Tomorrow sees the official release of Apple’s iPad.

Ever since it was announced, the iPad has gotten mixed reviews. Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing.net gave a compelling argument against, not necessarily the iPad itself, but perhaps more against the ability of an established gargantuan in the industry to affect truly innovative and envelope-pushing technology.

Recently, reviewers have begun publishing their thoughts on the iPad, after getting their hands on it. As Gizmodo summarizes, most of the reviews are surprisingly positive. Reviewers seem impressed by the interface, even though it’s really nothing new, and are impressed by the keyboard. The construction is solid, the processor is fast, and the battery life is remarkable.

Of course there are the negatives. There’s the lack of Flash, which is pretty huge in a device with which surfing the web is a large part. There’s the lack of camera and USB ports. And like the iPhone and iPod Touch, the iPad can’t multitask.

So the big question is, Should you buy an iPad?

I can’t answer this question for you, and neither should other bloggers.

The iPad serves its own purpose. It’s not supposed to be a laptop replacement. Nor is it an overgrown iPhone. Apple’s aim with the iPad was to fill the hole between iPhone and Macbook. Do you need a device to fill that hole? I can’t tell you that.

Personally, I think the iPad is an impressive piece of technology. When the pricing was announced, I was impressed. However, if I find myself in need of a mobile device that can do more than my iPhone, I think I’d rather have a full-blown laptop. If I want a device I can type stories or blog posts on, I want a physical keyboard. If I’m surfing the web, I want to be able to save images, documents, or songs to my hard drive. If I’m sitting in a restaurant or other public place, I’d like to be able to do other things while I check my twitter accounts once in a while; I don’t want to have to stop what I’m doing in order to check if I’d gotten any replies.

But that’s just me. I can see where an iPad could fit certain users needs.

You need to weigh the pros and cons as they apply to your own situation and needs. Go to an Apple store and play around with one. If you think you’ll get your money’s worth of use out of it, then get one. Otherwise, don’t. Don’t let bloggers tell you what not to buy; process the information on your own and make an informed decision.

In an older post, I showed you how to share your iTunes library between computers. In another post, I talked about the virtues of the syncing web service, Dropbox.

Now, iTunes & Dropbox join the ranks of Great Combinations, rubbing elbows with the likes of Dungeons & Dragons, Beavis & Butthead, and Nuts & Gum (Together At Last!)

Well, at least it has the potential to be a great combination. By using Dropbox instead of an external hard drive, it’s feasible that you could eliminate the need to carry your music collection with you. I’ll tell you how you’d set up sharing your iTunes library using Dropbox, but since I no longer use a PC at home, I can’t test this first-hand.

The idea behind this modified method is the same as before. The difference is that you’ll be saving your iTunes library to your Dropbox folder. DO NOT save your music folder to your Dropbox. I’ll say it again: do not save your music folder to your Dropbox. For one, it would take a really long time to sync. For another, you only get 2GB of online storage. You only want to copy your iTunes Library.itl file to your Dropbox folder.

Once you do this, you’ll have to redirect iTunes to look for your library in this new location. Hold down the Shift key (Option on a Mac) while you launch iTunes. Keep holding it down until you see the Choose iTunes Library… option box. Select Choose Library… and find where you saved it in your Dropbox. iTunes should launch normally, with all your ratings and play counts intact.

As soon as you do this, go into the Preferences (Edit » Preferences) and click the Advanced tab. Make sure the iTunes Music folder location is pointing to wherever you have your collection. It should not be pointing to your Dropbox; my iTunes changed this automatically when I chose to use the library in my Dropbox. Be wary of this, otherwise any music you add will be put into your Dropbox.

Now this is where the potential of this setup could soar, and where I can’t test it (yet.) Theoretically now, you should be able to save your music collection directly to your local hard drive on each machine, instead of your portable external hard drive.

This could be a fantastic setup if it works the way it does in my head. The biggest advantage would be that you could share an iTunes library between two computers without having to lug around an external hard drive. You would have synchronized play counts and ratings, and it would be (almost) completely transparent.

The disadvantage, however, becomes apparent when you add new music to your library. While the iTunes library will recognize it without problems, you’ll have to physically copy the music file to each computer that’s sharing the library. For example, if you buy a song from iTunes at home, it gets added to the library and all is well. But when you go into work the next day and want to listen to your new song, iTunes won’t be able to find it. You’ll have to carry the song on a flash drive and copy it to the collection on your work computer. If it’s just a song or two, you could save it in your Dropbox to sync, then move it when you get in to work. So, depending on how frequently you add new music to your library, this could be a big hassle. If you find yourself constantly copying music back and forth, you might be better off going back to saving your library on the external hard drive.

Another thing you’ll want to keep in mind is that because iTunes is constantly updating the library file while the program runs, so too will Dropbox be syncing that file. My iTunes library is about 4.5MB with about 2700 songs, and the corresponding XML file is about 10% bigger. So be aware of this if your network usage is monitored or if you have a slow connection.

As far as I know, this will not work between Windows and Mac, since the two operating systems use different folder structures. If you can try this between Windows machines, or between Macs, I’d love to hear how well this works; leave a comment so the rest of us can benefit from your great wisdom!

When I was first learning about computers back in junior high school, we were taught what RAM stood for – Random Access Memory – but not what it did. It wasn’t until I started developing a more intimate knowledge of the inner workings of a computer that I came to grok its purpose. Unfortunately, the vast majority of computer users won’t acquire enough knowledge to understand the idea of RAM.

Due to the same naive ignorance, I was also often confused about the concepts of “memory” and “storage”. To me, they were interchangeable. A hard drive was a kind of memory, right? But again, it wasn’t until I learned more about computers that I understood the distinction. Without a certain degree of knowledge and familiarity, these concepts can be confusing.

So, whenever I have to explain what RAM does versus what the hard drive does, I use the analogy of short-term and long-term memory.

For your computer, RAM (memory) acts like your own short-term memory. It keeps track of what you’re doing at the moment; what programs you have running. Your hard drive (storage) acts like your long-term memory. It remembers who you are (operating system) and what you know (data).

Just as your brain can pass information from your short-term memory to your long-term, so can your computer. For example, lets say you receive someone’s electronic business card in an email. When you open it, your RAM (short-term) keeps track of it, remembers that you have it open and what data is in it. When you save it to your hard drive (long-term) you now have that information available for retrieval in the future. In a real world sense, this would be like meeting someone; when they tell you their name, you hold it in short-term memory for quick access, but it also gets transferred to your long-term memory so that you’ll be able to remember their name five days later.

Make sense?

Now I know this isn’t a perfect analogy, but it seems to make sense to most people. Thoughts?

As if text messages weren’t convenient enough; did you know you could send them through your favorite email client?

I’m sure we’ve all been working on our computers when a text message comes in, and have to pause what we’re doing to reply using that little dinky keyboard/numpad on the phone. Well now, if you know the other party’s wireless carrier and phone number, you can type up a text message on your computer and have it sent straight to their phone.

Advantages

• Using your standard, full-size keyboard to type out your message is faster and easier than doing it on your phone.
• You can keep a permanent record of the text message in the Sent folder of your email account.
• It doesn’t cost a thing to send. As mentioned in my post about the cost of text messages, this can really help keep your number to text messages down each month.

Disadvantages

• The text messages are a little sloppy. As you can see in the example above, the text message you receive looks more like an email, which is to be expected.
• Your recipient has to reply manually to your text message. Because the message wasn’t sent through your normal phone number, your friend will have to start a new text message thread in order to reply. For example, on the iPhone you just need to tap the text field and start typing in order to reply. In this case, however, I’d have to go back to my list of contacts and start a new text message.

So, as with any technology, there’s a time and a place for sending text messages via email. Try it for yourself and see how it works with your phone/carrier. Who knows, maybe this will work well on some phones that handle text messages differently than the iPhone.

Regardless, here’s a list of carriers and the email addresses you can use to send your SMS text messages via email:

Alltel

(10-digit phone number)@message.alltel.com
Example: 1234567890@message.alltel.com

AT&T (formerly Cingular)

(10-digit phone number)@txt.att.net
(10-digit phone number)@mms.att.net (MMS)
(10-digit phone number)@cingularme.com
Example: 1234567890@txt.att.net

Nextel (now Sprint Nextel)

(10-digit phone number)@messaging.nextel.com
Example: 1234567890@messaging.nextel.com

Sprint PCS (now Sprint Nextel)

(10-digit phone number)@messaging.sprintpcs.com
(10-digit phone number)@pm.sprint.com (MMS)
Example: 1234567890@messaging.sprintpcs.com

T-Mobile

(10-digit phone number)@tmomail.net
Example: 1234567890@tmomail.net

US Cellular

(10-digit phone number)@email.uscc.net (SMS)
(10-digit phone number)@mms.uscc.net (MMS)
Example: 1234567890@email.uscc.net

Verizon

(10-digit phone number)@vtext.com
(10-digit phone number)@vzwpix.com (MMS)
Example: 1234567890@vtext.com

Virgin Mobile USA

(10-digit phone number)@vmobl.com
Example: 1234567890@vmobl.com

In my previous post about making an iPhone-friendly website, I talked a bit about the growing popularity of the iPhone and iPod Touch in regards to surfing the web. Just like any other browser, you can bookmark your favorite sites, but on the iPhone and iPod Touch, you can save bookmarks to the Home screen as well.

When a bookmark is saved to the Home screen, the iPhone or iPod makes an icon for it. By default, it will use a snapshot of the web page. But what if you want your visitors to see a custom icon instead of a micro-view of your blog?

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Create a PNG image that’s 57×57 pixels. Ideally, this would be the same as your favicon or your site logo if you have one.
2. Save the image with the filename apple-touch-icon.png
3. Upload this image to the root directory of your blog.

That’s it. Now when readers bookmark your site to their Home screen, they’ll have a shiny, eye-catching icon. Go ahead, try it with this site. Even if you don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch yourself, it doesn’t take much effort to offer an extra bell/whistle to those that do.

“But Chris, what if I don’t have the ability to upload to the root directory?”

Good question, Chris. If you’re hosting your blog on Blogspot, for example, there’s another way to do this.

1. Create your icon as mentioned above.
2. Upload the icon to your favorite image hosting service – Flickr, Photobucket, or TinyPic for example.
3. Go to Edit Template – how you do this will vary depending on your host – and insert the following code between the <head></head> tags:
   <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="http://www.location.of/your-image.png"></link>

Please note that in the Blogspot example, the filename of the image doesn’t matter; the rel="apple-touch-icon" attribute tells the iPhone or iPod Touch what to look for.

Also note that if you’re using the WPTouch addon to create an iPhone-friendly version of your Wordpress blog, then you don’t need to worry about any of this. Choosing an icon for the “Logo & Home Screen Bookmark Icon” in the plugin’s settings will take care of this for you.

As iPhones and iPod Touches continue to fly off the shelves, it’s becoming more apparent that spending the time to make your website or blog iPhone-friendly is worth the effort.

Even with (arguably) the best mobile browser in the world, the iPhone’s small screen can make it difficult to read information on some websites. Its zooming and panning abilities make it easier, but it still limits your peripheral browsing vision. Many mainstream sites like Google, Twitter, and Facebook have mobile versions of their content that allow easier browsing, but what are us little guys supposed to do?

While Astro-Geek:3000 displays fairly well on my iPhone – well enough to read, anyway – there are some elements that are a little off. So, I looked around a little bit to see what kind of options were available to me for making an iPhone-friendly version of the blog.

InterSquash is a web-based service that creates an iPhonization using your RSS feed. It’s a good idea, but it didn’t work for AG:3k; I keep getting String could not be parsed as XML errors. Maybe you might have better luck.

The only other real option I found is a Wordpress plugin called WPTouch. It allows different customization features including colors and icons; there are some icons included in the plugin, but it also explains how you can include your own custom icons. Another nice little touch is the section at the bottom that shows you any incompatibilities between plugins.

The plugin creates a nice iPhone theme that’s easy to read and navigate, but doesn’t stifle your blog. For instance, because InterSquash uses your RSS feed, visitors would still have to visit the main site to leave comments. With WPTouch, visitors have full commenting abilities right at their fingertips. WPTouch also supports pages by displaying their links under the Menu dropdown.

WPTouch is a solid plugin that does its job well.

The New York Times recently ran a story about the hidden cost of text messaging.

I’ve always wondered why wireless carriers charge so much for text messages. Many service plans include a number of monthly SMS messages; my iPhone plan includes 200 messages, which is more than enough for me. But if I were to exceed that number, I’d be charged $0.20 per message. This seems to be a fairly average price across the board.

So, how much does it really cost your wireless provider to send that little bit of text to your friend? Well, according to the New York Times – nothing.

That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.
(emphasis mine)

What they found out is that the wireless companies are sending your SMS messages along channels that are being used regardless of whether there’s a message to send or not.

On top of that, text messages take up very little space. If you’ve shopped for a new hard drive in the last few months, you know that storage is cheap these days. You can find a 1TB (~1,000GB) hard drive for $100 if you know where to look. To get an idea of just how small a text message might be, I created a simple Text file on my C: drive (test.txt) and entered “This is a test message for a file. It doesn’t say anything of importance.” The file is 73 bytes.

In 2008, approximately 2.5 trillion text messages were sent. If we use 73 bytes as an average size, that comes out to about 182.5 terabytes worth of data. In the article, they mention Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile, so if we divide this data among just those four wireless providers, we get 45.625 TB worth of data for each provider. So for less than $5,000 any of these cellular providers could buy enough storage space for a years worth of text messages.

Given this information, the wireless providers would be able to cover these costs many times over, even if they only charged each customer’s first text message. Granted, this isn’t how it works, exactly, but it helps to put it in perspective.

The bottom line: cellular service providers are charging us for a service that costs them virtually nothing; all they have to do is count the cash.

The LA Times is running an article about the imminent retirement of the VHS tape.

The last big supplier of the tapes is ditching the format, ending the long fade-out of a product that ushered in the home theater.

Read the rest of the article here.

For the better part of my life VHS tapes have been a staple of practical technology; my childhood coincided with its rise to domination. After its victory over Betamax in the great Videotape Format War of the late ’70s and early ’80s, the VHS tape became an integral, deep-seated part of the American way of life. It paved the way for the home theater system and video rental stores. With the rise of VHS came the rise of camcorders, and more and more people were capturing their greatest moments in life on magnetic tape. VHS was even a big player in the movie piracy scene; I remember a video rental place in my home town got busted for renting out illegally copied movies. And I dare you to find anyone over ~20 that’s never taped a movie off of television. Hell, a lot of my favorite movies growing up don’t feel complete without bits of commercials thrown in.

Goodbye, VHS. And thank you.

Have you ever been downloading an important file, waiting and watching as the progress bar slowly creeps to the right, and thought, “375k per second? Why is it going so slow? I’m paying for 3 meg download! Why isn’t it downloading at 3 megs? And where’s that pie?!”

Well, I can’t help you with the pie, but I can explain why you see such a disparity in numbers between what the cable or DSL company lists on your bill, and what your download window shows. And it’s rather sneaky and underhanded on the part of your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

This disparity can be blamed on the difference between bits and bytes, and the subtle and often overlooked difference in annotating these units of measure. To fully explain this, we’ll need to talk about the very fundamental ways computers work.

A bit is a binary digit, used to measure a single piece of information. It’s either a 1 or a 0, on or off, or a magnetic charge of either positive or negative. The bit is denoted as b. Please note, that’s a lowercase b.

A byte is 8 bits worth of information. This provides 256 possible combinations of 1s and 0s. For all intents and purposes, we’ll call this the basic unit of storage in today’s personal computers. Bytes are (most often) denoted as B. Please note, that’s an uppercase B.

And herein lies the crux of our disparity.

When you’re signing up for internet service, your ISP tells you that you can get 3Mbps download speeds. Now, let’s take a closer look at this: “Mbps” means Mega bits per second. So basically your ISP is telling you that you can download 3 million 1s or 0s per second. When you’re downloading something from the internet, however, your download window is showing your speed as 375KB/sec. Remember, a lowercase b means bit, while an uppercase B means byte. And since there are 8 bits in a byte, your download window is telling you that you’re downloading 375,000 groups of 1s and 0s per second.

So, if you take the total number of bits that your ISP is letting you download, and divide it by 8 (since that’s how many of those little buggers are in each of the bytes that your web browser is measuring) you’ll see that 3 million bits divided by 8 equals 375,000 bytes.

Make sense?

So while it may look like you’re getting cheated by your service provider, they’re actually just using creative marketing to kind of polish the numbers.

For quite a long time, I was trying to manage two iTunes music libraries; one at work and one at home. I listen to music probably 7 out of 8 hours a day at work, but fairly rarely at home. But when I did listen at home, I didn’t have the same playlists I had at work, since many of them are dynamic, based on play counts and ratings.

I found a remedy a month or so ago, and now I can listen to the same library at work and at home. It works wonderfully.

To make this work for yourself, you’ll need an external hard drive or some other form of portable storage. A USB thumb/pen/flash drive would work, if you have a small collection. I’m using a 160GB hard drive I’d purchased for my laptop. It’s not an external drive, but I purchased an enclosure for it. The great thing about this setup is that it doesn’t need a separate power supply; it receives enough power through the USB connection so there’s no need to carry around a bulky AC adapter. This makes it much more portable. The enclosure came with a carry pouch, so I can easily carry the hard drive and USB cable with me between home and work.

I digress.

Start off on the computer that has the library you want to use. If one library is more developed than the other, you’ll obviously want to use the more developed one.

1. First of all, move your music files onto your portable storage device. The read/write speed on an external hard drive is plenty fast enough, so if you’re worried about choppy playback, you needn’t fret. It doesn’t matter what drive letter your external drive comes up as, but it does need to remain constant every time you connect it. You may want to change it to something further down the alphabet so there’s no chance that other portable media will steal that letter. The drive letter does not need to be the same between computers, however; they can be different. For instance, it could be the K: drive on your work computer and the P: drive at home; as long as it’s always K: at work and always P: at home, you’ll be fine.
2. Once you get your music copied over, you’ll want to copy your iTunes library onto your external hard drive. It can be found in the iTunes folder in My Music (C:Documents and Settings(your username)My DocumentsMy MusiciTunes). Copy iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Music Library.xml over to your external hard drive, preferrably in their own separate folder.
3. Now that your music and library files are copied over, you can configure iTunes to use these files instead of the defaults. To do this in Windows, hold the [Shift] key while double-clicking the iTunes icon to launch it; In OS-X, hold down the Option key while launching iTunes. A window will come up asking you to specify a library. Click the “Choose Library…” button. Browse to where you saved your library onto your external hard drive and select it. iTunes will now use this library file instead of the one saved in your My Music folder.
4. The final thing you’ll want to do is change the iTunes Music folder location. To do this, go into the Settings within iTunes and click on the “Advanced” tab. Change the folder location to wherever it is on your external hard drive.

The first computer is set up.

On the second computer, all you have to do is follow steps 3 & 4 above. That’s it! You now have two computers sharing the same library, same play counts, same ratings, and same playlists! And the beauty of this setup is that you can import music on either computer and instantly have access to it on the other!

I haven’t tried it on more than two machines, but I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t do this on three, four, or as many computers as you want. Keep in mind, however, that this is not a media server. As far as I know, you can’t share out the library files to use on multiple computers simultaneously. This is a one-at-a-time setup. It’s designed for going back and forth from home/work, or perhaps if you’re going to be using an unfamiliar computer for a period of time.