I recently got into a discussion over the internet with some friends about charging the iphone with shake technology.
Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a reserve battery in your cellphone for emergencies and all you had to do was shake your iphone for 30 secs or so to get it charged enough to use it? Think about it. Your cell phone could be charging its reserve while you run, walk, or while its in your pocket while you are walking!

Some have never heard of such, and here I was thinking that everyone knew about this kind of technology to charge things.

I cant remember when I heard about it first, but many many years ago my Aunt got me a shake light for my Birthday and I was wow’d at the simple technology behind it. It has this really neat wireless switch that works of magnetics. It charges itself with a magnet passing through another magnet with wires wrapped around it. This charges a capacitor and stores the power. It can be charge hundreds of thousands of times.

Here is a video from the company demonstrating all there is to know about the light.

Its a fantastic flashlight and I recommend it to anyone. Its a great light to keep in your trunk as you will never have to worry about batteries corroding. Take it hunting or fishing, camping, anywhere!

REMEMBER: if Apple decides to use this in one of their future phones. YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST !!!

Not too long ago I purchased some mini spy dvr sunglasses off of E-Bay to use when I was hiking or bike riding or something. They were so cheap and really couldn’t pass them up.

I think I spent $22 dollars total on them and waited about 3 weeks for them to arrive from Hong Kong, then I went to Wal-Mart and purchased a $20 micro sd card, I think the size was around 8 gigabytes.

From the parking lot after I inserted the memory card to record the video too, I set up to the gym. Here is the video of this trip

I think the video quality is exceptionally good.

Here is a walk around the back yard.

I think these glasses are great and could be used for all sorts of things like sports, hunting, fishing, cycling, etc.

Get you a pair cheap here on E-Bay.

Features:

• User friendly operation button for easy control.
• Quality Polaroid Lens from brand makers.
• With extended memory slot for TF/Micro SD card.
• Easy connection with PC/Laptops, no driver needed.
• Sleek and elegant design suits for both men and women users.
• Real time recording , never let memorable moments sneak away from life .
• A must equipment and highly recommended device for journalist, traffic police, travelers and etc
• Batter: 5V DC / 450 mAh
• CVideo format: AVI
• Speed: Read > 700kbs, write > 500kbs
• Resolution: 640*480
• Support TF / Micro SD Card 1GB-8GB
• Photo: 1024*960
• Built in 400mAh Li-polymer Battery
• Power duration 4-5 hours
• Physical weight : 39g
• Operating system: Win98, WinMe, WinXP, Win2000, Windows Vista

Whats included:

• 1 x Spy Sun Glasses
• 1 x Carrying Case
• 1 x Cleaning Cloth
• 1 x USB Cable
• 1 x User Manual
• 1 x Wall Charger

This was recently discussed on my tech blog, but I felt like some of my readers that do not follow that blog could benefit from a rewrite. If you are still not backing up the data on your computer, what are you waiting for? It is NOW easier than EVER to do so without any additional hardware.

There are many ways to lose information from a computer:
A child playing the keyboard like a piano, a power surge, lightning, floods, and sometimes equipment just fails. If you regularly make backup copies of your files and keep them in a separate place, you can get some, if not all, of your information back if something happens to the originals on your computer.

There is no reason any of the above has to happen to you. Be prepared. Get Mozy!

Mozy Online Backup is the preferred choice by  Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Null of Yahoo! Tech  and winner of the  PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Award. It is the most secure, feature rich and inexpensive backup service in the world.

Consumers may choose Mozy Free or Mozy Unlimited.

Mozy Free offers 2 GB of automatic, secure online backup for free.
Mozy Unlimited offers unlimited, secure, reliable online backup for $4.95 a month.
Both services allow consumers to perform an unlimited number of restores via the web or Windows Explorer.

Oh don’t worry MAC users. Just because I say “Windows Explorer” doesn’t meant there is not a version for you too.
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Mozy Online Backup Features:
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• Open/locked file support
• 448-bit Blowfish encryption
• 128-bit SSL encryption
• Automatic or scheduled backups
• New and changed file detection
• Block level incremental backups
• Bandwidth throttling
• File versioning
• Public or private key encryption

There is a matrix comparing Mozy’s features to its competitors is available at www.mozy.com check it out.

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Mozy Online Backup Pricing
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• Mozy Free - 2 GB of secure, automatic online backup for free
• Mozy Unlimited – unlimited, secure, automatic online backup for $4.95 a month or $54.45 a year.

Seriously if you are not backing up your data in some fashion by now, you are begging *Murphy to come show you how bad you need it.

* Murphy = Murphy’s law, if anything can go wrong….it will

I recently installed the Tom Tom navigation application on the Iphone and thought that the Anti-Glare would make it easier to see in the day time.

I picked up a set of two for around $16 and that was the best money I have ever spent. To this day the one that I put on my phone is still as pristine as that day I applied it. My wife who is using the other one feels the same way. It is in and out of her purse all day long and there is not a mark on it. Fingers rub across the screen with ease, no dragging on the glass. I love it!

Now if only I could get compensated by Apple for expressing my feelings for a wonderful product in my blogs.

Check them out here

Power Support Anti-Glare Film Set for iPhone

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Made me think about the Iphone.

I have been meaning to inform the masses through my blog about all the wonderful things that it can do.

Let me start by saying that I wanted one before they were available, yet I still held out until the first gen bugs were out of the way and gps was available. See I am a big fan of GPS and when they put it in their second gen Iphone, well I just had to have one.

I have not regretted it one bit. Best phone I have ever had!

I used to dream of an all in one compact phone and the Iphone is about 95% the phone I always wanted.

Let me tell you all the things that I wanted a cellphone to be/do and then I will come back to the IT DOES EVERTHING part.

First I wanted a cell phone that was small and compact but not too compact. One that I could easily keep clean. I wanted it to have WiFi, GPS, be able to play music on it, watch video, and easily get on the internet. Well the Iphone and many other phones these days can do this. The Iphone just does it better.

But wait…there’s more….
I also wanted a phone that had a camera,  weather reports, video recorder,  fancy email,  radar detector,  police scanner,  and remote control for the tv.

Can the Iphonedo this? YES IT DOES EVERYTHING.

Ok the radar detector is not exactly like the ones we are normally thinking of that detect the policeman 2 miles down the road. Instead its an app called aSmart HUD +SpeedCams and you can use it to detect speed cameras along your route. It will give you warnings in advance.  It visualizies your, current speed, average speed, time, heading, altitude, weather forecast for nearest 48 hours the with 3-hour time interval, maximum reached speed (during the current trip or all your trips), maximum altitude and maximum distance to the starting point of your trip. Tapping the “HUD” icon mirrors all the text, so if you position the iPhone horizontally under your car’s windscreen you can see perfectly readable half-transparent reflection of the picture displayed. Of course this works best when not in complete sun.

I wasnt kidding about the police scanner. This is super easy to acheive on the iphone with Wunder Radio.

Ok for the things I wanted/needed….here is what I use.

Weather – Accuweather (app) or Safari http://i.wund.com/
Camera –  Built in Camera
Video – Cycorder (app)
GPS with Turn by Turn – TomTom for Iphone (app)
Trail hiking/biking/running tracking – RunKeeper  (app)
Police Scanner – Wunder Radio (app)
Online newspaper – USAToday (app)
Music – Built in Ipod
Online Music streaming – Slacker Radio (app)
Movies – Built in Ipod
Email – Built in mail client (Exchange and Gmail)
Calender – Built in Calender synced with Exchange
Remote for TV – WiFi remote (controls my media center pc/tv (app)
Remote for Itunes – Remote (controls music library on media center pc (app) )
Stream whats on my media center to my phone – Orb Live (app)
Stream live tv to iphone – Orb Live (app)

So basically I always wanted a phone that could play music, play back video, take pictures and video, get on the internet, use wifi whenever possible, has built in gps for navigation/other, a radar detector, a police scanner,  and stream live tv to it….. the iPhone… IT DOES EVERYTHING.

(disclaimer: while I didnt mention that it can not open a beer or remove that rusty nut on a bolt, I’m sure there is an app for that. There are tons of apps that make the iphone the ultimate swiss army tool, just gotta look for em)

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That was back in the good ole days.
These days its much harder for me to run.  I get winded very easily. That’s why here lately I have decided to try my best to get back into better shape.

I have been doing so by bike riding, getting on the treadmill, and my favorite has become trail hiking/walking/running.

I get bored easily on treadmills or the track so fitness trails, biking, and hiking seem to be the solution to that.

With the help of my co-worker Justin, we decided that we would try to use Tuesdays and Thursdays to do some sort of cardio exercise. I may be running, walking, hiking the Lost Bluff trail, nature trail, or biking.
Anyone of you that read this blog, know me and live in my area, feel free to hit me up through email or whatever if you would like to join in. The more the merrier.

Whats making all of this exercising even better is some of the apps that I have been using on the iphone.

So far I have used some really great apps like MotionX GPS, Trailguru, and Runkeeper.

MotionX-GPS was great but it loses gps signal if you fall below 3mph. I think this is terrible for a PAID FOR app as I sometimes only walk 2mph and I would like for it to log my walks. For bike riding it may be ideal, but I have yet to use it for that yet.

Trailguru is an awesome free app for the iphone. I like it alot, it has never lost signal even if I were to crawl. It makes really nice posts to the web as well as the ability to embed into your webpage as I have done here before. Right now however at the time of this writing, their website is down and I can not post my logs to their site.

Runkeeper was the very first app I ever put on my phone relating to walking/running and I have just now got back to using it. Mainly because the Trailguru website was down. I am glad I relaunched the use of this fabulous free program.

Today Justin and I did the regular 1 mile nature trail near the tennis courts at Grenada Lake. We ran it mostly and walked it in spots. We did it twice playing with the app runkeeper.

Below are the results using runkeeper. I think so far out of all 3 apps, I like it the best.
First time through.

Second time through.

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I learned a few things yesterday doing this.

While using trailguru, if you press the iphone’s lock key to blank out the screen, you turn gps off.
Also if you get a phonecall or reply to a text message, during your trek, it will stop the timer and mapping so you will have to start it again after the phone call or text. You will not lose already mapped data, you will just have to press start again on the app to pick up where it was paused.

I know now that the app has its own lock button that I can use instead of the iphones lock button. This prevents the GPS and app from going to sleep and losing trail data.

I posted the map below to show you that during screen locks and phonecalls it really messed up the mapping of my hike. It did however do as I expected and put the pictures on the map.
You will have to click on the plus sign and zoom in on the trail to see the pics. YOu will notice the broken trail lines where the gps got deactivated.

I want to do this will MotionX gps next and give it another shot. The reason I am liking trailguru (free app) over MotionX Gps (pay app) right now is that it doesnt lose GPS signal like Motion X does.

I never really knew until now.

It seems that President Obama did not want to part with his crackberry, err umm I mean Blackberry cellular device after his inauguration. As it turns out, he will be able to keep it, but it will be limited to personal use matters only.

For all non personal and business related calls, he will have to use the NSA approved Sectera Edge

There is only one thing that concerns me about this phone other than the size of it. IT RUNS WINDOWS MOBILE !!! How secure can this thing really be?

Video

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Ok so to rehash. I sold all of my carputer stuff on eBay and took the money and used eBay once again to purchase the Tom Tom Go 730.
I managed to get it brand new on eBay for $150 less than in stores.

I actually use it to navigate with and hands free calling as well as an mp3 player. I have it playing some of my mp3 collection through the audio out cable into my car stereo.
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It has a battery so you can take it with you to another vehicle if you choose to do so. While its in my car I use the supplied 12v adapter and its tucked away nicely. This way when the power is turned off, you get 10 secs to choose whether you want it to stay on or turn off with the car. I always let it go off with the car and it resumes where it was when I start the car again.

As I said earlier its a great mp3 player and easy to navigate through the music to select tunes to play.

It connects to my iphone with bluetooth as soon as I get in the car after the initial pairing. This also has my address book in sync with it which is really nice.
There is a listing of phones that is supports on TOM TOM’s website. Some phones allow the device to use the phones data connection to get out onto the internet and retrieve weather updates. There is also the capability with some phones to have it read text messages and emails aloud to you and you can respond with voice right back.

There really is too much to list so I tried to find a video that does the job pretty good.