Why I’m not upgrading to the official 2.2

Posted on September 1, 2010 by Max Swisher

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

Posted on August 20, 2010 by Max Swisher

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?

OmniWeb

Posted on August 6, 2010 by Max Swisher

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:

: The button to toggle the pane is shown in the top right.

OmniWeb Homepage

OmniWeb Download Page

Well, back to making fun of Microsoft

Posted on July 16, 2010 by Max Swisher

Unless of course you live under a rock, you have heard about the terrible antenna problems the iPhone 4 has been having. Basically, if you put your hand over the left black line, all of your signal drops. Apple was having a PR disaster, but today Apple held a press conference and it seems that the truths were revealed.

But I must say, Apple wasn’t playing fair here.

First, Steve Jobs ponts out how all of the smartphones antennagate. He showed test videos of many popular phones including the BlackBerry Bold. This is simply putting down the competition and saying “we can’t go against the laws of physics… yet.” [Steve Jobs]. Fine.

So I got curious and asked I wonder if my phone does this…

Well, I gutters its back to making fun of microsoft…

That concludes this postapalooza…

Posted on June 27, 2010 by Max Swisher

Our first postapalooza lasted from June twelfth to the twenty fourth! We had a total of twenty three posts!!

This postapalooza ended because I missed a day among all of my travel to Japan. If you think I missed a day or doubleposted, its just because of the time zone change.

Another reason is because I ran out of things to blog about. That’s why id like to have your suggestions. Click the suggestions tab on the left and suggest something that goes along these guidelines:

Technology related
Won’t cost me more than $5 (if its an iPhone or iPad app)

Thanks! I’ll try to make a postapalooza happen every quarter. 😉

Media Temple (mt)

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Max Swisher

If you’ve been reading Good Morning Geek since 2008, you may remember the times of maxswisher.blogspot.com. I liked that because it was completely free and easy. Then you may remember the times of goodmorninggeek.wordpress.com. Just as easy and free. Then, you may have realized that goodmorninggeek.com worked. That was just a redirect.

I was getting tired of not having much flexibility and storage (I was on Hurricane Electric which gave me 5GB/mo.), and because I was now earning some more money, I decided to get some real hosting of my own.

After asking around at the Teens In Tech conference, I concluded that Media Temple would be right for me.

I signed up for the Grid Server (gs) plan, which is 100GB, $20/mo (or $200/yr), and 1TB of bandwidth.

I had no idea that those $20 gave me SO MUCH.

I got

Email with built in spam filtering
FTP
24/7 help

But there were 2 things that really made it for me.

1-Click applications

Using this service I installed wordpress on this domain with a FEW (:O) clicks. I then imported the posts from goodmorninggeek.wordpress.com. You can install wordpress, drupal, and zen-cart with 1 click.

Multiple domains to one service

Because it is grid server, I can have different domains linking to different directories on a single hosting. That means that maxswisher.com, goodmorninggeek.com, teentechie.net, and every sub-domain is on a single $20/mo. hosting plan.

Definitely recommend this to everybody who is looking to host their own website. In fact, skribit (they power the suggestions tab on the left) uses (mt). Who knew?!

http://mediatemple.net

Cooliris

Posted on June 19, 2010 by Max Swisher

We all have media we want to look at. These days, video and images are quite the hubbub. Cooliris is a way to “immerse yourself” into your content using a 3D wall.

Using it is very simple. Go to a google image or youtube search and click the cooliris wall button in the top right (in Safari). Your google image search will be displayed on a 3d wall. To go across the wall, you can

Click and dragx
Click the arrows at the bottom of the screen
Click and drag the blue doohickey to the left of right
Horizontally scroll with your mouse

If you find an image you like, you can click on it to view it and get more information about it.

This process works on many different media sites including flickr, YouTube, and more.

When you are in the cooliris wall you can search these sites instantly with the search bar on the top. You can also use the sidebar on the left to navigate through different sources like news, entertainment, featured, etc. You can even view pictures on your computer!

Here’s a video showing cooliris in action:

Sorry, the video isn’t in good quality.

Currently, I am an intern at Cooliris doing bug testing a brainstorming. I did in fact do a review of Cooliris a long time ago, but many new features have been added (and more are on the way).

Cooliris homepage

Cooliris download page

Create a WiFi network with your Mac

Posted on June 17, 2010 by Max Swisher

I am currently in Japan, and in the Hotel we have no wireless in our room. We do have a wired connection, but we have iPads that need WiFi. Here’s how to take your mac and turn it into a WiFi network in a few steps.

1. Plug in ethernet

into your Mac. Make sure the internet connection is working by visiting a few sites. Many hotels have pages where you have to agree to terms. Make sure you agree and/or pay before proceeding.

2. Turn on internet sharing

Open up System Preferences and click on Sharing. In the list, click on Internet Sharing, but don’t click the checkbox. Configure it so it looks like this:

Then, click on AirPort options in the bottom right. Here you can put in the name of your Wifi network and a password if desired.

Click OK, and now you can click the checkbox next to internet sharing.

3. Connect your devices

On your WiFi enabled devices you should be able to see a WiFi network with the name you put in under Airport Options in step 2. Connect to it and enter a password if you configured one.

Tada! Now your devices should be able to browse the internet. Cool! Be aware that you can’t be on a WiFi network on your Mac while sharing your internet.

Use it wisely!

Safari 5

Posted on June 11, 2010 by Max Swisher

While Steve Jobs took the stage to announce the new iPhone, something else was happening on the apple website. It wasn’t on the front page, nobody had any idea whatsoever. Except for my friend Spencer Schoeben (CEO of Teens In Tech Networks, he ROCKS!) who tweeted that he was stickin to Safari 5 for now. I looked at is and said to myself “Wait a second… safari 5?” And here’s what’s new:

Speed

In many tests, it beat Chrome or was equivalent for speed. This is one of the main reasons to switch!

HTML5 Compatability

The new safari has a lot more support for HTML5, still expanding Apple’s belief in no flash. Of course Safari still has flash, because if it didn’t we would have… well… a small issue. And a mob in front of Apple headquarters…

Safari Reader

Safari Reader makes it easier to read posts and stories on the web. It isolates the content of a page and displays it in a clean, maginifiable interface. Just go to an article and click Reader in the URL bar.

A little more eyecandy

The Top Sites page got a facelift, and now features an easy link to get to your history in cover flow view. Also, there’s that blue loading bar in the top again, just like good ‘ol safari 3.

Improved URL bar

You can now enter the name of a webpage you’ve visited in the past and it will automatically find the URL from your history. Cool, but I still like the omnibar approach of Google Chrome.

Extensions

Exact same as Google Extensions. Developers can create toolbars and other goodies to work with Safari, just like chrome extensions. Cool, but a little behind, don’t you think?

Other than that, safari is the same browser you used to know.

Safari 5 Homepage

Safari 5 Download Page

AT&T is the data devil

Posted on June 10, 2010 by Max Swisher

AT&T has been having network problems for a long time.

But their solution to solving it is to make people stop using it…

Hence, AT&T is the data devil.

They will be removing the unlimited data option and replacing it with a 250mb a month for $15 and 2GB/mo. for $30. The new plans will take effect on Jun 7…

Wait isn’t that the same day as something else? Hmm… Let me think… Hmm… OH yah, the iPhone. So basically what this is saying is that SOMETHING on the iPhone will take a lot of data… like.. I dunno, TETHERING? Now I find this funny. For tethering you have to pay an extra $20/mo. on top of the data plan, and you are still restricted bandwidth-wise. Another thing is I don’t know, VIDEO CALLING? This takes up an average of about 84mb per minute, so after about 4 minutes of video calling your data plan will be up. *Edit: the video chatting requires WiFi, and if I have WiF i’d rather be chatting on my computer… just sayin… I dunno, but this seems kinda devilish…

Now currently on verizon I have an unlimited plan, and I’m guessing I use more than 2GB becasue of my tethering (which im not paying extra for). Also, I get coverage at my house, which might come in handy. So even if I switched over to AT&T and got the new iPhone, I don’t know if I would be able to cap my data at 2GB. I’d rather be free with verizon.

So basically, here we have a data hungry phone that AT&T has put on a diet (nice metaphor, eh?). I don’t know how this will go over, but I can’t wait to read all of the complaints becasue people go over their bandwidth limit.

Oh, AT&T…

TeenTechie

Posted on June 9, 2010 by Max Swisher

You may have read my post asking for technology passionate teens (thanks all of you teens who emailed me!). And we have finally mostly completed project teengather.

It is now named TeenTechie!
It is all about teen opinion of technology news
You can find it at teentechie.net
We have 6 authors, all younger than 17! (not for long… :P)
It also has a podcast!
Beware, the site is still under construction! Don’t email me your complaints JUST yet…
Our writers haven’t been very writiculous… (COUGH COUGH)
You can find the site at teentechie.net

There you go, a numbered outline about TeenTechie. Enjoy!

Good Morning Geek

Seize the mouse.

Tag Archives: Internet