Cloud Computing | Gear Diary

Evernote for Android Updated: “Skitch-ified” and Better Than Ever

Want to get the most out of Evernote? The other day we brought word of the downloadable book, Evernote Essentials. It is a good resource for anyone who is new to Evernote or wants to maximize their Evernote usage. Evernote has been on a roll lately. They bought Skitch, rolled out new versions of their software and are opening a presence in Texas. Now word comes that Evernote has updated their Android app and included some neat new trick including even tighter integration with Skitch. We’ll let the Evernote blog post explain… Today’s Evernote for Android update (3.2) gets a bunch of really…

News

Big News From Evernote: Purchases Skitch, New Apps and More…

Evernote is in the midst of their “first-ever Evernote Trunk Conference” and had some big news to share. Skitch As the above “Skitched” image indicates Evernote bought the image app/service Skitch and is making the app completely free. As they explain We love Skitch so much that we decided to buy the company. Skitch is an amazing Mac application that’s changed the way people capture, annotate and share images. Chief Skitchers, Cris Pearson and Keith Lang are moving from Australia and joining Evernote to lead a significantly expanded Skitch team focused on supercharging the product. Evernote goes on to explain:…

Reviews

The SanDisk Ultra 8GB USB Flash Drive Review

I collect thumb drives. At least it seems that way, as I have a whole bag of them. One of these days I’d like to replace all of the smaller ones with one larger one or a few larger ones. This 8 GB SanDisk Ultra flash drive is my second 8 GB flash drive and one of my favorites. Let’s take a look at its features. Speedy – Faster file transfer speeds Stylish – Attractive slider design houses your data in style Secure – Store your private files in a password-protected and encrypted vault on the USB flash drive Added Protection…

News

Bye-Bye, Spotify

When Spotify finally came to the US I was quick to jump on it. I like using streaming, subscription music services a great deal. I like the flexibility. I love being able to download and listen to pretty much whatever I choose for a small fee each month. Sure, I already have a huge music collection but there’s a ton of music I want to hear that isn’t part of it and there are enough tunes that it would cost me a small fortune to purchase all of them. I tried Rhapsody for a while and while I got hooked…

Music Diary, News

Music Diary Notes: Spotify Has Early Success, but … a LONG Way to Go to that 50 Million Member Goal!

Over the weekend we got some initial data from the Spotify launch courtesy of Billboard, who cite ‘inside sources’ as estimating that in the first week or so after launch Spotify has 70,000 subscribers (i.e. people who pay). From the article: In my travels last night and in emails this morning I had three distinct label/publisher execs confirm the same number: that @Spotify has right in the ballpark of 70,000 paid Stateside subscribers after only one week in business. It’s hard to put these numbers into context, but it would also be hard to call that anything but positive news…

News

Gear Diary Video Round-Up

Last week saw us post a larger number of videos than ever. In them we took a first look at the AT&T Status phone running Android 3.2.2, Carly talked to us about the benefits of Chromebooks and why they might be a great choice for you and we launched not one but two contest/giveaways. Missed any of them? Well we’ve gather all of them together along with links to each post… Gear Talk: iPad 2 Case Roundup Read It! Judie’s Orbino Padova for iPad 2 Has Arrived: Here’s a First Look Read It! Gear Giveaway: Judie Attended Intel’s Upgrade…

Gear Bits

OS X Lion’s AirDrop- First Experience with it Explains Why it Rocks

One of the features that will arrive with OS X Lion later this week is AirDrop. AirDrop makes it possible to quickly and simply share files with someone on your local network. Personally I didn’t see much of the point… until just now. Judie and I are both working on our Macbook Airs here in NJ. My 13″ has an SD slot while her 11″ Air doesn’t. (And boy oh boy has she been complaining whining about that fact!) She took some pictures for a review and wanted to get them on her computer. At first we were going to…

News, Reviews

First Impressions: U.S. Cellular HTC 7 Pro Windows Phone 7 Smartphone

I am very fortunate to have landed a review HTC 7 Pro unit from U.S. Cellular. A month or so ago I wrote about the 7 Pro launching as the first Windows Phone 7 device on U. S. Cellular. I will be doing a full review in the coming weeks, but wanted to give a few first impressions on (a) the phone, (b) the operating system, (c) the apps and (d) the service based on several hours of use this weekend. The Carrier – U. S. Cellular It probably would have made sense for me to check out the…

Editorials

A Cohen-Family 4th of July Mystery Solved, Thanks to Judie and Ancestry.com

Grandpa Alex “Sandor” Cohen Judie has actively been building her family tree and discovering the various connections in her large extended family for years. It even turns out her family lineage and Kevin’s crossed paths a number of generations ago, but from what she tells me, that is fairly common when you have family lines that haave been in the US for hundreds of years, coming down through the same states at around the same time. As she wrote about in this post regarding ancestry.com’s Macintosh software, she has a remarkably large family tree that’s been put together over the…

Editorials, Music Diary

Music Diary Notes: Suddenly the iTunes vs. Amazon Price Difference Matters!

Until this week I wouldn’t have even thought twice – legendary vibes player Gary Burton just released a new album yesterday, so I headed to Amazon.com to grab the MP3 album. But then I stopped and thought – if I buy this on iTunes I know it will be saved and available for any of my devices, will be stored on iCloud without penalty, and so on. But if I go to Amazon’s MP3 store to buy, I *should* be able to use iTunes Match in the fall which will allow the album to be tracked and not incur a…

Editorials

Some Quick Thoughts on Judie’s Ongoing Internet Nightmare

As Judie shared last week in a post, she has been having a terrible time getting and staying connected thanks to the WildBlue, a company that makes AT&T Wireless look good! Well over a week after being throttled, Judie still has a connection speed that is at or below dial-up. Judie’s internet speeds as of 05/23/11 Because she is in a rural area that is not covered by 3G, and because she doesn’t have a phone line (and even if she did, DSL is not available), and because “beamed” broadband internet will not work due to her home’s location (she…

Editorials

Adventures in Cloud Computing Brought to Me by WildBlue

image courtesy of toothpaste for dinner Cloud computing. It is here. It is powerful. It is growing. It is a good thing? Had you asked me a week ago my answer would have been a resounding “Yes!” A week later, I’m not sure sure. Read on if you care to join me in my wireless nightmare … For many years, Dial-Up was the only way most people could get online reliably, and the two main sources of internet access seemed to be AOL and to a lesser degree, MSN; because I wanted to be different, I went with MSN, and…

Gear Bits

Netflix? More Like NetHOG!

Have you ever wondered where all of that internet bandwidth is going? Apparently the answer is Netflix, according to a recent study by sandvine reported at TechCrunch. Here are some details: Netflix video streaming is now the single largest source of peak downstream Internet traffic in the U.S., according to a new report by Sandvine. The streaming video service now accounts for 29.7 percent of peak downstream traffic, up from 21 percent last fall. That puts Netflix above HTTP websites (18 percent), BitTorrent (11 percent), and YouTube (10 percent) as a source of downstream traffic during peak times in North…

News

Rackspace and Microsoft: A Possible Answer for Small and Medium Businesses

In a world of the “Haves” and the “Have Nots”, the “Haves” will always have a clear advantage. In business, large companies “have” dedicated IT personnel, while small to medium businesses “have not”. Rackspace Communications Services is looking to help change all that by making it possible for companies of all sizes to have their own IT access while providing a wide range of hosted and “cloud” solutions. Rackspace offers products including hosted exchange for email, calendar and task management, SharePoint, mobile solutions and storage. Rackspace is designed to provide comprehensive communications solutions in a manner that is affordable, powerful, and…

Editorials

Spring Cleaning: If an App Doesn’t Work with Evernote or Dropbox? Buh-Bye!

There are specific iPad applications that are key to my productivity day in and day out, and the “qualities” they need to have if I am to use them has evolved over time. Looking back over the ways in which they have changed in the last year or so, I realized that there is a specific pattern to those applications that have become more central to my work and daily life and those that were once useful but have fallen off the island. Strikingly, these changes have less to do with the applications themselves and more to do with secondary…

Gear Bits, News

DropBox Updated with Cool New Features!

DropBox is a great tool – essentially it is simply an online storage provider, but the excellent Mac, PC, iOS and Android app interfaces make using that space and sharing items an absolute breeze! Yesterday my iPad pinged me that there was an update … and it has a few great new options! First, you can now bulk upload photos rather than doing them one at a time! Generally I wouldn’t worry about this, but I just scanned dozens of old slides from my parents and wanted to have them available in multiple locations in addition to my iPad. DropBox…

Reviews

Ecamm Printopia for Mac Brings AirPrint Capability to iOS Users with Older Printers

When Apple announced AirPrint for iOS devices, I could almost see Steve Jobs’ point about the “post-PC era”. Being able to print from your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch (newer devices with iOS 4.2 or later) wirelessly sounded great. Indeed, Google’s Cloud Print functionality for their Chrome browsers works in a similar fashion. But then I found out how limited the supported list of printers was. Heck, even those of us with Apple Airport Extreme wireless routers that have attached printers could not use AirPrint: AirPrint only works with a network connection to an AirPrint-capable printer. A printer connected to…

News

AVG Launches ‘LiveKive’ Onlive Storage System

Like many folks, I make great use of DropBox for non-sensitive storage options for files I need to access from a variety of platforms. The free storage level tends to work fine for me, but I know many folks who take advantage of the reasonably priced upgrades in storage.

Editorials, News

Adventures in Customer Service- Apple and Spilled Crystal Light Edition

I thought of a number of different titles for this post. One was: “No Use Crying Over Spilled Lemonaide”. Another was “MacBook Airs and Crystal Light Do Not Mix”. Another was “Apple, I’m Sorry for all the Nasty Things I Have Said and Thought” Then there was “I’m an Idiot” Eventually I settled on simply using “Adventures in Customer Service- Apple and Spilled Crystal Light Edition”. Here’s my story. I did not have a good morning. I woke up not feeling particularly great and immediately had a number of phone calls with people who are in the midst of challenging…

Reviews

Review: CrashPlan+ Online Data Backup and Storage

With the recent earthquake, tsunami and issues with the nuclear plants in Japan, the one thing we should all seriously take a look at is a way to back up all that digital media we have accumulated since switching our precious memories to a digital form. There are some parents that never have taken a picture of their children without a digital camera. That means no shoe boxes full of pictures to burn or get wet. Instead, you need to worry about your system and when, not if, your system decides to have hard disk failure or some other problem that causes…

News

iPad App Update: Evernote App Update Brings Snapshot Notes to iPad 2

I have to say that I’m finding more use for the cameras on the iPad 2 than I expected. More than anything I’m glad to now have the same functionality across all my iOS devices. That means I don’t have to think about which device I want to use for which task. If I can do something on my iPhone I can do it on my iPod touch. If I can do it on my iPod touch I can now do it on my iPad. And, thanks to an update to Evernote’s iOS app that is more true than ever….