image courtesy of my-pc-nerd

My heat broke a few weeks ago; luckily it wasn’t too cold in New Jersey and the heating company fixed it quickly. After worrying about keeping everyone alive in the house warm, I did worry about what would happen to the various electronics. Fortuitously, Drive Savers has released a list of tips on how to keep your electronics from getting frostbite.

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The iPhone is constantly getting knocked for its inability to run applications in the background.

Well if you’re jailbroken have I got the solution for you.

Check out this video on three applications that when run together make for the ultimate background running experience.

Special thanks to Patrick at Just Another iPhone Blog for the heads up about mQuickDo.

If you’re interested in the applications shown in the video – mQuickDo, Backgrounder, Notifier.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year unless you get your loved one this “Netbook” on Black Friday.  Kmart is offering what they call a netbook for $119.99.  The only problem is this “netbook” has a 7 inch screen, 400 MHz ARM processor, 2 GB of storage and 128 MB of ram — and NO CHANCE of viewing a modern web site thanks to the ever crappy Pocket IE.

Unless they have pre-installed Skyfire or anything else, this computer is useless.  As for running your favorite Windows apps?  No way.  The only thing you may have a chance of doing is hacking it, and putting Linux or Android on it, but even then it would be pretty danged slow. Steer clear of this Black Friday “Deal”.

Via: blackfriday.info
Via: liliputing.com

I picked up a Toshiba NB205 netbook shortly after Windows 7 launched and have been enjoying it every since. The netbook shipped with an Intel® Atom™ processor N280 running at 1.66GHz, 1GB DDR2 memory, a 10.1″ WSVGA LED-backlit widescreen display at 1024 x 600 resolution, a 160GB 5400 rpm drive and more. It weighs in at only 2.9 lbs. and is 1.3″ high. The battery offers up to 9 hours of run time. Over all it is a pretty standard package, but at a current price of $399.99 at Best Buy it is a nice machine.

Not content to leave well enough alone, I did three simple mods that have it running better and doing more. I upped the RAM to 2GB, swapped out the spinning platter for an SSD drive and did a clean install of Windows 7 Home Premium. The result is a netbook that is quick, quiet and cool… and runs for a long, long time.

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Just back from running his 11th marathon, Larry is out and about with one of his girls. What are they doing on their fun “Father-Daughter” Day? Why they stopped into the AT&T Wireless Store, of course.

It was there that Larry discovered a pretty great deal.

He went to purchase a Jabra Stone headset and then, remembering something his uncle had told him, asked if there was any special promotion accompanying it. The clerk didn’t think so, but was good enough to check. Sure enough…

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Gmail is once again having some issues. When I woke up, I noticed that all of my new e-mails were indicating that they’d already been read when I checked from my iPhone. The problem was, I haven’t read any of them yet. I e-mailed Larry to ask if Gmail was down for him too, and he told me that he’d seen on twitter that exchange was having problems. Since I use exchange with Gmail currently, that clearly was the issue. Looking at my iMac, everything seemed to be fine. A few hours later and it still isn’t working properly. I checked in with Larry, and he indicated that his most recent e-mail on the iPhone was from 8:27 a. m. when in fact it was now 11:15 a. m.. His iMac, on the other hand, showed all of the new e-mails. Yes, it’s just another day in Gmail land.

Fortunately there is a bit of a workaround. If you’re currently using exchange on your iPhone to access your Gmail account … don’t. Turn off the exchange e-mail, and go into the e-mail setup wizard and create a Gmail account. Preferably use IMAP in order to set it up, so that whatever you do on your iPhone will be reflected on the server. Once you’re done setting up the IMAP account, make sure that the e-mail exchange account is off and the new IMAP account is on, and you should be good to go. No you won’t have push e-mail, but at least you be getting your e-mail.

Later on, when Gmail exchange is working again, you can just swap back. But don’t delete that IMAP account; it will likely come in handy again, soon.

So you have Windows 7 and you are all fired up about installing it on your netbook. The problem is that your netbook doesn’t have a CD or DVD player built in which means that DVD media that Windows 7 comes on is pretty much a coaster. You can solve the problem by popping $80-90 bucks on an external drive, but what if you could make that 4GB USB flash drive do the magic for you? Well you can, and it is pretty straight forward to do. All you need is a 4GB or bigger USB flash drive, a little bit of patience and your Windows 7 media.

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Larry is on duty today but that doesn’t mean he isn’t keeping his eye on things. He just emailed me with great news… Google Voice now has its own mashup that allows you to use thew service without having to give everyone a new number. It is an awesome new mashup, and I for one am thrilled.

Let me explain…

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I know this may be a bit of heresy that might draw some major criticism, but I’m starting to think the iPhone interface is growing a bit long in the tooth. I mean, it was one thing when you had a page of stock apps and a second page of website shortcuts, but when you now have five, six, seven or even more pages of apps, flicking through page after page after page after page after page after page every time you want an app on that last page is more than a bit annoying.

With other platforms offering different, and often better, user interfaces coming on strong, the iPhone and iPod touch interface starts to feel **gasp** old.

Fortunately there are some good alternative options for navigating the iPhone available that can potentially take the experience of using an iPhone to new heights. Most, however, require you to be jailbroken.

Here is a quick look at three. Continue Reading

Twitter has started to offer the ability to create lists of contacts within your Twitter account. This feature is being rolled out to a few users right now so if you don’t see the feature in your account when you log in then you’ll likely have to wait for it to be added. What do Twitter lists add? Well for one it’s an opportunity to quickly view similar types of contacts. For example I’ve set one list to display my company contacts and another list displays all the Gear Diary team writers.

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I personally use only one language on my Mac computers, English.  Unless you’re multi-lingual or unless you’re like Judie and plan on taking up another language, chances are you only need one language on your computer as well.

The Mac comes preinstalled with several language packs.  These packs includes fonts, and other things which all take up hard drive space.

That’s where Monolingual comes in.  Monolingual is a free application (donations are accepted) which allows you to selectively remove any language pack from your Mac that you choose.

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Gmail has enabled increased productivity for those who large amounts of email due to its unique interface (conversations, labels, to name two!). Not everyone uses keyboard shortcuts, but they can be a big time saver in processing email. Read on to learn more about keyboard shortcuts and how to quickly learn them.

Keyboard shortcuts are very useful because they quickly allow you to navigate your inbox quickly. You can also do things like select many messages at once and archive them, delete them, and even mark them as spam. Keyboard shortcuts are disabled by default. To enable them, simply go into your Gmail settings under the General tab and choose the radio button for Keyboard shortcuts on. Click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page and go back to your inbox.

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So, yesterday in my daily perusal of the web, I saw that AT&T had started silently rolling out MMS functionality for the iPhone in small batches.  It didn’t seem to have a rhyme or reason–some people on iPhone OS 3.0 had it, some on 3.01, and some on 3.1, all in different locations.

Some people in the Dallas-Fort Worth area were reporting working MMS, so the question at the forefront of my mind was HOW DO I GET IT!?  I’m an impatient girl, and I didn’t want to wait another 11 days for MMS on my iPhone if I could get it now!  A little more Googling and a few visits to the HowardForums gave me the answers I needed.  How can YOU get MMS working on your iPhone?  Well, I’ll show you.

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One of the more frustrating things about owning a Windows Mobile Standard device, particularly the ones which are tied to a certain carrier, are the sometimes you’ll find that there are these inane application locks in place. You usually won’t even know about the lock until you try to install a program that you think will make your life easier or your device usage more satisfying. When you try the installation, it is error city and the application will fail every time. I ran into this with the Pantech Matrix Pro that Julie and I reviewed this spring:

Is the Matrix Pro perfect? Of course not. It comes loaded with AT&T bloatware (Cellular Video, AT&T Music, MEdia Net, MEdia Mall [no, those aren't typos], AT&T GPS, AT&T Navigator, Shop Music, etc.), and while you can obviously add WM programs to the phone, for some it is as locked down as Fort Knox. For instance, if you don’t want AT&T’s preloaded programs, you can’t delete them. But even worse: Twitter addicts will have to update though the web – the excellent WM application PocketTwit can’t be installed without hacking. Another program I couldn’t install was Google Mobile Apps, though I was able to easily install Google Maps…go figure. Google Mobile Apps and PockeTwit both return an error stating that the applications can’t be installed because they “lack sufficient system permissions.” Gah! FAIL.

Microsoft MVP Mike Temporale has been promising that he was going to write a good two part series on understanding and then removing the application lock that sometimes gets placed on Windows Mobile Standard devices, and last week he delivered. Mike is actually the friend who showed me the removal procedure when I first needed it for another device ages ago, so it only makes sense that instead of regurgitating his instructions to you, I send you straight to the source.  Happy hacking!


Understanding Application Lock on Windows Mobile Standard Devices

Removing Application Lock on Windows Mobile Standard Devices

photo credit: thomas_sly

This quick tip may be obvious to many but it is easy to forget (as I did) so I thought I might share it with everyone. It is especially useful for iPhone 3G and 3GS users but really applies to anyone using a data connected phone and living on the edge… of a 3G signal.

Here’s the story…

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