The Princess Geek

When I wrote my last post, I was nervously excited about switching from a Windows based laptop to a Macbook Pro.  I had made my list of pros and cons and came out on the side of making the switch to a Mac.  I was ready to hit that “buy” button at the Apple Store when Steve threw my decision into a tailspin by announcing the iPad.

Although the iPad is often described as a large iPod Touch, it had me intrigued because of the size and that I thought that it would work well with my lifestyle when combined with an iMac.  It was also cheaper to buy the 32GB WiFi iPad and $1000 refurbished iMac than the 17″ Macbook Pro that I had been eyeing.  (The economics will be different if you need 3G access when away from WiFi.  However, you’d already be paying monthly for an internet card for your laptop if that is a requirement for you.)

If you travel with a laptop and need to print a lot, use Excel spreadsheets extensively or need specialty software while on the road, you will probably find that the iPad is a no-go.  Rumor has it that Apple is going to deal with the printer issue, it hasn’t happened so far.  There are a few third party apps that offer some solutions and offer some free trials.

I spend most of my day with access to my desktop so I didn’t necessarily NEED a laptop.  I always liked the option of moving around, though.  Because of the lack of portable options other than a laptop for email and internet surfing, I hadn’t really considered anything besides a laptop for over 15 years.  When I am away from my computer, though, I mostly access email, surf the web and (to be totally honest) look for a way for my device to entertain me!

The iPad absolutely fulfills my requirements for portability.  The email, internet, calendar, iPod, and video apps are all a joy to use on the iPad.  Although there is an unbelievable amount of crapware available in the App Store, the number of high quality third-party iPad apps is impressive and provide a long-term usability factor that I wasn’t sure about when I purchased the device.  Although I haven’t needed it yet, the tiny bluetooth keyboard from the iMac will be incredibly convenient in my travels.

My satisfaction with the iMac portion of this decision can’t be understated.  After using a laptop almost exclusively for 15 year, it was a  shock to have a screen as large as the iMac (even though I chose the 21.5″ version), I am thrilled whenever I look at the incredibly sharp, vibrant screen and the use the tiny keyboard.  I love the fact that the iMac is only 20 pounds or so and can easily be moved to another room if needed.

My advice to anyone who might be considering the Macbook Pro vs. the iPad/iMac combination would be for you to seriously consider how you use your current laptop or your future laptop requrements.  Although I think it would not be a good alternative for many business travelers, I think it is a terrific combination for most users and one that I would highly recommend!

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!

Would you like to listen to free audio books on your iPhone or iPod Touch?  Although there are more elegant solutions, one of the easiest and fastest way to add good classic audio books for free is to add  books as a podcast. I’ll explain how to do that in the following steps.

Step 1 – First, go to http://www.librivox.org. This site has many free audiobooks. They won’t be recent books, but are older books that are in the public domain

. When you get to that site, you will see a green box with the words LibriVox Catalog. Click in that box.

Step 2 – You will be take to a search screen that allows you to search by Author and Title. They also have links to browse the catalog, view the most recent titles added, or to go to a more advanced search for more search criteria. Find a title that you would like to hear and click it.

Step 3 – You will now see the detail screen for that audiobook. After the audiobook description, you will see some bullet points of information. In the last one, you should see the words “Subscribe in iTunes”. Click on those words.

Step 4 – Now open iTunes. Select Podcast on the left side of iTunes. You should see a list of podcasts to which you have subscribed. Find the one titled LibriVox, followed by your audiobook name. Click the arrow next to it and you should see a list of chapters (if the book has multiple chapters).

iTunes should automatically download the first chapter. If you would like it to download multiple chapters, press the “Get” button next to the chapter name. You can also tell it to download all of the chapters by clicking the “Get all” button next to the book name.

Step 5 – Connect your iPhone to your computer. Select your iPhone under devices on the left side of iTunes. Click on the Podcast tab in iTunes. Make sure that the box is checked next to Sync and select the number of episodes that you would like to have moved to your iPhone.

You should select either “All” or choose a certain number of episodes. If you select “Unplayed”, it might remove from your iPhone any chapters that you have started listening to, but not finished.

If the button marked “Selected Podcasts” is selected, make sure that your LibriVox book is checked in the list of podcasts below that selection.

Step 6 – Sync your iPhone and then go to your iPod application. Select the podcast button and the chapters of your audiobook will be there for you to enjoy! You might have to select More in the bottom right of the iPod app if you don’t see the Podcast option.
Tips: LibriVox.org often has multiple versions of audiobooks by different readers. When viewing the lists of books, you can select one and then choose one of the chapters to hear a sample of the reading.

If you’d like to see a picture associated with your podcast while listening, you can go to the Podcast list in iTunes. Right click on the audiobook title and select “Get Info”. Select the Artwork tab and paste in an appropriate picture for that book. I like to use images.google.com to find pictures.

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.

With the H1N1 flu continuing to make headlines all over the world, it is useful to track the outbreaks.  There are several good maps available to help people visualize the spread of this disease.  Many areas have scaled back routine testing for the H1N1 virus, making the recent confirmed case numbers lower than actual, but the fatalities should continue to be reported.

One map available is the Rhiza FluTracker (pictured above).  It uses data compiled by Dr. Henry Niman, a biomedical researcher in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, using technology provided by Rhiza Labs and Google.  The map is interactive and allows the user to drill down to local levels.  The legend helps locate suspected and confirmed cases and identifies fatal cases.

The New England Journal of Medicine’s HealthMap also provides an interactive map which allows the user to check boxes to bring up desired types of cases on the map, including suspected, confirmed, ruled out, and fatal cases.

Please visit http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/ for current CDC statements on the H1N1 virus.  The site has several easy-to-use maps that allow the reader to see the current situation in particular areas.  The World Health Organization (WHO) at http://www.who.int/csr/don/en/ provides a status of the progress of the disease from a gloabal perspective.

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!

It was a very pleasant surprise to receive the message yesterday that AT&T had implemented Media Share which allows users to stream Pictures and Music from your computer to TV.  I had never used Windows Media Player on Vista and couldn’t immediately see the settings to enable media sharing within it.  The U-verse Media Sharing window pointed me to  http://helpme.att.com/mediashare which links to a Media Share Wizard.

The Media Share Wizard was very easy to use and made the Windows Media Player and  network setting changes necessary for U-verse Media Share to see my picture and music folders.  I also attempted this on my XP computer and had no luck.  I still have not been able to get it working.

Back on TV, the Media Share function is quite responsive and easy to use.  Of course, since Windows Media Player does not play well with iTunes I could not see all of my music.  However, there was enough to give me some great choices of music to play while watching a slideshow my family vacation pictures.  Easier than ever to bore company!  LOL  When a song changes, the song information is displayed on the screen for a few seconds.  The DVR remote can be used to pause the slideshow, back up to previous pictures, increase or slow down the show, etc

The new update also allows you to bring up a News, Sports, or Kids Multiview which allows you to see 4 screens at a time.  I think there would be times that it would be useful, but would like to see more choices, like movies or documentaries.  That might be tough because the channels shown would have to be dynamic.

The TV & News Shows (not a good name) helps you find new programming by seeing lists of Nominated Shows New Fall Shows, Primetime Emmy Shows, Teen Choice and TCA (critic association) Awards.  You can also view Bios and Vote for Your Favorite Shows.

All in all, this is a great U-verse update.   As a few recommendations, I’d like to be able to randomly show all pictures in all of the folders instead of having to select a folder.  Same with the music…I want to be able to choose to shuffle all of the available music.   It would also be nice to save a slideshow/music combination to be able to bring it up quickly when a new victim shows up at the door!  This update really shows how great fully IP TV can be.  I just hope they quickly release the  iPhone app to allow us to use the iPhone as a U-verse remote and to allow us to watch recorded shows on the phone!

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.

Tom Tom demonstrated their new iPhone application for the iPhone that will be available for the new iPhone 3G 3.0 software (GPS enabled). The iPhone software upgrade will be available on June 19th, but the Tom Tom software may not be available until later this summer. Also announced is an iPhone Car Kit that will provide “secure docking, enhanced GPS performance, clear voice instructions, hands-free calling and in-car charging”.

No pricing has been announced. See TOM TOM for iPhone site
to sign up for email notification on pricing and release date.

Although I know that Tom Tom must place huge value on their software and maps, I hope that they realize that people do not consider their relationship with their mobile phones to be long-term. Many potential customers may think twice before laying down a chunk of change for a mobile phone that they might want to replace in a year or two, at most.

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!