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Review
Waze, social GPS, turns 3 on Android and grows up beautifully.
I’ve been testing out a lot of GPS apps over the past few months and Waze is the front-runner. Not only is it feature packed, but just yesterday it turned 3 on Android and the interface went from ok to great.
There are a lot of things I like about Waze but the biggest two are that it’s free and that it’s social.
The social integration part is what makes Waze stand out amongst others. This means that other Waze users can report traffic levels, accidents or even cops so that the rest of us know what’s going on in our area.
Google+. The social network that wants to be cool but isn’t.
Who doesn’t love the idea of Goolge+? It’s a social network, from Google, that ties into your Google life. It’s got a pretty easy to use interface, does a great job at grouping friends, has video and audio chat built-in and can automatically upload every picture you take from your Android phone into the system. It has a lot of good things going for it; except no one really uses it.
Sadly, Google+ doesn’t fix the main problem with social networks; noise. I actually follow fewer people on Google+ than I do on Twitter or Facebook and it just seems more noisy. There are so many links, images and videos that it’s information overload.
To the CloudApp with that screenshot and return me a link.
If you’re on a Mac, Cloud is a great free app.
To use it, you just drag a document onto the application icon in the menu bar and it gets uploaded to the internet. It then copies the link to the file so you can just paste it into an email or use it wherever.
To make it even more handy, it can automatically uploads screenshots you take and return a URL to the file to your clipboard. This is very handy when I’m writing an email or a form post where I want to include a screenshot.
Backblaze continues to backup my computer.
It’s been nearly three years since I signed up for Backblaze and it’s been backing up my computer ever since.
I have it set to back up once a day and it currently has backed up 112,452 files at 82,287 MB. That’s over 80 Gigs! All this for less than $5 a month.
Luckily I have never had a computer crash were I needed to get my files back. But, as my computer ages, it’s good to know that everything is safe.
Scream 4 – Cheesy but worth the rent.
The year was 1996 and I was in high school when Scream came out. I wasn’t a big fan of horror movies, but I somehow saw this one.
Then there was Scream 2 and Scream 3. Each move a not quite as good as the one before it but at least the characters stayed the same and they all follow the same basic storyline.
And now there is Scream 4; or Scre4m.
Once again the movie isn’t that great, but it’s Scream. Yea the acting is cheesy and the plot is basically the same but at least all the main characters, or more importantly actors, are there.
One hell of flashlight for about $20 bucks.
I’ve been meaning to get a new flashlight for some time now and I finally went on to Amazon and got one. It arrived today and it’s amazing.
The Dorcy CyberLight has 5 hour runtime, can survive an 8 foot fall and shines 500 ft! It even comes with batteries.
I took it outside and I’m able to shine across our rather large backyard to the neighbor’s house. I can shine it up into the top of our monster trees and even into the street half way down the block!
The fastest browser on my Mac is Firefox 5.
I tested four browsers with the SunSpider tests and it turns out that Firefox 5 was faster than Chrome, Safari and Opera. This was quite surprising to me as it beat out Chrome but quite a bit. It’s also interesting how far behind Safari is.
Opera 10.5 – 534.0ms +/- 1.4%
Chrome 12 – 524.6ms +/- 4.6%
Safari 5.0.5 – 566.9ms +/- 4.2%
Firefox 5 – 448.8ms +/- 0.9%
Now the tests aren’t scientific by any means, but they do represent my computer on a normal day. I’d suggest you run them for yourself and see what you come out with.
Just watched Battle for LA. Lots of shooting little story.
Battle for LA
I like a good action movie, but this was a bit over done. Where was my story?
Shoot. Kill. Repeat. That’s pretty much what it was.
And why do aliens, who can build spaceships and other cool stuff, always have one week spot that we can find and hit every time with a basic machine gun?
Turn your iPad or iPhone into a weather radio.
I’ve been looking to get a new weather radio and I found a really good, and cheap, one that happens to be an iOS app.
NOAA Weather Radio is an iPhone and iPad app that lets you listen to over 160 weather radio stations from all around the country and even a few in Canada.
The app also has current weather conditions, radar and forecast.
If you setup your location, it’ll alert you via push notifications when there are severe alerts in your area. Just like a normal weather radio, it’ll make the weather radio warning sound too.
Google Music vs Amazon Cloud Player – A quick review.
I’ve been testing out both Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player and have to say that they are both nice services.
Below are my pros and cons of each service after some initial testing.
Price:
Google Music – Free (for now)
Amazon Cloud Player – First 5 gigs are free, after that it’ll cost. Tip
Uploading:
Google Music:
- Pro: Creates a native Mac system preference.
- Pro: I can set the bandwidth used to upload my music.
- Pro: Automatically uploads all my music. And when new music is added to my system, automatically uploads that as well.
