he used facts. Facts like AppleCare only… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Most people who do any sort of creative writing aspire to be like one of their favorite authors, from Emily Dickinson to James Joyce to … well, whomever you like! And chances are, if you have read and reread authors over the years some of their style has bled into your everyday prose. By way of a tweet from a friend I learned that there is now a site called I Write Like that will analyze your writing and match your style with one of the authors in its database. So as a test I took some of my Thanks Amazon for Linking Me Up With Old Friends … um … I Continue reading on Gear Diary …

There’s been a bunch of stuff going around the web about the Droid X and the fact that it likely will not be able to run custom ROMS and may even be hard to root. I’ll try to describe, in layman’s terms, what this may mean to a prospective Droid X buyer. What is this root and custom rom thing? First, having root is like having the Administrator user password on a Windows machine or the root password on a Mac OS X machine or Linux machine. It essentially gives you the right to modify anything on the phone. You could, for example, enable tethering without having to pay for it on Verizon (Note: Gear Diary… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

We’ll all be watching later today to see what Jobs and company have to say about the iPhone 4 antenna issue. (Quick recap for those living under a rock… if you take your iPhone 4 out of the case that you ought to be keeping it in and touch it in just the right spot or squeeze it hard you MAY see the signal drop off.) So what will Apple say today? Your bet is as good as ours but at least we’ll know in a few hours. Throughout this entire episode Larry has made one consistent point. Time and again in conversation after conversation Larry has pointed out the simple truth that… if… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Image Courtesy Kevin Dayhoff’s Blog I had seen this image a month or so ago, but had lost the link – but it remains stunning to think of what is required for a musician to simply make minimum wage, let alone scrape by a reasonable living! The graph below shows how many of their recordings an artist would need to sell to make a mere $1,160 per month. Of course, that is gross earnings, not counting any taxes or other niceties paid to the various federal state and local governments we feed … First off, that number of $1,160 per month is stunning, because while it might be ‘minimum wage’ it is hardly… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

(image courtesy Newsrealblog) At Gear Diary, we receive a fair bit of unsolicited email pitching ideas. The originators of this email sent us such a boneheaded set of statements that I don’t feel it would be fair or right to post their names. However, I will post the five points they attempted to helpfully share, and why they are wrong…and let this be a lesson to any other public relations types out there-fact checking is your friend! The “helpful” email was trying to convince us why a Droid X was a worse choice than an iPhone: Five Reasons Not to Buy the Droid X 1. Not enough apps: If you are an application-lover, the Droid Continue reading on Gear Diary …

The HP Pavilion dv8t is an 18.4″ laptop with a Core i5 processor, a 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 230M graphics card, and 1920×1080 1080p HD resolution. The notebook is a media workhorse that has a Blu-ray player built-in for HD playback. For extra speed and storage this GearDeal includes a free upgrade to 6GB RAM and 640GB HDD standard. Sure, at almost 9 pounds the notebook is a bit heavy but as a desktop replacement that you CAN MOVE when you NEED TO it fits the bill perfectly. The list price on the HP dv8t is $1349.99… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I’m a nerd.  There’s no getting around it.  I’m a nerd and a geek.  I like high tech gadgetry and software and know quite a bit about it (geek), and I like talking about it and playing with it (nerd).  I like to think I’m a well-socialized version of the breed–my socks usually match; my pants reach my shoetops; I shower every morning; I married a non-nerd–but still. Even so, I’m not entirely sure I’d go as far as ThinkGeek did for Embrace Your Geekness Day (July 13–didn’t you know?), which is to introduce the BeerBot Bottle Opening Shirt!! A ThinkGeek exclusive product and available to those responsible meatbags aged 21+ (unless you’re opening root beer)!  Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I love my partner Sami for many, many reasons, but one thing that’s in there is similar to a line from When Harry Met Sally . . . :  ”Tell me I’ll never have to be out there again.”  i.e., “I’m sooo over the whole dating thing!”  (It’s not the main reason, obviously!)  Which of course doesn’t mean that you might not want to experience it vicariously. Now Strange Mind Films, working with The Weathered Underground, have produced a mix of animation and live action and turned it into an interactive movie for you iPhone (also available on DVD).  For an MSRP, you can have your vicarious relationship break-up experience. I haven’t checked… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I love my Ooma. I know, I know; when you hear the name you think of Letterman- “Oprah-Uma, Uma-Oprah”, but Ooma isn’t a comedy bit. No, Ooma is a phone service that lets you buy hardware once and then get unlimited calls within the US and low cost calls internationally for the life of the unit. I’ve written about Ooma before, and while at CES in January, I previewed some of their upcoming services. Now I’ve had a chance to use the Ooma Telo and new features in my own home, so let’s take a look. But be warned… there’s a lot of ground to cover here. A little background before… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

If you own a smartphone you’re probably aware that there’s a ton of universal pouches available that’ll work with your device. Some leather, some nylon, some who knows? But none are tailor-made, specific for the device you own. These pouches are mass-produced to accommodate many phones that are all generally the same size. I’ve yet to see a company make a pouch style case sized to fit only one device. That is until now. Enter the Primary Case Company. The company, which was started by a fellow smartphone users who were unhappy with the retail market’s selection of cases for their devices, seeks to create not only functional cases… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Wait – wasn’t XIII called out specifically in this article a couple of months ago? Yep – but through perseverance I managed to get it uninstalled and re-installed and properly running … so naturally I played it again and am here – well, quite frankly I’m here to stop you from bothering! XIII is one of those milestone games that tells a good and bad tale from my gaming life. I was very interested in this game based on what it offered – a quality FPS presented in a stylistic graphic novel presentation with a compelling story of mystery and intrigue that would require gamers to use their brains as well as their trigger… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

If you were a Palm OS fan, you were probably a whiz with Graffiti, the shorthand text input system. In college I took all my notes on my Palm M100, and I used Graffiti so much my pen and paper notes were in an unholy mix of print scrawl and Graffiti. So when I saw this morning that Access had released Graffiti (the famous, original, pre-lawsuit with Xerox version) for Android, I practically danced in my cubicle. It is everything I had hoped it would be and more! I was very skeptical at first, since Graffiti is so stylus-based, but it works beautifully… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

In today’s podcast Larry and Dan ponder, “What devices would we use if we were on an Apple boycott?” Other topics on GearChat 13 include the ongoing iPhone 4 controversy and Evernote’s new Evernote Trunk. A Content Note- How quickly things move. We recorded this podcast late in the afternoon on Wednesday, July 14. At one point Dan laments Apple’s silence on the iPhone 4 reception issue only to find out an hour later that Apple had called a press conference for tomorrow Friday, July 16. Go figure… Continue reading on Gear Diary …