bradgrier.com

Tag: Lifestyle Technology

  • 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…

  • Planespotting — hardcore! [video]

    Short doc­u­ment­ary on some very determ­ined avi­ation enthusiasts. [via www.youlikeairplanestoo.com]

  • DOS on the iPad? There’s an app for that.

    [UPDATE — looks like Apple has pulled it from the app store again] I’ve got a rather strange, yet fam­ily friendly habit — I tend to col­lect com­puter emu­lat­ors; soft­ware writ­ten for hard­ware, that acts like older hard­ware in order to run older software. With me so far? Over the last few years, Apple has been slowly…

  • Free photo app Instagram just got better

    The free and pop­u­lar instant pho­to­graphy shar­ing app for iOS, Ins­tagram, just pushed an update through — and it’s a nifty little update too! Aside from some bug fixes, two new fil­ters were added in the 1.0.7 update; Walden Hefe And one has been retrieved from the cut­ting room floor after a bit of a…

  • Havin’ a ball

    Some­times it great just to kick back and play ball with the dogs. Espe­cially when it’s ‑20 some­thing out­side and the little Daschunds just don’t enjoy play­ing out­side. Yes, they like their squeaky balls. As you can tell, I’ve been play­ing with pho­tos in my iPad Dark­room. This shot was taken with my Panason­ic FZ-30,…

  • How to run your favourite desktop utilities from almost any computer using Portable Applications

    In the course of my day, I use two or three main desktop and laptop com­puters in two or three dif­fer­ent parts of the city. And yet, work­ing on dif­fer­ent devices, I still have access to a core set of tools and util­it­ies that I find essen­tial to my daily work. Here’s how I do it. Some…

  • Two words I thought I’d never see together: Library & Groupon

    I must say I’m rather proud of the Edmon­ton Pub­lic Lib­rary — my loc­al lib­rary. They were one of the first in Canada to: offer free Wi-Fi to members, jump into social media, equip branches with self-check­out barscan­ners and RFID chip auto­mated checkin, allow online holds and media reservations, cre­ate a mobile lib­rary app, offer digit­al…

  • When is an iPad not an iPad?

    Ok, per­haps it is actu­ally “magic­al and revolu­tion­ary”. Or per­haps we’re just mov­ing toward the day that yes, there really is an app for that. Smart phones and tab­let com­puters are set to explode this year, but what will really move the hard­ware is innov­at­ive soft­ware cre­ated by developers who can see bey­ond the tra­di­tion­al fare…

  • Revisiting an old friend

    It’s a new year, so the slate is clean and there’s lots of new things to try. Or old things that dropped off the radar to revisit. In my case, it’s pho­to­graphy and image pro­cessing. I used to enjoy work­ing in a wet dark­room and watch­ing images mater­i­al­ize on paper. That was years and many…

  • Speed up your Internet experience by using the right DNS server

    Last week I saw this Life­Hack­er art­icle (via AppleIn­sider) about NameBench, a win­dow util­ity that tests the speed of your sys­tem’s DNS serv­ers. And I was won­der­ing if my DNS was as fast as it could be… Pre­vi­ously, I’d switched my DNS ser­vices over to OpenDNS, a free altern­ate DNS Pro­vider that adds value as: Ultra-reli­able, glob­ally-dis­trib­uted…

  • iPad synth app takes on Tron: Legacy tune [video]

    Daft Punk’s track Derezzed as per­formed by the cool KORG iMS-20 app on the iPad. Show’s the power of these little pads:

  • 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…