Seize the mouse.
Max Swisher
Max Swisher is a 12-year-old tech enthusiast who explores the possibilities of technology (with a budget) and posts his thoughts right here. He is a mac fanatic but keeps all operating systems nearby. You can contact him by emailing max@maxswisher.com.
Posts by Max Swisher
Beats by Dr. Dre Solo HD
Sep 2nd
These are some of the highest quality headphones on the market, competing with Bose. Here’s a full review of the headphones.
Design
Attractive and minimalistic design
The Beats Solo HD are some stylin’ headphones. They boast a very well put-together minimalistic design that will make skullcandy jealous. It features a tri-fold design so that it can easily be stored into the soft case.
The headphones detach from the cable so that Monster didn’t have to mess around with cable management in their case.
The Beats by Dr. Dre Solo HDs are on-ear headphones so they rest on your ear instead of going over your ear. This does a good job of keeping the music from leaking out, so you won’t bother the others around you.
The ear cups of the headphones pivot to cover your ear more evenly and comfortably.
These headphones are very lightweight and feel light on your head. They are great for people on the go with a busy and on the move lifestyle.
Sound quality
Sound is the most important aspect of headphones. If there is no sound, then what’s the point? The Beats by Dr. Dre series is all focused on sound quality, but these headphones are a broken link in the chain of sound satisfaction (like what I did there?). Compared to many headphones on the market they are above average, but some of the bose headphones really come out on top with this one. The sound from the headphones has quite the emphasis on bass. The bass tends to drown out everything else, which tends to take away from the value of these headphones.
Value
These headphones sell for $220 MSRP which is a bit expensive for headphones of this quality. These headphones seem like $100, and $220 is a lot to ask for for the sound quality these headphones deliver. I’m afraid I’ll have to mark these as a DNB, or Do Not Buy unless you can find them for under $150.
The new iPod nano and why I don’t like it
Sep 1st
So today apple announced a chutzpah of new stuff (as expected) including a new apple tv, a new iPod touch, a new iPod nano, and a new iPod shuffle. I’ll cover those in a later post, but for now I want to talk about the nano.
What apple did with this design really stood out to me, and not in a good way. First of all, they got rid of the buttons and replaced it with this extremely tiny excuse for a touchscreen, and got rid of the camera and curved edges and put a clip on it. So basically, it is an iPod shuffle with a touchscreen. But my big problem is the clip…
So lets say you have it clipped to your shirt like that picture. If you want to change the song you either have to bend your head over to see the screen and look like an idiot or you have to unclip it and attempt to hold the awkwardly shaped thing to change your music. So then why don’t you just put it in your pocket? Why include the clip? The only other function is to show EVERYBODY ELSE IN THE WORLD what music you are listening to at the moment. But to tell you the truth, nobody really cares what you listen to other than you. So that eliminates the clip. And what’s with the form factor of this thing?! It is a square that barely fills the palm of your hand, and it doesn’t look like it would be very fun to try to hold.
Oter than the clip, the other thing is how they tried to make it an iPod touch-like interface with homescreens. But instead of having apps, ou have things like albums, playlists, genres, etc. Why?! This interface might be cool if you wanted to use apps on it, and if you want apps go get yourself an iPod touch. it is 1/3 bigger (and is so much more confortable to hold) and boo hoo, you can’t tell the world what you are listening to. Oh, darn. That’s too bad.
I mean, nobody really cares about your music! It’s nice to know you are currently listening to the black eyed peas (I guess that explains why you, sir microsoft employee, are line dancing in the middle of your stores [traitor using iPods, don't worry I won't tell. ;-J ]) but nobody cares at all! It’s just an iPod shuffle with a screen. A smaller, less functional iPod touch. Something along those lines.
If you disagree or have anything more to add, comments are welcome. 
Why I’m not upgrading to the official 2.2
Sep 1st
So the official OTA 2.2 Droid Incredible Update is finally live.
But I’m not upgrading.
So to install this, I would have to unroot my phone. There is no way to root this version of 2.2, so I won’t be able to use my beloved Wireless Tether.
Now I already have a leaked version of 2.2 so I get everything of 2.2 other than the 720p video recording, but I get my wireless tether. So it really becomes a tradeoff between the wireless tether and 720p recording. Now I know that 2.2 has the built in 3G mobile hotspot, but that holds me at 2GB and costs me another $20/mo. Riiiight.
So I’ve decided to stay how I am with a partial 2.2 update and stick with my Wireless Tether until they find a way to easily root this version of 2.2.
P.S. Sorry for the lack of posts, I have a few more coming soon.
Wireless Tether with Droid Incredible
Aug 20th
So let’s just say that you are driving somewhere and you have your computer (or iPad or iPod touch for that matter) along with your droid incredible. Well now for free (actually, the expense of battery life) you can use your Droid Incredible as a wifi tether, so you can have an iPad on verizon.
Sadly, the speeds are dramatically reduced to a groping 70 kb/s. But I think it’s better than nothing. Can load pages, not so great for downloads and video/audio streaming such as youtube or pandora.
Step 1. Make sure your phone is rooted. Just do steps 1-4 of the tutorial HERE (continue the steps to install android 2.2, if desired!).
Step 2. On your incredible go to THIS LINK (try using chrometophone, review on that soon!)
Step 3. Once the link is downloaded open it and install the application.
Step 4. Open the application on your phone.
Step 5: Press menu and go into the settings and change around your preferences. change the SSID, and add a passphrase. Enable access control if desired.
Step 6: Press the big tether button.
Step 7: On your wifi enabled device go to the network selection and select the nework name that you had entered in the SSID preferences. Enter your asscode and Voila, you can connect to the internet!
One of the cool benefits of this is that you can be on the internet while in a car. Cool, eh?
How-to: Install Android 2.2 (Froyo) on Droid Incredible
Aug 6th
NOTE: I DONT TAKE ANY RESPONSIBILITY FOR LOSS OF DATA ON YOUR PHONE!
Thank you droid life, you have a build of froyo for droid incredible. Cool!
The only problem is that you have to be rooted. And from what I hear that is a command line disaster. Here I’ll show you how to root and convert to android 2.2 simply and easily. You’ll have to have a USB cable and an SD card in your phone. Sadly I can’t give you screenshots for the whole process as this can’t be undone. But I’ll give all of the screenshots I can. So here goes!
WARNING: THIS PROCESS MAY OR MAY NOT BE REVERSIBLE. THE ONLY BUG I’VE FOUND IS THAT GPS NO LONGER WORKS. DO NOT PROCEED IF YOU USE THE GPS FREQUENTLY (HOWEVER AN OFFICIAL RELEASE WILL NOT HAVE THAT PROBLEM SO IT SHOULD BE RESOLVED IN A FEW MONTHS)!
Step 1:
Download this zip. Once it has started downloading proceed to step 2.
Step 2:Backup all of the photos and videos from your phone. This process will indeed wipe out your whole phone and make it brand new. I am not responsible for anything that happens to your data!
Step 3: Download THIS application for mac, and THIS application for windows. These are the unrevoked.com reflashers.
Step 3a: Open the reflash application on your Mac or PC. I will show the process for mac as I assume that it is similar for Windows.
Step 3b: Plug in your phone to your computer with the USB cable.
Step 3c: On your incredible go to settings>Applications>Development and enable USB debugging.
There’s no turning back now, as things will start to happen. Your screen will be flashing terminal commands and all this crazy stuff that I couldn’t explain. Once it is done you should be shown a screen like this (if not, you should be on a white page with skateboarding android logos and select recovery from that list, and if not that, boot up while holding the optical trackpad button and select recovery from that list, and if not that then select bootloader then recovery to get to this list):
Step 4: You are now rooted! At this screen scroll down and select nandroid. from here click backup and let it run. When it is over reboot. I’m *pretty sure* that it should just reboot into 2.1. using nandroid backs up all of your data just in case something goes wrong so you can restore.
Step 5: Your download of the zip should be complete by now. Plug in your incredible to the USB cable (if it isn’t already) and set the USB mode to disk drive. Then copy that zip over to the SD card (NOT THE PHONE STORAGE! to figure this out your phone storage will be 8GB, the other mounted drive is the SD card!). Copy it to the root not under any other subfolders.
Step 6: Turn off your phone and reboot while holding the optical trackpad.Select bootloader from the list then select recovery. Then select Install zip from SD card.
Next, select choose zip from sdcard.
Then, scroll down the list and select the zip that you downloaded.
It will begin to install android 2.2, and this could take a few minutes.
After, reboot and you should see this new boot animation
followed by this red eye.
It may hang at the red eye for a few minutes, so don’t freak out (like I did)!
After it boots you will be introduced to android 2.2 with sense. Congratulations! To prove it, go into settings> About Phone> Software. It should say 2.2 under the firmware! Enjoy!
OmniWeb
Aug 6th
I’m sorry. I really am. This is, indeed, yet another web browser.
I was recently at a technology summer camp (I’m taking a class about photoshop) and the same instructor that ended up switching me over to macs kept telling me about how mazing omniweb was. I wasn’t convinced until I finally decided to download it.
The first thing you notice is speed. I know that people call chrome fast, and, well, it is. But from tests on Good Morning Geek, it seems as though graphics render either faster or from top to bottom. I’m pretty sure omniweb prioritizes the top of the page for rendering, as the header seems to appear almost instantly, followed by widgets in the sidebar. In chrome, it takes a couple of seconds for the header to appear.
Other than that the big thing is tabbed browsing. So lets say I have a lot of tabs open in Safari. I mean a LOT. In the menubar it shows the tabs as txt, the name of the webpage. But when it gets crowded things get a little harder to make out.
(click to expand) As you can tell, it’s kind of hard to tell which news article that CNN page is about. What if I have ten CNN tabs open but all I see at the top is CNN:…
OmniWeb takes a new approach. Thumbnails.
I don’t even need to figure out what the text is trying to refer to, I can just take a glance at the tabs and click the one I want to look at. And even if I have 20 tabs open, the thumbnails don’t get smaller because you can scroll through all of your thumbnails.
Another cool thing is the ability to load tabs in the background. I know this isn’t new to the field of browsers but I find that the system it uses to tell you that a tab in the background is loading (and when it is finished loading) very unique.
When a tab is loading it is greyed out and has a spinny thing in the top right.
When a tab in the background has finished loading, OmniWeb does a nice job of letting you know.
If you open the tab the check mark wil go away.
Other than that there is one more key feature to this: site-specific browsing options.
On any website you can click a button in the top right and select your options for ads, appearance, security– let’s just show a screenshot.
The button to toggle the pane is shown in the top right.
As you can see there is also a page info pane where it shows you all of the images, scripts, stylesheets, and frames on a webpage. Here’s a gallery with pictures of each and every pane, plus all of the other screenshots from this post:
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- The button to toggle the pane is shown in the top right.
Le Trackpad de Mágico! (Magic Trackpad)
Jul 30th
I have no idea why but this has been requested by numerous people.
Along with the launch of the new and improved iMac, Apple released the Magic Trackpad. It’s basically a larger bluetooth MacBook Pro trackpad. Their tagline is “why do notebooks have all the fun?”
I find it useful even tough I already have a MacBook Pro, because when I need gestures like exposé It is right there, not a reach across the desk to get to my MacBook.
Setup
The setup is very simple. First step is to update your software. Do that by going to the apple menu and clicking Software Update. This will then download the drivers for the Magic Trackpad.
Once you have downloaded the update and restarted, press and hold the power button on your trackpad until the green light starts flashing.
Once that is working, go into System Preferences and click on Trackpad.
Once in the pane, click on Set Up Bluetooth Trackpad in the bottom right corner.
Make sure the light on the trackpad is still blinking (if it isn’t just press the power button once) and you should see a window appear. After a few seconds it should look like this.
Once it looks like that^^^ click continue and your wireless trackpad will be setup! In the pane that follows you can configure a bunch of cool options.
Review
The Magic Trackpad is a good addition or replacement for a mouse. The large surface is convenient because you will rarely have to pick up your finger, however having it so large does make it feel a little bit awkward.
I think that if you are getting (or have) an iMac or other Mac desktop then you may prefer this over the Magic Mouse for it’s multitouch gestures. For MacBook and PacBook Pro users I find this only useful if you are already using an external keyboard and mouse because you can get the gestures right where you need them without reaching out across your desk to get to your MacBook’s Trackpad. It’s aluminum design fits in perfectly with the Wireless Keyboard and is even the exact same height. I’m thinking that apple should create a Magic Keyboard that has a Magic Trackpad on the side of it.
The Magic Trackpad is currently available at your Local Apple store for $69.
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT
Jul 30th
So all of the posts here have personal meaning to me. They are a reflection of my thoughts. All of them are important.
But if you look here, you’ll notice that all of them are at least a paragraph long.
Some of my thoughts are just as meaningful but don’t have that much to elaborate on. As an example, here is one of my thoughts that is important and relevant to this blog: “The Droid X is simply too big and isn’t confortable to hold. That’s why I prefer my Droid Incredible.” Now this is meaningful but what else is there to say? That would look kinda funny in a post where the title takes up more space than the post itself.
So that’s why I have created a new site for the posts that are just too small to fit (oxymoron anyone?) on Good Morning Geek. And just because the posts are shorter doesn’t mean they have any less meaning!
You can check out these posts at maxswisher.com. Please check over there along with Good Morning Geek!
Thanks!
Max
