iPhone Bike Mount

I am looking for a good solution for carrying my iPhone while I bike. I have been using Runkeeper to track my rides and if the phone is in my pocket it sometimes gets inadvertently turned off. An on bike mount would be ok but I ride several different bikes and don’t want to switch every ride. I thought about an arm band but don’t care for how it feels and looks kinda geeky anyway. Maybe just a CEO-style case? Meh! I’ll figure it out.

UPDATE: I did a review over at Schlick Cycles on several different ways to carry the iPhone on my bikes. Check it out!

No More Hulu on Boxee :(

I am in the process of dumping Time Warner Cable TV and had been looking forward to putting my Boxee / EyeTV replacement into place. The Hulu announcement it is pulling its content from Boxee is a bummer. I’ve been a Hulu fan for a while now and the integration was nice. Well, for $80-plus dollars a month savings I guess I’ll have to live with the change but this seems like a way for Hulu to alienate some of its best supporters.

I saw it here first:

http://www.macworld.com/article/138899/2009/02/huluboxeedisconnect.html

Scrub a Dub Oil Change Coupon On My iPhone

I went for an oil change today and was waiting in line when I noticed I’d forgotten a coupon to save a few bucks on the service. So, I looked up Scrub a Dub on my iPhone and found a $6 off web coupon that you are supposed to print out and bring in. I showed the coupon on the iPhone to the attendant and asked him if I could use it even though I didn’t have a paper copy. He looked at the image on the iPhone, chuckled a little, and said “Why not!”. Sweet! Another $6 saved by having the iPhone.

I need a second screen for my Macbook Pro

Boy Howdy, that new 24-inch Apple display is REAL Purty but what I need is a 2 inch x 3 inch screen that can clip on to the upper right corner of my Macbook Pro screen to display my Twitterific window!

Leave Steve Alone

How much can one man take? I haven’t seen the kind of scrutiny that Steve Jobs is getting since, well, since I don’t know when. Heck, even outgoing, and good riddance to, former VP Chaney hardly even warranted a mention even though it is fairly obvious a man like him would not be moving his own boxes. Hmmmm, maybe he has cancer, or his dog is sick , or, well, again any number of plausible, or implausible explanations may present themselves.

My biggest beef with the coverage, and don’t get me wrong I’d like to know that my favorite CEO is going to be fine as much as the next guy, is that supposedly qualified guys are making diagnoses that are based on pure conjecture. No physical examination or any thing! WTF??? How about not speculating on, could be or might be without even seeing the guy. Practice medicine, not guess work.

Anyway, I hope the Steve is fine and that we can all get back to business as usual.

If anything, this is an opportunity for Apple to plant he seed that, even though it may be in the future, the company is fine with out the prodigal CEO.

Happy Birthday, Macintosh!

The Mac and I have been friends since 1984! Wow, a whole quarter century. Hope to see you in another twenty five!

Macworld Keynote 2009

iLife 09

iPhoto

• Faces feature is very cool using Face Recognition and Face Detection to help organize your photos
• Places organizes by Geotag
  • Geotagging support
  • Google Maps display of Geotagged photos
• Flickr and Facebook Export
• New themes for books and slideshows
  I really love the books! Super high quality.

iMovie

• Phil recognized that while iMovie 08 had a cool way to work some still wanted to work in a different way and with more control
• Neat editing demo probably better to watch than to explain.
• Image stabilization. Very cool! Hope this helps get some better YouTube videos out there!
• Animated Maps in movies

Garage Band

• Learn to play an instrument
• Guitar or Keyboard
• 9 basic lessons included free
• Artist Lessons Popular Artists will teach you how to play their songs $4.99
• Downloadable so more will be added with a built in store

iLife 09 will be available in late January 09

iWork 09

Keynote

• New animation tools
• Magic Move transitions between slides
• Object transitions
• Text transitions
• Chart animations
• More themes
• Again, watching the Demo will really show these features to good effect.
• Very cool Keynote remote application for the iPhone or iPod Touch .99 in the App Store

Pages

• Full screen view removes distractions from the screen
• Dynamic Outlines
• Mail Merge with Numbers as well as Address Book
• MathType and EndNote integration
• 40 new templates

Numbers

• Table Categories categorize by columns
• Easy formula writing over 250 functions
• New Chart options
• Charts linked to Pages so updates are easy
• Spreadsheet templates

iWork 09 is available immediately

Mac Box set $169 iLife, iWork, Leopard coming at the end of January. Great price!

iWork.com

• Free Beta
• New service to share docs with others by invitation
• Mac or PC browser
• Add Comments and Notes
• Downloads in Pages, PDF or WORD
• Final site will be a paid service

17″ MacBook Pro

• 1920×1200 screen
• Anti Glare options
• 2.93GHz
• Up to 8GB Memory
• Nvidia Graphics
• up to 2 256GB SSD
• New battery technology
• Up to 8 hours
• 1,000 recharges
• Integrated to remove all the overhead of a removable battery
• $2799

iTunes

• new pricing in April .69/.99/1.29 allowing companies more flexibility in pricing

iTunes Plus
DRM-free

• Higher encoding rate
• 8 million songs DRM free starting today 2 million more by end of the quarter so all 10,000,000 songs are available DRM free via iTunes plus.

iPhone version of iTunes

• WiFi and now works on 3G networks starts today

iPhone Saves Me $200

While waiting for AAA to come and fix the stuck key in my ignition I Googled the problem, found a solution and saved the inevitable locksmith fee. Sweet!

Aurora Feint on the iPhone

Super game! I find myself playing whenever I have a few minutes to kill.

Garrett at his first Brewers game

Garrett made it to his first Milwaukee Brewers game a couple of weeks ago. He did really well and I am proud of him for making it past the seventh inning stretch. More games to come I am sure.

I found a couple of pix on my iPhone and wanted to try the Wordpress plugin so here they are!

My 15 month son showed me a new feature on my iPhone

My son likes phones. He pretty much gravitates to any phone so the iPhone is nothing special to him but pushing buttons is. On the iPhone there is really only one button to push so he has at it. Well, the other day he picked up the iPhone and it was locked and he rapidly pushed the home button a few times and it brought up the iPod controller! I didn’t know it did that, thanks little buddy!

Reminds me of another feature I found by accident. In fact, I even went to the Apple store to find out what it was and those guys couldn’t tell me. Seems when you have a song paused on the iPod function the name of the song shows up under the time instead of the date. I think this must have been changed with the 1.1.1 update because now the song name, and album cover as well, shows up only when the iPod is playing.

Technorati Tags: iphone

Apple’s New OS, Leopard, Debuts on October 26th

Over 300 new features and several that are major and will change the way you use your Mac.

If Time Machine lives up to its billing as a way to go back in time and restore and file on your system the usefulness of a backup solution just got easier.

The new finder looks interesting but I’ll have to wait to see how it works and feels to give an objective opinion.

Spaces may prove to be cool. For me, the ability to define different workspaces for different tasks should make me a bit more productive. At any given time I am likely to have 18-22 apps open apps and bunches of windows. If Spaces can help me stay a bit more organized that would be a good thing.

If I heard about Quick Look in the past it must have blown right past my memory circuit. With tens of thousands of files I produced on my Mac having a way to breeze through them sounds cool.

I am looking forward to a faster and better Spotlight as well. I recently began relying a lot more on the systems “Find” features rather than trying to take the time to file every doc in a hierarchal folder system. I now toss every document in the same “Document” folder, all still Photos and graphics in the Pictures folder, Music in Music and Movies in Movies folder. That covers about 95% of my filing. So far so good. By keeping the folder sort on “Most Recent” and using Spotlight to find groups of documents on the same subject, I think I am saving some time.

I’ll probably have to upgrade even if it were not for any other feature that Boot Camp. I have one, and only one, program I HAVE to run in Boot Camp. It is an RC Simulator called RealFlight G3.5. Doesn’t work in Parallels.

So, I pre-ordered my copy at Amazon for $109. You can too!

“Apple Mac OS X Version 10.5 Leopard” (Apple)

Technorati Tags: apple, mac software