Posts under ‘Tech’

Over the past few days I sent some emails that I thought would stimulate some discussion, but I heard no replies.  OK, well people are busy, no problem. But then when I sent something from my iPhone today, I got some pretty quick responses. After checking with a couple of folks, it became clear that [...]

A couple of days ago my phone locked up on the Apple screen after rebooting, and the only way out was to put it into DFU mode and do a full restore. But all is working now, here’s what happened. It all started when I used the HomeBudget app for the first time. When entering [...]

Back during my cross-USA bicycle tour in 2001, I composed daily email updates (this was pre-blog days) of my trip using a Palm Pilot docked into a Landware GoType external keyboard. To send my updates, I docked the Palm Pilot into the PocketMail BackFlip and then held the combo up to a pay phone (those were still [...]

I was a happy Palm PDA user for years, and when it was time to get a smartphone, the Palm Centro was logical choice, in part to dodge the issue of migrating my contacts list and other data.  Unfortunately, a year into my two year contract with AT&T, it was now plainly obvious that the Palm OS [...]

After thinking “why the heck would anyone want to use it” – now the subject line says it all!

Ever wonder what the “@”, “RT”, and other cryptic items in Twitter tweets mean?  Here’s a real simple guide:  http://cantondog.com/128/top-7-twitter-commands-everyone-should-know/ Here’s a post that mentions some interesting features in Facebook chat that I was previously unaware of:  http://cantondog.com/153/facebook-adds-more-features-to-chat/

The blog continues to be a little bit technical for now, but lightening up the entries will have to wait for another day!  Anyway, I’ve had some experience trying to edit video from Mini DV tape camcorders, bicycle helmet cameras, and most recently camcorders that record to SD flash cards.  Each one of these recording [...]

I prefer to use VirtualDub to for all of my “simple” video processing tasks on the PC, such as splitting and joining.  One problem is that VirtualDub can only process AVI files, and my new camcorder saves in MP4 format.  The other problem is that VirtualDub doesn’t support H.264 streams.  The following steps allow me [...]

Since my new netbook is bootable via SD card or USB flash drive, I wanted to use all of my old too-small-to-be-useful SD cards as bootable system recovery disks.  I bought a 16GB USB flash drive for doing a complete backup of the operating system (Windows XP Home) and program files, as all of my [...]

Rather than do a complete review and describe all the features (both of which can be found elsewhere on the web), I’ll just summarize the key things I like about this netbook.  Some of these I knew about before buying, some not until afterwards: