Last Week, Steph published the 500th post from on our 2FatDads site, a site he and I created far too long ago. Over the years we invited Ben, Eric and Steve to join us; not only writing some pretty awesome tech reviews and rants but also in creating the DadCast which will be resuming it’s 4th season in the New Year (unless we manage to squeeze one in over the Holidays). I thought it would be fun to poll the stats and pull out the Top Ten Posts from the vault of 503 (including this one). So here they are in true David Letterman fashion and like Dave, don’t expect too many punchlines.
- BlackBerrys PlayBook Doesn’t Play Fair
- Rim Bell Update The BlackBerry Storm to v4 7 0 148 rel 203
- New AppleTV Glass Half Full
- Apple MacBook Pro i5 Unboxing
- Two Weeks with an LG Xenon Part One
- Outrageous DOS Attack on Revision3
- Bell Throttling P2P and Bit Torrent
- Why My New BlackBerry Pearl 2 Deletes Txt Msg (SMS)
- Outlook for Mac 2011 Forget About Exchange Rules Sync
- TomTom GO 720 vs Ggarmin nuvi 255
Once again this morning, I arrived at work and yet another tablet device was thrown onto my desk with a post it saying: “I want my mail on this“. This has become a regular thing over the past couple of weeks and as usual I jump at the challenge of trying to see how a new device will fit into our corporate infrastructure. However, the small little thing about this tablet is that it’s a BlackBerry PlayBook and of course we are primarily a BlackBerry shop. Which means that my first thought is that this would be a walk in the park… Let me just say that in the mind of Research in Motion, walks in the park should only be compared to Afghani expeditions through the land mine filled plains of Rigestan. To say the least, it didn’t go so well.
I cleared my inbox and tasks this morning to download the much touted 4.7.0.148 update for the BlackBerry Storm and try to rekindle my love affair with the BlackBerry again. Lately, I’ve been getting that 7 year itch feeling whenever I use the Storm. The younger smartphones like the iPhone are suddenly looking really sexy and have recently become all grown up devices that makes an experienced user like me think that I might be missing out on something. But then there’s the MILF of all smartphones just around the corner, the Palm PRE, and you know that hooking up with this one again could be just like old times except that now the old cougar has so many more moves and is looking pretty damn good in that skinny little black number. So then, why would you want to stick it with the old faithful, apart from merely prolonging this antagonizing sexual innuendo, because after all these years you’ve really come to know each other and you know you’ll be able to rely on it. Let me explain…
Within seconds after I snapped my last picture of the AppleTV, I found myself pillaging my HDMI cable from our cable box in order to test out the interface and speed. The menu showed up crisp and clear on our 47” Samsung LCD. Next step was to setup the WiFi, no small feat when you have to use the Apple Remote and have a 64 bit HEX WPA passphrase. After 2 tries the AppleTV was sitting on our network. Setting up our iTunes library to use AirPlay was a snap. I simply had to enable Home Sharing, and bingo. Actually, Home Sharing was already on, and needed to be stop and restarted, but essentially the handshake was made and the AppleTV can easily browse and stream our iTunes library.
This is my new 15 inch MacBook Pro with an i5 chipset, 256Mb NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M discreet graphics chip, 1/2Tb 7200RPM drive, 4Gb of Ram and the new high resolution (1680×1050) anti-glare led back lit display model number: MacBookPro6,2. For the record I’m upgrading from this first gen white Intel MacBook.
We don’t do too many unboxings here at 2FatDads, usually because Canucks get the shaft and can only get new products months after our Southern neighbours even though we all know they are shipping these new shiny toys from China and delivering them a few degree to the North shouldn’t really be an issue. You can imagine my surprise when this box arrived while I was in an all morning meeting last week.
It’s been two weeks now that I’ve given up the ‘ol Blackberry 7130g that I picked up almost four years ago and turned on a brand spankin’ new LG GR501 Xenon that runs on Bell’s brand spankin’ new HSPA network! If you recall it was not too long ago that I was agonizing over which phone I would be buying; well I let pure logic guide me and went with the Xenon. Admittedly it helped that the rep at Sans Fil etc. in the Trois-Rivieres Costco didn’t stop throwing in things before I even asked for them so once the ball got rolling it was hard to stop. My heart told me to go with the Nokia N97 but every review said not to and so did my own calculations.
This weekend Revision3 was hit hard by a DoS that deprived me and countless others from enjoying Veronica Belmont, Patrick Norton, and the Digg Crew’s awesome and FREE as in Beer HD content. The culprits turned out to be a pretty shady vigilante group called Media Defender whose past customers have hired these web mercenaries to shut down Bit Torrent servers with illegal DoS attacks. Attacks that are designed to prevent a web server from distributing any content. Unfortunately, Media Defender never bothered to check what the content that Revision3 was serving up was. As it turns out that like most start-ups Revision3 is ingeniusly using BitTorrent technology to reduce the cost of the distributing it’s own HD Video content, much in the same way that Linux distros like UBUNTU use it to ease the load of serving up 700Mb ISO files to it’s user base.
Bell Sympatico, The Great White North’s largest internet service provider for consumers and reseller has officially and openly started packet shaping it’s network traffic to curb the effect of peer to peer file sharing and Bit Torrent protocols. Which is just ridiculous and down right wrong. ISP’s have to stop acting like Cyber police officers and more like utility companies, we have the RCMP and the CRTC to regulate acceptable web behavior. Last time I checked the Canadian law, file sharing and bit torrent technology was perfectly legal.
t’s not a conspiracy plot against other forms of non-email communications and for once it’s not even Bell Mobility’s fault. It’s just a little bit of bad planning on behalf of BlackBerry maker’s RIM. Here is what happened, I received my BlackBerry Pearl 8130 just before the Christmas break and like any other BlackBerry user would quickly do I quickly loaded up my favourite Google Apps, tried out the new FaceBook application (more on this another time), added Twitterberry and then proceeded to walk around the Office taking every one’s picture so I could “test” the 2 mega-pixel camera and update my address book with photos of who is calling. During the course of the day I had received quite a few text messages,SMS, and also replied to quite a few; Twitter had finally started working properly so this had brought on a wave of new “txts”. By the time I got home that night and check my new messages, the entire list was gone…
“Does Outlook for Mac 2011 allow you to manipulate Exchange server-side rules, as the Windows version does?
No.”
Despite what the good folk at Macworld said, I had to try it myself. So this morning I exported all 50 of my old exchange rules that were rather broken and still forced me to check my trash and junk folders more often than I wanted. Since going Mac at Work over 6 months ago, I have been using mail and waiting patiently for Outlook for Mac 2011 to come and make my mail management a lot easier. Even though Outlook is rather clever with it’s iPhone & GMail like conversation view and it’s unified inbox. However, and as usual there is always a however, the Exchange integration is still not there yet. When you click on edit rules, the Exchange account shows ups and you get the impression that you actually creating rules on the server. But don’t be fooled, just above the folder there is the ominous “On My Computer” header which literally squashes all your hopes and Inbox Zero dreams.
Time for toy shopping. I’ve been looking into buying a GPS for awhile. My first instinct was to look into what Garmin had to offer. Why Garmin? Well I actually couldn’t find anyone who owned a TomTom to ask them about their experience. So off to the big box electronic store. We were going on a road trip the next day, so we went up to a mid-range Garmin and an equivalent TomTom and entered in our destination. Right away there was a clear winner – TomTom.
According to our Stats you guys are still enjoying reading some of these somewhat dated posts, even the Xenon review from Eric. What was surprising is that we have not always been Apple FanBoys, at one point most of us(4/5) were using BlackBerry and touting it’s merits. Oh how times have changed… I guess that just proves that: A) We CAN be swayed. & B) Our taste in Tech is for First Class and not Fast Class. So thanks for the eyeballs over the years, we’ll strive to be ever so critical for the next 500 as well.