Author Archive

How Fast is Fast Enough When Shopping for Internet Service?

A speed of 768kbps/128kbps seems VERY slow. Are you sure it’s Kbps and not KBps? Difference is that little ‘b’ is “bits” and big ‘B’ is “bytes”.
As a point of reference, my iPhone on 3G does, on average, 2829kbps/506kbps.


Degraded Quality of 720p Videos Uploaded with iPhone Facebook App

With the release of Apple’s new iPhone 4 and Facebook’s updated app that lets you upload videos from your phone, many more people will have the ability to record and upload high-definition 720p videos to Facebook. However, there are many ways to upload a video to Facebook and they do not all produce the same [...]


iPhone 4 Does Not Upload or Email Videos in 720p

Just received my iPhone 4 pre-order (a day early) and first thing I did was start recording some 720p videos with it. As soon as I recorded my first video I decided to share it with the world so I sent it by email and uploaded it to Youtube right from the phone. Much to [...]


Oil Change Interval (OCI): Are the Dealerships Ruining Your Engine?

Back in the, not so distant, day it was common knowledge that cars should have their oil changed every 5k miles or so. With the advent of fully synthetic oils and manufacturers offering warranties that cover the first few oil changes, things have changed. Now when you open up you car’s manual the interval at [...]


Solution to iPhone Update 3.1 Causing Your Phone to Brick

UPDATE: I highly suggest NOT updating your iPhone to the newest 3.1 OS. After using the phone a couple of days I have noticed that my battery drains A LOT quicker. And by a lot I mean it is under 20% at 4pm after not using it AT ALL and having fully charged it the [...]


Unable to Minimize Windows in Mac OS X

Macs are known for their ability to just work. Software seems to behave very well and for the most part, you don’t get as many crashes or freeze ups as on a Windows machine. However, the more I use my Macbook Pro the more I realize that, while it is true that you get less [...]


How to Enable Emoji on Your iPhone for Free

UPDATE: I wrote this article back when there were no aparent free solutions to enabling emojicons. Now that is not the case and you can easily find free apps that enable emoji on your iPhone. All emoji apps are the same. Some add other useless functions but they all enable the same emoji keyboard so [...]


Just Won a Free Copy of Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac

Parallels and OnTheHub are currently offering free copies of their amazing Parallels Desktop 4.0 to the winners of their Twitter contest. The instructions are on their twitter accounts and on the OnTheHub page but basically, all you have to do to enter is: Re-tweet #parallels4students. That is it! The contest might still be going so hurry [...]


Let’s Play a Game of Monopoly… Using Google Maps!

Google and Hasbro are teaming up to bring you the classic game of Monopoly with a new twist: Google Maps! You will basically be able to play Monopoly using real locations. It is called Monopoly City Streets.

Each player will start with $3 million and be able to buy property and constructs buildings to get rent [...]


A Fun Little Cocoa Program

While working on Hillegass’ book Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition). I made this small app. It is called Speak Line and it basically speaks whatever you type in the text field. It is very entertaining.
The book shows you how to do it with the default voice but I could not stop there. [...]


Xcode 3.2 and iPhone 3.0 Update Available for Snow Leopard

Today I was programming in Xcode and realized that every time I ran my programs, I would get these weird messages in the debugger console. They didn’t break anything or cause the program to end prematurely but it made the compile and run process take longer and flooded the console with the weird message “unable [...]


How to Download and Create Free iPhone Ringtones

A lot of people always ask me what the easiest way to create ringtones for the iPhone is. Apple made sure to make the process time consuming and not that obvious for the average user. Instead they offer to create the ringtone for you through iTunes at a price. Well I am here to tell [...]


HP Scanner Not Working with Snow Leopard

After installing the new OS X Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro, I encountered some incompatibilities with some software. All of these incompatibilities were easily fixed by updating the software except for one: my HP printer/scanner/copier software.

The printer was working fine as a printer but I was not able to scan anything. I would press [...]


Snow Leopard Has Changed the Way the Sleep Display Hot Corner Works.

Up until today, I have been using hot corners in Mac OS X Leopard in two ways:

To start the screen saver as a way to lock my machine (require login)
To put the display to sleep when I am in class and wish to conserve energy or hide my screen without having to log back in.

After [...]