OK… so the real reason for this post today is so that I don’t go the entire month of October without an update to the website. Things have been busy, but not with the sorts of things to update on the website.

We had everyone to our place for Thanksgiving which was a lot of fun.

Matt and I are also trying our hands at video podcasting now with The Skinny on Sports Tech. The latest episode talks about my new toys - the new iPod nano and the Nike+ Sports Kit. You can check out the video to find out more about that. The easiest way to play the videos if you’re having trouble is with iTunes. We’re hoping to make it much easier in the future for those of you that just want to see the video within the web page itself.

That’s all for now. November is just around the corner!

Technorati Tags: apple, nano, nike, podcast, sports kit, video

After doing some searching, I finally found a Skype phone that is compatible with a Mac - the IPEVO Free-1. If you’ve never used Skype, now is as good a time as any to try since they recently announced that not only can you call between Skype users for free, but you can also call any number in the US or Canada from Skype for FREE! This will be great when I’m traveling this summer and that is part of the reason for getting the phone. If you’re wondering what I mean by “Skype Phone”, basically it’s a USB device that looks like a phone and communicates with Skype. It’s an easy way to avoid having to use the built in mic and speakers on your computer - plus it seems less awkward to be talking into something that looks like a phone instead of just a mic on the computer! To use it, your computer needs to be on and connected to the internet, but then you can place calls on the phone and it goes through Skype. You can choose to either call one of your Skype contacts, or call any other regular phone line. I’ll let you know how the quality is, but as I say, it was the only one I could find for a Mac, so I thought I’d give it a shot! You can get all the details about the phone here.

Technorati Tags: apple, ipevo, skype, usb phone

If anyone is looking for what I would consider to be a good deal on a USB stick, check out this link. For $74.99 after $15.00 mail-in rebate, you get a * 2 GB * stick. Shipping is only $7.99 and I’ve dealt with this online shop in the past with good results. Also, this particular USB stick has received very good reviews for really fast transfers. I’m sold!

I can’t believe how cheap USB Flash memory has become. I finally took the plunge to upgrade my old 32 MB stick. I figure it will come in handy this summer since I may not always be able to carry my laptop around with me to and from the hospital in Sydney. Less than a month now until I’m on the plane to Oz!

Seeing as I’ve been talking about some of my favourite Mac software on here lately, and FreeMacWare.com is running a contest involving free sofware for the Mac, I thought now would be a good time to write about by Top 5 Free Mac Software that you too could use for free if you switch to a Mac!

Up first is Camino. I use this as my everyday (actually every minute) browser. It’s built off the same engine as FireFox and has the feel of a Mac program. It also has the nice side effect of feeling “snappier” on my Powerbook than Firefox.

This is about as easy as Bittorrent gets on a Mac. With Transmission, you just download and start the torrent file - that’s it! No frills, no messy interface, just an easy download.

If you want a player that can handle virtually any audio and video file out there, look no further than VLC. This player is available for many platforms and seems to “just work” for almost every file.

Audacity is a great (and very powerful) audio editing program. We use it every week to edit The Skinny on Sports Podcast and it comes in handy for trimming lots of other audio files. A must have tool for anyone doing audio work.

Last, but certainly not least, is Cyberduck. It’s a simple FTP program with drag and drop support. Can’t ask for much more from an FTP client - especially for the average user with very simple FTP needs.

That’s my list! These little free applications make me realize everyday that I definitely made the right decision switching to a Mac!

Technorati Tags: apple, audacity, camino, cyberduck, freemacware, freeware, transmission, vlc

This is another one of my picks and LaunchBar is an application that I can’t live without (sorry to all you windows users, it’s Mac only). Someone recommended LaunchBar to me when I first got my Mac and I checked out the website, but I didn’t really get it. I thought, sure, it looks interesting, but is it really a necessity. Then I started using it and then it just clicked, and I realized why I needed it. Instead of having to clutter up my Dock, I can keep the bare minimum of items, and then use LaunchBar to quickly launch anything else that is on my computer with quick keyboard shortcuts.

LaunchBar is smart. For instance, if you type “ITU” it will give you a list of everything starting with those letters in a drop-down menu. Then, after you choose iTunes from the list, it remembers this and next time you type the shortcut, it becomes the first item in the list.

LaunchBar is fast. You would think that having to go through everything on your computer and remember what you picked last would slow everything down. Not at all. LaunchBar is always there when you need it and quickly makes itself invisible when you don’t.

LanchBar searches. You can even setup shortcuts to search templates. For instace, when I type “G” it selects the Google search template, then I just press the spacebar, enter my search term, and my web browser launches with the search results. This is especially useful when multitasking since you don’t have to keep switching between windows, it just does it. I’ve also setup other shortcuts for Wikipedia, IMDB, Pubmed, and many more searches.

LaunchBar emails. (Or at least launches email). You can configure LaunchBar to search the email addresses in your address book. When you select the address from the list, it launches a new message in Mail with the address already entered.

LaunchBar rocks! If you aren’t convinced yet, you just need to try it for yourself. At $19.95 it’s a steal considering how much I use it. You can configure LaunchBar to do as little or as much as you want (I haven’t even talked about launching iTunes playlists or bookmarks in your web browser). Once you “get it”, it will change your Mac experience forever!

Technorati Tags: apple, launchbar

I use iTunes for my podcasting needs, but I found that I didn’t like it as much for video podcasts. It just seemed a little slower to me and I wanted a bit more control over the content. That’s when I found a great application called FireAnt. The application is still in development, but even with a few minor bugs, I’m using FireAnt as my everyday video podcasting client. The developers are also very responsive to email about problems and suggestions and I’m looking forward to upcoming changes. If you’re looking for a new way to manage all of your video subscriptions, give FireAnt a try!

Technorati Tags: fireant, podcasts, video podcasts, videoblog

I thought it was time for a new header graphic after seeing this cool use of images on flickr.com. If you haven’t heard of flickr, it’s a way to easily share photos online. What the people at Spell with flickr have done is allow you to type in a word or phrase, and then using letters that are found within pictures on flickr, it creates an image of your word (as seen in my header graphic). You can also click on each letter that it gives you if you want it to choose another one from flickr until your image looks just the way you want it to. While there may not be many super practical uses for this site, I still think it’s fun!

Technorati Tags: flickr

They say there comes a point in time for every iPod where the battery doesn’t like to hold a charge any longer. That time came before Christmas for me. I headed onto Ebay.ca and picked up a new battery for my 4G 40 Gig iPod. It arrived and then it was the fun of trying to crack it open and install the new battery (since iPods don’t have any screws, this can be a little more “fun” then you might think!)

I found these great instructions - there is a PDF document and even a video to show you how it’s done. I followed it step-by-step and didn’t seem to have any problems.

However, shortly after changing the battery, my iPod started to act a little weird. It would just randomly crash and tell me that the battery was out when it wasn’t, etc. Not fun! So, after almost giving up and possibly shipping it back to Apple to see if they could fix it, I decided to do a complete “Restore to Factory Settings” - bascially it wipes out everything and you’re left with a fresh iPod as if you just bought it. I was skeptical about this working, but I would want to do this to ship it back anyways.

So far, (and I know it’s just one day), it seems to be behaving as it should. I know that’s not the ideal situation for others that are having problems with their iPod, but as a last resort, it seems to have done the trick! I’ll post an update if things change…

UPDATE: The replacement battery does not seem to be holding a charge for nearly as long as it should and my iPod has still been randomly crashing. The guy who sold me the battery on eBay is going to let me exchange it, so I’ll wait for that before giving up and sending the whole iPod back to Apple. I’ll keep you posted.

UPDATE: I installed the replacement battery and the problems I was having seem to have gone away and I’m getting a good charge out of the new battery. I wanted to wait a while before posting the update since last time I said all was good, it all went bad again! All in all, besides the hiccup with what was likely a faulty battery, I’d recommend that anyone who’s iPod needs a bit of a boost check out getting a new battery.

Yahoo! has jumped in on podcasting with a new website. It’s been out for a couple of weeks now, but I wanted to point it out now since we are on their front page as one of their Staff Picks. You can view a full screenshot here.

Thanks Yahoo!

Everything should be moved over to the new host now. The frustrating part for me the past few weeks was that the site always seemed to be down on the weekends, which is when I usually actually have some time to think about posting here. Then by the time the site was back up, I had forgotten what I was going to write about and the site would sit quiet for a while again.

Hopefully this new host will be a bit more reliable. Let me know if you notice anything weird about the site as there may be a few kinks yet to be noticed from the move.

As many of you have probably noticed, there has been significant downtime with this site in the past few weeks/months. When I first switched to the hosting company I am currently using (VizaWeb) they were really good at getting back to me and answering my questions. They would give me reasons for site outages, and since they weren’t occuring that often, it didn’t seem like too big of a deal. In the past month however, they have not returned a single email to me about what has been happening with their servers, nor have they answered or returned my phone calls. I’ve decided that enough is enough and I will be switching web hosts. I have one in mind and I’m hoping the transistion will occur relatively smoothly. However, if there does happen to be some downtime in the next few days or weeks, it might be a result of the move.

I’ve given VizaWeb numerous oppotunities and plenty of time to return my emails but have yet to hear a thing. As I say, their service used to be good in the beginning, but it’s time for me to move on to a company with a better record for customer service.

I’ll keep everyone posted and hopefully there will not be too much downtime as a result of the move.

After writing about Mac’s on this website for a couple years now, and talking about them with numerous people, I finally took the plunge and said goodbye to my Windows system. Instead, I now am the proud owner of a 12″ G4 Powerbook and I haven’t looked back.

I’ve acually had the new Powerbook for almost 2 weeks now, but I wanted to hold off on posting about it until I had used it a bit and gotten a better feel for it. Things just seem “easier” on a Mac and while I was hesitant about dismantling my old system, I haven’t actually had the need for anything in the Windows world (aside from my old data files) that is making me question my decision.

Over the next little while, I will be posting more about some of the new programs that I’m really liking that are making my life easier as well as other bits of Apple technology that I’m now using around the house.

Last Wednesday saw the start of med school with O-week. In addition to getting to meet all my new classmates, we also had some time to learn a bit about what we’ll be up to for the next three years and also have some fun! This included a fake 3 hour exam put on by the second year students, the Med Olympics, a Calgary-wide scavenger hunt, and lots of other fun and pranks!

One other great part about med school for technology geeks like me is that at the University of Calgary, they give each one of the med students a Palm Tungsten C PDA. I know the cost of these is virtually nothing compared to the amount of tuition we pay, but it still feels good to at least feel like you’re being given something for free! The great part about this model is that it has Wi-Fi capabilities making it easy to synch email and calendars anywhere that Wi-Fi internet access is available - which just happens to be the entire hosptial and Health Sciences Centre. There are also many textbooks and online databases that will be available as well so this should be one gadget that all students will really learn to appreciate.

The real classes start this week so it’ll be interesting to see what that’s like - especially since I haven’t had actual lectures in quite a while.

One more exciting note - I won’t be needing to buy a stethoscope since I won one during O-week!

A lot of people ask me how I stay on top of things in the world of technology. I’ve talked about feed aggregators in the past which help to bring all of the information from the various websites that I read into one place. Reading is fine, but it’s definitely not the same as audio and video.

I used to watch a television show called The Screensavers that was on TechTV before the network was bought out by a gaming network. The new network got rid of the most of the old personalities and the show went downhill from there. Leo Laporte was the former star of the show and he has brought together some of the other former on-air talent for a weekly podcast talking about everything in technology. The show is called This Week in Tech (TWiT) and it’s usually about an hour in length. They’ve done 10 shows already and the technology content is really good.

Kevin Rose, who also used to appear on The Screensavers and now apprears on TWiT, also has his own internet video project called Systm. They have put out two episodes so far and it seems that these videos will cover more hard-core geeky tech information.

Leo also hosts a show that airs in Canada and Australia called Call for Help. Through the magic of BitTorrent and the Call for Help Tracker you can download episodes of this show which are aimed at beginner tech users but still contain enough geeky content and product reviews to satisfy everyone.

Amber and Mikey who also have segments on Call for Help have recently started a video project called Command-N. They are putting out a weekly video about 10 minutes in length covering tips and tricks from around the internet. Definitely worth the watch!

As you can see, there are many options out there that do not involve traditional broadcasting methods to receive audio and video. I beleive that podcasting and interent delivered video are on the verge of getting even bigger than they already are and the face of content delivery is about to change drastically. It will be fun to see how things develop!

It’s been a crazy past couple of weeks and I’m off to Chicago tomorrow for a few days for a conference with work. I’ll be sure to take a lot of pictures with our new digital camera. We chose the Olympus Stylus Verve because it’s super small and weatherproof. Those were the two biggest things we wanted since the hassle with cameras is having to actually lug them around and then take them out of the case when you want to use it. This camera is completely sealed when it’s closed so you don’t have to worry about a little rain or dirt getting inside. Just throw it in your pocket and you can have it out to take pictures in a snap!

Talk to you next week!