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Holiday Gift Guide: Nike Amp+

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Christmas time is almost here, so it’s time to rev up the Pulpconnection Holiday Gift Guide.

First up is Nike’s unreleased Amp+ wristwatch. Although it hasn’t been officially released, Men’s Health magazine is already featuring this gadget in its 2007 Tech Guide. Supposedly the Amp+ wirelessly ties into your iPod so that you can control your tunes from the watch. It can also talk with the Nike+iPod Sports Kit so that you can see your running stats on the watch instead of looking at your iPod.

The Amp+ is estimated around $80.

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More AV Woes

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Yet more problems with my AV/home entertainment gear. My digital camcorder wasn’t behaving, and now my TV is acting up. It’s making a hissing noise with an occasional popping/cracking/sparking noise. Can’t quite describe it but it doesn’t sound good. This Mitsubishi picture tube TV has been around for 14 years so maybe it’s time is up?

New Get a Mac Ads

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Three new Get a Mac television commercials are now airing. Go check out how Apple makes fun of spyware for PCs, touts their new magnetically connected power adapter, and enables the creation of cool “arts and crafts.”


Do yourself a favor and get a Mac. Then you can go hang out at Starbucks and look cool at the same time!

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Mac Users, Jump on the RSS Bandwagon

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If you’re a Mac user who still hasn’t jumped on the RSS bandwagon, then this weekend is for you. If you purchase NewsFire, a popular RSS aggregator for the Mac, you’ll get Inquisitor, a search aid for Safari, for free. You can read the details about this great 2-for-1 offer that’s good only through this weekend.

While I’m a NetNewsWire user, I’ve heard good things about NewsFire, and perhaps if I came across it before NNS, then I may have gone with this beautifully-designed app. If you don’t have an RSS aggregator, go check out NewsFire and take advantage of the deal.

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Students, Get a Mac

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BusinessWeek technology columnist, Stephen Wildstrom, advises students to Pack a Mac this upcoming school year.

Unless you have a compelling reason not to go with a Mac, an Apple laptop or desktop offers the best combination of features, ease of use, and value.

Don’t forget, to sweeten the deal, Apple has its Back to School special going on where you get a free iPod Nano and free printer. Nike has its iPod Sports Kit coming out very soon for your workouts, and if you want a truly versatile computing platform able to run multiple operating systems, look into the Parallels Desktop virtualization software.

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Playing Around with WordPress

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Got the open source blog server WordPress running at work the other day. Gonna try to use it for some internal work we want to improve on. Installation of all the components (Apache, PHP, MySQL, phpAdmin, and WordPress) was okay, a little confusing at times, but not too bad.

Finding WP themes to match a project’s “style” is harder and more important than I thought. I figured any theme would do since it’s all eye candy but not really. The structure of the theme (number of columns, where data is placed, etc.) actually does make a difference on perception (and therefore) usage of the blog.

Also learned that WP supports many different plugins that add features to your blog. Have to look through the various plugins and try some of them, especially the ones that help draw out important or the latest information.

Hope to have a solid start for next week.

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RSS Newsreading Is a Game Changer

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After choosing to go with NetNewsWire over Endo as my RSS newsreader/aggregator, I’ve been re-evaluating my web reading habits and noticed that I rarely visit web sites as a starting point. I have a bunch of RSS feeds that I subscribe to with NetNewsWire, and I use those feeds as my starting point. I no longer fire up my browser and go to site after site in my bookmarked favorites.

I save quite a considerable amount of time by looking at the headlines and/or summaries of the RSS feeds instead of visiting each site and waiting for pages to load. Additionally, I don’t get ads in RSS feeds that clutter up the screen or open pop-up windows. I can subscribe to much more news sources and scan them quickly in a shorter amount of time. This is a game changer.

I’m not saying that strictly using RSS feeds is the only way to go. I still do visit web sites, but I find more and interesting content via RSS feeds. Sometimes, the entire article is included with a site’s feed so I never have to visit the site, and that’s perfectly fine with me. The feeds that include nothing but headlines are irritating (you hear me ESPN.com?).

So, if you’re looking for ways of getting more information in a shorter amount of time, then strongly consider using RSS feeds and news aggregators.

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Mac (Hardware) Officially Does Windows

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My how things have changed! Today, Apple officially endorsed the installation and running of Microsoft Windows XP on Intel-based Mac hardware. Using Apple’s Boot Camp (in public beta), legal WinXP users can install XP on a Mac and dual boot between the “X” operating systems, OS X and XP.

There have been recent hacks that allowed the installation of XP on Mac hardware, but now Apple’s making this an official reality. Why would you want to run XP? I don’t know, but if you got to, you might as well run it on the best and most elegantly designed hardware on the market.

Now I definitely need a MacBook Pro!

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Experience with Mac Office 2004 Update

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I installed the Mac Office 2004 Update 11.2.3 last night, wanting to see the Spotlight integration and Entourage syncing with .Mac. After installing the update, I repaired disk permissions and kicked off a sync with .Mac. Things didn’t go too smoothly though. Initially, I got expected warnings to deconflict contact information between Entourage and Address Book. No surprises there. Then I got a few strange error messages that I unfortunately didn’t write down. Something about inconsistent data and telling me to sync with a computer with good data. Kinda scary.

But even with these repeated errors, syncing seemed to eventually work since I saw changes to my contact info in Entourage (and Address Book). To be on the safe side, I repaired disk permissions once again. Since then, I haven’t got any sync errors.

In all fairness though, I didn’t follow good troubleshooting techniques since I had also installed the info management app, Yojimbo, and was trying to use its .Mac syncing feature as well.

Now that the update is installed, syncing works and Spotlight can search my Entourage data. I’ve found some old forwarded emails in Entourage using Spotlight with keywords I remembered in the email.

But I’m getting used to configuring Spotlight and .Mac syncing via the System Preferences. Seems like for Spotlight, Entourage email searching is clumped together with Mail Messages searching which is represented by the Apple Mail icon and for syncing, I’m guessing Entourage contact syncing is part of Contacts syncing, represented by the Mac OS X Address Book icon? For syncing, there is a new entry to sync Entourage notes however.

Bottom line is that the features in the update works.

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Mac Office 2004 Update!

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Lookee, lookee, the Microsoft AutoUpdate kicked in today and showed an update to Mac Office 2004. This update now enables “Mac OS X Sync Services and Spotlight searches to sync and find Entourage items, use smart cards with Entourage 2004, and enjoy improved overall security…”

Oooohhh, Spotlight integration. I must say using Spotlight on my Mac has made it much easier finding things since I store stuff all over, in my Documents folder, in Entourage email, in iPhoto, etc. Having Spotlight able to search through all of this is so, so much better. And, syncing Entourage! Hope that means I can sync contact info without the need of additional software.

The 11.2.3 update is a huge 57 MB.

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