This is a bit of a rant, but I’m going to do it anyway. I drive a lot for my job. I spend endless hours on the road driving between client locations. I often have my iPhone on the dash where it gets better reception and use bluetooth for calls and even have it plugged into my car stereo via one of those junky tape deck adapters so I can listen to music, Podcasts, or more recently streaming Podcasts via Stitcher (which in my opinion is one of the killer iPhone apps). It’s also very handy for snapping photos of interesting things you see on the side of the road.
This morning, I was driving from Raleigh, NC up to Blacksburg, VA where I’ll be spending the week for work. I got off I-81 to fill up my car and when I was getting back on, I had a small altercation with a semi-truck driver. It was a typical entrance ramp on the right and as I was coming down the ramp a big rig, who was accelerating, got up close to the van in front of him in the right lane, making it impossible for me to merge. I am a pretty safe driver, so I slowed down almost to a stop and eventually was able to get in the right lane, but I was already in the gravel.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Life Customer Service, iPhone, Reviews, Social Networks
I got my Google Voice invite recently. Even though I consider myself pretty tech savvy and up to date on cool betas and other Internet tools, I let this one bake for a bit before giving it a test. My first impression is that it’s a very useful tool and is yet another example of the Internet (and Google) making past and present tools and technologies commodities. In this regard, I have to express my frustration with AT&T and Apple and echo many folks before me. I’ll get into that, but first here’s my early impression of the service and features.
For a brief introduction, Google Voice is a telephone number that is supposed to be your last and final telephone number. You set up Google Voice with your other phone numbers and then you can control how and when you accept calls from who. Sounds great, but let me provide an example which may make more sense. You set up your Google Voice number to send everyone in a “Work” or “Coworkers” group to your office phone number and your cell phone number during week days from 8am-7pm, but not your home number, but you have one particular work buddy that likes to call you on weekends so you make an exception for that individual, but only for your cell phone. You never give out your cell phone number (or any other number) and Google Voice “screens” your calls.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Work Apple, AT&T, Google, Internet, iPhone, Reviews
I found the coolest add-on/plugin for WordPress. It creates a theme for your blog when browsed to from an iPhone. It doesn’t mess up your default theme, but when someone browses to your WordPress blog from an iPhone, iPod touch, or Android it displays a custom theme for the small form factor.
No modifications of any kind were necessary on my part. After installing, I immediatly browsed to my blog from my iPhone and checked it out. I then went into the settings for the plugin and made some changes like including tags in the theme, or changing the icons in the menu.
Here are some screenshots from my iPhone:
And since I was plug-in happy, I added the NextGEN Gallary as well..now I just need to see how that is displayed on my iPhone.
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Sid Boswell Blog iPhone, Wordpress
I can’t take all the credit for this. I can’t even take a small amount of credit for this. All I did was google, google, and more google for a method to get my calendar entries from my company calendar server (running Leopard Server) to my iPhone. Most of the solutions I came across involved some sort of sync between two calendars (local and remote) using paid for software (which may provide more functionality (like reverse sync)) or using paid software to sync your calendars to Google Calendar and use that as your iPhone calendar.
What I really wanted was alerts. I can’t tell you how many times I missed a conference call or was late to a meeting that was on my company calendar that wasn’t on my iPhone. I just wanted it to ping me 5-15 mintues before a meeting, is this too much to ask for?
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Sid Boswell Blog, Work Apple, iPhone
It’s still in beta (as most Google applications are) but now Google has an application that will sycn your iPhone. This concept strikes me as strange, but I guess with this you could ditch iTunes and use something like Songbird and Google to sync everything on your iPhone.
It uses a licenseable Microsoft protocol for the synchronization. Why didn’t Google just write their own? I mean how can they crush Microsoft if they are using their product?
Upon further examination, I think (at least for now) you will still need iTunes. I haven’t tried the Google sync and don’t know that I will. I currently use the Mobile Me sync to keep everything up to date real-time.
Anyone try this yet? If so, what’s the scoop?
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Sid Boswell Blog Apple, Google, iPhone, Microsoft
So the weather sucked and I didn’t feel like playing any online games today. I decided to do some updates, upgrades, and play around for a bit.
The first order of business was to update my Mac and iPhone and they were pretty easy and benign (and the latest iPhone upgrade rocks). I applied all the updates to several Windoze computers or Virtual Machines, and performed all the updates for the various flavors of Linux running around the house. No problems with the basic updates. Everything went as planned.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Linux Apple, iPhone, Linux, Mythbuntu, MythTV, Ubuntu, Windoze, Wordpress
