bradgrier.com

Category: Reviews

  • How to view PDF and other files on your iPhone and iPod Touch

    This art­icle was ori­gin­ally writ­ten in April 2009. A few new apps have appeared since then, but one, GoodRead­er is now my daily go-to PDF read­er right now. I touch on a few of the new apps here, includ­ing GoodRead­er, but you’ll be back on this page if you want to check out Stanza — a…

  • 5 favourite iPhone & iPod Touch applications

    I recently bought an iPod Touch to replace my very cool, yet aging Palm T|X. The iPod Touch does­n’t yet ‘fit me like a glove’ but I’m sure after time it will, and I’ll doc­u­ment my exper­i­ences with it here. Pre­vi­ously I’d writ­ten that I was rather unim­pressed with the ‘WiPod’ as I called it then.…

  • Songbird solves my multi-multimedia player dilemma

    Between home and work, I have vari­ous Win­dows, Linux and Macin­tosh com­puters. I cent­ral­ize my media on a Net­work Attached Stor­age (NAS) device, access­ible by all. As you can ima­gine, I use dif­fer­ent media play­ers on all. My biggest hurdle has been con­sist­ency in user exper­i­ence. I’ve had to run iTunes on the Mac, Win­amp, FooBar2000…

  • What to know when changing website hosts

    A couple of weeks ago I found the fol­low­ing in an email from my webhost: Your web host­ing account for bradgrier.com has been deac­tiv­ated (reas­on: site caus­ing per­form­ance problems). Although your web site has been dis­abled, your data may still be avail­able for up to 15 days, after which it will be deleted. After a quick call…

  • 2 More Simple Home Backup Solutions

    photo cred­it: nick­wheel­eroz With the fin­an­cial crisis swirl­ing around this week, I took anoth­er look at ways I keep my data safe. To best achieve this, off­s­ite backups are a must. Should my com­puters become dam­aged or stolen, my data is still secure. I’ve writ­ten before about Mozy, an effect­ive auto­mated online backup sys­tem, but…

  • Mini-Book Review: A Case of Exploding Mangoes

    Yikes! This is waaay over­due (sorry about that) The Mini-Book Expo concept is simple, yet I man­aged to blow Rule # 4: Blog it. * Post some­thing about the book with­in a month of get­ting it So, without fur­ther ado, here’s my mini review! Title: A Case of Explod­ing Mangoes Author: Mohammed Hanif Pub­lish­er: Ran­dom House (Canada)…

  • Google Chrome: a quick look and how to block ads with Privoxy

    photo cred­it: Randy Zhang Google Chrome is no Fire­fox (yet). For the last week and a bit, off and on,  I’ve been using Google Chrome (Google’s new entry into the browser wars). On the 3 XP-based sys­tems I’ve used it on, I’ve found it to be very fast, very effi­cient, and stable. Pretty good per­form­ance for…

  • A fast and fun way to mockup almost anything

    Online Mockups…easy! Part of the reg­u­lar web devel­op­ment cycle is the user inter­face mockup. I’ve worked with many dif­fer­ent tools includ­ing Google Sketch­up and Adobe Pho­toshop to build rep­res­ent­a­tions for clients. But noth­ing has been as quick, easy, and fun as Bal­samiq Mockup, and online (and desktop/offline) user inter­face mockup tool for PC, Mac and Linux.…

  • How has the Logitech G15 (v2) fared after 6 months?

    You may remem­ber that I went through a rather inter­est­ing guar­an­tee replace­ment with Logit­ech over the wear­ing paint on my ori­gin­al G15 key­board. The short ver­sion is that they hap­pily replaced it with a new, Ver­sion 2 G15. I thought I’d take a moment and update my thoughts about it. I miss the three-key wide lay­out of…

  • Key Messages from the Gerry McGovern Masterclass, Ottawa, May 5–6, 2008

    photo cred­it: dandy_fsj To wrap up this inter­view series with Krista Vie­ira, we’re fea­tur­ing the Key Mes­sages gen­er­ated by con­fer­ence attendees. If you missed the inter­view series read these: Gerry McGov­ern Mas­ter­class — essen­tial con­tent for con­tent man­agers (part one) Gerry McGov­ern Mas­ter­class — essen­tial con­tent for con­tent man­agers (part two) Gerry McGov­ern Mas­ter­class — essen­tial con­tent for…

  • More cool sites from the Blogging Pack

    photo cred­it: Brett L. It’s been a busy week, but I’ve always made time to vis­it some sites (and Digg/Stumble posts) with­in the Blog­ging Pack, which I describe in pre­vi­ous post. Only two sites pro­filed today…but they’re chock full of bloggy-good­ness. Enjoy. Remark­ab­log­ger - Remark­able Blog Con­sult­ing and Coach­ing. An inter­est­ing fol­low on Twit­ter, and even…

  • Just how easy can publishing on a WordPress blog get?

    Image via Wiki­pe­dia Very easy. Ridicu­lously easy. Deli­ciously easy! Zemanta is a word­press plu­gin that works on the admin­is­trat­or side. Basic­ally, it ana­lyzes your post con­tent, then starts recom­mend­ing images (like the one to the right) and links to oth­er art­icles based on your post content. As well, when you set it up with your…