bradgrier.com

Category: Reviews

  • How to view PDF files on your iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch with DropBox

    Drop­box really is an amaz­ing com­put­ing and file shar­ing applic­a­tion. I was ini­tially intro­duced to it when I needed to eas­ily share files with vari­ous com­puters across the inter­net — and email was not an option. Recently my wife asked me for anoth­er solu­tion to view­ing PDF files on her iPod Touch. She’d been using…

  • 3 books I’d give as Christmas presents

    I’m spend­ing much more time in malls and shops this month — must be the sea­son.  One of my favour­ite places to spend time is a book shop. Any book shop. Some­thing about them just make me happy. This year, I spot­ted three books that I’m con­sid­er­ing either giv­ing or get­ting for myself, just ’cause they’re…

  • A tale of two coffee machines

    It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wis­dom, it was the age of fool­ish­ness… …and with that I’ll end my Dick­ensi­an pla­gi­ar­ism and get on with it, my exper­i­ence with two single cup cof­fee makers and the cof­fee they pro­duce. …more This post is an…

  • Space. The final frontier.

    Winter in Canada means cold winter nights — nights that, if you’re on the prair­ies, are usu­ally cold, crisp and clear. Which means per­fect even­ings for star­gaz­ing. But if you’re tem­per­at­ure chal­lenged, live on the ‘wet’ coast, or are loc­ated in much cloud­i­er environs, then per­haps these two astro­nomy soft­ware applic­a­tions can help. Bonus points…they’re…

  • 3 windows applications improve your desktop’s appearance

    Lately I’ve been try­ing to keep my win­dows desktop icon and clut­ter free. In my case, this has meant that I’ve been sav­ing less to my desktop (my default save-to loc­a­tion) and more to work­ing dir­ect­or­ies. And, since a cluttered desktop reflects a cluttered mind, I like to think of this as a bit of…

  • A great tool if you’re writing on a deadline

    All righty then. Just fin­ished up a cool con­ver­sa­tion with a dude that I have to meet with later to fig­ure out some stuff. Now, I guess I’ll keep plug­ging away at writ­ing, nay, test­ing Write or Die, a tim­ing and word­count inter­face that helps focus your writ­ing by impos­ing lim­it­a­tions and con­sequences on your writing.…

  • How to add a network activity monitor to Windows 7

    I like Win­dows 7. But there’s one thing that I noticed miss­ing right off the top, a net­work activ­ity mon­it­or in the Taskbar. Sure, you could ad a gadget/widget thingie to the desktop, but when you’re work­ing on some­thing, odds are you’re at full-screen resoulu­tion and the mon­it­or is behind whatever y ou’re work­ing on. Well,…

  • Backups don’t have to be painful

    In a pre­vi­ous post (on my per­son­al blog) about pre­par­ing for your Win­dows 7 install­a­tion, I briefly dis­cussed backups. Aside from the obvi­ous reas­on of hav­ing a copy of your imort­ant stuff stored safely, backups have anoth­er bene­fit; they give you the con­fid­ence to work on your com­puter your­self — not hav­ing to rely on…

  • Finally. The must-have app for your iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch

    I’ve been in love with Drop­box for a while now, so much so I’m pro­mot­ing it in my adspace in my sidebar. Drop­box has made it much much easi­er to trans­fer files between com­puters. Sure, I could email them, but that’s not at all eleg­ant. All I do with Drop­box is copy a file to…

  • Revisiting my 5 favourite iPhone, iPad & iPod Touch applications

    It’s been almost six months since I picked up my iPod Touch and pos­ted about my 5 favour­ite iPhone & iPod Touch applic­a­tions, so I thought it’d be time to see if they’re still my favour­ite, and if not, which are now. Here’s my pre­vi­ous picks: The iTunes Applic­a­tion Store Flight Con­trol Ever­note Google Apps Safari And…

  • How to make a Polaroid from any digital image

    Even though Polar­oid instant cam­era and film packs are no longer being made by the Polar­oid Cor­por­a­tion, you can get that same look on your digit­al pho­tos with Rollip.com. Once upon a time you had to manu­ally cre­ate these things in Adobe Pho­toshop or GIMP. Not any more. Basic­ally, Rol­lip takes your image and does some…

  • How to use a webcam as a home security camera

    Over the years as I’ve acquired vari­ous bits of hard­ware, I’ve some­how ended up with a few ‘extra’ web­cams. Not really want­ing them to lan­guish in my parts bin, I figured I’d take a stab at set­ting them up as home secur­ity cam­er­as. And, I wanted to check out what my dogs were up to…