Determined to find out the precise capacity of my coffee pot, I pulled out my Pyrex measuring cup and began pouring. The result? My supposed 5-cup pot holds exactly 3 measuring cups of liquid. Busted! Why do they label it as holding five cups? It’s false advertising.

While I’m at it, I must toss in a long standing complaint I have about coffee pots in general. I’ve never used a pot that doesn’t dribble coffee down the side when I’m pouring it. What is the deal? “You’re pouring it too fast,” people tell me. Rubbish. I should be able to pour coffee as fast or as slow as I want with the expectation that it isn’t going to dribble all over the kitchen counter. Did anyone at the coffee pot factory test their product before they churned out millions of units? Seriously, I want some competent engineer to design a coffee pot that doesn’t run down the side when it’s poured. How hard can this be? It completely baffles me!

A recently discovered flaw in the execution of WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup) makes it relatively easy for a nearby hacker to circumvent your wireless security settings and gain access to your network. The fact is, every router that bears a seal of certification from the Wi-Fi Alliance ships with WPS enabled by default! In essence, that means that every router that has been sold in the past several years is potentially vulnerable to attack.

I am not a security expert, so I am not going to delve into the dirty details of how a router with WPS enabled can be compromised. I simply want to get the word out to everyone. Fortunately, an attack on WPS must be made within the wireless signal range of your router, so attacks in this form cannot originate from long range across the Internet.

The bottom line is that everyone should immediately visit the settings page for your router and disable WPS!

You can do an online search for this security flaw to find out more information. At the time of this writing, a reasonably good article detailing the GPS security flaw can be read at TechLogon.

It is assumed that router manufacturers will eventually update the firmware of their products to correct this flaw in WPS. That said, WPS itself is a system designed to let a novice user create a secure wireless network with little knowledge or effort. Anyone who takes computing and networking seriously would never use WPS in the first place, so I recommend that all users disable the feature and leave it disabled permanently.

While I am on the topic of Wi-Fi security, I want to add that everyone should have their wireless home network secured using WPA2 encryption with a password key that is at least 12 characters in length. Obviously, you should never use the name of your wireless network (SSID) as your security password. Personally, I use a complex 16-character password, which I think is sufficient.

A few months ago my brother and I set out to get the bulk of these old films digitized for their preservation and our enjoyment. After researching several online companies, we settled on CJS Technologies. The benefit of using a professional service is that they physically clean and scan each individual frame of the film and create a remastered digital movie. CJS offered a free trial offer to digitize a single five-minute film reel at no cost. We mailed off a test reel and were very impressed with the results.

My dad later mailed off our entire family collection of 27 film reels, all of which were shot in the 70s and 80s. CJS spent a month cleaning and scanning all of the film and we received the completed package just in time for Christmas. It was a wonderful, lasting gift for the entire family.

It is wonderful to have all of our old family movies preserved, and in a modern format that everyone can share and enjoy. I have to commend CJS on doing a fantastic job restoring our films. I would recommend them to anyone looking for such a service. Their company not only outputs your restored movies to a playable DVD, but they also send along the pure digital output files in uncompressed AVI format. Most impressive! Job well done.

Visit the website AmericanCensorship.org for all of the information you need and to find out how you can make yourself heard. As their website puts it: “These bills will kill jobs and stifle innovation, undermine cyber security, risk censoring the American Internet, and provide cover for totalitarian regimes that want to undermine Internet freedom abroad.”

Fast-forward to the present day. I no longer like them. It would probably be impossible for me to finish even a small box of cherries today. They are way too sweet. And very messy!

This past week, for fun, I posted an informal poll on Facebook asking my friends for their opinion about chocolate covered cherries. I received a hefty response. As the comments began to roll in, the general reaction was decidedly negative. But after a couple of days the love/hate ratio began to slowly even out. In the end, the naysayers held the majority.

Personally, I have a suspicion that the older generation likes them and the younger folks do not. I wasn’t able to prove that theory with my silly poll, but what the hell, I’ll assert it anyway.

I don’t know what the white muck surrounding the cherry actually consists of, and it would probably be best not to know. I’ve come to realize that it is this internal goo that makes the whole experience downright nasty. It tastes like cough syrup or that foul cherry fluoride that we were once tortured with as kids at the dentist.

Skimming the list of items that make up a Queen Anne cordial cherry, I counted 21 different ingredients, some of them bearing absurd chemical names. Yuck!

In the future, if I get a craving to bite into a mysterious substance that is ludicrously sugary, I’ll buy a Cadbury Creme Egg.

Flipboard aggregates the data from your favorite online services and displays them in an elegant display. It pulls feeds from your accounts at Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram, Google Reader, LinkedIn and more. The resulting combined output is displayed in a beautiful tiled format that you simply flip through with your fingertips. All of your favorite activity from across the web is organized and simplified into a single app that you can browse with fluid ease and elegance.

I can confidently say that Flipboard has the single best design and stunning fluidity of any mobile app I have ever experienced, hands down. It is nothing short of spectacular. And it’s completely free! If you’re an iOS user, go download this app right now and experience the future in the palm of your hand. You’ll love it!

My passion for Photoshop notwithstanding, I have a complaint to make. It focuses on one of the most annoying photographic tasks imaginable — creating rounded corners! You may have noticed that my picture on the right sidebar of this page has rounded corners. It was a small pain in the ass to achieve, I can assure you.

From time to time, I need to make rounded corners, and each time I have to seek out an online tutorial or YouTube video that will remind me of how to get it done. There are a few different methods of achieving rounded corners, none of which are simple in any way. I don’t see why this task needs to remain so difficult. I’ve even searched for plug-ins to automate the task, but the few that I found were written for outdated versions of Photoshop, which I believe probably wouldn’t work anymore.

Adobe needs to add an automatic rounded corner tool in Photoshop. Period. I understand that Photoshop is a professional-grade program, and single button fixes isn’t typically its style, but some form of automated solution is sorely needed. I want to see an icon that will make rounded corners with a single click. Why isn’t this a feature already? For the hardcore Photoshop user, the traditional methods of creating rounded corners would continue to exist. If my idea doesn’t appeal to those hardcore users, then at let’s agree that Adobe should at least add this functionality to their consumer-grade Photoshop Elements program.

I am aware that there are websites such as RoundPic that can churn out photos with rounded corners, but I wouldn’t recommend such a service to anyone who is even remotely serious about editing their photos. I prefer to stick with real tools.

I’m sharing a link to the online tutorial that demonstrates my preferred method for rounding corners in Photoshop. Knock yourself out.

These days, I compose the bulk of my writing in a local word editor on my computer. My personal editor of choice is the simple Mac TextEdit app, which is the program that I am using to write the text you are reading now. It provides reliable on-the-fly spell checking, which is a must. Fortunately, it but doesn’t have grammar checker, which I have never really cared for in any program. I have always been a fan of Microsoft Word, and I have used it to write a few posts, but it is largely geared toward print formatting, and I consider it to be overkill for this venue.

Once I have typed a working draft in my editor, I print it out so that I can step away from the computer and read it in its entirety on paper. This may seem somewhat wasteful and absurd, but I think there is a purity in reading my work on a plain sheet of paper, absent any visual distractions. I even scribble notes on the printouts and almost always find careless mistakes and room for improvement.

At the end, I go back to the computer and make my tweaks. Once I’m finished, I simply paste my body of work into the WordPress editor and hit Publish.

The end.

I recently discovered that he hosts a podcast called Judge John Hodgman. It has quickly become one of my favorite shows. He positions himself as a judge between two parties who are having an unresolved dispute. He presides over cases that often petty and meaningless, but it’s John’s serious delivery and wiseass humor that propel the show. I’ve only listened to a handful of episodes thus far, but I’m now going back to the very beginning and listening to all of them.

If you’re a fan of Hodgman, you are sure to love his podcast. You should definitely tune in.

I created a GetGlue account late last year in November 2010. Before that time, I admit that I had not heard of the service either. I discovered it after noticing friends post their GetGlue check-ins to Twitter. I was intrigued, and created my own account.

During the past year, I’ve made nearly 300 check-ins and have unlocked 32 stickers. Stickers are unlocked as you become a fan of whatever you’re checking-in to. Your fan status is determined by the number of times you have checked-in to any one topic. Topics include books, movies, television shows, music, podcasts, games, and much more.

I personally happen to enjoy check-in services of all kinds, so GetGlue is a natural fit for my Internet lifestyle. Not only do I find it enjoyable, the service helps me to discover similar musicians and movies that are likely to cater to my taste. I’ve discovered several things that I may not have known about otherwise. In addition, when I make a check-in, I can participate in a conversation thread surrounding that topic that other users have generated.

When I launch GetGlue, I am presented with a feed list of check-ins that my friends have made, allowing me to to see the things that they are enjoying as well. To date, I only have 10 friends that I’m following on the service, but I have more users than that who are following me. My username is Blitzcraig. Unlike Twitter, new followers must be approved by the user.

If you think GetGlue sounds like an interesting service, I encourage you to check it out. Naturally, they also offer convenient apps for the popular mobile platforms.

Visit the Moom website for more information, demos, and a free trial. Moom is only $5 to buy, and is well worth it for something I use every day. You can download the program directly from the developer, but it is also available on the Mac App Store.

Evil Dead 2 came out in 1987, but it is so low-budget that looks even older than that. The previews that played before the movie were all for horror movies that came out in the late 70s or early 80s. In fact, Halloween 2 was one of the previews. So cheesy. All of the audio came from the front speakers; no surround sound to speak of. It was retro all the way. The film itself was so old and worn that it had countless artifacts, distortions, and reel changes. Awesome!

As soon as the movie began, the film broke. Everybody laughed and cheered. It was much like watching a public production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The crowd obviously knew this movie inside and out, and had probably had seen it countless times before. It is likely the craziest movie I can think of. Everyone in the theater truly ate it up. It was so awesome to see it with a large crowd of fans. Everyone present was there simply to have a good time, and we all did.

Every cheesy line that Bruce Campbell delivered and every god-awful special effect was met with cheers and applause from the crowd. It was a giant party. The audience loved every minute of the movie, which by any modern standard is truly a terrible production. But it is the overall bad production quality that lends Evil Dead 2 every ounce of its charm.

In a funny twist of contrast, I brought my friend Amanda, who is only 23 years old. It’s hard to imagine, but she was born after this movie came out. I wasn’t sure if she would dig the retro experience, but she certainly did.

It was all so retro last night, much like watching a movie back in the 70s. So awesome. I enjoyed it more than the blockbusters of today, by a mile. I want to go see more old movies in this kind of setting.

The new notification system is my overall favorite feature. I was getting a little jealous of friends with Android phones that were able to see all of their notifications and local weather conditions on their lock screen. Now I can enjoy the same, without a jailbreak.

iMessage is a killer feature for me, as I don’t pay for unlimited texting from AT&T. It is really awesome! My dad, brother, and I had a 3-way iMessage chat going this morning for an hour. It was great and only added to my excitement. The camera app loads faster now, which is a welcomed enhancement for everyone. The new Mail app is great. I’d recently been using the Gmail mobile webpage in Safari, but now Mail supports flagging of important messages in the app and it has worked really well so far.

Some new iOS features are more hidden and subtle, but certainly a step forward. I’m also happy that iOS5 will now offer small over-the-air updates instead of one hulking download; something that Android users have had enjoyed for a long time.

I don’t really care about WiFi syncing or iCloud at this juncture. I chose to not enable any iCloud or WiFi sync features in my phone setup today. Some day in the future, I may flip that switch. For now, I mainly charge my phone on my computer, and I don’t need wireless syncing or cloud storage since I’m plugging it in already. My computer will continue to handle updates and backups for now.

The new iOS, combined with overhauled versions of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Google Voice this week have made my phone feel like a brand new toy. I use Google Voice a lot, and the new version that Google finally released this week, while no more attractive, is noticeably more responsive now, and integrates fully with the new iOS5 notification system.

I’m happy with all the upgrades. So much so that I don’t feel in a hurry to upgrade my phone hardware. I am eligible for an upgrade to the iPhone 4S per my mobile contract, but I am rather content with the phone I already have. I may get a wild hair one day and buy a new phone at some point, but I am happy with what I have for now. All of the new goodies have made it feel brand new again.

One of the greatest leaders of our time; a man who changed the world.

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.” – Jobs, 1993

My usual solution for this is to sit in front of a roaring fan in an attempt to keep the little buggers off of me. That isn’t a perfect solution by any means. I suppose I could use a spray-on repellent, but I find them disgusting and I refuse!

Now you can turn down the fan and toss out the sprays and Citronella candles. Simply buy the OFF! Clip-On. It is all you need. I’ve used one for a couple of months and it works like a charm. The initial purchase for the unit is around $10, but it is reusable. The AAA batteries can be replaced and you can buy repellent refills.

This product is amazing! I haven’t had any mosquito bites this summer since I began wearing the clip-on. Buy one and prepare to be amazed. Just make sure to turn it off when you don’t need it, or risk killing the battery. I’ve had to replace the batteries in mine a few times after forgetting to switch it off.

If a homeless man defecated into a cup it would probably taste better than this Chobani non-fat yogurt. Just awful.

I laughed out loud as my finger tapped to tweet that remark. But after checking Twitter during my lunch break I saw that the Chobani company had written me a public message about what I’d said. Their response? “Ouch.” They went on to ask what I didn’t like about their yogurt. I immediately felt like an ass. A feeling of shame washed over me. I was only upset at having bought the non-fat version of their product.

Someone at Chobani had apparently searched Twitter for mentions of their brand and read what I said. What I had posted was truly over-the-top and absurd. I compared their food product not only to the taste of human feces, but I threw gasoline on the fire by adding that it tasted like a homeless man had shat in a cup. Instead of ignoring my searing remark, the company replied with a friendly “ouch” and asked why was I unhappy with my meal. It was completely unexpected. I was impressed.

Chobani went on to reply to me twice more in a friendly back-and-forth I’d had with them via Twitter today. They told me that they were not offended by my tweet. I apologized to them for what I’d said and thanked them for their sense of humor. In turn, they wrote me back and said they liked my sense of humor too. I was floored with how they handled my vile tweet. I’ll certainly buy more of their yogurt; even more so now, thanks to their delightful exchange. I have a new respect for them and their company. I’ll just have to make sure to not buy the non-fat variety next time. Hehe.

Well done, Chobani. I wholeheartedly take back what I said this morning. I offer my sincere apologies.

That aside, I have a complaint that the Apple TV doesn’t allow me to actually fully login to my Flickr account. The Flickr integration merely points to one’s public Flickr account, and displays the photos and slideshows accordingly. That is fine and dandy, and the display is quite beautiful, but it only works so long as the photos in one’s library are all “public” photos.

My cousin brought this to my attention. He wanted to look at a photo set on his TV that I’d recently posted, but he couldn’t because I’d set the photos to be private (friends/family only). He cannot view them on his TV because he cannot log in to Flickr directly from his Apple TV box. I tried this myself, and he is correct. Even I can’t see my private photos on my own TV. Crappy!

I have the Flickr iPhone app and it remains permanently logged in to my account, allowing me to browse all of my photos, private or not, as well as upload photos, and manage my account fully. The iOS TV software on the other hand, isn’t a collection of apps, but integrated operating system features. Flickr slideshows and photo browsing is a built-in OS feature, take it or leave it. It does not allow you to log in or tamper with your Flickr account in any way. Grumble.

I went to the Apple support site to write them a nastygram about the Flickr integration. I wasn’t able to find a direct email address to contact them, but a search of the Apple TV discussion board revealed over 27,000 posts about Flickr. Many people have complained about this very issue, some dating back years ago when the first generation Apple TV was introduced. Therefore, the company must be aware that some users want to be able to log in to Flickr directly and see their private content.

I don’t know if it is Apple or Yahoo that is limiting this, but I wish the situation would be remedied. Like now.

Some time ago, my friend Chad created a Facebook fan page called “Rabbit Rabbit.” He generously made me an administrator of the page. In the early days the fan page only had a dozen fans. We are now up to nearly 100 fans. I would like to see that number rise to 1000 and beyond. This week I created a permanent username for the page so that it now has its own direct URL on Facebook. I’m hoping that by giving the page it’s own unique URL that it will start to appear on search engines and elsewhere. The address is: facebook.com/rabbitrabbitpage

Any Facebook user who is a fan of the page is allowed to make posts to the wall and even post pictures! That said, I monitor this very closely. Last week a user posted a spam advertisement for a website selling rabbit food. I believe that spam showed up on the news feeds of everyone who is a fan of the page. Let me be clear that I will not tolerate junk posts to our page, and I will bring the hammer down on anybody who does. So behave yourselves!

It’s also worth nothing that there is a page on Wikipedia that explains the origins of Rabbit Rabbit. It’s an interesting read, but Chad and I had nothing to do its creation or content.

Apple doesn’t include free navigation on the iPhone. As a result, many users simply choose to use the free built-in Maps app for maps and directions. The Maps app is useful for finding nearby places but is inadequate as a substitute for turn-by-turn driving directions. I want a GPS app with maps in first-person view and turn-by-turn spoken directions. There are several solutions in the App Store and I’m going to focus on the big three. All three apps below utilize multitasking so you can still use another app or talk on the phone and they will continue delivering voice guidance.

MotionX GPS Drive

In the past, MotionX GPS Drive is the app I have used the most, and I even wrote a post about it in July of 2010. It costs 99¢ in the App Store. It is feature-rich and works relatively well. The catch is that in order to get the voice guidance, you have to subscribe via an in-app purchase. 30 days of voice guidance costs $2.99. It isn’t an automatically renewed subscription, but a 30-day pass that you can re-activate whenever you need it. If you rarely need to use GPS navigation, this is a very cheap solution. You also have the option to pay for one full year of voice guidance at $24.99 (reportedly now $19.99), which is far cheaper than buying a standalone GPS unit.

Some downsides to MotionX GPS Drive are that the app interface is a bit cluttered. I think that many of the options and settings could be simplified. For example, if I’m sitting at a stoplight and I want to quickly navigate to one of my saved locations, I have to click through several screens to get to that. I appreciate that the app has the sheer number of settings that it does, but I’d like to have an option for a much more simplified view of my choices, in much larger writing.

MotionX uses OpenStreetMap as its mapping source. The biggest cost in a GPS system is the actual map data. The big boys charge a premium for their well polished maps. OpenStreetMap is a crowdsourced mapping system that was created and is maintained by the community in a way like Wikipedia, meaning regular Internet users are adding and updating the data on these maps. The use of OpenStreetMap is what keeps the cost of MotionX so low compared to some of the others. This can also lead to inaccuracies, but I never noticed any issues when I’ve used it in my area.

Map data is downloaded from the server at the time you plot a route or choose a destination. You must have an Internet connection via Wi-Fi or 3G to get this initial map data. Maps are then cached and are reused until the cache is filled (up to 2 GB of storage). This is a disadvantage if you are in an area without data coverage. However, it is an advantage in that the app itself is small and maps are always fresh, having just come from the source.

Overall, I had a fairly successful experience with MotionX. My biggest complaint is that the app would often tell me to turn when I was right on top the turn, or when I was already passing it. I often didn’t get enough warning of an impending turn and found myself glancing at the screen a lot just to feel certain about what was coming next. Another downside is that the voice navigation doesn’t pronounce street names aloud. It says highway numbers but leaves road names out. I prefer to hear the road names spoken to me. In addition, I prefer to see speed limits within the GPS unit and MotionX does not provide this information. That said, MotionX is constantly being improved and updated. New features are made available all the time.

Garmin StreetPilot

Garmin finally got in the game at the beginning of 2011 with StreetPilot. This iPhone app looks exactly like the Garmin Nuvi GPS unit. The interface is dead simple and easy to use. Maps on the Garmin are downloaded on-the-fly just as MotionX does. Garmin isn’t using OpenStreetMap though, it uses the same map source used in their GPS units, so map data is likely to be more accurate. The app also offers real-time traffic updates.

StreetPilot is a one-time purchase of $34. It is cheaper than TomTom and far cheaper than a standalone unit. I almost purchased StreetPilot, but I’d read many negative reviews of it on the web and in the App Store. Garmin has released several updates since the initial version, but users have still complained about various aspects of it. The number one complaint I’ve seen is that the voice isn’t clear or loud enough. Many users reported trouble understanding the spoken voice guidance. I’m sure it Garmin makes a solid product, but the user reviews turned me off and I looked to TomTom instead.

TomTom USA

From my research, the TomTom app is the gold standard of iOS navigation apps. It has won the praise of many. TomTom bundles all of their map data within the app, so no data connection is required to use it, just like a standalone unit. The maps are updated when they release new versions of the app. The inclusion of the map data makes the app itself very large. The TomTom USA app amounts to a whopping 1.3 GB, easily the largest mobile app I’ve ever downloaded. When TomTom releases an update of any kind, you have to download an entire new 1.3 GB app again. That said, some map updates are pushed to the app automatically, and large app releases are relatively few and far between. TomTom is also quite expensive at $49. I bought it a few weeks ago on sale for $39. That is a lot of money for an iPhone app, but a fraction of the money I would have spent on a TomTom standalone unit, which I was also considering at the time.

I really like the TomTom GPS app. The interface is simple and clean, with large letters and graphics. It warns me with ample time to make a turn or to change lanes. When I approach a complex interchange on the freeway, the app automatically shows a zoomed view of what lane I need to be in to stay on course. That is pretty sweet. TomTom is the only one of these three to offer celebrity voices, including Homer Simpson! Celebrity voices cost extra via an in-app purchase. I have not installed any such voices. They are cute, but rather unnecessary. The included voice is perfect as it is. Street names are all read and pronounced aloud. Traffic information is also available, if desired. TomTom also makes a US and Canada combo app that is slightly more expensive than the US only version. International versions are available as well.

Overall, MotionX provides the cheapest GPS navigation solution, but I find the TomTom app to have a bit more polish, accuracy, and ease of use. I also prefer the one-time purchase over subscription pricing.

Not so fast! On the registration card is a special barcode that you can scan with your camera phone! I have a barcode scanner in my iPhone called RedLaser. I fired it up and scanned the provided barcode. My phone instantly took me to the Whirlpool mobile website where it already had my product information displayed and the individual serial numbers of my actual units! Wow! Then all I needed to do was type in my name, address, email, and select the store where the products were purchased. Boom! I was done in a flash. It said my product was registered and I immediately got an email from Whirlpool with warranty and product information. I will be notified about potential product recalls via email in the future.

To think I was going to use the website and type it all in. That behavior is now considered old school. I am very impressed. Wow! The future has arrived.

The first app you should check out is called Plaintext. It has replaced the Notes app for me on my iPhone. Plaintext is a free and simple barebones text editor. What makes it so useful is that there is no local saving of text files. It automatically saves everything you type into a folder on Dropbox. Plaintext makes note-taking much easier than using the Notes app where you sync files via iTunes. I can now jot down notes on the go and when I get home to my computer, the notes are already there waiting for me. It works in the opposite direction as well. I can write and save files to the Plaintext folder in Dropbox on my computer and I can access and edit them on my phone. There are other apps that do the same type of thing that Plaintext does, but Plaintext is completely free and does works perfectly. I highly recommend it.

Sometimes I don’t feel like typing long notes on my phone and would rather record a voice memo. Say hello to Dropvox. It is a simple voice recorder where the recordings are automatically saved to Dropbox. The Dropvox app is extremely basic, almost to a fault. You can’t go back and listen to what you just recorded, or see a list of files saved. It is a one-way street. Of course, you could use the Dropbox iOS app if you want to browse what is in the folder. Limitations aside, it’s nice to sit at my computer and see the files of my recordings waiting for me. This is easier than using the Voice Memos app included in iOS where you have to sync the phone to iTunes to get the files. Granted, the audio quality is compressed with Dropvox, so you wouldn’t want to use it in situations where you want the best audio quality. I tend to use it when I’m driving and I want to remind myself of something to look up later, or something to add to my hate list, for instance. Dropvox costs 99 cents.

Apple is rumored to make a big cloud push this year, and the release of iOS 5 may bring this type of functionality to the native Notes and Voice Memos apps. We shall see. For now, try the two solutions above. Both Plaintext and Dropvox work on the iPad as well.

Before I get into my list of features I want in the iPhone app, I would like to point out a glaring omission with the Google Voice system as a whole. That omission is that MMS texting is not allowed. If anyone sends me a text message that includes a picture, I receive absolutely nothing. No notification, no bounceback. Absolutely nothing. I don’t know why this isn’t fully supported. It couldn’t be a storage issue since Google owns enormous properties like YouTube. The amount of data to manage MMS messaging would be less than a drop in the bucket of the data management for YouTube videos. At the very least, I wish Google would deliver me the text portion of a MMS message with an “attachment not included” warning. Get on this already!

Back to the iPhone app. For some unknown reason, composing text in landscape mode is not supported. I most always lock my phone in portrait mode, so it’s not a huge deal for me, but not everyone uses it the way I do. Landscape mode for the Google Voice app is surely needed, especially for people used to typing in that fashion.

There are no zero options for notification sounds! The only sound the app makes is the generic iOS default notify ding. I’ve used the TextFree app in the past and it had a dozen or so options for notification sounds. This would be a very welcomed feature for Google Voice. The fact that it doesn’t exist already is outrageous. This is one of my biggest complaints.

The font size for text composition is entirely too small. If I compose a brand new text message, the font size and window for typing is just right. However, when working in the inbox timeline of a text thread, the font is really tiny, and replying is done in an incredibly small window. I would like this to change. I would even like to see some font size options in the app settings. In fact, the entire interface of the app could be a lot more attractive overall. I’m calling for a complete overhaul of the user interface.

I use the Google Voice app a lot during the course of a day and I feel like the app is a battery and resource hog. I have no evidence to back this up, mind you. It’s just a hunch. At times it can feel a bit slow and clunky. I don’t know what could be done about this, if anything, but I can’t get past the feeling that the app is making my phone work harder than it should. This issue is the least important in my wishlist and for all I know, it isn’t really an issue at all, but I had to toss it in at the end.

I’ve never used Google Voice on an Android phone so I can’t comment on that experience. I do love the service as a whole. I just wish the iPhone app would receive the overhaul it desperately needs. Get on it, Google!

I have to sign up for some sort of texting plan because without being enrolled in a plan, each text sent and received costs 20¢. At that rate, costs can spiral out of control very quickly. I have opted to pay $5 per month for 200 texts. It isn’t many, but I use the Google Voice app on my iPhone to bypass the carrier and do my texting for free. Not everyone understands why I have two phone numbers, so I typically only give out my Google number to my friends who are the most heavy texters.

I wish that AT&T would offer a rollover system for unused texts for everyone who has a texting plan below the unlimited plan. I don’t always use my allotted 200 texts per month, but I will occasionally go over that limit. It would be nice if I could carry over those unused texts the same way that I can with my voice minutes. More text plan options would be good too. Currently, there are only 200, 1500, and unlimited plans. How about adding a 500 or 1000 plan in there somewhere? I’m not certain what Verizon’s texting plans are, but I’m sure they’re equally expensive.

In fact, the entire text messaging industry is a complete and total rip off. A past article in TechCrunch calculated that the cost of text messaging at 20¢ a pop is equal to $1310 per megabyte of data. That is a staggering figure.

Moving my domain and WordPress database has been a learning experience. I’ve enjoyed tinkering with it all, and look forward to more. The biggest benefit of this effort is that my new host allows far more advanced controls, like SSH access, for instance. My new service is at a much more pro level. I have begun to feel like a wizard behind the curtains.

Now that my blog is five years old, I want to share some statistics with you. This morning I added a word counter to my blog footer at the bottom of this page. To date, I’ve written 545 blog posts that collectively amass a whopping total of 110,289 words. Incredible! Some day I would like to make a giant coffee table book of the entire production. As awesome as that sounds, such a printing would probably cost a small fortune.

Here’s to (hopefully) many more posts in the future. I can’t promise five more years. I’m just doing this day-to-day. For all I know, I could decide to quit tomorrow. Cheers!

Film Sack is definitely an entertaining listen. Each weekly episode is entirely about a single film. The show is full of jokes and humor, so don’t expect to be too serious. It typically runs one hour per week. It’s been in production since late 2009, but I’ve only been listening for the past couple of months. I’ve been enjoying so much that I’ve been going back and downloading some of the past episodes.

Aside from the humor, I love the movie titles that they review on Film Sack. The movies they have chosen to review is part of what makes the show so great. Such films include: Swamp Thing, Superman 2, Revenge of the Nerds, 2010, The Fly, Beetlejuice, Star Trek V, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and even the ridiculously obscure Killer Klowns From Outer Space! (My brother will get a chuckle out of that last one.) Film Sack does not review new releases or any film that has recently been in theaters. It isn’t that kind of show. A lot their movie selections are ones I fondly remember watching in the 80s, and I easily relate to their nostalgic point of view. In fact, I’m going to petition Scott to record an episode about the 1987 movie Innerspace!

If you’re a movie buff, or have an appreciation for the type of movies in their show catalog, you should definitely listen to Film Sack. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do.

I use a traditional alarm clock next to my bed that completely infuriates me every morning when it blares out its trademark wail. It makes me so mad when it goes off. Despite its horrible piercing noise, I can never seem to drag myself out of bed. I always end up slapping the snooze button countless times, pushing the window for me to get up and get ready to the last possible minute. Sure, I could move the clock across the room, but I’ve done that before and it doesn’t work for me. I will still run over to smack it and jump back under the covers.

In addition to the physical alarm, I use my iPhone as a second alarm clock. It makes sense to use my phone, since I have it with me in the bed every night, and it can survive a power outage. It is also a lot more gentle. Unlike my physical alarm clock, which fires up like a bulldozer crashing into the room, my phone sneaks up on me with a pleasant sound. I never beat the crap out of the phone like I do with the real clock. The alarm is my phone’s way of saying, “Hey, peek-a-boo, look at me. Don’t you want to check Facebook and Twitter?” And that I do. Once my phone sounds off, I snatch it to see what’s happening in the world. It gives me a reason stay up and I almost never snooze it. It will often make me stay in the bed for far too long, though.

Neither of my above solutions make me want to get out of the bed. That is the whole problem. This is where my idea for an alarm clock bed comes in. What if the bed itself had an alarm that would not stop alerting you until you got out of bed? It could be pressure-sensitive like car seats or the seat on a riding lawn mower. Perhaps you can set it so that the alarm only activates once you are in the bed, so that if you’re out of town, for instance, it won’t go off. A vibration feature would be nice, but may only encourage you to stay in the bed. The vibration would have to be quite strong to make you want to get out as soon as possible.

This was just a half-brained idea when I thought of it. Clearly, this system would have flaws. First, it would be expensive and unnecessary. I have no idea how you’d set and maintain the time on this bed. If you have a water bed, as I do, then adding electrical components is clearly not a wise idea. Also, if you happen to pass out on the couch, it wouldn’t work. Another pitfall is that you have to be sleeping alone. Obviously, if two people share the bed, or if you have a heavy dog, this concept isn’t going to fly.

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea in the first place. Oh well.

For instance, I can be behind closed doors in a bathroom stall when lo and behold, some idiot struts in and cozies up to the urinal that is directly adjacent to my stall. He’s so close that his shoes practically penetrate the boundary of my personal space. I can literally stare at his twitching foot while I’m sitting on the commode. This is horrible! Why do men do this repeatedly, when there are other toilets that are farther away from me?

Continuing the Men’s room rule: If there are a line of urinals in the bathroom, do not for any reason come and stand next the one I’m using. Everybody knows that! Everybody, except for half the men I encounter in an actual bathroom! What is wrong with you people? Let me be clear. I never want to stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone and urinate together. Ever!

Furthermore, men, when you’re reliving your bladders, it isn’t necessary for you to deliberately force out a fart while you do it. I mean, really. One may slip out here and there, but to proudly fire off your farts amongst strangers isn’t the least bit appreciated, I can assure you.

I’ve also noticed that a man who is occupying a stall will start blowing their nose when I walk in the bathroom. They’re obviously making a halfhearted attempt to cover up the sound of their sputtering ass. I have news for you fellows, you’re not fooling anyone. You’re noses are almost never clogged, and besides, I can still hear the painful echos of your bloody diarrhea throughout the bathroom.

And another thing. If I’m already in a stall minding my own business, don’t come waltzing in the bathroom and fiddle with the sink for 10 minutes. I have this experience regularly. Men walk in the bathroom and begin rinsing the coffee pot or their lunch containers, and run the water at full blast for what seems like an eternity. All while combing their hair, or staring in the mirror performing some other mindless ritual. This is a public bathroom, not a shower or a kitchen! Get the hell out!

I can’t imagine a single man disagreeing with me on what I’ve just wrote. Still, I say this knowing that tomorrow, one of the terrible sequences of events mentioned above will inevitably transpire before me yet again. Good grief.

I read the above instructions on Twitter, and did just that. This is a gag that has apparently been making the rounds online for a while. Basically, people have been taking pictures of their head in a freezer and uploading them with the tag “241543903.” It’s such a specific search term that all you see are these silly pictures.

I had to make one myself! My brother was in town and helped me stage some funny pictures with my freezer. Adding to the amusement, my cousin got on-board and coaxed her son to put his head in a freezer, too! Hilarious! I uploaded my best photo to Flickr and tagged it appropriately. Now I have to sit back and wait for Google to index it.

Below you will see the picture of my head in my freezer. Even better, what you actually see is a printout of the picture, stuck to the front of my freezer, and staged with my awesome Photoshop refrigerator magnet set! That makes it a double joke. I’m quite proud of this creation!

This past Christmas, in 2010, my brother and I recanted tales of this long lost game. At first, we struggled to even remember what the game was called. After doing some online research, we are now certain the game we once enjoyed was indeed Voodoo Castle. I don’t exactly know the time-frame in which we originally played it, but it was popular in our household at some point around 1983-1984. This game is probably where I mastered my typing skills as a young lad.

Voodoo Castle was released on a plastic cartridge that you plugged into the back of the computer (image below). As such, there was no way to save the game! Once we turned off the computer, all progress was lost. If you’re too young to have used a computer in those days, I’m sure you can’t even imagine what that was like. Well, that was the reality for games that were released 30 years ago. We simply didn’t know any better!

I have no recollection of how the game ends. I do vividly remember repeatedly reaching a point in the game where it told us, “You are lost in a maze of passages.” At that point, you are virtually screwed and no exit can be found.

I’m excited to announce that the complete game is now available on the Internet for free. You can play it in its entirety in your browser via a Java applet. I have played it, and it really took me back. Try it yourself!

I love location-based services and I’ve been turning others on to the idea as well. I always call out Foursquare, but they are not the only player in this game. Others include Gowalla, Loopt, Facebook Places, Google Latitude, and more. I don’t care much about the others, as Foursquare is by far my service of choice.

Foursquare now allows its users to view their complete check-in history! Simply add the word “history” to your username URL at Foursquare and you can view every place you’ve ever been with the service. For example, the address would read: foursquare.com/username/history. In addition to your past locations, your history includes your comments, tips, photos, and a list of other users who were checked in there at the time. Cool!

A few days ago I wrote a post called “My Advice To Twitter,” where I suggested that Twitter add an archive view of users tweets. The URL structure I suggested in that post is the same as the one that Foursquare has now enabled. I don’t know when Foursquare officially launched their new history view, but I was not aware of it at the time when I wrote my post about Twitter. I guess irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.

If you want to see my complete history, you’re out of luck. You have to be my explicit friend on Foursquare, or be logged in as me. Random Internet passersby cannot view any of my location history. This is true for all Foursquare users and this cannot be changed. I’d say that is a smart decision by the company.

Foursquare has done it right. I applaud the company for creating this new complete history view for its users. It is an awesome way to look back at everywhere you’ve been and what you’ve been doing. I wish that Twitter would take notice.

My tweet was clearly over-the-top, as I often am, but I do have genuine thoughts on this matter. Therefore, I have crafted and submitted the following list of advice and suggestions to the “powers-that-be” at Twitter.

Faster Pageloads

I would like the “New Twitter” site to be a little more responsive and serve faster page loads. I can’t help but feel like the Twitter website as a whole has gotten slower over time; even more so since the redesign this year. I am well aware that their servers process a mind-boggling mass of data every second, but the end-user experience at my computer can be less than ideal at times. This is one reason why I like to use external Twitter applications like Tweetie, and not use the website unless I need to.

Exporting Features

Twitter seriously needs to offer better exporting options for users accounts. I want to be able to download a complete archive of all of my current Twitter data in a variety of different formats at any given time. I’ve grown tired of fiddling with Twitter backup companies, and I’ve used several of them. I’ll say outright that Tweetbackup doesn’t work at all. I’ve never had that service work for me even once! Backupify is a reliable service that conveniently archives all of my tweets on a schedule, but I can only download that data in CSV format, which I have to load as a huge spreadsheet in Excel.

More importantly, exporting in general is currently limited by Twitter to your last 3,200 tweets. That is all you can view or access, period! They promised some time ago that this artificial cap would ultimately be lifted. To date, that hasn’t happened. As users accounts grow ever larger, this issue needs to be addressed. Longtime users can have upward of 10,000 tweets. Today, those users are left in the cold if they want to roll back to the tweets in their early years. Fix this now!

Archive View

I would like for the Twitter website to add a new dimension where you can view all of the tweets in your entire archive in an elegant presentation. One example of this today is Tweet Nest, a solution to archive your tweets on your own web server and display them on a page. The resulting page looks clean and has a wealth of information. Twitter doesn’t have to copy this model, but it is an example of what I’d like to see them create for its users. Users could access this theoretical new archive display by adding the world “archive” to their URL. For example: twitter.com/username/archive. I think this is a fantastic idea, and long overdue.

Longer Tweets

I still insist that tweets could be a little longer to make use for longer links and retweets. As I’ve said in a previous post, I’d like to see the current 140-character limit raised to 160 (thereby matching the traditional phone text message limit), or even all the way to 200. I’ve already mentioned this in detail in the past, so I won’t go on about that again here.

Tweet Counts

In my experience, Twitter’s total tweet count for me is fluid and seldom completely accurate. This is especially noticeable with the count in the Favorites feature. I can log in on the site and have 25 favorite tweets that I’ve previously starred. After I’m finished reading some of them and unstar a few, it takes a very long time (hours) for my Favorites count to show lower than the original count of 25. It’s annoying, and I wish something could be done about it.

Having said the above, the count numbers get even whackier when using the Twitter iPhone app, where it sometimes takes days to reflect a profile picture change or update my total tweet count. Why this this? Surely Twitter itself must be deliberately limiting calls for this data in its API structure. Can’t this policy be changed to allow more accurate information?

In Closing…

This is just a few of the ideas and suggestions I’ve sent to Twitter. The tweet count issue is complex and really not a big deal, but account exporting and a complete archive view are both essential. I’m growing tired of relying on countless third party solutions to compensate for Twitter’s built-in limitations. I hope they heed my words and make my suggestions a reality.

Back in my younger days, if I wanted to keep a journal, it was likely bound to paper. Paper has a few benefits, but also carries many drawbacks. First and foremost, a journal is meant to be private. That isn’t possible in physical form. Fortunately, today there are many avenues to explore for keeping a virtual private journal.

I have complained for years that there was not a good solution for maintaining a journal on my computer. I always found the crop of journaling software to be outdated and lackluster. Old journaling programs would trap you in with limited exporting abilities. I tried a few Windows clients in years past, but never liked any of them. I suppose that one could use a simple text editor or Microsoft Word to write entries, but that practice would not be secure, nor could you easily search across multiple files for segments of text. This all makes me wonder what computer program Doogie Howser was using back in 1989? Hmmm.

For the Mac user, the best journaling program by far is MacJournal. I’ve used it several times in trial modes and it is great. The problem for me is that it has too many features. It’s extensive features threaten to turn it into more of a virtual scrapbook than a simple journal. Personally, I want to type words, and words only. I don’t want to embed video clips, web links, fonts, and all that fluffy jazz. MacJournal is also a pricey $40 to purchase. The software is superb, but I don’t want to invest that much in an activity I only occasionally engage in.

An online cloud solution seems to be the way to go for most users today. A few benefits are that your data is safely stored offsite and backed up, plus you can use more than one machine to access or write to your journal. I’ll mention two that I’ve had experience with.

LiveJournal has been around for many years. It is a decent off-the-cuff solution, but the service is geared by default toward sharing your content. You have to deliberately change your account settings to make all entries private and to hide your profile from site searches. The default stance of this site encouraging public engagement turns me off a little. LiveJournal does let users export their entries into a monthly CSV format, which is a nice.

The online journaling service that I like best is Penzu.com. It’s been around for a few years now. Penzu is solely aimed toward complete privacy. It is a very private experience, not a social one. It also has a clever interface that lets you go old-school and type on lined notebook paper. Free users get unlimited storage. Though, to be able to export your data, you have to pay for a Pro account at $19/year. Penzu exports to PDF, XML, and TXT formats. Penzu has a lot of clever features and falls very much along the lines of what I’ve looked for in a journaling solution. The interface and slickness of the website as a whole make it fun to use.

Having said all of the above, I’ve saved the best for last.

I read about the following solution recently and it is brilliantly simple: If you are a GMail user, simply create a “Journal” label in your mail account. When you want to write in your journal, write yourself an email using the new label. This solution is free, secure and amazingly simple. If you think about it, your email account is already its own journal in many ways. You can already look back through messages and read what you were up to and the mood you were in at any given time. Therefore, adding the direct “Journal” label and writing yourself a simple email of private thoughts makes complete sense. Boom! It’s funny how the simple solution will often elude us.

I don’t even realize I’m overdoing it. I tend to write and hammer out words as though I’m speaking out loud to someone. I find myself inserting commas at random in an effort to invoke a slight pause in the flow of the message. I want to sprinkle commas everywhere! I’m not certain of to what degree of grammatical correctness any of my comma usage actually is. I’ll leave that to the experts and future historians to decide.

I started to wonder if commas at some point in the far future will gradually get weeded out from all written text. At least perhaps that could be possible for all casual writing. Along with the advent of emails and text messages it seems that written language will inevitably get more simplified over time. Perhaps some day it won’t look unnatural to have a whole body of text without any commas. Could you imagine such a world? I wonder if I could ever bring myself to write an entire blog post without using a single comma.

Wait. I just did.

In August, I wrote about the awesome TextFree iPhone app. I’ve used it for a while now and definitely would recommend it to replace the expensive text plans from the mobile carriers. I even paid $5.99 for a year of ad-free use of the app, which I think is well worth it.

However, last week, the free Google Voice app suddenly appeared in the App Store. I immediately downloaded the app. Calls to my Google Voice number will automatically ring my phone, and all text messages are displayed through a push notification. It’s pretty awesome. I don’t intend to replace my voice calls with my Google number, but I do intend to use it exclusively to replace native texting. Make sure you disable the forwarding of texts to your actual mobile number in the preferences to avoid being charged for texts by your carrier.

With Google Voice, all text messages are saved and can be browsed in a web interface that looks and behaves like GMail. That is an impressive feature that TextFree doesn’t offer. I hate to abandon TextFree, but I find Google Voice to be incredibly slick, and the app to be more responsive overall. It will be my exclusive means of mobile texting from now on.

“Gorgeous Stuff! My spouse and i had been only contemplating that there’s too much wrong important info on this theme and you also just simply updated our judgment. Appreciate your sharing a very effective piece of writing.”

Even worse is listening to music on the go and using my iPhone to do a Google search in Safari for the lyrics of what I’m listening to. Pages load slowly with the crazy amount of ad content that comes with them. Usually once a page is usable, it’s typical for a pop-up ad to show up about something stupid (like buying ringtones) and I have to zoom the page to click a tiny “X” to close the overlaying window box. Horrible! I wish that everyone would make mobile-friendly sites. As for using apps, lyric-specific apps are a little lacking, as they have their own ads or incomplete catalogs.

I’m not trying to plug the site, but I tend to generally use 1SongLyrics. This site is a little less bloated than the others, but absent a better solution, I’ve chosen to settle for it.

I’ve long been calling for a lyrics site with leaner ads, but perhaps the perfect solution would be if Google would just give me the lyrics right inside the search results. They already do that with the weather and sports results. I don’t know if this would create a copyright issue, but I just want the words to a song without the fluff.

If anyone thinks they have a better solution, then I’m all ears.

The demolished theater was the old United Artists theater at 632 South College Road. It hasn’t been in operation for many years now, but in its day, it was the best movie house in town. In fact, United Artists bought the theater from Litchfield, the original owners. I clearly remember the old animated Litchfield logo sequence before the start of every movie. I saw more movies there when I was growing up than I can possibly remember. I have countless memories from within its walls.

Scattered among the memories of being there with my parents and family, I have a strong memory of going there with my brother Chris to see Innerspace when it came to theaters in 1987. That one memory is a drop in the bucket, but for some odd reason, it sticks out in my mind. Beyond that, you can name any popular movie from the 1980s or 90s, and if I saw it at a theater, I most likely saw it there.

The theater had six screens and some of the largest rooms I’ve ever experienced. The lobby had an unusual layout with a large circular concession stand in the center of the room. I vividly remember loving the smell of that lobby. Reaching beyond the usual scent of popcorn and goodies was something more. It was unique. It had class.

My brother got his first job working as a projectionist at this very theater. I know that he was a tremendous asset and dedicated employee during his tenure. I know that building meant as much to him as it did to me; certainly even more so. It will always be a permanent fixture of our childhood and will certainly be missed.

Over the weekend, the local weather dipped below freezing. The overnight low was predicted to be 29 or 30 degrees. When I glanced at the weather forecast on my phone, I was prompted with a red “severe alert” icon. The alert turned out to be a mere frost advisory. Seriously, is a frost advisory actually severe? I think not.

The same is true for drought conditions. Over the summer, I’d often hear news reports that parts of the state were in moderate to severe drought. It was reported that the western part of the state was currently in a severe drought. I seriously doubt it. In my mind, a drought so bad as to be labeled severe means that all trees have died away and the dirt has dried to a bleak desert sand.

Also over the summer, I’d frequently see ozone and air quality alerts mixed in with the weather conditions. The ozone alerts, however insignificant to the average person, were most always labeled as being severe. If conditions outdoors were severe on a daily basis, the population would have long since withered away.

Almost nothing is truly severe. I’ve had enough of this. When something truly severe does come along, I don’t know how it will be described. I suppose the verbiage could jump to “extreme” but that word is just as overused and nearly equally as meaningless.

The panel on the show seemed to unanimously agree that optical drives are a relic of the past. Leo Laporte, host of the show, scoffed “When was the last time the anyone used their optical drive?” To which everyone chuckled in agreement. I shrugged at their tone. I had just used my DVD burner the night before I heard the podcast! I use it often and I wouldn’t want a computer that didn’t have the ability to read or write to optical discs.

May I also mention that I also use my optical drive to burn audio CDs? What for, you ask? To play songs with my CD player in my car, that’s why! Scoff if you like, but I still occasionally have to use a compact disc player.

CD and DVD media are not dead. In fact, I prefer to buy software on physical media, especially large programs and games. Giant downloads aren’t the problem. The problem is that in the end I have to store that download somewhere as a backup for the program that I have paid money for. I eventually may need to reinstall that software on my machine at some point. Blank DVDs are cheap. I’m not going to purchase a slew of USB sticks to store each package on.

Everyone that is deep inside the tech industry likes champion a rush of existing technologies to the grave. The problem I have with it is that I, among most people, still rely on those technologies! No one is selling me a computer without a DVD drive any time soon. I promise you that.

I chose to write this today because a friend of mine at work was out today because she’s home sick from having a flu shot a few days ago. What is the point of this shot if it makes some people sick?

Everyone save your time and money; avoid the flu shot sham.

I wanted to make this second post about the Ta-da List site primarily to mention the simplistic beauty of the mobile site, which I’ve recently started using. I’ve sampled a few iPhone apps and have tried to maintain a to-do list that way, but I’ve found that the Ta-da List mobile website is the perfect solution. In essence, I can add and check things off on the go or from my desktop, while always managing the same list. It’s all in one place, so no syncing is necessary. I use it to maintain many lists, including holiday gift ideas, hate list ideas, blogging ideas, shopping lists, and beyond.

I doubt anyone reading this has even heard of this service. Go check it out and marvel at its simplicity.

The problem is that to do so, I have to tap Settings, tap General, drill into Bluetooth, then slide it on or off. This doesn’t sound like a lot of trouble, but it gets cumbersome if you do it every other day.

I propose creating a single icon that toggles Bluetooth on or off. I could add such an icon permanently to the dock and tap it once to enable it, then tap it again to disable it. The icon color will indicate the current state (as well as the usual Bluetooth indicator in the menu bar.) I think this is a brilliant proposal and will help everyone extend their battery life.

This is likely possible if you jailbreak your phone. I don’t wish to do that at this time. This is something that should naturally be included in the operating system. Last week, I actually wrote Steve Jobs an email demanding this very feature be added to the next version of iOS. I have serious doubts that my email will ever be read by anyone. I’m including that email, shown below.

Steve, I’d like an easier way to toggle bluetooth on/off in my iPhone. I hate digging through Settings/General/Bluetooth. I want an independent icon for bluetooth that I can tap like an on/off switch. How about adding this addition in the next iOS update? Later.

I never back into a parking space! For one, I drive terribly in reverse. It takes me two tries to get it right. The thing is, I’m going to have to back up one way or the other, whether it is when I arrive or when I leave. If I choose to do it when I get there, I have to do it twice to fit in the space correctly, wasting even more time. And again, doing so would also waste the time of people behind me.

So, all of you stop backing in! Having said that, I do often back into my driveway because my car is always covered in dew or ice when I leave for work in the morning. I don’t like to back out at those times and risk running over a kid going to the bus. That is a special case that gives me a reason to make that kind of effort. Other than that scenario, forget it.

I’ve looked at many different ways to disable it and delete past revisions. After some digging around, I settled on the easiest solution for each. They are as follows.

First, to disable revisions, use the Revision Control plug-in for WordPress. It has a range of settings beyond a simple on/off switch. It’s free and simple to use. I used it to disable revisions entirely across the board. (Note: Disabling does not delete revisions which you have already stored.)

Now, to delete ALL of the revisions that are already stored in the database, follow the instructions below:

1. Login to phpMyAdmin for your database access
2. Select your WordPress database from the phpMyAdmin sidebar
3. Click the SQL tab on the menu. Insert the following line of code and click to apply:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = “revision”;

To my disappointment, Xmarks notified all of its users last week that they are shutting down the service in January 2011. The company said they are out of money and cannot continue operations. They are directing users to the built-in sync features in Chrome and in the upcoming Firefox 4. Firefox 3.x users today can download the Firefox Sync add-on from Mozilla. I’m pleased that bookmark syncing is starting to be included as a standard browser feature, but that doesn’t address syncing across multiple browser types which Xmarks currently provides.

So long, Xmarks. Thank you for providing such an awesome service for free for all of these years. It’s been a good ride.

Twitter recently completely revamped their website, dubbed “New Twitter” by many of its users. Among the many great new features of the new site is that tweets you’ve flagged as favorites are clearly visible in their own group on the website. For example, if I read a tweet from a tech site that links to a page listing the top ten newest WordPress themes, I can simply star that particular tweet as a favorite in my phone. When I later pull up the Twitter website on my computer, it cleverly appears in my list of favorite tweets for me to review at my convenience.

Twitter Favorites are a very useful and handy feature. If you haven’t been putting them to use, you’ve been missing out.

Let me begin by saying that I’m not a coffee snob. I’m not saying that McDonalds has terrible coffee, but I think of their coffee as being a side item to the food. Their breakfast combos come with a drink, which is usually coffee by default. In the instance of a combo, I find that their coffee is acceptable to drink, as I would be there for the food first and foremost. (Disclaimer: I do not endorse eating at McDonalds!) However, when I go to Starbucks, I’m going specifically to get coffee, and I put that experience to a higher standard than a side item from a fast food place.

Starbucks makes their coffee very bold and strong, which happens to be the way I prefer it. Their coffee tastes bold, rich, and hearty. While I happen to love it, the sheer strength of their product isn’t for everyone. I’ve picked up a few cups for coworkers to sample over the years and one person complained to me that it was as thick as mud. Of course, that person was probably used to making coffee that looks like iced tea when it’s poured.

I don’t often go to Dunkin Donuts. Their coffee is always a bit weak in strength for my taste. Adding to my dislike, the staff always seem insist on adding the cream and sugar themselves, and they always overdo it! It is easy to go too far with the extras when the main product isn’t very strong from the start.

I’m writing all of this because I went to Dunkin Donuts this morning. I deliberately went inside so I could control the final product. Despite the fact that I was standing in the store, they still wanted to put the cream and sugar in from behind the counter. I agreed, but said I wanted very little of either. When I got my coffee, it was shockingly light in color. The coffee was so weak that the cream had nearly turned it antique white.

With Starbucks coffee, it is so strong that it takes a lot to overdo the cream or sugar. With weak Dunkin Donuts coffee, a couple of packs of sugar turn it into virtual sugar water. Seriously, the cup of coffee I had this morning was so sweet, it tasted like I was drinking from a hummingbird feeder.

In closing, Starbucks is the best place to get a solid cup of brewed coffee. That said, if you’re looking for a breakfast sandwich, both Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts are equally horrible. Avoid the hot foods from either establishment at all costs!

You too can make such an archive of your tweets with TweetNest. To use TweetNest, you’ll need a web host with PHP5 and access to a MySQL server.

People, it is very important for everyone to use secure passwords that include upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. Passwords should also be long and complex. If you are using anything less, you are setting yourself up for the potential risk of being hacked. In fact, I tested several 8-digit passwords that included only lowercase letters, and this site said a rogue computer could potentially figure them out in a mere 5 hours!

In addition to using a very long password (more than 12 characters), I also make sure that I use a different password for nearly every site that I have to log into. This is a wise practice, but also carries the potential for becoming messy when it comes to remembering all of those passwords. This is where a password tool like LastPass comes in handy. I recommend this tool to everyone. If you use such a service, just be certain that your password for the password manager is above and beyond rock solid.

This functionality comes via the awesome WordPress Mobile Pack plugin.

Scott and Turpster make for a very funny duo. Turpster in particular is hilarious and amazingly witty. This podcast is squarely in the comedy category. While their advice can be good at times, they make it clear that they aren’t trying to be serious in any way.

You can listen to the show on their website, or you can subscribe in iTunes. Give it a listen. As of today, they have produced 22 episodes of the weekly podcast. I look forward to many more.

The downside to not having cable is missing out on the news, sports, or live television. I was going to regret not being able to watch the Panthers football games this year, for example. So I went to Walmart (of all places) and bought a $25 Philips Indoor HD antenna. I’d give it a try to see if I could pick up any local channels over the airwaves.

The results were staggering. My TV scanned and identified 17 channels that are being broadcast over the air for free. I was stunned at the sheer number of channels. I now get ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CW, Retro, LiveWell, and several others.

The best part is that the picture is in high definition and crystal clear. Long gone are the days of images of static and snow using rabbit ears and aluminum foil. With the switch to digital, as long as you can receive the signal, you get full resolution. I’ve even watched during thunderstorms and didn’t see any degradation in the picture quality.

I have no desire to pay for cable or satellite again. I can get everything I want over the air for free. I admit that I do love the original series on HBO and Showtime, but I rent them from Netflix. I am very satisfied without having to pay a bloated cable bill each month.

It’s worth mentioning that you cannot easily record the TV shows that are coming through the antenna, but I don’t miss that anyway. When I had a DVR, shows were constantly piling up, and the whole experience of trying to catch up began to feel like a part-time job. If recording isn’t important to you, I’d throw down twenty bucks on an antenna and see how many channels you can get in your area. You might be surprised.

I already pay $5 per month for a 200-limit text message plan with AT&T. For a few of months, I’d even boosted it to the next level which gave me 1500 texts per month for $15. I think the entire texting industry is absurdly high priced. If I am already paying for 3G Internet data, simple 160-character text-only messages should come and go for free. I’m tired of paying such ridiculously high fees for texting.

It looks like I’ll no longer have to. I’ve found Textfree and it gives me a completely new phone number to use for unlimited texting, all for FREE. No longer will I be taking it in the rear from the phone company. I highly recommend this app to every iOS user, which includes iPad and iPod Touch users. The app is ad-supported in the free version, but you can eliminate all ads if you subscribe as a paying customer for $6 per year. Even as a paying customer, the price is a steal compared to paying for traditional texting via the mobile carrier.

Do yourself a favor. Check this out. Save some money.

I have a suggestion for Apple regarding the next version of iTunes. Instead of packing more features into iTunes 10, I think they should simply fine tune the application in much the same way they did with Snow Leopard. Personally, I don’t want any more features than iTunes currently offers. I would, however, like to be able to download tiny point-release updates to the software without being forced to download the entire 130 MB application every time they change one line of code. Why haven’t they made this happen already? I think this should be the focus of the next version. Bigger isn’t always better, and iTunes has grown big enough as it is.

I’m not disputing that the song is great. It is. However, in my opinion, it could be superb if it didn’t have a fatal flaw. That flaw is that there is not a third chorus for, “Welcome to the Hotel California.” This has always irked me.

Since there is no third chorus, I hardly ever listen to this song all the way to the end. After the final line, “You can check out any time you like but you can never leave,” there is still 2:08 left in the song. It annoys me that it just trails off into guitar for over two minutes while never hearing the chorus of the song again.

Perhaps I am alone in thinking this way. I realize that the last line, “You can never leave,” doesn’t really warrant anything else to follow that. Still, I don’t see a reason to add two more minutes of music after the vocals are over.

It is a fantastic Scrabble clone that you play online with your friends. In fact, the official Scrabble game doesn’t even have the same fun online game play.

I moved the icon for the game to my home screen so I could see the notification badges when it is my turn. I’ve been playing five or more games at the same time. The fact that you’re playing with another real user is really cool. I love when I check my phone and see that Words With Friends notifies me that it’s my move.

If you have an iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad, this game is a must. There is a free ad-supported version and a $3 paid version. Personally, I paid for the app, because I despise ads. Pick either version of the app and play. I’m addicted!

When you use the onscreen keyboard, you are likely to make errors. Apple has obviously spent a lot of time determining the most commonly mistyped words, and automatically correct them. I appreciate that very much, and in a general sense, the feature works quite well. I often take for granted how well it is fixing my typos as I hammer out text.

However, it feels that with iOS4, the auto-correct feature has become overreaching. The results are not always pretty. I’m getting fed up with the changes it makes to my text. There have been countless times that I’ve had to send two text messages instead of one simply because I have to follow a bad auto-correct with an explanation. I’m tired of wasting texts!

I’ll list a few examples of what I mean, but there are many more examples than the few I’m going to mention.

1. When I type the abbreviation “msg” in an email or text message, the iPhone automatically changes it to a capitalized “MSG.” This happens every single time. I can only assume that it thinks I am talking about either Madison Square Garden or monosodium glutamate. Now, why the hell would the average user write about either of these in a text message? Why in the world would this be the default auto-correct? It is truly amazing.
2. Every time I type the word “hell” it is auto-corrected to “he’ll.” Annoying. The same is true for the word “well.” It is made into a contraction, but the vast majority of the time I am simply saying, “Well, blah blah blah.”
3. Just a few days ago I wrote a silly text to my brother, quoting the movie Weekend At Bernies. When I hit SEND, I realized the phone had corrected my joke to “Weekend At Bermuda.” The joke was ruined, and I had to send a second text to explain the screw up. This kind of thing happens to me every day.

I’ve had to turn off the auto-correct feature. I am simply tired of every thing I say being altered into something completely different. I’ve had enough! From now on, I’ll handle my typos on my own.

Long story short—It was fixed in an hour or so.

During the blackout, I used my iPhone to communicate with the outside world. I posted a couple of tweets to Twitter about my Road Runner connection being down. I was so frustrated! I know that TWC has a network status page, but I couldn’t find it on their overly-complex site while browsing with Safari on my iPhone.

Anyway, Twitter user “TWCableHelp” replied to me in a message and asked what was wrong with my connection. I was a bit taken aback. I should say that by the time I read their reply tweet, my Road Runner was working again anyway. So I, in turn, replied that it had been down but was now fixed and “hooray.” Surprisingly, they replied again and said that they were happy. Hmmm. I’m impressed that a bloated, mammoth company like Time Warner would have a tweeting arm to engage end users. Interesting. Hmmm some more, even.

What a lie! Miller High Life is honestly the worst beer that I can imagine. It is truly horrid. In no way imaginable would anyone under any circumstances mistake this swill for a beer that was even slightly expensive. Trust me. Never drink this beer. Ever. This is false advertising at its best.

I’ve now found the perfect solution for my needs. I downloaded the MotionX GPS Drive app, which is currently on sale for $1. I think it usually goes for $7, but I am not exactly sure about the standard price.

I don’t need a GPS unit on a daily basis. I mainly want it for the occasional road trip. This app provides a very cheap solution for those needs. MotionX GPS Drive has turned out to be awesome! You have to pay for the speaking turn-by-turn navigation feature, but you get to use for free for the first month. After that is only $3 for a single month of use, which you can purchase any time. If you want to pay for a full year, it is $25. You could do that year after year and still make out for less than a standalone GPS unit, or the Tom Tom app. I’m sold.

One advantage of using this solution is that the maps are downloaded to the phone and cached. By default, it will use up to 2 GB of storage for the map data. You can clear and reset the maps at any time, and you always have the latest up-to-date maps for your area. The fresh maps are the advantage over using a standalone GPS unit.

I’ve been using MotionX GPS for a few days to try it out. I am very impressed. It has performed well. A bluetooth earpiece is handy if you want to talk on the phone at the same time and still be able to see the maps. My phone does get a little warm to the touch after using the navigation. Also, expect this app to eat away at your battery when you use it. The phone is doing a lot of thinking, so that doesn’t surprise me.

iOS4 now has multitasking, and MotionX supports multitasking. I can easily jump out of the app and do other things on my phone and it will continue to tell me where to go. iOS4 also includes a portrait-locking mode to keep the screen from rotating when you turn it. I love this feature of the new OS, but MotionX GPS Drive is one app that looks better in landscape mode. It still works in portrait mode, but the map and directions feel cramped.

This app has received very positive reviews. Definitely give it a try. It is the probably the cheapest professional voice navigation app on the iPhone, to my knowledge. If you have an Android phone, you’re probably snickering, as Android phones include free navigation software from Google. I am quite aware of this. If you have an Android phone, then congratulations. If you have an iPhone, get MotionX GPS Drive.

Here is the official announcement from WordPress regarding the new version. A video is included in the link that demonstrates the newest features of the software.

There is an awesome YouTube video of a user demonstrating the new features of iOS4.

The new Mini is now encased in aluminum, matching the design of the iMac. It has access to the computer memory underneath the machine. The power supply is now inside the machine, unlike older models which carry a power brick. An HDMI port is now included! The new computer also sports a faster processor, graphics card, and more.

I like what I see. I’d love to have one!

I think that Twitter needs to increase the character limit from 140 characters to something higher. I’ve personally think that a better limit would fall around 200 characters. That would be a 60 character increase from the original service. I think that would be sufficient to make the service all that it can be.

Too often I see users post a single thought in two separate tweets due to the character restriction of today. The limit feels even tighter when one uses Internet links and hash-tags for trending topics. Entire industries have been created to cope with the strict character limit imposed by Twitter. The countless number of URL shorteners are just one example.

Sure, the beauty of Twitter is in its limited simplicity. I do appreciate that. However, I often find myself posting the same thought to Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. When I do so, I usually have to severely crop my original post to fit within Twitter’s limitations. The result of the final text is quite often a dimmer representation of what I was trying to say in the first place.

So come on, Twitter, give us all a little more space to say what we want to say.

Countless tech blogs are buzzing with this news today, so I have no need to go into detail about the new features. You can read those details elsewhere. I will say that the iPhone 4 OS (now called iOS) is going to be released for free to all users on June 21st. As a 3GS user, I’ll surely benefit from the new operating system upgrade. That said, I’m not sure if I’m all that crazy about the new name “iOS.”

I’ve provided a few links to a some tech blogs for news about the new iPhone 4. These links will age quickly, as more will be written in time.

• Apple iPhone Page
• ArsTechnia
• Engadget
• Macworld

For my birthday, my dad gave me a Jawbone earpiece to use with my iPhone. I have the Jawbone ICON Hero. It is totally awesome! It has fantastic range, clarity, features, and battery life. Background noise is filtered out with their military-grade noise filtering technology. I’m able to talk on the phone and keep my windows down while driving. It also speaks caller ID and battery life information in my ear. My experience with it has been outstanding. If you’re in the market, I highly recommend one.

In addition to my Mac, I also tested Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP. Its score was absolutely abysmal. If I were a Windows user, I’d never use Internet Explorer, regardless of the version installed.

I’ve listed my results below.

• Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3 – Score 101
• Apple Safari 4.0.5 – Score 113
• Google Chrome 5.0 – Score 142
• Internet Explorer 8.0 – Score 19

After June 7, AT&T 3G subscribers will no longer have an unlimited option. A new $15 plan with 200 MB will be available, along with a $25 plan that caps out at 2 GB monthly. The 2 GB plan has a $10 charge for each additional GB that exceeds the plan.

The sudden change appears to be linked to the June 7th Apple WWDC announcement of the upcoming 4th generation iPhone. Some in the tech industry have been up in arms about the sudden change. Others have taken a more measured response. They have been citing how the other wireless carriers are also placing bandwidth caps of their own. I believe that in the end, none of the major carriers will offer an unlimited wireless data plan.

I’ll state my opinion on AT&T’s announcement: I personally do not care.

I don’t use very much 3G data, and I could actually benefit from the cheaper $15 plan that is half the cost of the $30 unlimited plan that I pay for today. In order to be certain, I checked my monthly data usage on AT&T’s website tonight. It turns out that the most wireless data I have used in a single month is 133 MB. That is all!

I’m obviously not a heavy user. I rarely stream video over 3G, or do other data-intensive tasks. AT&T says that 98% of their users use less than 2 GB of data per month. That works for me! I couldn’t consume 2 GB on my phone if I tried.

All of the above said, I concede that iPad 3G owners will certainly be the most likely to feel the pinch of the new bandwidth restrictions. I wrote this article with the iPhone user in mind.

The best thing about the new app is that it is now completely free, unlike the apps of the past. There are a few new bells and whistles in the new app, but overall, I haven’t found it to be all that different than Tweetie2. The app icon is prettier, but that isn’t much to write home about. Retweeting and other actions have been simplified in the new version, but I’ve found most of the changes to be quite subtle.

My only complaint is that users are still stuck with black text on a white background. The original Tweetie had an option to change the background color to black. Personally, I liked reading in that way. That option disappeared in Tweetie2, and at the time I went as far as to write the company and tell them I missed the feature. I received a reply from the company! They had said that a large number of users had written asking for that very feature to make a return. They said that it would be brought back in version 2.2, citing that they had too many important changes to make in 2.1. Now that Tweetie was bought by Twitter, that plan must have been scrapped. There is no option in version 3.0 to change the background color. Umph!

Despite that relatively minor complaint, it is still my belief that Tweetie/Twitter 3.0 is still the best Twitter client for the iPhone. I can only hope that they finally update the aging Mac desktop Twitter client, which is still stuck on version 1.2.6. Hurry up, guys!

There have been countless hospital dramas on TV over the years. Think: St. Elsewhere, ER, House, General Hospital, Scrubs, Chicago Hope, Grey’s Anatomy, and others. Scrubs, with its particular brand of humor, is the only such show that I have been able to tolerate over the years.

I simply find that having a television signal beamed into your home that portrays someone in a hospital bed, muttering their final words, to be depressing to say the least. Let’s face it, nobody likes being at the hospital, whether you are a patient, or a visitor. A hospital is a place with a distinctly negative vibe.

The notion of willingly piping such emotional drama into your home seems ridiculous to me. I personally don’t care to watch the unfolding drama of a sick person in a bed. I don’t want to see it. It’s a downer. I’m not willing to subscribe to shows that are downers by default, period!

I have since gone through periods of love and hate with the screen cover. After some time, when used in conjunction with my Otter Box case, the screen protector began to show air bubbles at the top and bottom edges. This problem has grown more frequent in recent weeks.

A month or two ago, Apple decided to stop carrying such screen protectors in their official Apple store. They apparently don’t want to promote the idea that you need to protect this device at all. Since that time, I’ve read many opposing viewpoints online on this issue, and I’ve never been able to reach a decisive conclusion.

A week ago, I finally grew tired of the reoccurring air bubbles in my screen cover, and ripped it off. Now I’m using it bare. I have to say that it feels much slicker and more responsive without the screen cover on top of the glass. I’m going to continue to use it this way. I put my phone in my pocket, and never put any change or keys in the same pocket. I’m very protective of my phone, and I don’t think I need a screen cover to keep it safe. Plus the screen simply looks more shiny and clear! Ditch your screen covers.

Kevin and Alex are usually sitting on a couch, downing beers, and talking about anything that comes to mind. Within the show, they choose various stories submitted to Digg.com and discuss them. Their banter is quite addicting. I haven’t missed a show since I first started watching it. It is hilarious.

Occasionally, Diggnation is hosted live with a studio audience. They have done shows in many places, including New York City, Austin, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and even Tokyo. I’m happy to hear they are going to try to do more live shows. I wish they would come to Raleigh, NC. I would most certainly attend!

The show is pretty geeky. If that appeals to you, you’re sure to enjoy Diggnation. Check it out their website, or their YouTube channel.

Opera Mini is touting faster speeds and more features over the built-in Safari browser for the iPhone. That said, I don’t see any speed improvement in my experience. As for the extra features (such as tabbed browsing), they all serve to make the Opera interface look too cluttered. There are simply too many buttons, options, bells and whistles. It looks as if they tried to cram all of the features of a desktop application into an iPhone app. For me, that strategy just doesn’t work for a mobile device. The screen real estate for the actual web page is cut in half by all of Opera’s interface clutter.

I applaud Apple for relaxing their tight grip on third-party web browsers. If you’re interested in Opera Mini, then by all means, give it a try. As for me, I’m going to stick with the ease and simplicity of Safari. Any speed increase for Opera is negated by the fact that I hardly ever use a web browser on my iPhone to begin with. On the whole, I honestly don’t see use in Opera taking off for any platform. I doubt Apple does either, which is probably why they accepted the app in the first place.

I cannot predict his reaction to my idea. I guess I’ll have to see. At the very least, it wouldn’t cost us anything to start it, and there would be the added benefit of being hammered the whole time while recording it. Sounds like a winning idea! Will he bite?

The highlights of the new version are multitasking and folders. Yes, actual multitasking of up to seven apps at a time, from the reports I have read. Hooray! I cheer that on, but I can’t honestly say I need multitasking on my iPhone. For iPad users, this will be a must-have.

I was hoping to hear an announcement that Verizon will be getting the iPhone later this year, but there is still no word on that, despite years of endless speculation. Maybe someday!

Last month, I bought an iPhone 3GS. I quickly installed the Geocaching app from geocaching.com. It is terrific for locating nearby caches. In addition, I installed MotionX GPS for the iPhone which allows me to determine my exact location in a variety of formats and email the information to myself. MotionX GPS does that and much more. I highly recommend it.

With the added help of the iPhone apps, we created our very first geocache today. I have submitted our cache information to the geocaching.com website for approval. It was a lot of fun to assemble the small cache. I can’t wait until the first person finds it!

I remember mocking the idea of geocaching the first time I heard about it. Since that time, I have come around to love it. It is really a lot of fun, and a nice, free way to get out of the house and exercise outdoors. If you have a hand-held GPS, why not give it a try?

You’ll soon realize how much Flash is overused on many sites. After I started blocking Flash, the static ad images that appear on sites don’t bother me enough to continue running my ad blocker. Try it yourself.

• Flash Blocker for Firefox
• Click-to-Flash for Mac Safari

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, I have an easy way to find which channels your neighbors are using. Grab the app WiFiFoFum and see all channels which are in use in your WiFi area. I love this app. It is extremely helpful in many ways beyond this single example. I highly recommend it. I’m sure desktop solutions are available, but I prefer using my iPhone for portability.

Once you can see a map of channels in use nearby, choose a channel for your network that is not in use by other nearby networks. Technically, each channel number represents a range of frequencies, many of which still overlap each other. To get as far away from other networks in the channel spectrum, choose a channel number that is 5 points away from other networks. For example, if everyone around you uses channel 6, choosing channel 1 or 11 would be best in that case. You won’t always be able to space your network that far from the others, but choosing any number not being used by others would still be helpful. I am providing a link that you can read for more information about this topic.

In addition to wisely choosing your WiFi channel, also make sure you also have renamed your network from the default (such as “linksys”) and have turned on WPA or higher security. For additional security, it is also wise to change the router login/password and disable wireless access to the router setup page.

Foursquare is an app for your mobile phone that allows you to check-in to places around town, meet up with friends, and explore your city. Foursquare users collect achievement badges and become the official mayor of places that they visit more often than other users.

I originally heard about Foursquare on the TWiT podcast network. Once I finally got an iPhone a few weeks ago, I was eager to try Foursquare, having heard so much about it. I installed Foursquare on my iPhone, as well as GoWalla, a Foursquare competitor. I’ll go ahead and say that I prefer Foursquare, largely because of the badges and overall fun nature of the app. It also helps that it is much more popular in my area than GoWalla. I’ve never had to add a location into Foursquare in any of my check-ins.

I found GoWalla to be adequate. The user interface is nice. The problem for me was that after many check-ins using both services, GoWalla did not have the place I was visiting in their database even once. I found myself having to add places manually, which eventually wore on my nerves and took some of the fun out of using the app. If it is popular where you live, you may feel otherwise.

Give Foursquare a try. You can install it on iPhone, Android, Palm, and Blackberry devices. I have my check-ins forwarded to my Facebook account so that my friends can see where I am even if they aren’t using Foursquare. Sure, it’s kind of nerdy, but I enjoy it.

The iPhone version of Plants vs. Zombies is absolutely fantastic. It is likely the best iPhone game I have ever played. The desktop version is perfectly recreated on the iPhone. The touch interface fits the game like a glove. I played for hours last night. If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, this game is a must-have.

Some of Adam’s theories truly live up to his crackpot title. I certainly don’t subscribe to all of them. I admit that I don’t often agree with all of their political leanings either, but the dynamic of these two guys is fun to listen to. I enjoy it when they tear into the propaganda embedded in a lot of commercials and TV dramas that air today, as well as all of the celebrity media “distractions” that are thrown at the public.

John C. Dvorak is my favorite of the two, and his pet peeve of the day is always amusing. Together, their laid back, unscripted conversation-style show combined with their refusal to spoil it with sponsors makes for an enjoyable listen. Check it out.

Since dumping Quicken 2007 in search for a better alternative, I have experimented with numerous other programs. Those include Moneydance, Moneywell, iBank, Cha-Ching and others. I have never been completely satisfied with my experience with any of them. I believe Moneywell is the best program I’ve used, but lately I’ve grown frustrated with a few issues that I believe must be software bugs.

A wider question is whether to use money management software at all these days. A lot of people don’t bother. I can think of three alternatives to not using said software: 1) Not keep track of your money at all, 2) Use an online solution like Mint. I am not interested in using an online service to house my banking information, so that option can be tossed out immediately. 3) Track your finances using a spreadsheet.

Quicken has been promising a new Mac version for a couple of years now. It has been delayed time and time again. In fact, some in the tech press have called it vaporware. However, it seems that they are finally about to release it. I received an email from Intuit saying that the new version will be released by the end of this month. It is called Quicken Essentials for Mac. The screenshots look attractive, but is it worth it for me to spend any more money on software to help manage my money? After all, I find something that I dislike in all of them.

My needs in money management are pretty simple. I manually enter the data and I just want to know the bottom line to avoid possible overdrafts. With that in mind, I’m now trying a new approach to managing my checkbook. I’ve created an Excel spreadsheet that will house my transaction data. I tried a few iterations of my own, but I’ve taken a liking to the attractive Excel 2008 checkbook template that Microsoft offers for download on their Mactopia website.

So far, I like the complete control over the fields and information that I can store using Excel over a money application. Over time, I’ll see if tweaking the spreadsheet will be enough to satisfy my needs. If not, perhaps I’ll test drive Quicken’s new offering. Maybe they’ll get it right this time.

Of more than a hundred iPhone apps installed on my iPod Touch, Tweetie2 has become my favorite. It’s often the first app I click when I turn it on. I often take the iPod in the bathroom (ha) or in the bed to scroll through the latest tweets and trending topics. Tweetie2 is a fantastic Twitter client and I recommend it above the competition.

I post at least one tweet to Twitter every day. That much is easy. I’ve been try to post daily to this blog. Due to the long form format, it takes time, and I won’t be able to continue it indefinitely. Often times when I see a great movie or find out about something amazing, I’ll tweet about it, versus hammering out an essay on the topic. I suppose that I’ve become lazy by the 140 character limit of Twitter.

Twitter is valuable. Over time, I have carefully managed the list of people that I follow. Today, I follow 175 people and companies, and I read their messages daily. I find out about things the instant they happen. With Twitter, I feel completely plugged in. This is especially true for tech news, of which I am very fond.

If you aren’t using it, I don’t know why. Everyone can sign up, and nobody forces you to post messages of your own. The value in crafting a list to follow of people who are important to you is immeasurable. In fact, I have exchanged direct messages with people such as the editor of MacWorld magazine, and others. It’s quite a community. I foresee using it for a very long time.

My latest Twitter updates are on display in the right sidebar of this blog. You can follow me @blitzcraig.

The eatery is called Goodberrys and only has locations in Raleigh, Durham, or Cary North Carolina. Goodberrys has a good reputation in the Triangle for their ice cream and frozen custard. I don’t particularly have a problem with their desserts, but I can say first hand that their hotdogs are a complete abomination. They are so bad, I imagine that eating one could possibly take a year or more off of your life.

I remember the meal like it was yesterday. We each ordered hotdogs from the location in Cary and ate them on our way back to work. I have to say that the Goodberrys in Cary is historically the worst of them all. Neither of us could choke down an entire hotdog that day. My teeth simply could not separate the internals. I liken it to biting into a rubber, steel-belted garden hose. To this very day, it remains the single grossest thing I have ever eaten from a restaurant in my life.

Hilariously, Laura has had the same experience. She told me that her encounter with a Goodberrys hotdog happened almost fifteen years ago. She said the hotdog had the consistency of a rubber stick with a bone in the middle. Disgusted, she threw the rest of her half-eaten hotdog to the stray cats that had made themselves a home around her house. The stray cats would not touch it! That says it all.

I realize that it has been over a decade since I ordered food from Goodberrys, which isn’t really fair to complain about now, but it may as well have been yesterday. It continues to haunt me as the most terrible meal I have ever consumed.

To summarize, if you are in the Raleigh area, for heaven’s sake, do not order a hotdog from Goodberrys. Trust me, they are absolutely dreadful. I seriously have my doubts that what they are serving even legally qualifies as food. You’re likely to get more flavor and nourishment from ingesting a dead cat on the side of the freeway.