mavrev.com

Why Google Buying Motorola Doesn't Protect Android

matt — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:24:41 +0000

Google says Android is open. And for now, the mobile operating system is open-source. But for how long? With this morning's announcement that Google will acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, Android's future may be up in the air. Read more...

2011 at the Box Office

matt — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 14:36:22 +0000

With the 2011 movie season kicking into high gear for the Summer, I thought it'd be a good time to take a look at my box office predictions. I'll check back in at the end of the year to see how I did. All estimates are for worldwide grosses.

Top Ten
1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 - $1.06 billion
2. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides - $940 million
3. Transfomers: Dark of the Moon - $820 million
4. Cars 2 - $760 million
5. Kung Fu Panda 2: The Kaboom of Doom $720 million
6. Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn $620 million
7. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 - $580 million
8. Captain America $560 million
9. Fast Five $550 million
10. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows $540 million

Honorable Mentions
11. The Hangover: Part II $470 million
12. The Muppets $460 million
13. Rio $450 million
14. Super 8 $440 million
15. X-Men: First Class $430 million

Apple Kills the iHub

matt — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 08:11:17 +0000

The short-lived iHub was available for $9.90 from MIC Gadget

In what is one of the quickest turnarounds for Apple's legal team, MIC Gadget's iHub was discontinued today due to reported legal pressure from the consumer electronics giant. Luckily for me, I purchased one of these as soon as I saw it, knowing it would be dead soon. Read more...

Why Amazon Prime is the Most Important Weapon Amazon Has Against Apple

matt — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 16:30:51 +0000

CC: Flickr/tgraham

For $80 a year, Amazon Prime subscribers receive free two-day shipping on everything they order (so long as it is eligible/fulfilled by Amazon), unlimited streaming access to 5,000 movies and TV shows on Amazon Instant Video, and possibly in the future increased CloudDrive storage, and even a discounted or free Kindle or Amazon Tablet. Yes, Amazon Tablet Read more...

Portal 2

matt — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:33:29 +0000

Portal 2 available for pre-order on Amazon.com

The sequel to one of the most popular games of 2007, Portal 2 is finally coming! After multiple delays, Valve will release Portal 2 on April 19th. If you purchase the PS3 version of the game, you will be able to sign in with your Steam account and sync your game and data to your free included copy of Portal 2 for Steam on Mac or PC. Read more...

Amazon Announces Ad-Supported Kindle

matt — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:43:06 +0000

CC: Flickr/HorsePunchKid

Amazon has announced that they will now start selling an ad-supported Kindle. No, it's not free (even if the price trend is edging towards free Kindles), and no it's not $99. Instead, the Kindle (with Special Offers & Sponsored Screensavers, as Amazon calls it) will be available for $114, which is $25 off the current Kindle WiFi price.
Read more...

Amazon Cloud Player & Cloud Drive

adam — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 05:59:31 +0000

Learn more about Amazon's new Cloud Drive

It seems Amazon has just beat both Apple and Google to the punch as it launched it's music-streaming service just hours ago. Read more...

Motorola Xoom: The Day After

adam — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 03:13:05 +0000

The Motorola Xoom

The Motorola Xoom Wi-Fi officially released yesterday, even though some stores had started selling it a day or two before. For those who aren't familiar with the Motorola Xoom, it's the first real Android tablet to compete with the iPad. Beating Apple to the dual-core punch, the Xoom was first released only in partnership with Verizon in February. Read more...

What is Wordpress Development?

Katharina — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 08:51:12 +0000

Wordpress is the leading blog and CMS software used online

WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Finally, WordPress is the result of the combined effort of people from all over the world united with a common goal: to make the best darn web software for publishing your Personal and Professional story, may be for personal or business use, on the web and sharing it with the world. Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, Read more...

The iCycle

adam — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 01:35:36 +0000

Graphic by The Oatmeal

No, no. It's not Apple's newest product. On the contrary, it's something that's been around for quite a while now. Since the early days of the iMac and only magnified by new products such as the iPhone and iPad. It's a ruthless cycle that harnesses our basic human instincts. Read more...

In Review: The iPad 2

adam — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 19:20:37 +0000

CC: Flickr/Cesar Dominguez

Apple just debuted the iPad 2. A pseudo-upgrade to the iPad line, the iPad 2 brings such upgrades as a dual-core and faster processor, x9 graphics improvements, two cameras and a thinner device. How does it stack up to the competition? Let's find out. Read more...

The 83rd Academy Awards

matt — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 20:35:22 +0000

CC: Flickr/Dave_B_

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released nominations early this morning for the 83rd Academy Awards (Oscars) for 2010. The winners will be announced February 27, 2011 at the Kodak Theatre. Both the nominees and my predictions are listed below. Read more...

Toy Story 3: Review

matt — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:37:00 +0000

Toy Story 3 was directed by Lee Unkrich.

This has been the film I've been looking forward to since Disney purchased Pixar. We all knew it was coming, but no one knew what to expect. There is no doubt in my mind that I can call this my favorite Pixar film yet. Sorry Wall·e, but no matter how much I love the first silent portion of the film along with the subsequent thrill ride, Toy Story 3 just tops it. From the opening sequence which makes for a terrific reintroduction to the characters we know and love, to the final emotional moments, it not only is a wonderful Pixar film, it is a fantastic film, for everyone.

Read more...

Toy Story 3

matt — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 09:07:28 +0000

Toy Story 3 was directed by Lee Unkrich.

I'm going to see Toy Story 3 tonight at midnight. I don't believe I've been this excited for a movie rated G since Toy Story 2.

Watch this post and my Twitter feed for my thoughts afterwards.

Spotlight : World of Goo

Matthew — Tue, 18 May 2010 02:21:34 +0000

World of Goo is developed by 2D Boy.

World of Goo by developer 2D Boy is one of the most polished independent game to come out in recent history. The gameplay centers around gelatenous gobs of 'Goo' which are stretched and pulled into structures, typically with the goal of reaching a new area, or completing some machine.

Read more...

Public shortening via urlShort at u.mavrev.com discontinued

matt — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 01:30:25 +0000

urlShort, The Open Source URL Shortener.

After some time with reliability issues this year, I've decided to discontinue public shortening of URLs via our urlShort service at u.mavrev.com. Read more...

iPhone OS 4.0

matt — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 05:18:10 +0000

iPhone OS 4.0 is to be unveiled on April 8th.

I posted most of this on Twitter earlier, but it's worth it to put it in a more organized fashion here. In bold are predictions that I am almost certain about. Read more...

What Apple has in mind for iSlate

matt — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 06:32:44 +0000

MacBook Air is more than one of the thinnest notebooks.

When Apple introduced MacBook Air in 2008 (at the end of January in fact), most saw it as Apple's "netbook", a term they have refused to use, and rightfully so. MacBook Air is not a netbook, nor is it truly a laptop. It is a portable computing device, which Apple wanted to become the thing you take everywhere with you. Not just when you need a computer, but everywhere.

Read more...

Ten things Apple can learn from the jailbreaking community and lifestyle

matt — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 04:39:14 +0000

Jailbreaking is as simple as one click with blackra1n.

So, about two months ago now I jailbroke my iPhone again, using blackra1n. I'd previously done it in August, but ended up going back after the update, and because I didn't feel comfortable with it. But now, I'm not looking back. With the advancement of apps available to jailbroken users (be them apps on the springboard, or elsewhere in the background), they have now become an essential part of my mobile digital lifestyle. Backgrounding apps with ProSwitcher (free), or getting around to new places with xGPS (free) are things I now take for granted. And my custom theme (based on Suave)? I don't think I could stand going back to the default look of the iPhone at this point. It just feels so... archaic and tired to me now.

So thinking about it, I managed to come up with 10 things that Apple can learn from the jailbreaking community, and the accompanying "lifestyle". Whether or not anything on my list will ever happen remains to be seen, but if one thing is for sure, Apple needs to at least consider some of these to be taken seriously in the continuing race to market dominance, as their competitors in Android and even Palm's WebOS keep innovating and offering competitive features and designs to consumers.

Read more...

Google Chrome: A Month In Review

adam — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:36:58 +0000

Google Chrome. A fast new browser: Now available for Mac.

So it's been a month since I switched over to Chrome. I've had a lot more time to stress test it and even through some of the bumps, I'm still using it.

Read more...

Apple iSlate, Magic Slate, and iGuide

matt — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 03:11:44 +0000

CC: Flickr/nDevilTV

After discovering the iSlate trademark (which is the leading contender for the name of the Apple Tablet), MacRumors did a bit more research and discovered similar fillings for an iGuide trademark. It looks like the fabled Apple Tablet is about to become a reality.

Read more...

Google Chrome for Mac Review

adam — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:12:56 +0000

So Google just launched Chrome for Mac. I've been very excited for this day and have been waiting for it for a long time. I headed over and downloaded the Beta.

Installed and launched. It's fast. I'd dare say it's faster than Safari, which is quite an accomplishment. The first page that displayed was Google's home page. It prompted me to install Chrome, which I thought was quite amusing.

Read more...

Twelve Days of Christmas, Holiday Gift Ideas from Maverick Revolution

matt — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:01:45 +0000

Amazon.com Widgets

The holidays are upon us. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are both over, and the December rush has begun. Whether you're shopping online, through retailers like Amazon.com, Overstock.com, or offline in retail outlets such as Wal*Mart or Target you can be a smart consumer. By using sites like PriceGrabber or Google Product Search or mobile applications like ShopSavvy (Android & iPhone) you can be sure you're getting a good deal.

Of course, the best place to start is to look at who you're buying for, and how much you're willing to spend on them. But to get you started, I've thrown together a list of some of the bigger consumer products of the year. Ranging from the cheaper stocking stuffers, to the more expensive presents this list has a little bit of everything, although it's definitely for the geekier folk.

Check back daily, from December 1st through the 12th for our top picks in a variety of gift categories, from media players to the best geek stocking stuffers. Or, you can subscribe via RSS Twitter or Email.

For more, including links to all our postings visit mavrev.com/twelve-days. Read more...

Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change

matt — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:07:43 +0000

Introducing urlShort 2.0.0

matt — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0000

We just released urlShort 2.0.0, the latest and greatest release of the urlShort Project. Version 2.0.0 features a revamped and updated user interface for both the web and bookmarklet views, a brand new automatic installer (complete with options for specific features), basic statistics (total visits since creation), optional embedded media (.FLV, .MP3, .GIF, .JPG, & .PNG), and sub-directory support for URLs, plus copy to clipboard (finally)!

Download urlShort 2.0.0

Read more on mavrev.org...

Raising Awareness for Climate Change: Blog Action Day 2009

matt — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:39:09 +0000

Mark you calendars, Blog Action Day 2009 will be on October 15th. Blog Action Day is an annual event, where bloggers worldwide post about the same issue (last year was poverty) with the goal of starting discussion, and action for change. So if you have a blog (or, even if you don't), you should get going and sign up to participate now. As of this writing, over 400 blogs and taking part, including some big names such as The Google Blog, Mashable, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Autoblog, and Joystiq. And of course, Maverick Revolution is taking part again just as we did last year.

And while Blog Action Day is centered on raising awareness and establishing discourse, you can also take action or by helping promote it on sites like Twitter, Facebook, or your own blog.

One day. One issue. Thousands of voices.

More information at www.blogactionday.org.

Announcing mavrev.org

matt — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:47:07 +0000

For quite some time Maverick Revolution has contributed to the open source community with our urlShort Project. More recently, we've also put together the Better Twitter Greasemonkey script compilation. Up until today, urlShort has been hosted on SourceForge.net, which was great for a while. It was free, fairly straight-forward, and easy. But recently SourceForge decided to change everything, and it's been, quite frankly, a pain in the ass to find things now both as an admin, and as a user. In addition, their hosted apps service was almost useless for us.

As a result of both of these we decided to move urlShort off of SourceForge.net. Major thanks to Tobie for providing the hosting for mavrev.org, and the urlShort Project. With this move, we have switched everything over. Our trac, SVN, forums, and website for urlShort are all on mavrev.org now. In addition, mavrev.org will host other open source projects in the future, as well as offering articles relevant to the open source community through blog postings similar to mavrev.com.

In summary, mavrev.org is the same as mavrev.com, but strictly for open source projects. Currently that only includes urlShort, but that will be changing in the future.

Built with urlShort: m.brep.us

matt — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:32:06 +0000

We all know that short URLs are important for sharing links on social sites like Twitter because of character limits, but did you ever think that they could be useful for sharing music? Services like blip.fm do this, but they require a separate account. So what if you just want to link your Twitter friends to a great MP3 track?

Read more...

Hello again, world.

matt — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:55:41 +0000

It's been bad, I know. First HostingZoom took urlShort offline without notice, and then our move to Linode wasn't the smoothest. In fact, it's taken 4 days to get everything stable. At first, things were working, but slow. Then they just stopped working randomly. But thanks to Linode's community, and our host (and my friend) Adam Kragt for their help.

As of this posting, everything looks good, and while there may be some small hiccups, the worst problems are done with. But for those of you who didn't stop visiting during the past few days, stick around because there'll be some exciting news coming within the next few weeks. :)

HostingZoom Takes urlShort Offline (updated)

matt — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:07:34 +0000

Up until today, Maverick Revolution and its services including imgUp and urlShort have been hosted by HostingZoom.Then around 11am (central) today HostingZoom took the urlShort subdomain (u.mavrev.com) offline, without any prior notification. Citing concerns of "abuse/spam links" being spread using urlShort, they decided in their infinite wisdom to just block off access both for our users, and for our FTP access. HostingZoom has effectively cut-off nearly 2,000,000 (2 million) URLs which are being clicked on around 5,000,000 (5 million) times per month. I can understand if they had a problem with links (which they claim we should have "filtered", which is damn near impossible), except the terms of service that urlShort users agree to is that links that abuse our service can be removed at any time, if they are reported by users. However, we have not received any reports from users (other than 20th Century Fox) for removal of any URLs. In addition HostingZoom did not contact us before deciding to cut off access. We're working on moving to a new server at Linode, because quite frankly HostingZoom sucks. Please, if you've used urlShort in the past, contact HostingZoom and let them know that they suck. A lot. Thanks. Follow @mavrev on Twitter to stay updated as we move to restore service to urlShort.

By matt ~ Updated September 2, 2009 - 6:32pm

So, HostingZoom are being complete dicks, and ignoring our requests for access to our own data. The earliest point at which we will be able to move to the Linode server is this coming Friday. Sorry.

By matt ~ Updated September 4, 2009 - 2:28pm

After 73h 15m of downtime, urlShort is back online. We will be moving to our Linode server sometime Sunday.