bradgrier.com

Category: Opinion

  • Three essential PDF readers for iPad

    A while ago I wrote about ways to read PDF files on your iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad. Well that post is show­ing it’s age, so rather than com­pletely redo it, I thought I’d dis­cuss my cur­rent three top PDF read­ers, and why. GoodRead­er GoodRead­er is my first choice, go-to PDF read­er on my iPad. First off,…

  • Need a mic? Find a Yeti.

    In the last few years it’s got­ten a bit easi­er to use a micro­phone to record audio on your home com­puter — USB head­sets with qual­ity micro­phones have been avail­able for a while, but only recently have USB desktop micro­phones oved out of the niche and spe­cialty retail­ers into the main­stream, driv­en mostly by the…

  • Looking for a smart phone? Consider the Palm Pre 2. Seriously.

    Over the last few weeks I’ve been check­ing out the Palm Pre 2 — the next gen­er­a­tion key­board / touch screen data­phone from HP. Pre­vi­ously I’d not con­sidered a webOS phone much of a con­tender against the tra­di­tion­al lead­ers (Black­berry and iPhone), but this little unit changed my mind. In this review, I’ll touch on the…

  • Boppin’ with the BeBot!

    iPad music and synth apps all seem to be try­ing to exactly rep­lic­ate the exper­i­ence of using a real syn­thes­izer or instru­ment, like Vir­tu­oso Piano 3 . Recently I dis­covered BeBot, an iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad music app that breaks that stereotype. Accord­ing to the developer, BeBot is: …Part syn­thes­izer, part anim­ated robot. Touch­ing the screen causes the robot to…

  • My top Apps of 2010

    Everyone’s got a Top ‘some­thing’ of the year list, so I thought I’d jump in with my picks for Top Apps of 2010 — with a little twist; only one app, per plat­form, amongst the 3 plat­forms I use (Win­dows, iOS (iPad), and Inter­net). Yes, Inter­net, for my pur­poses is a plat­form — it’s mostly…

  • Kodak All-in-One is awesome asset in the digital darkroom

    “Man that sucker’s huge”, was my first thought as I unboxed Kodak’s new flag­ship All-In-One photo print­er. But that stands to reas­on, as the Kodak ESP 9250 All-in One Print­er (hence­forth known as ‘the 9250’ or ‘Kodak Unit’), does a lot more than just print. And that’s why it’s so hard to write about these Swiss…

  • Commerce in a post-Wikileaks economy

    You’ve likely seen the news that Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and others are under distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks by folk who feel that WikiLeaks headman Julian Assange is being persecuted for distributing sensitive information he...

  • Print? Scan? Copy? Fax? It’s covered!

    Recently I had an opportunity to put one of the new Brother multi-function printer devices through it’s paces, and overall, I liked what I saw.Priced as an entry level unit, the Brother MFC-J615W (that’s a mouthful, why can’t they...

  • I read the news today (oh boy)

    If you’ve been without power and not heard the news today, The Beatles music lib­rary is now avail­able from Apple’s iTunes store for down­load. Joy. No, I’m not overly enthused by this, as I already own digit­al cop­ies of all the Beatles music that I’m inter­ested in. I bought them on CD years ago, and…

  • Saving time with Text Replacement utilities

    I write a lot. Blog posts, pro­pos­als, reports, reviews, email…you get the pic­ture. Often times I end up cre­at­ing new doc­u­ments that share sim­il­ar format or con­tent, and I cut-and-paste from older docs into new­er ones. But I’m lazy, and always look­ing for easi­er ways to get the job done… I’m Lazy Over the past year…

  • Best Skins Ever — Perhaps

    I’m a bit prissy when it comes to my dis­play screens on my mobile devices and tech­no­logy. I like put­ting screen scratch pro­tect­ors on them. To pro­tect them. To give me the peace-of-mind that they’ll sur­vive the harsh treat­ment they get in my vari­ous bags and packs, and that the pro­tect­or, not the screen, will…

  • Dilemma: Offloading old tech

    Ok, so here’s the deal. You want a new com­puter, or iPad, or BluRay play­er or whatever. But your old one is still work­ing per­fectly fine. Yet, the fea­tures of your next tech­no­lo­gic­al acquis­i­tion are so good, so cool, that really, that new tech item will make your life much better. Great, so you go…