Since my new Canon PowerShot Elph 300HS required a Class 6 SDHC card to record 1080p HD video and also included native support for the Eye-Fi series of wireless-enabled SD cards, I decided to pick up a new Eye-Fi Mobile|X2 SDHC memory card. Let’s be up-front about this: you pay a premium for the convenience [...]
iOS5′s new features
It’s been about a week since I upgraded to iOS5 on my iPhone 3GS (and performed the untethered jailbreak) and I’ve since been learning my way around some of its new features. Twitter: don’t use it Newsstand: don’t use it (I use MegaReader) iCloud: don’t use it (except for Find My iPhone) WiFi iTunes sync: [...]
iOS5 untethered jailbreak arrives, I take the plunge (again)
The iOS jailbreaking community got a nice holiday/new year’s gift the other week from pod2g and the dev-team: the untethered iOS 5.0.1 jailbreak for the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and original iPad (iPad 2 and iPhone 4S users might get their own jailbreak soon too). I’d been running iOS 4.3.3 on my iPhone 3GS since [...]
Creating interactive fiction with Inform 7
If you owned a personal computer in the 80s and played computer games, you probably played at least one Infocom text-based adventure game like Zork or (my personal favorite) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Known as interactive fiction, or IF, these games used the most powerful computers on the planet for their processing engines [...]
Home automation with Z-Wave
A few weeks ago we upgraded our home security system and added ADT’s Pulse service. In addition to the remote security features (such as being able to monitor, arm, and disarm the system from a browser or an app on my iPhone), Pulse also introduced us to home automation via Z-Wave devices.
Amazon Kindle Keyboard (WiFi + 3G)
Six months ago I got my daughter a refurbished 2nd generation Amazon Kindle from woot! and she has been inseparable from it. Thus, it was a distressing day for her this past Thanksgiving weekend when she turned it on and found just a series of black lines on the screen. None of the reset methods [...]
Amazon dumps Stanza, so I do too
One of the first apps I put on my iPhone 3GS was Stanza, to replace iSilo from my Treo for reading e-books. At that time, Amazon had just acquired Lexcycle and I remember wondering they would end up combining the Kindle and Stanza apps. Well, now we know the answer: nope. A recent update to [...]
Library books on the Kindle – slightly complicated
This week Amazon unveiled public library books for the Kindle, a feature the Nook has had for quite some time. This evening I checked out (pun intended) the process to see how I could get a library book onto my daughter’s Kindle.
WebOS is dead … long live, er — uh, nevermind
Today, just six short months since announcing a slew of new WebOS devices, hp announced they are discontinuing the entire WebOS line. The successor to PalmOS and its related devices like the Pre just never took off and the TouchPad was pretty much dead-on-arrival, crushed by the iPad only 49 days after its release. It’s [...]
ZoneMinder
Last summer, my mini-tech project was installing some wireless internet cameras inside and outside the house so I could keep tabs on things while I was away. For the past year I’d just been using the built-in features of each of the cameras (motion detection, e-mail alerts, etc.) which was hit-or-miss since each manufacturer offered [...]
