Smartpens

It's been a while, but I've got a cool one to pick up on: smartpen technology.

One of the most common are the Fly Fusion pens, but I wanted to start off with the Pulse by Livescribe. Very cool. I'm jazzed that it'll record audio sync'd with your notes. That'll be useful for meetings. They say we'll be able to print our own sheets of paper as well, but that's not going to be available until the end of 2008. It doesn't do text capture yet, but again that's something that's supposedly coming by the end of the year. Big downsides for me are that it won't run on a Mac, even when using Parallels. I'll have to whip up a Windows partition now. The 2GB version also goes for $200. Ouch. I'm also concerned about the battery in these things. I hope we can at least send them back to the company if we need to get a new battery.

Maxed-out at 128 GB?

Apple Discussion

OWC Helpdesk Info

Portable PC Apps Options

100 Top Mac Apps

Open Source Multimedia Studio

White Box iPhone Bug

Two days ago, I went to sync my iPhone and was a little surprised that the one photo I remember taking wasn't appearing when I launched iPhoto. It wasn't a super-important image, so I let it slide.

Then yesterday, Hyunjoo and I went for a hike on Mt. Nittany and tried to take images there. That's when I discovered that the camera wasn't taking pictures. I was almost certain that it was a software issue.

I just hopped on the internet and lo-and-behold... it's a pretty well documented bug.

I used the Method #2, but maybe should have waited to read further down to the "f1b43d3b3ecf259a3626c13a8b0cebd8ba513117.mdbackup" solution. That's OK, I'm beginning with a new slate.

Apple's new iPhone (kinda)

Well, Apple did it. I dunno why they didn't do it earlier, like at Macworld. I waited until the 17th of January to buy my iPhone because I was holding out for a 16GB model and they just released it two days ago. Nineteen days, geesh. Well, it would have been $100 more than I had paid which in itself is enough to warrant patience. But, now that I've been using the 8GB model I'm OK with the capacity since I'm syncing about every day anyhow and I can't go through 8GB of video, podcasts, and audio. But the prices will come down and when Hyunjoo gets one, she'll get the bigger one for sure.

iPhone, so easy a baby could use it

Installing Leopard without a DVD

Eye-Fi SD card sends images directly through network

Streaming video to iPhone

The iPhone Remote software is awesome! Unfortunately I've been having problems streaming video. I tried to stream a recording of "Dirty Harry" I got off my EyeTV. The sound will drop out and it's difficult to navigate forward or backward to resume play. It'll stop every minute or so and then start up again without sound.

EyeTV to PSP FAQ

I'm not using my PSP for video playback anymore, but good information none the less.

Good Article on all the In's and Out's of Video on an iPod

PDF to Website

1. Convert PDF to JPG

2. Import text to XLS 

Page 001

3. Set fixed deliminations

4. Fill rows down

5. Series to 100

6. Save as Tab delim Text

7. Open in TextEdit and clean up text

8. Paste into DW

How the iPhone has changed my life in 4 Days

• It is so much easier to keep on top of heaps of emails.
• I don't have to carry my cell phone and Palm TX anymore
• I can watch TV that I record using my EyeTV
• I can schedule my EyeTV to remotely record
• I can get map information that's more up-to-date than the most recent version available through my Garmin GPS
• I can stay in contact with everyone far easier than before
• I can finally begin to sort out my music and finish adding my "star" recommendations
• I can take pictures again after my digital camera kinda died
• It's much easier to update my address book and calendars now
• I can check out new music on the road through the iTunes (mobile) store
• It's a lot easier to check out YouTube videos and share them

There are some things I'd like to see...

• When a website claims that it has a dedicated iPhone website, that's not necessarily a good thing - they usually limit what you're able to do compared to a desktop
• Flash compatibility when surfing
• Deleting multiple emails
• The ability to make basic edits among your pictures before sending them out
• Taking video clips
• Making voice memos
• Full To-Do lists
• Free Skype functionality
• SD card support
• ability to edit docs in Google Docs
• more onboard storage

Birthday present: iPhone

First off, thank you to everyone who chipped in to getting me my iPhone:

Mom and Dad

Abonim & Oughmonim

Hyunjoo

Scott & Hyunjung

Nayoung

Winston & Julia

I haven't actually gotten my iPhone yet, but that's because Macworld begins in a few days. It would be silly to buy one before finding out what the new changes in Apple's offerings are.

I'm not interested in the next iPhone version. I'd just like more memory.

Leopard woes

I don't regret switching to Leopard. I do like Spaces and the redone finder. I wish I could play around with TimeMachine, but I don't have another external drive. The upgrade forced me to start fresh and clean things up... but I've run into some problems like many with this new version of the Mac OS.

• Kernel Panics & bittorrent client
  
• Dock Problems
  
• EyeTV issues
  
• keyboard/trackpad lock-ups

Unfortunately for me, those are things I'm using all the time now. I hope Apple and developers get some patches out soon.

Leopard Crashes: Kernel Panic

I woke up this morning to find this lovely screen on my Mac. Actually this was the second screen. I can't take a snapshot of the first screen cuz the whole darn thing is frozen. Yesterday my computer choked maybe four times and this morning makes five. I've never had my Mac crash on me... I'm not using any applications I didn't use with Tiger, so it must have been something with Leopard.

I thought I found some good information on Hoopla! posted by LCO, but my computer crashed after making the suggested changes:

- Try disabling IPv6 in your Airport System Preferences
- In Azureus preferences, expand Connection -> Advanced Networking Settings, and make sure “Prefer IPv6 addresses when both are avail” and “Enable experimental extension…” are UNTICKED.

There's also a good website that has kept tabs on which applications are not compatible with Leopard. This would have been nice to know before I upgraded.

UPDATE: After making the changes LCO mentioned above... I only had one more crash, but it was after I set Azureus back to "Simple" mode or whatever. Once I returned it back to "Advanced", I haven't had any problems again.

UPDATE: Still crashing under Azureus. Transmission isn't any better while running a large torrent. Tomato - I'm not even going to go there.

Test Bubbleshare Album

Please click on slideshow to view a larger version or to download.

How Mac & PC can Share an iTunes Network Library

I thought I had started another post on this... I'm trying to find a way to share one iTunes 7.5 library, stored on a network drive, between my 10.5 Mac and her XP-PC. I want both of us to be able to play, add, and trash songs and video - it doesn't have to be simultaneously.

When you start up iTunes on a PC holding the "Shift" button down, it will ask you if you want to "Choose a Library..." or to create a new one. When you choose a library, the app looks for an ".itl" file. When I navigated to the network drive, it listed all of the directories, but no library file was apparent.

My Mac generated iTunes library file has no extension on it. Just for kicks, I added an ".itl" extension to the Mac file and it asked me if I really wanted to do it. I said yes and then I tried launching iTunes on the PC again.

This time it loaded the library up with out a problem. Then, iTunes began updating the library since I had just installed the newest version of 7.5 on the PC.

Now, my fear is that I won't be able to access the library file on the Mac. It's just a waiting game now.

UPDATE: It seems to work fine. I might not have even needed to add the ".itl" extension, but it doesn't seem to negatively effect the Mac version.