I really have no idea why I picked such a title. Regardless, happy Memorial Day!
There's nothing really as good as some solid music on Memorial Day so check out my blog post over at OurStage: Summer Blues Playlist!
When it comes to staying organized I've tried all sorts of lists and programs and websites. Recently I can across RTM or Remember The Milk. Of course this catchy name made me look further to find a service that does everything I need.
Things I use:
- Reminders prior to something being due (to sms, email, and IM)
- Posting Todo's from email, sms, iphone, etc.
- Organizing multiple lists.
- Text to data: e.g. Due: "tomorrow 4pm" becomes "May 19th, 2009 4:00pm"
- Offline browsing with google gears.
Not all of us can afford the latest and greatest in tech equipment. Of course, everyone would love to get the latest gadgets! Ways to dramatically upgrade your old system in speed and usability is getting easier and cheaper. We'll be going through a few of those ways:
;)
#1: SSD
Solid State Drives (SSD's) have been around for years but they're just starting to become affordable. For about 10th of the price of a new computer, you can make it feel all new and shiny with amazing speed, you could never get from silly RAM or hard disk upgrades. With computers average lives being 3 years, you can breathe new life into some perfectly good hardware!
I have a 2 year old MacBook Pro. I purchased a OCZ Vertex 60 GB drive from Newegg. Now you may not be happy with that price to space ratio, we'll get into fixing that later. Of course you could purchase a regular hard drive, with quite a bit more space for cheaper. Just take this into yourconsideration, how many 2 year old computers have you seen that can boot in 14 seconds with 8 programs autoloading. All of the Adobe Suite loads in seconds.
So first step, purchase an SSD, and an enclosure. You should literally take the drive out, put it in the enclosure and leave it as is. This way, if anything were to go wrong, you can always boot into the USB drive, or replace it into the computer. Install a fresh system onto your new SSD, copy essentials from your old hard drive. Oh, and by essentials, I mean not your iTunes library, etc. Now that you have a speedy computer, move your iTunes library, photos, movies and major files onto an external hard drive.
;)
#2: Leave your external drives at home
So the majority of places you use your laptop probably have internet. It would make sense that you could access your files through the internet now a-days. Of course, you can always store files online or even use services such as box.net or dropbox. However, don't you wish you could mount a hard drive from anywhere? Now it can be done, quite simply.
Pogoplug is a new device that lets you access your files from anywhere. In about 5 minutes your hard drive(s) can be online through an online web interface or a mountable drive on Windows or Mac. Can't be beat huh?
So Cinco de Mayo is almost over, however here I am with quick update. To put an end to your day, check out this crazy weird video from OurStage.
Twitter. Everyones on it now. I can use it to hear from a newly reformed band such as Blink 182 (Mark Hopus) post pictures from only moments ago of their current happenings in their lives. I can get P. Diddy's insights into daily life, and my personal favorite, police information on what's going on around Boston (other police forces are beginning to do it as well). Twitter is getting big. Real big, real fast. Early reports indicate twitter doubling in size in the past month, CRAZY.
Who knows what the future will hold for twitter, however it's growth is far stronger than facebook's was at this time in it's life. Watch out for it. If you don't have one and want to stay in the know, get one. Now. The End.
For twitter fanatics out there, check out this movie. I did the music for it, for campus movie fest. Check it out!
Proud of your performance skills? Check this out:
;)
The Palm Pre has been turning heads ever since it was announced a few months ago. The industry knew, not only did the iPhone need a solid competitor, but Palm, a very historic tech company, needed to pull something amazing or they would be lost in the dust.
Long before the introduction of the iPhone, palm created the Palm Pilot 1000 in 1996. The following decade Palm would basically own the mobile device industry, as they gobbled up other companies including Handspring. The devices were a hit among business-people, mothers, and even children. The use of the devices however were different than the uses today.
The original idea of a "Palm Pilot" was a PDA or Personal Digital Assistant. Generally things such as calendars, lists, notes and other programs were used on the devices. Soon enough, Palm was building a powerful mobile smartphone fan-base, but the devices were still so... 1996?
;)
In 2001, Apple launch the iPod. At the time, the device had one purpose, and one purpose alone: To play music! People flocked to the device and it quickly became the strong owner of the portable music industry, all but killing alternatives to the MP3 player such as the MiniDisk. Soon apple would add photos, podcasts, and videos to the devices.
Continuing with innovation, in 2007 Apple announced the iPhone which did everything the iPod did, and more.. better. In fact, it's redesign led to a non-phone model, quickly steering more into the original Palm realm. These new devices would do everything a Palm device did.. except much prettier and without a stylus!
Now lets step back for a moment. The iPod. A Music device. The Palm Pilot. A Personal Data Assistant.
As Palm gets set to release their new device, we are told the iPhone will receive a strong run for it's money. That's great and all... 2 devices, now you get to choose, right? Well of course phone companies won't play fair and they still demand exclusivity for a device, so in reality you may have to change service to get the device you would like, but that's a debate for another day.
Apple just announced a huge batch of updates that bring the iPhone almost to par with what we expect from the Pre. However, will the Pre be a replacement for your iPod? Since, of course, this is where the iPhone came from and is not truely a palm "thing."
Competition leads to innovation, on the part of both of these companies. Only time will tell what will be the case.
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Why hello there. If you've reached this page,
1) I'm sorry
2) I must enjoy using squarespace
3) hopefully there's something useful for you!
I've had numerous blogs before, simple things such as xanga, caledia, and live journal. I also started my own music blog in high-school called ModRoc. I've never really been able to keep a solid blog online so this is my attempt to create a professional, long term blog on my life, music and technology I like and find useful.
I currently am on Coop for OurStage.com so I will be talking about them quite often. You can also read quite a few of my posts on the blog there as well. I've found the company a great way to step into the industry and figure out exactly what I want to do with my life, or at least I hope!