cool

apple / cool / ipad / iphone / tv — No Comments
1
Sep 10

Apple TV: Should you ditch your cable / satellite?

So…the question is should i cancel my TV service? What’s the tradeoff?

Downsides (some temporary):

1. No more CNN, FOX, MSNBC, Live sports or anything live for that matter. Maybe losing cable news is a good thing anyways.

2. The only networks participating at launch are Fox & ABC (surely the others will follow though). No HBO, Showtime, NBC etc – YET.

3. Presumably you will have to wait a day or 2 after the episode airs before you can watch it. Spoiler alert!

4. Lifestyle networks that my wife loves (i.e HGTV, Food Network etc – are they ever going to get on board with this stuff?)

5. Is the remote bluetooth? If not you won’t be able to hide it. If it is, it won’t work with your universal remote. (update – it’s an IR remote)

6. Download caps with your ISP. Be aware of them and keep in mind a feature length movie in 720p HD will probably be 3-4GB.

At $0.99/episode that’s about $4/mo per show. For the price of my existing cable bill i could watch about 20 shows a month, every episode.

So it seems like for people who have larger cable bills (like me), and watch less than 20 shows this becomes pretty attractive. Really attractive.

concert reviews / cool / music / rush — 4 Comments
14
Jul 10

Concert Review: Rush Molson Amphitheater, Toronto 07/13/10

Yeah, we were pretty far back.

Last night i packed up my air drums and headed into the city for Toronto’s very own Rush. Here’s the salient points:

- Neil Peart: he still has it, although damn he is looking old these days.
- Geddy Lee: the vox, the slappa da bas, the keyboards – BRILLIANT
- I now have an appreciation for the last 3 tracks on Moving Pictures (Camera Eye / Witch Hunt / Vital Signs)
- The older material was absolutely incredible, some of the newer stuff is good but it has a generic hard rock feel and is not as interesting as the more adventurous 70′s/80′s songs.
- The comedic videos throughout the show were fun, in particular the “i love you man” reprise at the end.
- Molson Amphitheater while fine once you get into the venue, is an absolute disaster to get in and out of in typical Toronto fashion.
- There is a sweet free parking area on the north side of the Gardiner Expressway just west of British Columbia on a side street.

cool / drums / how to / music — No Comments
8
Jul 10

How to play drums

Best Neil Peart drum solo of all time in my opinion. When he starts doing the cymbal chokes around 2:50 i lose it.

cool / fitness / gaming / iphone / recommendations — 2 Comments
11
Mar 10

How to make 30 mins of cardio feel like 5

This shit is crack cocaine

This shit is crack cocaine

So i think the developer of Plants Vs Zombies got access to some super secret API for warping the space time continuum. I use it at the gym to make 30 mins of cardio feel like nothing – it’s awesome! (i wouldn’t recommend playing it while on a treadmill though).

$2.99 on the app store & totally worth every cent. Go git it!

apple / cool / iphone — 2 Comments
15
Feb 10

I haz an iPhone app on iTunes


It’s my first, and it’s certainly not perfect but as they say “release early / release often”. Since i come from a web development background the Objective C language has a ridiculous learning curve, so a few months ago i learned about http://www.appcelerator.com and am having a blast with this framework. Special thanks to Nolan Wright & Kevin Whinnery from Appcelerator when i got stuck! Lots of cool features, fixes & improvements planned for the next release – stay tuned! [ Download ]

cool — 1 Comment
13
Nov 09

Guy mountain bikes down Whistler with a helmet cam

This is just insane.

cool / iphone — 2 Comments
9
Jul 09

20 must have iPhone Apps

My HomescreenWell it’s been about a year since i got my iPhone, and i’ve installed probably at least a hundred apps (most of which i quickly uninstalled). Here are my 20 favorite apps today, not including any games.

1. Evernote (free) – cloud based text/photo/audio service [iTunes]
2. Truphone (free) – voip [iTunes]
3. Flixster (free) – movie showtimes / info [iTunes]
4. Weathereye (free) – better than the stock weather app in my opinion [iTunes]
5. Remote (free) – great when hosting parties [iTunes]
6. BeejiveIM ($9.99) – best IM client i’ve seen, supports push [iTunes]
7. Tweetie ($2.99) – best twitter client i’ve tried (and i’ve tried alot) [iTunes]
8. Facebook (Free) – actually makes facebook enjoyable, although app is due for a major update [iTunes]
9. AroundMe (Free) – as the name implies very simple but effective tool to find ATM’s, gas etc [iTunes]
10. Prowl ($2.99) – push notifications for Growl. Read my post on it here. [iTunes]
11. MLB 2009($9.99) – Not cheap, but streaming video of games (even over 3G) is awesome. [iTunes]
12. Auto-Stitch ($1.99) – take a bunch of photos, tap em and this app creates a pano automatically. [iTunes]
13. Shazam (Free) – what’s this song called? [iTunes]
14. Shopper ($0.99) – Great if you’re not the pen & paper grocery list type [iTunes]
15. Tip ($0.99) – tip calculator [iTunes]
16. Groups ($2.99) – great for MobileMe users to organize their contacts [iTunes]
17. Trails ($3.99) – log your bike ride, hike, etc and upload to everytrail.com[iTunes]
18. Guitar Toolkit ($9.99) – Tuner, metronome, chord fingerings, etc… [iTunes]
19. Flickit (Free) – take photos, open flickit – tap your photos to upload to flickr [iTunes]
20. SportsTap (Free) – push notifications for sports teams you follow [iTunes]

cool / how to / iphone — 5 Comments
6
Jul 09

Tutorial: iPhone twitter push notifications using Tweetie

Couple Notes: This will only work on a mac (as it requires the Growl notifications), assumes you are running Tweetie on the desktop and you will have to purchase a $2.99 iphone app called Prowl (but it’s well worth it, read to see why) and you must be running the latest iPhone firmware. A few other caveats, while the technology used to get DM’s & mentions to your iphone is push, Tweetie on your mac does not use push (it polls every few minutes)…So depending on how your iphone is setup for email, you may receive the notice of a DM before the Prowl push notification (thanks to commenter Ryan for pointing this out). Also, i believe this will only work (as far as i know) if the mac you are syndicating notifications from is online 24/7.





Mac Setup

Step 1: Goto the Prowl Website and setup an account / install their Growl notification plugin on your mac.

Step 2: Open the “system preferences” pane on your mac, and access the Growl settings (should be under ‘other’).

Step 3: Click on “display options” and select the Prowl style. Enter your username/password you used to register as per above. You can also configure Prowl to only send notifications to your iphone after your computer goes idle (awesome). Click on verify just to make sure it is connecting properly.

Step 4: Click on “applications” while in the Growl settings. You should see a list of apps. Find Tweetie and click “configure”.

Step 5: If you now click on notifications you should see there are 3 behaviors that trigger Growl notifications in Tweetie: timeline, mentions & DM’s. What you most likely will want to do is either set your DM’s (and/or) your mentions to use the Prowl display style you just installed.

iPhone Setup

Step 1: Head to the app store on your iphone and purchase/install the Prowl app [ iTunes Link ]

Step 2: Boot up Prowl on your iPhone and enter your Prowl username/password.

That’s it! You should now get a push notification anytime Tweetie receives a DM or mention. The cool thing about this is you can use Prowl with any mac applications that trigger Growl notifications (i.e Transmission, Dropbox etc etc)

Update July 8, 2009: Check out OmniGrowl for a great app to handle push notifications for other things like weather, news, traffic, flight status etc…

bizarre / cool / funny — No Comments
27
Jan 09

Is this thing dangerous?

bizarre / cool / gaming — No Comments
30
Nov 08

Guy playing Dragonforce on Guitar Hero using drums

This song is insane enough on guitar!

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