This is an amazing app which has been around since the inception of apps in July of 2008.  Shazam is a free and amazing life tool, it identifies songs that are playing where you are by taking a thirty-second sample using the built-in microphone, and within a few seconds has analyzed the song and presented you with a useful screen displaying the song title, artist, album, and links for a Youtube video, to buy it in iTunes, and to Tweet about the song.

I’ve included some screen shots of it from my use—and in my few days of using it, I’ve found that it’s incredibly accurate at identifying music, even in noisy environments.

Get this app for free from the app store. [link]

Strangely, this app requires an iPhone, however could work on a 2G iPod Touch.

[DISCLAIMER: THIS NEXT SECTION IS A RANT]
This is aggravating; I am looking at signing away the next three years of my life to Rogers and >$2600.  Because of the fact that I have to buy something from them that I could buy from two other companies, I should get a Palm Pre (Bell) or another phone from Telus, both of which have great EVDO coverage in my area, while Rogers only has EDGE.  However, I constantly drink the Apple Kool-Aid and therefore will wait and will pay outrageously for possibly the slowest phone in my neck of the woods.
[/END RANT]

I also heard a rumor today that AML, the local Rogers authorized reseller for the Atlantic Canadian region is getting a supply of iPhones to their local branches  ‘Thursday or Friday’.  However I’m not convinced of my source’s credibility, though. **I do not endorse or except responsibility for this rumor.**

HP 12C:
This is arguably the most famous HP financial calculator and has sold well for decades. The app that emulates this is $14.99 and 1 MB.

HP 15C:
This is the HP 15C scientific calculator. This app comes in at $29.99 and 1.6MB.

Read Gizmodo’s post about this for more information about these.

[My opinion]
As Gizmodo made clear; the physical calculators that these emulate are significantly more expensive (many times more expensive) and are perfectly emulated by this app. However they don’t mention that most non-free apps in the app store sell for about $1.99 (most sold are probably free!) and that makes the price tags of $15 and $30 irrelevant in most sense of the matter. However, if TI wants to make a graphing calculator app to save high school students (most of which have iPod Touches or iPhones) from having to buy the hardware analogues.
[/MY OPINION]

Links to the app:

• HP 12C
• HP 15C

This post significantly draws from Gizmodo’s post about these calculators.

1. Go to http://twit.am/ in Safari
2. Click on Listen Live
3. [A Player opens – as seen below]
4. Click the home/menu button on the front of the device and the audio keeps playing in the background.

I love Apple more and more everyday… also, if you wanna see something cool from the days of iPhone 1.0 in June of 2007, input the url to an RSS or XML or podcast feed into Safari’s address bar.  [See picture below]

 32 GB White iPhone

Currently I’m paying $30 for my current phone; a prepaid Keybo (aka enV2 on Verizon in the US) on Telus which includes a few minutes, text messaging, and ‘wireless web’ (WAP), so for jut $25 more per month I’ll actually get something that I will use and love.  Going back to that, I love the Keybo—the simplistic nature of it, the relatively low cost, and the lack of contract: but it isn’t a Smartphone, which is what I now realize is what I need.  I do have some revisions to my previous recommendation of the Keybo: This phone is great for a phone, but not as a smartphone. 

I’ve grown tired of the less-than-fluid interface and usability of the Keybo and although the iPhone is significantly more expensive and it’s like comparing a $25 pair Wal-Mart jeans with a $150 Abercrombie & Fitch pair—with the Wal-Mart pair not fitting just right so the pockets don’t really feel comfortable..  But I digress.

Suffice to say that I’m excited about iPhone.  I’ve been in anxious preparation for a few days now, but have been ready for this for my whole life.  It’s true love. 

However, the whole iPhone experience isn’t new to me, I’ve had an iPod touch for more than a year now and have continued to upgrade it at the not-free-cost of $9.95 twice (for the 2.0 and 3.0) and so have been able to discover great apps like Tweetie, Tap Tap, Jelly Car, Crayon Physics, Touch Physics, Last.fm, CalcRPN, RSSPlayer, and Evernote.  But on an iPhone with a persistent data connection, location aware-ness, and a camera will make some apps so much better, such as:

• Tweetie will be (4.0924 x 10^129) times better because it will give me Twitter when I’m board, not just when I’m home.
• Evernote is enhanced with both the data and camera in the sense that I will be able to make notes AND make picture notes everywhere | Last.fm is music—and I have music stored on the iPod-so if I have data everywhere then it could potentially replace my need to carry music entirely (for a small fee, that is)
• RSSPlayer—the built-in podcast client doesn’t allow podcasts over 10MB to be downloaded—however because I’m paying $30/mo for data, I’m gonna use it for what I want-and RSSPlayer allows you to download podcasts of any file size to your iPhone anywhere—and you can get them much before Apple has refreshed their podcast feeds.

One final reason that the iPhone is awesome: it gives me the reason to subscribe to (and pay for) Geoff Smith’s Ringtone Feeder.

I’m sorry for the length of this post, but I’m just so excited! :^)

On Audible this book is in a half-dramatized, half-narrated story with different characters voice by different actors or actresses, which conveys nicely because this book can be downloaded using Audible’s new ‘E’ format (which bring the file size for this book to about 500MB).  This is one of the best applications of the audiobook medium yet; the high quality, great narrators, and a great story. Keep in mind that this book is a significant investment of time, at 15 hours and 57 minutes.

If you like this book, it’s author has a sequel premiering in 2010, Freedom.  You can take a look at free chapters on the authors site, here.

Get this book for $31.47 or 1 credit on Audible.

Or get this book in dead-tree format for $16.98 from Amazon.

**PS With credits this book can cost as low as $7.49, or using a sponsored trial (such as from TWiT) you can get it free (with new signup)**

(Publisher’s Summery)

Technology controls almost everything in our modern-day world, from remote entry on our cars to access to our homes, from the flight controls of our airplanes to the movements of the entire world economy. Thousands of autonomous computer programs, or daemons, make our networked world possible, running constantly in the background of our lives, trafficking e-mail, transferring money, and monitoring power grids. For the most part, daemons are benign, but the same can’t always be said for the people who design them.

Matthew Sobol was a legendary computer game designer – the architect behind half-a-dozen popular online games. His premature death depressed both gamers and his company’s stock price. But Sobol’s fans aren’t the only ones to note his passing. When his obituary is posted online, a previously dormant daemon activates, initiating a chain of events intended to unravel the fabric of our hyper-efficient, interconnected world. With Sobol’s secrets buried along with him, and as new layers of his daemon are unleashed at every turn, it’s up to an unlikely alliance to decipher his intricate plans and wrest the world from the grasp of a nameless, faceless enemy – or learn to live in a society in which we are no longer in control. . . .

Computer technology expert Daniel Suarez blends haunting high-tech realism with gripping suspense in an authentic, complex thriller in the tradition of Michael Crichton, Neal Stephenson, and William Gibson.

©2009 Daniel Suarez; (P)2009 Penguin Audio

(You follow these commands to install the ones you want–if you already have one there is no ned to reinstall it under normal circumstances)

Type: sudo su and give your admin password.
To get:

• GNOME: apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
• KDE: apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
• xfce: apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

Type: exit to get out of superuser mode.

Now when you get to hte login screen you have the option to pick an environment and can chose a default. (That is found under the ‘Session’ menu).

Linux is just a kernel, the underpinnings of the operating system and doesn’t specify the desktop environment. When it comes to desktop environments you have a few conventional choices: KDE, and GNOME, xfce.

These all have grown alike in that they have the conventions of a “desktop” with folders and icons, an area that minimized windows go to, and a “tray” of service-type application status icons. However they also have vast differences; take how GNOME has a Mac-like menu bar at the top of the screen and KDE has a more Windows-like metaphor with a panel resembling the Start Menu, which is triggered to appear when a Start Button-type button is pressed.

Ubuntu is a very common and in most cases the recommended distro of Linux recommended, especially to beginners (to Linux). Ubuntu in it’s default package comes with the GNOME desktop environment, however from the same project you can also chose from: Kubuntu (as I did) or Xubuntu. (The former being packaged with KDE and the latter being packaged with xfce.) However, just because your copy of Linux ships with one desktop environment doesn’t mean you can’t change over and test the others–and the best part is that (if your computer is capable of running the environments and has enough disk space) you can chose between them from the login screen and try them all!

[UPDATE-12:20p] Changed year [/UPDATE]

1. Spotlight Searching (system wide)–with this feature you will be able to swipe to the screen left of the hope screen and you are given a search screen which searches your apps, your apps data, your songs, notes, and podcasts. So cool
2. Landscape keyboard system wide!–enough said…
3. Shake to shuffle–because it makes a good demo
4. This may be the most important… APIs – The latest apps will use the new APIs which Apple will use in 3.0… meaning that if you don’t upgrade you will not be able to use the latest apps… call me blasphemous, but this does seem a lot like an issue you would see from Microsoft, not Apple.
5. Faster Safari, hopefully using some of the Safari 4 (for desktop) javascript technology
6. And lastly and most requested, copy and paste (with cool gestures). This will be a cool demo feature, especially because I wasn’t alive to see Steve Jobs demo the original clipboard on the macintosh in 1984, so this is just as monumental. Now I can demo this to all of my friends who may have already used a clipboard on their Blackberrys or desktops, but this is on an iPod; so it’s cool.

**A note on the many new APIs Apple has included in the SDK, of which I don’t possess as I am not a registered developer, there are thousands. It is important to talk about the APIs for notifications, which have not yet been given highlight from the media, even though it may prove to be the most influential of them all.

Bittorrent.  I have found what I consider to  be the holy grail of bittorrent clients for the Mac, Transmission.  Transmission is simply a front-end to a historic backend bittorrent engine and has been built to be (according to developer’s site), “Easy, Lean, Native, Powerful, Free” which I have interpreted as a very cutdown interface (especially when compared with Vuze, formally Azureus) and uses very little resources and memory; it just seems fast.  The other point is that it feels ‘Mac’, it completely utilizes Growl, dock notifications, and complies with the GNOME HID Guidelines. The other features include encrypted connections, selective file downloading and prioritizing, fast resume, bandwidth management, HTTPS, IPv6, and DHT support.  And what I consider to be the best feature, if you click and drag a hyperlink from a webpage on to the program screen, it automatically downloads the linked torrent file and starts downloading; you never have to see another .torrent file again!

You can get this for FREE from Transmissionbt.com.

**Of course in pointing you in this direction I do not ever intend for you to break copyright laws in your local jurisdiction, and do not accept any liability for your doing so.  Bittorrent is not all evil and has legitimate uses, such as my primary use, downloading Linux distributions while saving bandwidth $$ for the host.**

A few weeks ago I violated the Apple iPod Touch/OS EULA and jailbreak’d my iPod Touch.  The process for doing this varies mostly on whether you have a first generation or second generation iPod touch, thankfully I have the first generation and can use a great tool, QuickPWN.  Basically, this tool makes you plug-in your iPod, figures out what version it is, finds a copy of the iPod software (either on your hard drive from iTunes or from Apple’s servers), modifies it to be a jailbreak install, then installs it on your iPod.  This whole process took me about five minutes start to finish.  There are many great applications and abilities you inherit from jailbreaking including the ability to background an application (which is great for internet radio, like TWiT.am).

I stand behind this application and can only say that I’ve had a good experience, I do realize that this is a somewhat geeky thing to do and may cause issues with your computer or iPod (software only issues).  I have never had an issue with this on Mac OS X or on Windows (however the process is a little more involved for Windows).

Get this for free from QuickPWN.com.

**To do this it is recommended that you first restore the iPod to factory settings via iTunes, then disable the option Open iTunes when iPod is connected.

I came across this thought when investigating office collaboration and how amazingly wikis work, we’ve seen that (corporate wikis, PBWorks, Wikipedia), but what about those situations where a group is working on a project/document that is includes graphics, specialized fonts and layouts (like Publisher documents, for example, or a PDF). Te problem is that wikis work well for mostly unformatted text, but what about a wiki that would allow a user to create a template in Publisher or in itself and allow the wiki content to be mapped to it.

A good possible UI could be borrowed from Google Books, a mostly Javascript based interface that allows the user to toss pages around, uses AJAX to dynamically load pages as they’re called, and provides text search and indexing that is just plain cool. What if this could work in a wiki? This could be somewhat easily done by just mapping content from sections of a wiki onto a page, or using some voodoo software it’s possible that the user could change the text in a WYSIWYG style editor.

I’m just proposing something that would be SO cool, and would definitely create sales and encourage those not using wikis for the reason of not being able to have pretty, Word or Publisher layouts of their content. From what I’ve seen from PBWorks, this is definitely possible for them.

The basic cURL syntax is curl and then the arguments. For example to download the TWiT Video using curl you would use curl http://bglive-a.bitgravity.com/twit/live/high -ooutput.flv (note that the -o or output tag doesn’t have a space between it and the output file name.) However for uploading the command I used was the -T, or upload. This is what I used curl -T ~/Desktop/SN-039.mp3 http://192.168.1.113:8888/sn39.mp3 this incorporates the source filename (and path) and the destination path (and destination file name, this is required).

This post is mostly for my future reference, if it’s useful then I’m happy, if you’re new to this whole idea of putting files on your iPhone/Pod Touch then I welcome you to this new world. If you’re curious why I would put an MP3 file on my iPod without going to through iTunes, consider the times that you don’t have time to update your iPod, specifically if it’s an MP3 file that you can’t get through the iTunes podcast store (I do not encourage music piracy, even if this could be used very effectively for it).

Remember, if you’re using Mac OS X then you have cURL already. (It’s shipped with OS X since version 10.2, if I recall, otherwise you will have to download it using the command apt-get install curl, but that’s for another day.)

I’ve discovered that there is a lot of scripting possibility in Linux, but I still can’t wrap my brain around Python, however Perl scripting should be more than adequate for me. Last time I wrote I mentioned that it doesn’t remember my wireless network password, I discovered why. I had to set up my KDE password wallet (similar to the Mac keychain). It now works fine and can transition from wired to wireless with ease, and contrary to what I originally thought, the wireless on/off switch works fine.

I suppose I should move on to my daily complaints about Linux that I will eventually find a fix for: first, there are no good twitter clients. Second, network printing is less than intuitive and I haven’t got it working yet. Third, Google Docs in Firefox doesn’t display the same font as on Windows. Forth, Flash player sucks. Fifth, flash player REALLY sucks. Sixth, It’s depressingly like Windows.
**You can ignore the sixth reason, it’s not really a legitimate argument.**

You can ignore most of the reasons that I’m hating on Linux as they aren’t that real, Flash Player is a bit slow, but nothing worse than using flash on a Pentium 4, and the font issue is just a slight variance that comes with a different operating system. I can’t encourage readers to give Linux a try, I l-o-v-e Kubuntu. It works well in a virtualization platform like Virtualbox, Parallels, or VMWare (Microsoft VirtualPC is on the fence and not-so good, if you need free, go Virtualbox), but there is nothing like running it actually. Remember that PCs catch viruses, the Macs marketshare is climbing and will soon have viruses, whereas Linux is purely for people in the know and probably won’t have all of the issues, but is at the same time great for just about anyone to use.