Category Archives: Personal

Custom URL Shortener

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Hey there!

You all probably see bit.ly all over the place. Twitter, facebook, websites, etc. Well in case you don’t know, it’s a URL shortener. What it does is takes a long URL like http://goodmorninggeek.com/archives/11567 and makes a link that goes from bit.ly/xF4y7 and redirects to the long one. This means that you can reduce the amount of characters you have in your URL, so there’s more room for text when you are limited to a certain amount of characters.

Well, I have created one of my own.

It’s called gdmnggk.me. So when you hit that retweet button up there, it includes the link gdmnggk.me/XXXXX instead of goodmorninggeek.com/archives/etc. or bit.ly/XXXX.

HAPPY 200th POST!!!

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Well, actually, the last post about GMGtv was the 200th post.

But close enough!

200 is a big number. It’s 100, times two. Yah, that big.

And I would like to answer a question that I have only ever answered when meeting someone at a conference.

How did you get started with your blog?

Almost everybody I meet asks this question.

Here’s the story.

The year is 2007. I am a mere 9 years old.

I have been playing around with computers since 2002, when I was four, so I was doing the usual browsing, finding free software, etc.

And then, I came across Blogger.

In case you don’t know what it is, it is a blog network (now owned by google) where you can create your own blog and post to it easily. Cool!

So on I went, creating my own website. This was so cool that I could create my own website for free!

I created it, then I went on posting.

About the grass.

About the fan on my desk.

About how the sidewalk curves outside the front of my house.

About how I was taking a vacation to hawaii.

Indeed, I was a free, meaningless blogger.

Then, it hit me.

Who cares? I mean, it’s just a sidewalk. Or my vacation. Why would anyone care?

And that is when I decided to make it a technology blog, as some people were interested in it.

Since 2008, I have been posting merely about technology. I have gone through many changes in my website. First, as you know, it was a Blogger site. Then, I transferred it to a WordPress.com site. Then, I was tired of not having the flexibility of themes and the URL goodmorninggeek.com. So that’s when I moved to MediaTemple hosting, got my own domain name, and got wordpress working. (I have learned an amazing amount of server management and DNS since then, however I am still trying to get down the whole database thing.)

Another thing I would like to talk about is my logo. Boy, is this quite the story.

When I started with this blog, I was a HUGE apple fan. I was OBSESSED. I only liked apple stuff, I had apple posters, I had apple gear, I ranted about apple all the time.

So I wanted to incorporate my belief in Apple into a logo.

Here’s the result, the first logo I ever made.

Oddly I still have this on my hard drive.

As you can tell, I was extremely young when I created that picture.

The red was from colourism, a site where you put in your name and birthday and it will find a color just for you. Oddly, I still have this picture as my youtube profile picture.

But I started to get tired of that. So I decided to create a new one!

Oddly I have this one on my hard drive too!

This one I really liked. So I tried to print a Tshirt of it.

But Zazzle gave me an error for copyright because it has the Apple Logo in it.

So I had to start over.

I thought how so  many people called the site GMG instead of Good Morning Geek. So I thought maybe I could get something off of that.

And I knew that the > can be used as a newline code (and it looked technical).

So I decided to have my logo say >gmg. And I wanted it lowercase just because it looked a bit more modern.

As for the gradient, I literally picked those colors with my eyes closed and it just worked out. 🙂

I have had that >gmg for almost a year, and I have had no copyright issues or anything like that. So I think I’m planning on keeping it.

Thank you all of my readers for supporting me through these years! 🙂

Introducing GMGtv!

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I’ve been working on a little bit of a project the past few days and the first outcome is here!

Introducing GMGtv, a (hopefully) weekly video about tech news and opinions done by yours truly. Here’s the first one, hope you enjoy it! (p.s. I keep looking around because instead of a teleprompter I have a lot of pieces of paper with the outline of the script on it. I’ll work on that next week  [:  ).

The lighting is a bit uneven and there is an extremely annoying high pitch noise (from the studio lights), both of which I have fixed for next week. I figured out how to use the equalizer to get the noise to disappear and I have gotten an extra light, a reflecting umbrella, and a couple of diffusers (and this studio is tiny so there’s absolutely no space left in here).

I hope to soon get this in iTunes, so you can subscribe on your iDevices, but that might be a few more weeks.

Thanks for watching, and soon I’ll do a behind the scenes! 🙂

The New MacBook Pros Released: What a disappointment.

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The rumors of a new MacBook Pro are true. But that’s about as far as the truth goes.

When I went to Apple’s website and they had a huge ad for the new MacBook Pro, I thought it was the old one. Why? Does this seem familiar:

I think I’ve seen this somewhere… Oh yah, every time I’ve gone to apple’s website for the past THREE YEARS.

The “REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES” consist of the tiniest things, and I’m trying to convince myself it’s because Apple’s AMAZING REVOLUTIONARY MacBook Pro just isn’t ready for prime time…. I hope…

Here’s what’s new.

The 13 incher now has a dual core i5. Better than a core 2 duo.

The built-in iSight I MEAN FACETIME camera is now widescreen. Yay… That’s been a popular request……?????

There’s the new Thunderbolt port.

Basically, it’s their new way of creating yet ANOTHER FireWire port.

Luckily, the current display adapters are supported, so it’s still a Mini DisplayPort adapter. But when I see the “Thunderbolt to VGA Adapter” in Apple Stores nationwide, I am going to tip a cow.

And the one other improvement: Battery life. It boasts 7 hours of wireless browsing on a single charge. Nice, but I’d rather see big leaps forward in innovation instead of three performance enhancements.

I’d consider this launch a total failure. The whole line is

The Marketing Dilemma

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Marketing is the first thing anyone sees about a product. Before they have the product, they almost always have seen the website, an ad, press about it, packaging, and a range of other things about your product.

Because of this, marketing ends up being one of the most important things about getting people to use your product.

But there is always a problem with Marketing. It’s all limited. You have limited space on a page, limited space on a billboard, limited size of text and images so that people can read them. Limited time in an ad, limited attention spans of targeted audiences, it’s all limited.

This means you need to have the most effective marketing so you can get your message across with limited space, time, and attention spans.

To do this, you usually need to categorize your product into one of two categories: Simple, or complex? In many cases, this is the same as BC or BB. Business to consumer, or business to business?

When you have a simple, consumer product, marketing is usually pretty easy. You just need to show off what your product does. And if it doesn’t do anything, then you obviously have a problem.

If you have a simple product that has already been done before, you need to also include what makes yours better. For example, Google Chrome is just a web browser. But it’s a fast web browser that might make you want to use it over any other web browser.

Then, you might remember printopia. I did a simple video that showed the flaws of AirPrint and how Printopia fixes them. That’s basically what the product does.

What the product does it the use case. You the use case of printopia is to print to non airprint printers. The use case of Google Chrome is to have a better web browser (better has to become more specific when you get to marketing).

But that only applies for BC (business to consumer). When you are BB (Business to Business), your product tends to be much more complicated.

One example that I’d like to use here would be Content Rules, inc.

Content Rules provides different services that basically fixes content so that there’s less to fix after the content is translated. What that means is that you end up paying less.

The reason that content rules is unique is because it is bringing these enterprise features that usually only companies like Adobe and Google could afford, and thanks so SaaS (Software as a Service), they can provide the same software in “seats” to smaller businesses that can’t afford a full license.

But the software and list of services are huge! They do sentence structure correction, repetitive reuse, term aggregation, there are a ton of steps to use this software (which is why businesses are expected to use it, not consumers).

So how do you market it?

It’s all about the use case.

The use case: Fix problems in content so that you don’t have to fix them after translation.

Market off of THAT.

Market off of how you end up having less errors in translation that have to be fixed, which ends up that you pay less money. That’s what you need to market off of.

You might not even end up showing the product at all in your advertising. It might just be eye-catching diagrams (which can also be handy for your attention span issue).

So lets dumb all this down a bit.

BC/Simple: Market use case and specific features

BB/Complex: Market very simplified use case

So when you are creating your marketing, take a step back and remember what it is exactly that you are marketing.

All of my sites

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I have quite a few personal websites, mostly just little experiments that I never finished. Here’s all of them.

Good Morning Geek

goodmorninggeek.com

Welcome to the site! Blog posts, all about technology. Enjoy.

Max Swisher

maxswisher.com

This is my personal site all about me. All about my accounts, my feeds, where I work, my YouTube, all of those things about me.

Max Swisher’s Ideas

ideas.maxswisher.com

I have lots of ideas, and I post them there. People ask if I am afraid that people will steal my ideas, and frankly, it would be great if they did. All of these things are the things that I’d love to use/have, but I’m not about to go on creating.
DTLosGatos

dtlosgatos.com

One of my incomplete experiments, this site was made to be a listing of every shop in downtown los gatos. It was going to have all of the different stores (every single one) with reviews and ratings on each aspect. It was a collaboration with my friend Gustaf, and we both kinda stopped working on it. So there it lies, with 3 shops for each category and marking that say **these will be linked**.
ResearchBase

theresearchbase.org

This is still underway and hopefully I can get it going soon. As a middle schooler, I often find that getting good resources for my research can be hard. Because we aren’t allowed to use wikipedia, sometimes it takes some real digging to find good reliable information on a certain subject. So the final purpose is that people can tag certain URLs with a different subject or topic, so when someone needs solid research for a certain subject they can find it. At the moment it’s a drupal install with absolutely nothing installed. Enjoy!
Teen Techie

teentechie.net

This USED to be a site where it was a teen writing collaboration, but that kinda died. So right now it is a domain where I can put stuff that I’m testing. Right now, the homepage for  definr is there. definr is an app that we made at programathon, with my friend Kfir and Max (other max). It was made to be a game where you have to define SAT words, but the arrays for 5000 words didn’t go along well. So the part I coded, which would be HTML interface,  is beautiful, but the part that Kfir and Max were in charge of (the backend PHP) is totally disfunctional. So what is there is a template with radio buttons and a submit button, and if we got the PHP working, it would actually be a game. 😉
files.goodmorninggeek.com

You may notice that this doesn’t have a title, but the URL is pretty descriptive. When I need to transfer files, then I can use FTP to upload them to the URL then download them somewhere else. It’s also helpful for sharing files with other people online, but nobody can access any files on it unless they have the exact URL of the file (I might want to try and change that sometime but we’ll see).
tumblr.maxswisher.com

For the big things, I share here on GMG. For the small things, I share on Twitter. But there needs to be a balance in between. So that’s why I have this tumblr, and I share photos, URLs, and other things. I mainly use cortex and instagram to share on this, and if you want to do the same thing with the same general theme and cortex, here’s a link.

There’s more to a good product than a good idea

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When you think of creating a product, the first thing that comes to mind is always the idea. The idea is really the heart of a product. It is what makes people use it, what makes people discover it, and what makes it worth creating. A bad idea in the first place will always cause complete failure.

I would insert an example of a company where this happened, but frankly, if a company has such a bad idea that it fails, then it’s such a bad idea that nobody ever will take note of it. The idea is what determines everything…. almost.

Once you have your good idea and a company built, you aren’t done. It needs to be available to people, at least 99% of the time. I am going to relate this to the battery life vs. features scenario. If you get a phone that packs the most features and amazing performance with unbelievable power, but it arrives with no battery, then it’s all a failed effort. Something as simple and cheap as a battery can determine the value of the rest of the whole device. This same thing applies with any product or website. If it isn’t available to people or keeps failing/crashing, then the rest of the whole product becomes useless.  You need something to power and maintain your idea, because unfortunately, ideas aren’t self-sustaining.

I am going to bring this whole thing down to a specific example, which was the reason I am writing this post.

The example is chi.mp. The idea behind chi.mp is to aggregate everything from you into a single page. Blog posts, flickr posts, twitter updates, facebook updates, and a whole slew of other things is aggregated into a single page. Your page can be yournamehere.mp, so you can avoid subdomains, but still for free. Pretty good idea in my opinion.

However, the battery tends to become disconnected (metaphorically speaking). Every other page you get this error:

And after a plethora of refreshing, it still displays this. I clear my cookies and cache and a few refreshes later it loads something.

Because of this lack of service (and confusing error messages), I am abandoning this service, as many other people would do. Every browser on every OS, the same thing happens. So this is NOT a problem with your computer, but a problem with THEIR back end (a.k.a. battery).

This example is proof of the title of this post: No use having great features and a great idea if you just plain can’t get to them.

So when you have your magnificent idea, make sure it has a stable power supply.

Android vs. iPhone

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Android and iPhone have always been one of the biggest disputes in the technology world ever since Mac vs. PC (which still isn’t decided). There are many factors to which makes one better, and with the iPhone soon on verizon, network coverage and carrier subscriptions are no longer some of them.

Why iPhone is better than Android

Lets start out with the iPhone.

The iPhone is made by one vendor, Apple. Apple does everything that has to do with the device: sells it, supports it, updates it, designs it, authorizes apps, etc.

And this allows for a kind of unity that is not found on android devices.

On iPhones, almost 80% of the users are updated to the latest version. Which means that if you develop and app that requires the latest verson of iOS, then 80% of all iPhone users can download it. Also, the updating system is flawless. All of your media, apps, mail, etc. can be synced over a single app on your Mac or PC that you can download for free. In addition to all that, you can also install software updates with the click of a button when prompted. And because apple all works as one system, when the update is available to one iPhone, it’s available to the rest.

With android, things are different. Very very VERY few are updated to the latest version, mostly because there are so many different android phones on so many different vendors that only some of the vendors update some of the phones some of the time. So if you develop an app for only one of the versions of android, few people are going to be able to use it. Some people are still on android 1.5! And if you develop an app for the newest version, same thing. There’s always going to be many users that aren’t able to use your freshly developed application.

In addition, androids have a much  bigger learning curve. To do advanced things like install new unofficial OSes, you have to root your phone and know how to install roms and things along those lines.

Another thing would be apps. The applications for iPhone are coded in objective C, which has a lot more possibility then Java. Many people say that when coding for android, they feel very confined in what they can allow their applications to do. Also, apple has to approve all apps submitted. These combined result in very high quality apps, which are easy to use and have a lot of functionality.

Why Android is better than iPhone

Android also has some nice benefits. First of all, it’s open source. This means that any developer can legally take the software and customize it and install drivers for different devices and do whatever they want with it, all legally.

This also means that if you do the right things to your android, you can install different versions of the operating system that have been modified by people ranging from people in office buildings to hobos living on the streets that happen to have coding skills and an internet connection. Having the ability to customize even the core operating system on the device is a big benefit with androids. And even though the manufacturers may take a year to come out with the new version of the OS officially for your phone, there is almost always someone porting the OS to the device early so you can get it before any of your friends.

Android is also not restricted to the Android Market. On iPhones, to install apps that aren’t in the app store you have to jailbreak. But with android, it’s as easy as checking a box in your application settings. Once that box is checked, you can download APK files from anywhere online and install them without a problem. This is good if an app maker doesn’t feel like putting their app in the market or just wants to keep a closed beta of it. Either way, having this feature is definitely a big plus for android.

And yet another benfit would be the huge variety. There are hundreds of android phones (all of which you can find on android.com) and as many vendors as you can imagine. This gives you a wide variety of different software, skins, hardware, power, price, coverage, and many different plans with different prices and different speeds and different features. Because of the wide variety of phones available, Android is now taking up a bigger market share than iPhone.

Conclusion

Androids and iPhones both have their ups and downs. But I think that I might admit to getting an iPhone when my upgrade is available. Even though I like the availability of open source on androids, I still feel like there is a wider variety of higher quality apps on the App Store that I could use.

The best of GMG!

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I’ve been blogging over here for a couple years now, and I have 40% more daily visitors nowadays then I did about 4 months ago. So for you new readers, I’ve decided to bring back some of the old posts.

Mindnode
 Mindnode is a great free app for mindmaps. It is now available on the Mac App Store.

Wireless tether with Droid Incredible
 Tethering wirelessly is extremely convenient and here’s how to do it.

Omniweb
 Omniweb is a fast and simple web browser that has a really interesting tabbing interface.

Create a WiFi network with your Mac
 Sometimes you are at a hotel and only have one ethernet cable. Here’s how you can use your mac to create a WiFi network so your other devices can also share the love.

Top 5 favorite things about Mac
 I personally prefer Macs over PCs. Here’s a few reasons why.

CloudApp
 Cloudapp is a great and easy way to share screenshots and other images with your friends.

Bluetooth not available? Here’s a ten step fix!
 It has happened to me a few times that when I startup my computer I get the wonderful bluetooth not available symbol in my menubar. In that case, I just come back to this post. It has never failed me!

Air Display
The iPad has a beautiful display. Here’s how you can use it as an extended monitor for your Mac!

Get Facebook chat in iChat
Facebook chat is great because it’s likely that you have a LOT of facebook friends that you can chat with. Here’s how to integrate Facebook chat into iChat using Jabber.

Chat with Phil McKinney
I had an interesting chat with Phil McKinney, the CTO of HP, and his words still stick with me.

Top 3 Trends at CES 2011

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CES 2011 was awesome. It was my first CES and I had a blast (but my feet didn’t). I befriended everyone at Eye-fi, met Altec Angel, got a free headset, took 1000 pictures, played a 3D racing game, and became an exhibitor for a booth for a few hours (more on that in the next post). Here are the things I saw that were extremely trending.

Number 3: Mobile
Mobile was as expected,a huge trend at CES. There were new phones announced by different makers, 4G technology, high res displays, and more.

A subtrend of this area would be accessories. There were headphones, mobile speakers, docking stations, backup batteries, a LOT of stands, and a lot of cases.

Number 2: Tablets
Tablets tablets and more tablets!

I got a chance to play with the Galaxy Tab (which I personally didn’t like) the BlackBerry PlayBook (which I loved, more on that later), and I played around with a lot of crappy android tablets.

Many companies all around the world are trying and failing to enter the tablet market. They all use android which is good for apps, but the devices themselves are TERRIBLE! The biggest mistake I saw was the use of resistive touch screens. Basically, instead of electrical content triggering a touch point (which takes the lightest touch) you have to “touch” hard enough to press two plastic sheets together that are over the screen. When I picked one up that had been made in china and tried to use it like I could my phone, iPad, iPod touch, or any other touch device I had, I thought it was broken. After PRESSING on the screen I could get a result.

Another problem is that the creators of these things were making them powerless. They had android 1.6, a 400 mhz processor, a terrible touch screen, poor design, bad graphics, terrible cameras, it was all just terrible.

I think that the tablet situation will be similar to the one with the iPod, where one vendor will rule over all others (in this case Apple).

AND NOW… FOR THE NUMBER ONE TREND AT CES….

NUMBER ONE:

There was so much 3d it was crazy.

Optoma had their whole booth all about 3d. All about 3d projectors and technologies.
Intel’s whole booth (which is quite large let me have you know) was all about their 3d processors which could drive 3d graphics to a 3d tv.

There were 3d cameras, 3d tvs, 3d camcorders, 3d monitors, 3d phones, 3d that you didn’t need glasses for, 3d that made you confused, and 3d that didn’t work. There was a LOT of 3d!

CES was an extremely cool event, but there wasn’t much eye-popping stuff. Everything was mostly just improvement on other things. 3D was big last year too, but here it’s being moved to more devices and more applications.

Swishar

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The Swishar is a newsletter that I am going to try to send weekly ish.

It will include my new posts, older posts that I would like to make new again, and different articles on the web that I have found useful.

Put in your email address below to subscribe. 🙂

Enter your email address:

Thanks!

Monitor Configurations

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If you are a multiple monitor maniac, you would know that sometimes it’s hard to decide to put your monitors. Placement can depend on use, ergonomics, functionality, placement of speakers, space, and available equipment.

I’ve gone through many different monitor configurations.

My first ever multiple monitor configuration looked like this:

Then I decided to kick out the PC and attach my Mac to that monitor.  I also found out that I could use my iPad as an external display.

TAfter this configuration I got another Mac that I decided to use for all of my media. So I added that to the mix and for the first time I rose up the monitor over the others, and it created a four monitor grid.

Then I decided to take the two laptops i had and make it two rows of three.

And then I did something crazy. I put the monitor from the top left on the opposite side of my desk and got rid of those two laptop screens.

But tonight I decided to pull it all back together. And I ended up with:

As you can tell my MacBook is sideways. But the screen is rotated so i can actually use it properly.

This was not easy to do. In the system preferences pane they don’t give an option to rotate an internal screen, so you have to download a third party app called Display Rotation Menu and change the rotation from the menubar of your computer.

So that’s the story of monitor configurations. Different ones have been cleaner than others, but I just wanted to post about the emphasis that monitor configurations have. My current one has proven to be the most productive so far because I don’t have to move around to work on all of my monitors.