bradgrier.com

Month: January 2011

  • Hardware helps information be free

    Inform­a­tion wants to be free, an inter­est­ing phrase sum­ming up the concept that tech­no­logy has the poten­tial to be lib­er­at­ing, rather than oppress­ing. It was first used in the 1960’s and attrib­uted to the founder of the Whole Earth Cata­log. Today, that phrase is often used to sup­port open file shar­ing activ­it­ies. And recently I…

  • I’m giving away a Palm Pre 2

    Time for anoth­er Life­style Tech­no­logy giveaway con­test — and this time the prize is one very cool Palm Pre 2 and a few accessor­ies, worth around $500.00. 😀 Over the last few weeks I’ve had a chance to put the Palm Pre 2 through it’s paces and found it to be a sol­id smart­phone. And…

  • FX Photo Studio is a great addition to your iPad Darkroom

    It seems that new photo cap­ture and edit­ing tools for Apple’s iOS devices are being released every day. Often they’re aver­age qual­ity tools avail­able for a buck.

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…