Computers

I've been eyeing the Apple TV for a while now, thinking I'd like to get one, but since I have a perfectly good media streaming device already (the MG-35), I haven't been in a big rush to purchase one. A buddy of mine from work picked one up a few weeks ago and I convinced him that he should let me borrow it for a couple of days so I could try it out. I wanted to try it out first hand before deciding if I wanted to drop a couple hundred bucks (plus) on it. In the end, I still think I'd like to get one, but I'm not rushing out the door to grab it right now. I felt it came up a bit short on some of its functionality, but I think the flaws I saw could all (easily) be fixed with some software tweaks.

When it comes to online mapping, I've never looked anywhere else but Google. I've been waiting for them to update their "Satellite View" of my neighbourhood so that my house would finally show up, but that hasn't happened yet - currently it shows a lot of empty lots that are actually no longer empty lots.

Just this morning I found out about Microsoft Live Maps and it turns out they have some pretty cool features. One of these is the option for a "birds eye" view of the map. As you can see by the photo on the left, the birds eye view is much more up-to-date than what Google has for their satellite view. They also have an aerial view which is also more up-to-date than Google. What's up with that?! Time to catch up Google! From the looks of the picture, it was taken last summer when my lawn wasn't doing so well. :)

One of the cool things about the birds eye view is that it gives you 4 different view angles of the same location - you just need to click on the rotate button. With this, you can get a really good look at a particular location. Impressive! Obviously not all locations have this view available.

Just for fun, here are some links to birds eye views of a few different places:

Parliament Hill

Disney World

Trafalgar Square

This saga started back in October of 2007 when I first submitted a 'change request' for an incorrectly named road in the New River Beach area of NB. I submitted the change directly to NAVTEQ and eventually got a response back from them in May of 2008 saying that they had made the change. I wondered how long it would take before I saw the change on Google Maps. Well just the other day I was playing around with my iPhone and the Google Maps App on it and decided I'd go and have a look. Turns out that Google has indeed picked up the name change, as you can see from the photo accompanying this post. The weird thing is that when I visit google maps from a compter, it still shows the old name - see here. So, it looks like the maps being used by the Google Maps application on the iPhone are more up to date than those available to everyone else. What's up with that?

UPDATE: I was really curious about this, so I did a bit more digging. It seems that the maps that are available through Google's API for maps are also the more up to date maps. I checked out the maps at gmap-pedometer.com and they too have the updated road name. Just to be sure, I checked out the maps on activesteve.com as well and sure enough - updated road name there too. Interesting that they don't use the most up-to-date maps for themselves... BTW - the 'most up-to-date' does't mean they are correct, I've seen at least a couple of errors in the maps so far.

I just pledged Duane who is participating in a 'blogathon'. It's an interesting concept, and definitely an impressive feat - a blog post ever half hour for 24 hours - especially for someone like me who sometimes goes months with no activity on my blog. Anyways, if you have some time, head on over to his blog and have a read. If you're feeling generous, you could even pledge him.

Lately I've been wondering if I should make the switch from Drupal to WordPress. It's funny, cause way back when I first started this blog, on the advice of Boris, I started it using WordPress. That lasted for a short while and then I decided that I really needed to be using Drupal, since that is what Boris himself was using, plus a few other friends were also using it at the time. I went through the painful process of copying my content over manually - not that there was a whole lot of it - and I've been pretty happy with Drupal ever since. I guess I figured that Drupal would give me more control over my site, and what I was able to do with it, but after having used it for a few years now, this site is nothing more than a very sporadically updated blog of mine - so why not just go with a nice easy blogging CMS like Wordpress? The added bonus of course would be the WPtouch theme that Duane and Dale Mugford developed. Anyways, I've just been thinking about it. Haven't looked into any sort of utility for converting my content from the drupal DB to a Wordpress one...

Well I guess Apple got their way, after hoping that that my WiFi stability troubles would go away with the latest OS X update, and then realizing that they didn't - I am at the point of being so sick of the dropouts I'm experiencing (to my network) with my macbook that I'm willing to shell out the $$ to buy an Apple AP; specifically the airport extreme. To be fair, I'm not convinced this is actually a problem with my macbook not playing nicely with my AP, but more thinking it's a problem with my POS access point. I've used the macbook in a bunch of different locations now, with different APs and I only get the dropouts occuring at home so... Anyways, placed the order today for this new unit and I'm looking forward to getting it. It'll play nicely with my macbook and iPhone and I plan to plug a USB hub into it and connect my printer and external HDD to it. That way I should be able to print, even if the iMac is asleep, and I'll have a backup solution for my macbook which I'm currently missing. Fantastic! The only thing I'll be missing now is the AppleTV, but that should come within a few months I think. :)

Check out the screen capture to the right of this post. A piece of SPAM showed up in my SPAM folder today and when I took a closer look at it, it was sent to homdepot at haggaret dot com. The only place I would have used that address would have been to sign into the Home Depot webpage, and I don't think it is supposed to be publicly visible. To me that means that they must have sold my email address. Not cool at all.

BTW, I do this for nearly all website where they ask for an email address. Makes it easy to filter incoming mail and also to find out if they are doing stuff like selling your address...

I've never lined up early for something before today, well not really, I mean I've waited to get into restaurants, movies and amusement park rides, but nothing like this. So, prior to today I had sent an email out to a few people I knew who were thinking of getting an iPhone, seeing if anyone wanted to join me in the waiting game this morning. Most people said no, but one friend said that he'd join me. Unfortunately (for me) on Thursday night he backed out, saying he had something else to do. At that point, I wasn't sure if I was going to bother going alone or not. I watched the eleven o'clock news to see how many people had queued up already to get a feel for whether or not it was worth it to go the next morning. It didn't look like a whole lot of people were there so I decided that I'd get up early and head down to have a look.

I set my alarm for 0600, but was up by 0530 and out the door before 0600. It was a bit wet out, having rained over night and I thought this would help my chances of being in a decent place in line. I drove downtown and cruised by the Rogers store on Bank St - the one that was supposed to open early at 0800. There seemed to be a decent lineup, but I parked the car and added myself to the end of the line.

As most people who know me know, I've been anxious to get my hands on an iPhone ever since they were first released. Sadly it took more than a year for the thing to come to Canada (yes I know I could have bought one, unlocked it, etc) but now that it is finally arriving - we are getting the latest and greatest, and at the same time as the rest of the world - that is good news indeed! Anyways, when Apple announced that the iPhone 3G was coming on July 11th, I was all set to rush out and get one...until Rogers announced their rate plans that is. After careful consideration, I decided that it just didn't make sense at the prices they were offering and so I signed the petition at ruinediphone.com and set about moping and cursing Rogers. I also decided to send them an email to express my displeasure, here it is:

Way back when, Boris told me about something called RSS and showed me how I could use it to bring information to me, instead of having to go out and look for it myself. It took a while, but eventually I 'got it' and started amassing RSS feeds from all over the place - starting with my friends' blogs, and then later finding feeds from newspapers, tech blogs, and even Environment Canada (for local weather updates).

I tried different desktop clients as my RSS aggregator (or reader) for a while, but then eventually found out about, and started using exclusively, Google Reader. I love it, and one of the things I like best about it is 'Shared Items' - both being able to share with my friends as well as being able to see what they are sharing. Even better, with some recently introduced features, I can even add a note to items that I share to explain why I'm sharing them. FriendFeed takes this one step further and allows you to have conversations (in the form of comments) back and forth about shared items. I signed up for FriendFeed and have it aggregating some of my stuff (Flickr photos, Google Reader shared items, and Twitter posts) but since nobody else I know is using it - I'm not really making use of it all that much. My FriendFeed feed is here.

Anyways, if you're not using Google Reader yet - I highly recommend it. My shared items page can be found here and there is even an RSS feed for them - although if you've got me listed as a contact in your gmail, then you'll automatically have a feed for my shared items anyways.