The Princess Geek

Although I’ve always used PC’s (well, except for a short stint with an Apple Lisa back in college), I’ve always been impressed with the loyalty and obsession by owners of all Apple products.  I have a BS in Computer Science and used my first IBM PC back in the early 80’s.  It’s where the masses and businesses in which I worked put all of their IT dollars.  I worked on PC’s, I supported them, and I purchased them for my personal use.

Then came the iPhone.  I used to be a Palm Treo fan.  It was an open platform and fun to modify, hack, and tinker with.  When I saw the first iPhone announcement, however, I was fascinated.  As we all know, it was revolutionary.  Unlike any other cell phone in any way.  And very expensive for one who didn’t get the Apple theory that their products are the best and worth the extra cost.

I broke down and bought the iPhone in Feb. 2008 and never regretted it.  I’m now on my 3rd iPhone (sold or “passed on” my others) and am never tempted, although intrigued by other phones.  Having never considered a Mac before the iPhone experience, I now “get it” that the experience and quality can justify the extra cost.  I’m ready to find out if that experience translates to the Mac over a PC as it does with the iPhone over other cell phones.  My husband has encouraged this experiment by placing a picture of a MacBook Pro in an envelope and placed it under the Christmas tree.

The first step in this process was to check with MacRumors.com to get their buying advice.  Unfortunately, it said to wait to purchase.  Rumor has it that Apple will be making some product announcments during the last week of January, so I’m trying to sit tight until then to see what is released.  I plan to purchase a refurbished Mac because of the rave reviews of the refurbished Apple products .  And, it’s the only way to save money on a Mac.  I’ll keep you posted on my next steps in joining the Mac Mania World!

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Filed under: Laptop, Mac, MacBook Pro

The iPhone is a terrific device, made even more amazing by the huge number of applications available in the iTunes App Store. It can, however, be very difficult to find a particular type of application for which you might need or want. Even more difficult is finding the BEST applications of a specific type.

The iPhone App Store in iTunes will allow you to search for certain type of applications. For example, you can search for Card Games, but the results can appear quite random and often offer no way to sort your results. With some searches in popular categories, like games, you can end up with more than a hundred pages of applications with limited ways to sort.

There are so many thousands of applications in the App Store that we all need a way to find really great applications! Here are some steps that can help you find the best application to suit your need!

Step 1: Point your browser to www.yappler.com. There will be a search box titled “Search for Apps:”. Enter your search criteria and press the search button. For example, you could enter “card games” in the search field. Press the search button.

Step 2: The screen that you see will include all of the iTunes applications that meet your search criteria. They will be sorted by “Best Match”. Go to the “Sort by” fiend and choose “Rating” in the drop down box. This will sort the applications on a scale of 1 to 5 in how actual owners of the applications rate the app. Click the search button again to find the best apps within your search criteria.

Step 3: Click on the names of the top applications returned by your search where you can get more information about the app, read more reviews and sometimes see video of the app not available anywhere else. This will all help you to make a better buying decision!

Step 4: When you are ready to purchase, you can click on the “Download in iTunes” button. iTunes will open, showing the app that you selected, ready for your purchase.

Tips:  In the “Minimum Rating” field, you can eliminate the lower rated applications by choosing 3 or 4.  You can also limit your search results based on the price.  Yappler also allows you to view videos of some applications to allow you to make a more educated decision before purchasing an application.  Yappler also lets you save favorite apps to return to make your buying decision later.  Very useful…lots of times I’ve seen an app go by, but didn’t remember the name when I wanted to find it later.

I have no affiliation to Yappler.  I just find it an incredibly useful site for finding new apps.

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Filed under: Apps, iPhone, iPod

One of the lesser mentioned features of the new MMS functionality recently activated by AT&T on the iPhone is the ability to send Voice Memos.  As the attached image shows, when you click on the “Share” button, you are given the option to choose to send memo via MMS.

This may not seem like a big deal, but it adds a bit of personality and emotion to a message that wouldn’t be possible with a simple text message.  It might be a much faster way to send message, rather than typing one out.  Nice feature!

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Filed under: Twitter, iPhone

Last week, I turned on one of our laptops and got a beep and that horrifying message “Internal HDD HARD error”. I felt a little sick, because, as way too many of us do, I hadn’t taken the time to fix the problem I was having with our automatic backup. So, there it was, the ugly error message saying that we had possibly lost all work done on that laptop for the last couple of months.

I did a little debugging and found that the hard drive was probably OK, but the hardware controlling the laptop had gone bad. Apparently, it’s a common problem in this particular laptop. I tried moving the hard drive to another computer, but only encountered messages saying that there was a password on the hard drive that was unknown and unbreakable.

So, I bought an enclosure to try to access it from my other laptop which had a SATA drive and not an IDE drive (which the broken computer used). That still didn’t work…for some reason, my laptop would not access it no matter what I did. So, I started reading and found a very interesting solution.

This is what I did to access my data:

The data was saved! And even better, I discovered that Linux is great about recognizing the other devices on the computer, so I was able to use the wireless mouse and even able to configure it to access the internet. After I configured it the way that I liked it, I put an unused USB memory stick in and saved my configuration file to it. The CD operating system pulls the configuration file from the memory stick when I boot up so that I don’t have to configure it each time.

So now, even though we wouldn’t try to use the computer for much, it is still very useful as a backup computer and internet device!

Huge Kudos to all Linux developers, especially those responsible for Puppy Linux!

Tips: You might have to change your boot order to get the laptop to boot from your CD. My computer already defaulted that way, but on some, you might need to press F2 or something like that during bootup.

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Filed under: Computer, linux

I just moved my blog at www.geekmommy4.wordpress.com to this site, bring most of the content with me.  I wanted to have more control over the theme.  I have lots of tinkering to do, so bear with me if I break something!

Please leave comments if you have suggestions of articles or theme improvements.  Especially leave comments if you agree or disagree with my articles!  Most of my posts here have been links to my articles on eHow, but I should be getting up some exclusive material up here soon!

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Filed under: Uncategorized