Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a reserve battery in your cellphone for emergencies and all you had to do was shake your iphone for 30 secs or so to get it charged enough to use it? Think about it. Your cell phone could be charging its reserve while you run, walk, or while its in your pocket while you are walking!

Some have never heard of such, and here I was thinking that everyone knew about this kind of technology to charge things.

I cant remember when I heard about it first, but many many years ago my Aunt got me a shake light for my Birthday and I was wow’d at the simple technology behind it. It has this really neat wireless switch that works of magnetics. It charges itself with a magnet passing through another magnet with wires wrapped around it. This charges a capacitor and stores the power. It can be charge hundreds of thousands of times.

Here is a video from the company demonstrating all there is to know about the light.

It really is a nice flashlight and I recommend it to everyone. Its a great light to keep in your trunk as you will never have to worry about batteries corroding. Take it hunting or fishing, camping, anywhere!

Christmas is around the corner and this would make a great gift for anyone.

You can download it with iTunes and it will be the full install of 709MB or you can use your iDevice and go to Settings/General/Software Update and update it over the air. This will be only the changes needed and will be 55 mb.

I will tell you about two the I enabled that are pretty awesome and that you may find useful.

First feature that I find very very cool is the panoramic mode of the camera.

Its pretty cool actually. You have to have a steady hand to pull off some great pics, or a tripod.

There is a arrow that acts like a leveler and you touch the camera button then slowly turn to the right and it snaps many photos one frame at a time and puts it together.

Here are some examples and they were done fast and ugly.

The one above was really ugly and done fast.

With a steady hand you could take some really neat photos.

Next is the hidden auto correct feature on the keyboard

OK so you like all this and want it and want it all without jailbreaking right?

OK LETS DO THIS!

First you will need a tool. The Tool is iBackUpBot and its available for Windows and the Mac.
Get it here http://www.icopybot.com/itunes-backup-manager.htm Its free to download and use for this.

Download the correct version for your operating system.

Next you will want to do a full backup of your iPhone to iTunes.
I do it the old fashioned. That is to say that when the iPhone is detected in the left hand pane of the library window in iTunes, right click the iPhone and choose Backup.
This will back it up and copy any new apps over to iTunes.

Now you have a complete backup.

Now install iBackupBot (free download) program and open it up.
It will scour through your iTunes Backup directories and reveal all of your backups.

Select the latest most recent backup.

Now for the Camera hack, look for Library/Preferences/com.apple.mobileslideshow.plist
Double click it to open it up in the plist editor.
Click Cancel on this page about registering the iBackupBot app.
Now you will add a few lines and they will look like this:
<key>EnableFirebreak</key>
<string>YES</string>

Then save it, then close it. Follow steps one, two, and three.

Here is a picture.

Now for the keyboard hack.

While you are in iBackupBot with your backup open, look for
Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboard.plist
You will do the same thing but add the following:
<key>KeyboardAutocorrectionLists</key>
<string>YES</string>
After that click Save and Close.

Now from within iBackupBot, you will restore your backup to your device.

Now you are complete.

Let us know what you think about these hacks.

When I setup my hosting account with BlueHost they gave me $80 worth of AdWords Credit to use.

I have recently been using DropBox for my cloud storage for all my security cam uploads. (thats for another story)

DropBox gives you 2 gigs of free storage and if you refer others you can get increased storage for up to 8 gigs.

I recently read and article on Lifehacker.com that explained how you can use adwords to get more referrals.

I thought wow that’s a great idea and I have $80 in Google Ad Credit so why not!

Well I tried and it and Google kicked my in the nads! Not 1 day after I set up my campaigns, Google had this to say.

Your Google AdWords account has been permanently suspended for repeated violation of AdWords or Landing Page and Site policies in this or a related account.

So I contacted Google about this OVER THE PHONE!
The representative on the phone said that he saw nothing at all wrong with my account, and that he would escalate it to a higher level and that I would get an email within 24 hours.

All that Google had to offer me was this:

Thank you for your call last week regarding your account.

It has come to our attention that your Google AdWords account doesn’t
comply with our terms of service and advertising policies. As a result,
your account has been suspended, and your ads will no longer run on
Google.

We appreciate your cooperation.
Best regards,
The Google AdWords Team
So I replied saying they still didn’t tell me what I actually did wrong and that I combed over the terms and could find nothing wrong.

They replied once more with a sense of harshness this time.

Thank you for your continued patience during this process. Our specialists
have re-reviewed your accounts and have determined that our decision is
correct and final. As a result, your account, and any related accounts you
may have created, have been suspended, and your ads will no longer run on
Google.

NEXT STEPS

- Our support team is unable to provide any further information on this
matter.

- Please refrain from creating additional AdWords accounts, as they will
be subject to the same suspension.

We appreciate your cooperation and thank you for your understanding.
Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team

At this point I am mad now. I did some searching and found that Google is doing this to many people and they are not happy about the non explanation for it.

I am going to try it again with a new account and see how far I get.

Meanwhile read this article to see what I wanted to do that many others are doing. Nothing at all wrong with this.

http://lifehacker.com/5854955/how-to-max-out-your-dropbox-referrals-with-google-adwords-for-free

Google is just being an Asshole!

Before I lost myself in “L O S T” it was “Big Brother” on CBS.
We used to pile around the TV set and watch this show.

To this day I cant figure out why, but me and several others used to have Big Brother and Survivor parties and sit and watch these shows. I say I cant figure out why, because after about 5 seasons of the same thing, you grow tired and wonder what the hell you were doing ever watching it past season one.

Back in those days it was a sure fire way to have a social gathering. A very positive thing.

The negative, was that you may have found yourself always having to be in front of the TV at a certain time. These days the entire television frontier has changed.

The future of TV is right now and growing quickly. Right now you no longer have to fit YOUR schedule around your TELEVISIONS schedule.

With the advent of DVR’s (digital video recorders) and other like devices, you can now watch TV when YOU want to watch it.

In this “On Demand” world we now live in, everyone wants to WATCH what they WANT when THEY want to, freeing up their lives to do more, like going to soccer games, no longer postponing dinner engagements, and other things.

Currently there are many devices on the market to which TV shows, Podcasts, Music, even Movies can be delivered to your TV anytime you want them.

We really shouldn’t call these devices SET TOP boxes anymore as its hard to set anything atop a flat screen LCD that is only about 2 inches thick at most. Instead we now call them appliances. Seems like everyone is getting into this game now. Lets see there is the Roku player, the Boxee Box, The Apple TV, heck even hard drive maker Western Digital is getting into the mix with their WDLIVE!

Out of all the appliances out there today, the only one I want you to really meet is the new black Apple TV or as some are referring to it as the Apple TV 2 or ATV2 since its the second generation one that Apple Computer has put out.

Apple TV is slick and tiny. It can fit in the palm of your hand, and is very easy to setup.

You simply just take it out of the box, connect an HDMI cable (not included) to your TV and power it up, then you are quickly presented with a screen to set up a few preferences.

Check out this video about the Apple TV

I purchased one of these for my Aunt and she says its the best gift she has ever received, a truly amazing device.

I highly recommend this device over the other ones for its pure simplistic user interface.

I thought ok, I will choose Get Info and change it to Audiobooks. Well that doesnt exist in the latest iTunes. You can however add the word Audiobooks in Genres, so I did that. I went to sync the iPhone and I chose that Genre on the lower bottom half of the music part of the iPhone sync section in iTunes.

After the sync was complete I checked, and it didnt do much good. It was mixed in with my music. All this had done was, when you click on the MORE section of your iPod on the iPhone, there is a place called Genres, all the mp3′s were in there and mixed in with my music, so this was not acceptable.

Finally! I figured it out.

In iTunes, in the Music Library, I chose the album or selection of mp3′s and right clicked and selected GET INFO and on the OPTIONS tab where it says MEDIA KIND I chose AUDIOBOOK. Next I chose REMEMBER POSITION-YES , and PART OF COMPILATION-YES then it moved into the Books Library.

Next before I synced my iPhone I went to the books tab on the Devices part of iTunes and at the bottom of the page I chose Sync Audiobooks, then chose Selected Audiobooks and finally placed a check by the Audiobook I wanted to sync.

That was it.

After the sync it was under AUDIOBOOKS on the iPhone just as it should have been all along.

Hope this helps.

Yes its going to take better pictures, but only because its going to have 5 lenses, better aperture to bring in more light,  and a new larger sensor.

So how many megapixels do you really need?

See in the past, the 2g(first) iphone, the 3g, the 3gs and the 4 were all almost capable of taking fantastic pictures, but they lacked the lens and sensor to do so. Its always been the Lens that makes the difference in good pictures.

Sure having 8 megapixels is nice, but only if you are going to print out 16×20 inch photos for your wall. Let me explain.

The choice of how many megapixels you need on your phone depends on what you want to do with your photos. If you just want to capture life’s memorable moments, send them to friends and family, and post them on the Web, a 1.3 or 2 MP camera will do the job. If you want to take high-resolution pictures, blow them up, and edit them on your computer, then pixel-size really matters.

This guy explains it really well.

So you see you can’t always believe the hype when it comes to advertising megapixels. People tend to go on the notion that more is better. Especially in this case when all the cellphone makers are competing to be the leader. Most people will buy simply based on how many megapixels a camera is cause the average consumer thinks that more is better.

The latest cellphone trying to get the top megapixel spot is the “Samsung’s M8910 Pixon12″ capable of 12 megapixels.

Crazy isn’t it?

This is terrible for networks and network speeds. Emailing a 12 megapixel photo from your cell phone? Forget sending that over MMS. Are you serious? That’s going to be 9-10 megabytes in size. Ridiculous!

If you can take anything away from this short article and video, just remember that when it comes to purchasing a Digital SLR camera, a point and shoot, or cellphone with high megapixel camera, just remember its all in the lens and not the advertised megapixel. Please do not believe that the more megapixels the camera has, the better this is. This was not the case with the iphone 2g, 3g, 3gs, and 4.

After seeing that my brain started to click and I though that could easily be done on an Apple Mac Computer.

See the Mac and say out loud anything you tell it to say. All you have to do is type in “Say” and something to follow. The command is simply Say. So if I wanted the computer to say that “I am on the internet” I would type at the cmd line or terminal, SAY I am on the internet and I press enter and it would speak it. Very neat.

I want my computer to tell me the weather forecast and time every morning, or at least on weekdays.

For you Apple Script folk here is the script to do it. Download here

Or you can copy the following and paste it into your applescript editor and save it:

–this is the city code. Search the code for your city on http://weather.yahoo.com/ set CityCode to 12774701 –temperature format set t_format to “F” –voiceover format set v_format to “S” –say present condition set a_format to “Y”

set IURL to “http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?w=” & CityCode

–downloading the file using curl set file_content to (do shell script “curl ” & IURL) –looking for the line with actual condition set theText to text ((offset of “yweather:condition” in file_content) + 1) thru -1 of file_content set sub_1 to text ((offset of “\”" in theText) + 1) thru -1 of theText

–today conditions found set actual_condition to text 1 thru ((offset of “\”" in sub_1) – 1) of sub_1

–looking for actual temperature temperature set sub_1a to text ((offset of “temp=” in sub_1)) thru -1 of sub_1 set sub_1b to text ((offset of “\”" in sub_1a) + 1) thru -1 of sub_1a set actual_temp to text 1 thru ((offset of “\”" in sub_1b) – 1) of sub_1b

if t_format is equal to “C” then set actual_temp to (5 / 9) * (actual_temp – 32) as integer end if

–looking for today forecast set theText to text ((offset of “yweather:forecast” in file_content) + 1) thru -1 of file_content set sub_2 to text ((offset of “\”" in theText) + 1) thru -1 of theText

–maximum and minimum temperatures found set today_min_temp to word 9 of sub_2 set today_max_temp to word 12 of sub_2 if t_format is equal to “C” then set today_min_temp to (5 / 9) * (today_min_temp – 32) as integer set today_max_temp to (5 / 9) * (today_max_temp – 32) as integer end if

–looking for today forecast condition (a bit tricky) set sub_3 to text ((offset of “text” in sub_2) + 1) thru -1 of sub_2 set sub_4 to text ((offset of “\”" in sub_3) + 1) thru -1 of sub_3 set today_forecast to text 1 thru ((offset of “\”" in sub_4) – 1) of sub_4

–looking for tomorrow forecast set sub_5 to text ((offset of “yweather:forecast” in sub_4) + 1) thru -1 of sub_4 set sub_6 to text ((offset of “\”" in sub_5) + 1) thru -1 of sub_5

–maximum and minimum temperatures found set tomorrow_min_temp to word 9 of sub_6 set tomorrow_max_temp to word 12 of sub_6 if t_format is equal to “C” then set tomorrow_min_temp to (5 / 9) * (tomorrow_min_temp – 32) as integer set tomorrow_max_temp to (5 / 9) * (tomorrow_max_temp – 32) as integer end if

–looking for tomorrow forecast condition (a bit tricky) set sub_7 to text ((offset of “text” in sub_6) + 1) thru -1 of sub_6 set sub_8 to text ((offset of “\”" in sub_7) + 1) thru -1 of sub_7 set tomorrow_forecast to text 1 thru ((offset of “\”" in sub_8) – 1) of sub_8

–VoiceOver Section set myTime to time string of (current date) set myParts to words of myTime set mySpeak to (item 1 of myParts) & ” ” & (item 2 of myParts) & ” ” say “Good morning, it is ” & mySpeak using “Alex” if a_format is equal to “Y” then say “Outside it is, ” & actual_condition & “, and ” & actual_temp & ” degrees ” using “Alex” end if if v_format is equal to “L” then say “Today: ” & today_forecast & “. Temperature: between ” & today_min_temp & ” and ” & today_max_temp & ” degrees. Tomorrow: ” & tomorrow_forecast & “. Temperature: between ” & today_min_temp & ” and ” & today_max_temp & ” degrees” using “Alex” else say “Today: ” & today_forecast & “, between ” & today_min_temp & ” , and ” & today_max_temp & ” degrees. Tomorrow: ” & tomorrow_forecast & “, between ” & tomorrow_min_temp & ” ,and ” & tomorrow_max_temp & ” degrees” using “Alex” say “I say again, Today: ” & today_forecast & “. Temperature: between ” & today_min_temp & ” ,and ” & today_max_temp & ” degrees” end if

I later used iCal to schedule it to run on weekdays.
Hope you are creative and have fun with this

Here is a video of me getting the computer to say it.

First let me remind how AirPlay works by showing you this video.

Ok so now that you are reminded of what it does, some of you do not have an Apple TV and you use XBMC or Boxee or even Plex as your media center.

Thankfully there is a fellow that has coded a way to finally do this. His name is Pascal Widdershoven. Check out his website here for information on what he has done and a video to show you. http://pwiddershoven.nl/blog/2011/01/05/airplayer.html

He has some great code, and I installed it and all of it went somewhat well, but it took me a long time to figure it out even with instructions. There were a few pitfals so I wanted to write this article to help out some of my freinds and the rest of you out there on the web, so lets get started.

First off download the following files and place them in an easily accesible folder, like c:\apps. If you do not know how to make a new folder under the C drive on windows, stop reading now. Oh and by the way this tutorial will focus on Windows as my Boxee system is running on Windows 7 and most of my friends are doing the same thing.

Files to get:

Install 7zip so that you can untar the file below that you will need to download
http://www.7-zip.org/download.html

https://github.com/PascalW/Airplayer/tarball/master
This is Pascals hard work right here and there is a file inside install.mdown and I suggest you open it up in Wordpad to read the instructions inside.

Next get Python for Windows and this is the best and easiest version to install so that you will not have to fool with installing PIP or any other special tools.
http://www.activestate.com/activepython/downloads Get the appropriate version for your version of Windows.

Get the Bonjour SDK from me so you will not have to log into Apple to do so.
http://userbytes.com/extra/bonjoursdksetup.exe

Ok now install
1. Install 7zip
2.Bonjour SDK
3. Active State Python
4. untar the airplayer file you downloaded by right clicking on it and choosing extract to blah blah .tar using 7zip. After that do it again on the tar file and choose extract to here and it will show the name of the file. Next go inside all that and you should see all the files that are listed here.
https://github.com/PascalW/Airplayer

Copy the Airplayer folder to your c:\Python27 folder. It can really go anywhere but I like it mixed in the meat where the work is going to be happening.

Ok now we need to open a cmd window and do some work, go to START or the ORB/Pearl thingy on Windows 7, and in the search box or run box type cmd and press enter.
While in here lets start with cd \ and press enter to get to the C: prompt and only the C: prompt.

Now lets type cd python and you can actually just type cd pyt and press the tab key and it will complete it for you and it may say python27 press enter and you should now be at c:\python27.

Type cd scripts and press enter, now you should be at c:\python27\scripts

While here type the following at the command line and press return or enter

pip install -r c:\pyhton27\airplayer\requirements.txt 

Some things will install that you need and you will see lots of text go by.
Before we fire this off and test it all out edit the settings.py to reflect your setup.

I went into the airplay folder (C:\python27\Airplayer\Airplayer\settings.py) and opened settings.py with Wordpad.
Since I use Boxee for Windows I edited the following:

MEDIA_BACKEND = 'Boxee'

MEDIA_BACKEND_PORT = 8800

And thats it, save it and exit.

Now you can test it out right now by opening a cmd window and navigating to your airplayer.py file and make python run it.
At the command line enter the following and press return or enter

python C:\python27\airplayer\airplayer\airplayer.py

You should now see a some time stamps if its connected or if Boxee is closed, it will say it can not connect.
It will run in this window there until the window is closed, and while its running, launch Boxee, now while holding your iphone in hand, go to your pictures and open one and in the upper right hand corner you will see a tv looking icon with an arrow pointing upwards. This odd arrow looking icon means there is has been an airplay device detected. Touch it and you should see your computer name and when you select it, it will put the image or video on the screen. Way cool huh?

Ok that is way cool and all, but what happens on reboot? Do I have to start it up again manually? Well yes, but there is a better way.
Lets make it a system service that starts automatically when the computer boots up.

I  cannot take any credit for this next bit of work either, but to make it a service download nssm2.9 and read this blog on how to do it.
http://pascalw.github.com/Airplayer/airplayer-windows-service.html

Check that out and it will show you all about how to make a service and make airplayer start up when the machine boots up.

Now if you do not see any video on your boxee box, you will need to go into settings, media, advanced and disable the hardware acceleration.

Here is a video we made today when we made this happen.

I hope to have at least one good money making app in the AppStore before 2012. That means I have given myself all of 2011 to complete this goal.
Wish me luck with that.

With this new goal set, I have retired from repairing computers on the side. It was just cutting into my time too much and for now I’m having to let it go.

Well here’s to a great year!

Check back often as I will be posting more often from my cell as I am doing right now. Lots of random stuff and updates on my app development.

Oh by the way if you think you have a great idea for an app, leave a comment below or use the contact form. Maybe we can work something out.