groovyMAT

4.26.2012

Remember Blogging?

I just got an email from blogger asking me to update my account or something. I have to say, I quite like what they've done with this. It makes it all fresh and new looking. Perhaps this is the interface everyone on Google+ has been wishing for.

6.11.2011

Mac of the Living Dead

The Mac has always been touted as easy to use, and we always hear ads about how anything from Apple just works, (except the Newton, the quicktake, the pippin, etc...) and hey, they sure do make pretty, shiny hardware. But this is proof positive that regardless of how simplistic and intuitive you think your devices are, it really doesn't matter once you cross that threshold and turn into an incontinent viral video on the internet.

Case in point, Rita and Frank. I'm not sure where they got made fun of / famous first but I saw this video on the latest Tosh.0 episode. Wait, did you hear a click? Best grandparents ever! I love how when they die, this is how they will be remembered. Regardless of any great things they may have done pre internet circa 1950. Ebb and flow right? Yea, ebb and flow. Out with the old and in with the new. Computer illiteracy is no laughing matter, especially when it comes to people being unable to figure out how to work a Mac. That's like a kid who was born in the 80s not knowing how to transform Megatron into a gun so they can go rob places.

6.10.2011

What Android Apps?

Liberty 2.01 custom rom is awesome. Hoping Liberty Gingerbread will be out soon.

Bytemat's Droid X - Liberty 2.01

Phone: Motorola Droid X
89 total, 76 free (85%), 13 paid (14%), 180MB total size, $39.70 total price

View this Android app list on AppBrain

My 6thsense is an awesome app once you use it for a while if you want one intuitive place to read ALL of your streams. I fed it all my news feeds from google reader, plus my 3 twitter accounts, my facebook, and my google buzz. Good stuff. Also been really digging seesmic lately. Twidroyd just started sucking too bad.

Of course, if you can get a [url=http://music.google.com]google music[/url] app invite, then actually get more than 5,000 songs uploaded to it before it thinks you have a full account, it's pretty bad ass.

The wikitude app is my replacement for layar if you like messing around with augmented reality. I still say it's not useful until it's in a lens.

Satellite AR is awesome for tracking what satellites are visible above your location at a given time. Really cool for finding them at night, and it actually works when you get a good gps lock.

Shoot Me is great for taking screen caps.

the google docs and reader apps are kind of cool, but mostly just google mobile site wrappers.

Glympse is pretty bad ass, it's the thing I use when I post myself driving on facebook. You can see where I'm at on a map with my current speed. Pretty neat for showing people where you are when you're running late.

Quadrant is a cool app for benchmarking some basics on your droid (x). It's interesting to see how much the benchmarks increase when you mess with overclocking different voltages.

Favorite new game - Stupid Zombies. And tank hero... and of course, my nesoid emulator, which you can't find in the market anymore. Not nice.

Evernote is a cool note pad that you can quickly pass text between computers with, that and make to do lists and share them with your girlfriend. You can also use gdocs for that if you can get your girlfriend to use google docs. I also have an appbrain market account you can check out stuff on.

6.07.2011

Apple Propels Fanboys into Next Gen Cloud Music Storage...

With an idea found buried in the debris of what used to be the dreams of Z Company. Remember Michael Robertson? Next question, remember 1997? Put those two together, sprinkled with a little digital music revolution, and you get mp3.com, then you would get sued. Michael Robertson was trying to figure out a quick fix to a problem until just recently, most of us were still trying to figure out. You know, OVER 12 YEARS AGO... This is what happens when the record companies are allowed to sue whoever they want for whatever silly reason they want, all because they feel threatened by evolution. All because they have limitless resources... All because they can. It's just business after all. Right?

All the RIAA is doing when they fire off lawsuit after lawsuit at the good people of the Internet, is preventing the inevitable from happening. I swear the RIAA was formed to impede technological progress. What was the last ingenious thing the RIAA came up with? The cassette tape? Compact Discs? Lady Gaga? Sure, but how big of a part did they really play in her rise to fame? I'm guessing not a whole lot. It's all about networking and making your net work for you and your particular niche. You want to hold onto your tired, uninspired business model of sucking the life out of each and every living thing you come into contact with, in a sort of weird surreal Midas Touch paradox, then go right ahead. But when the industry leaves you behind in the dust, don't sit there crying about how you never saw this coming. You've been watching this come for the last twenty years, like a slow motion porn star... Just because NOW you are powerless to stop this, you want to get behind a company instead of trying to sue them so their overall share price is cheap enough for you to buy it up without your accountant even noticing the withdraw.

That, and the fact that you know if you went after one of these big three, it might possibly be YOU who gets sued out of existence. How poetic would that justice be? You know Biggy and Pac would roll over in their graves to fist bump if that happened. Anyways, all complaining and ranting about how the RIAA is quite possibly EVIL incarnate aside, is it weird that Apple is going to charge $24.99 a month for an idea that mp3.com tried to implement over a decade ago? This is more proof positive that, especially in the tech world, it's not who you know, but who you... You know. Putting it more professionally and succinctly, it doesn't matter what great "game changing" "outside the box" "revolutionary" idea or concept you come up with, as long as you have an inexhaustible amount of cash money, you can pretty much do anything you want. It also helps to have the record companies on board rather than trying to depreciate your business with frivolous lawsuits.

It will be interesting to see what Google ends up charging for it's music service once it gets the beta tag lifted. If anyone can offer a great cloud music service like this and even manage to keep it free, yet still be able to support the bandwidth it takes to scale something like this in any sort of large Googley way, it's gotta be Google. I love in the news article how Apple says how much more convenient iTunes Match is compared to Google Music. DUH? Yea, I just wrote DUH in a tech blog. Hey Steve Jobs, I would hope you're polished, silver and white ocd friendly software you've spent ( insert ridiculous amount of time and resources here) on, is more convenient than Google's BETA. But somehow, I have a feeling that it won't run anywhere near as smooth. Unless of course Apple teams up with the RIAA to create the largest online frivolous patent / class action lawsuit app EVER! Don't laugh, stranger things have happened.

6.06.2011

The Periodic Table of Seo (Search Engine Land)

The Periodic Table of SEO from Search Engine Land
and Column Five Media.

That's right geeks, a periodic table outlining, you guessed it, the ELEMENTS of search engine ranking. Very helpful when trying to climb to the top of the search engine results. I remember back in the day it used to be easy, then everyone started hiding text the same color as the background at the bottom of the page. I remember highlighting the block or two paragraph and revealing words like sex, porn, barely legal; on quite a few of my favorite websites. Ah, the good old days, back when designing a site took little more than Photoshop and Dreamweaver.

But I digress, (I've been waiting all day to digress). Go check out Search Engine Land for tons of great SEO tips and tricks. Say hi to Danny Sullivan on Twitter while you're out and about. See what I did there? By typing SEO and search engine optimization, I automatically boost my chances of being ranked higher when someone searches for those terms. At least that's how it used to work. Does this still apply? I don't know, let's go to Search Engine Land and find out.