My girlfriend and I did a long weekend in Hawaii: 2 nights at the JW Ihilani and 2 nights at the Marriott Waikiki Beach. On top of it being a great weekend, we were fortunate enough to be there for the tsunami scare. I won’t recap the whole story for you. Check out here, here, and here if you need background. So while the tsunami (or lack thereof) kept us confined to our 24th floor hotel room and resulted in no result whatsoever, we got some pretty cool footage of what Waikiki Beach, one of the ten most popular beaches in the world, looks like without a a single person on the beach. That’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing to see.

I put together some video footage above, and I have a few full-size images below to download or view. Enjoy!

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Picture courtesy of TiVo.com

I recently posted that one of my bigger disappointments of CES 2010 was TiVo’s lack of announcements. It appears that TiVo didn’t want to share the spotlight with other electronics manufacturers, and yesterday they released the TiVo Premiere and TiVo Premiere XL. I won’t go through all the details here, but you can find plenty of info here, here, here, and here. I’m a diehard TiVo snob so I ordered one right away! TiVo offers some great deals for existing users. If you have a lifetime service on one of your DVRs, you can get a $200 discount on the lifetime service from TiVo for the new box. Click “Read More” to see screenshots of what they’re offering. The new DVRs will be shipping in early April, and I’ll be SURE to post my impressions once it arrives!

If you already have a TiVo monthly subscription, they’re offering you the following 20% off deal:

If you already have a lifetime subscription, they’re not discounting the box. But the lifetime service is $200 cheaper. It’s a slightly better deal, assuming you were going to buy the lifetime subscription anyways.

I ended up going with the TiVo Premiere XL and lifetime service. Right now, after my multi unit discount, I only pay $9.95/month to TiVo because I have a lifetime subscription on my Series 2 device. By paying $199 for a lifetime service, it will pay for itself in less than two years.

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$15 for WiFI?! Are you kidding me? I thought $12.95 was steep, but $14.95 really stinks! I’m writing this post from UA 14 Premium Service SFO-JFK on March 1, 2010. I think they just raised their rates today, March 1. The funny thing is that I just played the GoGo game to get a free internet session here. It gave me a FREE internet session up to $12.95 value. I wonder if it will work on the $14.95 United P.S. flights. I’ll try it next time. Anyhow, I think $10 is a fair price to pay for cross-country WiFi. $12.95 seemed steep, and 14.95 really seems bad. I hope people use it less. I guess they just count on business users to not care and expense it.

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I’ll be the first one to admit it – the reason to jailbreak your iPhone is at an all time low. If we look back a few years, we all had iPhones with no applications except for the default set, no chance of using video streaming or VoIP applications, and we had a 10MB cap for downloading applications over the cell connection. We live in a different world now. Our phones are chock full with 3rd party applications. We can use VoIP applications and Slingplayer over 3G connections. The download cap has been raised up to 20MB for applications. Things are looking rosier and rosier. However, all is not perfect in Apple land. Read on to hear about my top ten favorite jailbroken iPhone utilities and applications. BTW, Big shout out to the iPhone Dev Team for making it all possible.

1) RockApp

I had to start with RockApp, perhaps better known as Rock Your Phone. When you first jailbreak your iPhone, you will likely start out with Cydia as a default package manager. While it does its job properly, it’s also quite slow. Think of RockApp as Cydia on steroids. It lets you manage the exact same packages that Cydia does, but it also gives you access to the store of Rock Your Phone. You sign up to get a RockID, and with this ID, you can purchase jailbroken applications. They also offer other nifty features like backup. It will backup a list of all your jailbroken apps so if you ever have to reformat your phone or restore it from backup, it will remember every jailbroken app you had on there before and restore them for you. You can install this app from Cydia, and while it’s free of charge, many of the apps it gives you access to are paid applications. I don’t mind paying for quality, though, and I do like supporting independent developers. Definitely check out RockApp as an outstanding replacement for Cydia. FREE

2) MyWi

Dear AT&T, please let me give you some legitimate revenue for tethering. Apple has enabled it. All you need to do is come up with a pricing plan and flip the switch. Do you hear me? No? Okay fine then I will tether anyways, and I’ll keep my money. And how will I do such a thing? With MyWi! MyWi is a $9.99 application that can not only enable tethering on your iPhone, but it can also turn the phone into a 3G hotspot, a la Sprint / Verizion MyFi. I have definitely got my money’s worth out of this application. As a frequent traveler, it is incredibly convenient to have 3G data for my laptop wherever I go. One word of caution: be careful how much data you use while tethered. If you use too much, AT&T may catch on to you, and while I’m not sure what would happen in that case, it’s likely not a very good thing. $9.99

3) My3G

Hopefully this app won’t be necessary for much longer, but at this point, it still is. Some applications still have bandwidth / connection restrictions on them. iTunes downloads have a 20MB cap on them. Skype still hasn’t been enabled to work over 3G (some speculate this is due to the Verizon deal). My3G takes care of all of this. By enabling it on an app, that app is made to think it is on WiFi, and boom – all your troubles are gone. I’ve been using Skype, Slingplayer (which no longer needs My3G), App Store, etc over 3G for a long time, and My3G makes this easy! $2.79

4) SBSettings

Now this is really cool and handy! I spend a lot of time traveling for work, and it can take a long time to “prep” my phone for flights, drives, etc. Is my battery low or is there no 3G service? Well then I should turn off 3G. Am I getting on a plane? Okay I’ll put the phone in airplane mode. Am I going to be in a car with no WiFi? Yeah I better turn WiFi off. SBSettings is an awesome, quick way to toggle these and many other settings. When on the iPhone home screen, you just swipe your finger from the top left to the top right of the screen, and a menu with toggles drops down. You can quickly turn things off and on and then close it. This is MUCH easier and faster than navigating through the menus within the Settings application. I HIGHLY recommend SBSettings to everyone. FREE

5) QuickReply SMS

This app is SUPER convenient. In fact, with the exception of MyWi, I probably use this the most out of any other app I’ve mentioned. If you’re in the middle of a crazy Flight Control session, you don’t want to leave the game just to respond to a stinkin’ SMS! QuickReply SMS lets you respond to the message from a popup window, and you never need to leave the app. Keep working on beating my high score . $2.99

6) ultrasn0w

ultrasn0w is a package that unlocks your iPhone. In other words, you buy your AT&T locked iPhone. You unlock it. Now you can use it on ANY GSM network around the world. There is some housekeeping you must do to keep an unlocked phone. You need to make sure you preserve an older version of the baseband, the iPhone modem firmware. I won’t go into all the detail here, but be sure to check out the iPhone Dev Team blog for information about the process. Also, a word of advice… If you’re like me, you may not have much international travel or NEED for an unlocked phone. However, I sell my iPhone on eBay every summer to fund the purchase of my NEW iPhone. This works quite well. If you sell an unlocked iPhone, it works even better . FREE

7) Five Icon Dock

The iPhone lets you dock your four most commonly used applications on the bottom of the screen. Even though Steve Jobs tells us that we should have four favorite apps, maybe we have five? In this case, Five Icon Dock is for you! There isn’t much else to say about this utility except that it allows you to put five icons along the bottom of your iPhone. Very useful. FREE

nes4iphone

The legality of this one definitely falls into the grey area. In fact, it’s probably illegal. Then again, if you bought the NES app back in the day, and you bought a NES, then… okay well I won’t debate the legality, but if you want to look the other way and play NES games on your iPhone, this one’s for you! You can download game ROMs from within the application, the emulation is perfect, and it really is great. $4.99

9) Elert

You’re in the middle of using Google Maps to find the closest steakhouse. Your phone vibrates. Is it a useless work e-mail? Or is it your wife with an important message? Maybe your boss firing you? Wonder no more! Elert puts a little alert in the lower right of your screen with a preview of the e-mail message. You can close it by clicking the “X” or you can can click the notification. Clicking the notification doesn’t actually open Mail. It opens a pop-up window allowing you to mark the e-mail as read, delete it, or exit your current app and enter Mail. You can close the pop-up and never leave Google Maps if you like. Very useful. Very slick. $0.99

10) Intelliscreen

Image courtesy of www.intelliborn.com

Are you frustrated that if you want to check the weather on your iPhone, it requires an unlock of the screen and a launch of the weather app? If you answered “no” then this app is probably not for you! However, if you want the ability to see recent e-mails, take a look at the weather, and view other useful information, all from the initial lockscreen on your phone, then Intelliscreen might just fit the bill. Intelliscreen comes out of the box with a plethora of widgets to put on your lockscreen. I mentioned weather and recent e-mails. There are also calendar events, text messages, etc. It really allows you to do a lot from your lockscreen. Personally, I only use it for weather as I don’t want someone who just picks up my iPhone to be able to obtain any personal insight about my life. It’s totally customizable, though. $9.99

So there you have it. Apple has made some great strides with the iPhone, and in my opinion, they really have reduced the need for people to jailbreak their devices. However, there are still very unique and useful niches that developers are filling to make our iPhones more and more useful. I hope this was an interesting guide to the ten that I find the most useful!

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Do you travel frequently? If you’re answer is no, then you may not be interested in this post. But if you’re answer is yes, then let me rock your world . When bouncing from airport to airport, sometimes on different carriers, it can be tough to keep up to date on flight delays, gate numbers, etc. FlightTrack Pro from Mobiata gives a great interface for tracking ALL of your flight information. Combine it with TripIt and you get all of your flight info automatically entered. Read on to hear how!So first thing’s first. You’ve got to start using TripIt. What is TripIt and how does it work? It’s an automatic itinerary builder for all of your travel plans (car rentals, flights, hotel reservations, dinner plans, etc). It’s simple – you know all of those confirmation e-mails you get from United, Marriott, Hilton, Continental, or whoever? You just forward those to a tripit e-mail address, and it parses those e-mails and builds a full calendar for you. It even creates a feed so you can subscribe to it via iCal, Outlook, Google Calendar, etc and have all of your travel plans automagically placed on your calendar! Seriously, this is a huge perk. TripIt is 100% free. They offer a “Pro” version for something like $60/year, but I can’t find a compelling reason to sign up for that.

You just forward it your confirmation e-mails, it parses them out, and it builds an itinerary like below.

… and it automatically separates and categorizes everything you’ve forwarded into trips!

VERY cool stuff. And like I mentioned earlier, it makes a feed that you can subscribe to from your calendar of choice. You get all of this functionality just from forwarding your confirmation e-mails. It gets better. TripIt has an API so other apps can link into your data. My app of choice is FlightTrack Pro for the iPhone. Take a look below.

Just like TripIt, all the flights are categorized by trips. Clicking a flight shows you all of the flight status information: delays, gate information, airport weather, a google map showing the flight’s path, etc. It really is very convenient. The best part is opening up the app and seeing all of your upcoming flights in there without every having to enter that data in anywhere.

To make things even better, FlightTrack Pro uses the iPhone alerting system to alert you of delays and other flight changes. This works fantastically well, and in my experience, I end up getting iPhone alerts before they make airport announcements or update their monitors. It’s that quick.

TripIt is free. FlightTrack Pro costs $9.99 on the app store. If you travel frequently, get both. They WILL make your travel life much more organized. I would pay for TripIt if i had to, but I’m very glad it’s free!

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Just a quick post to brag that I beat Geo-Defense! This is a really great game for the iPhone, and I bought it when it went on sale a couple weeks ago. Posted a pic of my scores for the last of the hardest levels to prove it. It was a VERY challenging game. Time to delete it and move onto the next!

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After installing Fedora 12 on a new virtual machine with VMware (I use Fusion on the Mac), the first thing you’ll likely want to do is install VMware tools. You need to install a few packages in order to make the installation seamless, however. There are countless posts around the internet with people looking for help with this. Here’s a quick 15 step guide to getting up and running.

1. Download Fedora 12.
2. Install the OS.
3. Boot up the virtual machine.
4. Open up the Terminal.
5. Run “su” and type your root password to gain administrative control.
6. Run “yum update” to update all the packages to the newest version.
7. Reboot.
8. Open up the Terminal.
9. Run “yum install kernel-devel kernel-headers gcc mkinitrd”
10. Reboot.
11. Click the menu option in your VMware application to install VMware tools. This should put a compressed folder on the desktop.
12. Expand the zip file and using the terminal, navigate into the newly created directory.
13. As the root user, type “./vmware-install.pl”
14. When it asks you questions and prompts you for a response, just hit enter. Everything should be properly configured at this point.
15. Reboot when the script finishes. That’s it!

Once the machine reboots, you should be able to immediately play with some of the more useful features of vmware-tools. For example, you’ll notice that if you drag the edges of the window to resize it, the resolution of the Guest OS will automatically adjust on the fly. If you drag files from your Host OS into the window of the desktop OS, they will copy over. Additionally, you should be able to copy and paste between the two systems. Enjoy!

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CES has come and gone. The two dominating themes of this year’s show appear to be tablets and 3D televisions. I am interested in neither. Unless Steve Jobs shows me something amazing in two weeks, I don’t see the need for a tablet in my life. Not one bit. And I have ZERO desire to put on 3D glasses just to watch Modern Family or the Lakers beating pretty much anyone. However, I DO have the desire to have an updated HD TiVo. I have a TiVo HD with a 1TB hard drive upgrade, and while it works great, I really wish it did a better job of integrating internet media. There were leaks of a TiVo Premiere, and I really thought CES would be the time and place for TiVo to introduce a new line of DVRs. Oh well. I’m a sad Panda. And as for Sling, I would have loved to see some innovation on the consumer end of things. Show us a Slingcatcher that ACTUALLY can sling HD. Show us a better iPhone client. Just give us something cooler than all of the boring OEM crap you released! So anyhow, big lumps of coal for TiVo and Sling Media. I was hoping to see neat products from both!

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Keeping with the theme of recent Sheevaplug related articles, here’s a post about a new, interesting piece of software called Tonido. Tonido advertises itself as a “personal cloud,” allowing you to share all of your personal files to anywhere. It’s a software platform that you install on your own home server. Once you’ve installed the platform, you can run a plethora of applications, and they have an SDK, in hopes that others pick up and write their own apps for it as well. It’s cross-platform. You can install it on Linux, OS X, or Windows. Or if you want, you can even buy their own plug PC, the TonidoPlug. Read on to hear a bit about installation on my Sheevaplug and my first impressions of the software.As I’m installing Tonido on my own Sheevaplug, I need to buy the embedded license for a hair under $30 from Tonido. After buying the license, you’ll get an e-mail from Tonido, asking for your MAC Address. You respond with the MAC Address, and they send you the link to download the software. Installation is pretty simple. I used wget to download the file onto my sheevaplug, and then I installed it with dpkg -i tonido-file.deb . Done. I then added the startup script to my /etc/rc.local file to make sure Tonido starts up at boot.

Once you’ve started the server, you can navigate to it with your web browser by going to the server’s IP address at port 10001 with your web browser. You’ll be greeted with a Tonido login screen, allowing you to create a new Tonido username and password. Upon doing this, you’re at the Tonido homescreen. Here’s a screenshot of mine below:

Click for full-size image

As you can see, it’s a very clean, Web 2.0 looking interface. Clicking “Apps” will let you install some of the many included applications. “Groups” allows you to connect and share with other Tonido users, and “Inbox” lets you send messages to other Tonido users. I’m not very interested in the latter two. I get that they are trying to play up social networking, community, and connecting, but I don’t really have an interest in doing that. I just want cool apps for my “personal cloud.”

You get the following included apps out of the box:

• Jukebox
• Thots
• Torrent
• Workspace
• Webshare
• Photos
• Search

The first thing I did was install the Jukebox application. This lets you play music from your server no matter where in the world you are. My server has my entire library on it so this sounded great! I was quickly disappointed. First off, it only supports MP3s at this time. All of my AAC (non-drm) files are useless. Furthermore, I was really surprised to see that it doesn’t organize my music by ID3 tags! Instead, it uses my folder structure. Modern music apps like iTunes use tags like artist, album, genre, etc to browse music. I love the idea of having a cloud based jukebox. I’m not sure how useful it is, considering that I have my laptop with me most of the time, and if I don’t, I have my iPhone, but if I wanted to browse to a specific song on a friend’s computer, I totally could with the jukebox. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like this implementation is very good at this point. Add support for more file types than MP3 (AAC please!) and support ID3 tags, and then maybe I’ll be interested.

I didn’t play around with Thots, Torrent, or Workspace very much. I don’t need an always-on bittorrent client. As for Thots and Workspace, I don’t know if I fully understand the value of having this on my own personal server. Why can’t I just use google docs, blogspot, or something similar? In fact, I actually find these apps inferior to current web-based offerings. If my personal internet connection dies, my router needs to be reset, or my drive hooked up to my tonido server dies, then I lose access to whatever I wrote with Thots. Using an already available free service protects against this, as the true “cloud” includes data replication and backup. A personal jukebox, I get it. A personal torrent server, I don’t use it, but I get it… Personal blog / notes on my own personal server? eh…. You’re losing me there.

Webshare is actually a really great app, though. My Sheevaplug has a USB drive attached to it as a NAS, and so now with Tonido, I can drag a file onto my NAS, and then use Webshare to send anyone a link to the files. For example, my friend left a flash drive of important files at my house. The files were too big to zip up and e-mail. I copied them to my NAS, fired up Tonido, and sent him a link to the files. You can set it to be available publicly to anyone or you can set username / password access. You get a link to send the person, and then your friend can browse the folder of files, download files individually, or click one button to have everything zipped up and downloaded. VERY handy! I find Tonido to be almost worth the price just for this app!

Click for full-size image

I didn’t bother to play with the Photos App as this centers around the fact that you have pictures ordered hierarchically in folders. I don’t – I use iPhoto. So unless they can offer some time of iPhoto integration, which I don’t find likely, I’ll probably skip that app. As for search, I don’t have a need for this. My Macbook has Spotlight built-in, and anything on my Sheevaplug is sync’d from the Mac.

Another great thing is the Tonido Relay Service. This allows you to access everything on your Tonido remotely, without having to open up any ports on your router. I actually don’t know the technical details of how it works, but it DOES work very well. You use your username and navigate to http://username.tonidoid.com/. And just like that, you’re on your Tonido remotely. It lets you do everything you can do with the local network connection. Very cool!

Image taken from Codelathe's blog. Click to be taken there.

That covers all of the included applications. Is it worth $30? Like I said, for me, it’s worth it for the web sharing capabilities. I love that if I need to send a friend a file, or a folder of files, I can just throw it on the NAS and send them a link to the file. I can give them unique individual access or I can jut make it public. Very cool stuff. As for the rest, if the Jukebox app undergoes some improvements, I would definitely use it. The rest is up to the developer community that Tonido is trying to build. I can imagine that there are some innovative people out there who will build Tonido apps that I never even thought of. If and when that community flourishes, Tonido will be even more useful. Until then, I recommend this application, but only to power users who know exactly what the pros and cons are going into it. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions. Thanks!

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