Absolutely No Machete Juggling

Now that the Verizon Droid has been released, lots of blogs and technology sites are comparing it to the iPhone. When I was researching the droid, I found most of these comparisons worthless, as I’ll never use an iPhone as long as Apple’s policies regarding the phone and its app store remain as they are today.

But for the last year I’ve been a very happy T-Mobile G1 user. I love the Android operating system, I love the Google integration, I love the (relative) openness of the device and the near perfect openness of the application market. I cannot imagine using a phone that doesn’t run Andoid any time soon.

Despite loving the software on the G1, I’ve never been completely crazy about the hardware itself. The screen sliding feels a little cheap to me, the phone generally feels a bit sluggish, and the trackball becomes nearly worthless after significant use. Overall, these are minor annoyances, but annoyances nonetheless. The G1 always felt like something of a knockoff iPhone; it was the thing you got when you couldn’t afford a slick, sleek iPhone from Apple. It has features like an iPhone, but generally inferior hardware.

So when I started seeing the Verizon Droid, I got excited. I was eager to switch back to Verizon (I had switched from Verizon to T-Mobile to get the G1 when it first came out) due to Verizon’s superior network coverage and the fact that my wife is a Verizon user. Moreover, the phone looked simply stunning to me. Solid, industrial, sleek, thin (or at least thinner than the G1). Overall, a bad-ass looking phone.

Unsurprisingly, I purchased a Droid the day it was released. In fact, I suffered the early termination fee with T-Mobile in order to get it.

I’ve had the phone for a day now and I wanted to offer some comparisons between it and the G1.

Continue reading ‘Verizon Droid vs T-Mobile G1’ »

I’m a big user of Google Reader, so it annoyed me a bit when I started seeing things like “50 people liked this” and similar features peppering my Reader interface a while back. I wasn’t alone, there’s a Google Groups thread where a number of people lament the inability to deactivate this “feature.”

But a few days ago, I saw the payoff: Google Reader Recommendations. Recommendation engines are one of my favorite things about the new social web – Amazon’s book recommendations and Netflix’s movie recommendations have led me to find things I never would have discovered on my own. So when I saw that Google Reader had recommendations of other blogs or RSS feeds for me, I was excited.

Continue reading ‘Google Reader’s Creepy New Feature’ »

I do not belong to the cult of iPod. I use a nonstandard mp3 player and I hate iTunes. If I’m going to use an mp3 player, it needs to show up as a USB drive on my Linux workstation, my Windows desktop, and my Mac laptop. I need to be able to drag files over and be done with it. So far, I’ve been successful at accomplishing this.

But the simplicity comes with a price. I cannot download books from Audible.com and put them on my player to listen to them. I have to convert all of the files I download from Audible into DRM-free mp3 files. But most instructions on the internet advocate a cumbersome process, many involving that unholy beast iTunes, which effectively just plays the audio books while capturing the output stream.

I have developed an alternative to this method, which lets you convert your Audible audio book downloads to DRM-free mp3s in just a few minutes, with a very small amount of manual work.

Continue reading ‘How To: Convert Audible .aa Files to .mp3 Quickly’ »

I love RSS feeds. I love the fact that I live in a time where the vast majority of sites that I find interesting have managed to export their data, updated live, in a universal format that I can pull together in a single place. I can read what’s going on with hundreds of sites I care about by visiting a single site like Google Reader, or through a single piece of software or a browser plugin. It’s great.

But this comes with a downside. I have almost 200 subscriptions in my Google Reader account. Many of these subscriptions are to sites, such as Reddit or Digg, that themselves, aggregate other sites. I have divided my Google Reader subscriptions along various categorical tags (such as politics, development, movies, etc) as well as priority tags (Must Read, Should Read, Can Read, Can Ignore, and Should Ignore) but even that isn’t quite enough to manage the firehose of information coming my way via RSS.

I have utilized Yahoo Pipes to manage this deluge of information and I thought I’d take some time to share how. This article will serve both as a basic tutorial for using Yahoo Pipes to manage your RSS feeds as well as a place to show some specific examples I use to control my feeds that you can use as well if you subscribe to the same sites I do.

Continue reading ‘Managing The Firehose: Controlling RSS Through Pipes’ »

I purchased the Android phone from Google not too long ago. I plan on posting a detailed review of it someday soon, but I wanted to post this now in case anyone needed it.

Just recently Google started pushing new firmware to the phone with a bunch of new features. My phone suddenly popped up a screen asking if I wanted to install the update, but I was in the middle of something so I said “Update Later.” The screen vanished, and when I finished what I was doing I was unable to find a way to make the phone check for updates and try again.

Here is how to do it if you do the same thing I did.

1. First, have AnyCut installed if you don’t already
2. Next, Create a new shortcut on your phone’s desktop. Select “AnyCut” and then select “Activity”
3. Select “Device Info” as your activity. I can’t find any other way to get to this activity on the phone
4. Press the new shortcut icon you have created.
5. Scroll to the bottom and find the “Check for Updates” button. Click it. You may have to a few times for it to succeed.
6. Once the “checkin” has succeeded, exit back to your home screen and you will be prompted to install the update.

That’s it!