Got Public WiFi?

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It’s 6 A.M. The kids have just started filing into the local aquatic center for a large swim meet.  In every other kids’ swim bag is a WiFi enabled cell phone, an iPod Touch with WiFi, or a netbook.  In every other swim parent’s bag is a laptop or netbook.  And there are about 700 kids at this swim meet, and at least 300 parents and spectators.  And they all start connecting to the free public WiFi at the pool as soon as the kids and parents fire them up.  And the network slows to a C-R-A-W-L.

Forget about using the free pubic WiFi for uploading meet results to the internet.  Absolutely forget about using a home router on 2.4GHz to use Windows Networking to network the computers being used to run the meet.

Some ideas we had to solve this problem:

1) Change the public WiFi password right before a large swim meet. This way, if you really need WiFi, you can get the password; otherwise, the iPod Touch in your swim bag doesn’t really need to be on the network while you are swimming!

2) Use a 5GHz draft N MIMO router to network the computers being used for the swim meet.

3) Reallocate the network bandwidth to allow for more public bandwidth during a meet.

So far, we have tried #2, and we will try #1 and #3 at the next meet!!

Google Chrome Extensions and Themes

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This day, I had to take a break from programming. How do I relax? I upgrade the browser software on my computers! I have upgraded to the latest version of FireFox v3.6.3, and also upgraded Google Chrome to the 5.0.342.9 beta version.

I have been comparing the two browsers all day today, and I have found that FireFox has many more “personas”, and “themes”, than Chrome has, hopefully that will change soon. I am in love with the FireFox Two Little Birds persona. I have settled for the Tibi theme in Chrome, but I don’t really like any of these Chrome themes as much as the FireFox themes and personas. It’s a personal thing, I know…

However, as far as extensions and plug-ins go, now the Chrome allows you to add extensions, Chrome is hands-down the best browser out there as far as I am concerned. Above, you can see a screen shot of me typing this blog post on my Chrome browser. Along the the top, next to the address bar, are all the little icons for all the extensions I have installed.

I have installed the following:

Gmail

Google Voice

Google Buzz

Google Caledar

Google Wave

Facebook

Twitter

IE page

bit.ly

delicious

Sharaholic

Chrome SEO

You can get any of these extensions from this link: https://chrome.google.com/extensions

Happy browsing!

iPhone App Hounds: Add More Pages of Apps to Your Phone, NO JAILBREAK!

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http://www.appleiphoneschool.com/2010/01/28/how-to-get-more-than-11-pages-of-apps-no-jailbreak/

By following the directions in the above link, it is possible to add more pages for your apps on your iPhone. I am running the latest version on firmware, and this procedure works perfectly.

I have not tried a sync with iTunes yet, but I will update this post when I do.

Thanks guys at AppleiPhoneSchool.com !!!

Best iPhone Apps

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I love my iPhone so much, I want to buy an Apple computer and write iPhone apps.  But first I will just write blog post about my favorite iPhone apps.

1) Navigon – An excellent GPS turn-by-turn voice navigation system. It includes a points of interest feature that is the best I have used to find restaurants and tourist attractions. 5 stars.

2) WunderRadio – Turns your iPhone into a radio.  It allows you to listen to AM and FM stations across the globe.  I live in Raleigh, NC, and this app lets me listen to FM stations across NC that have spotty reception at my home.  Plus I can listen to all the old AM and FM stations I loved when I was in Chicago! 5 stars

3) WeatherBug – Best weather app for iPhone.  Forecasts and radar maps. 5 stars

4) System Activity Monitor – When some iPhone apps are closed, they do not release all the memory they reserved back to the operating system. This can cause your iPhone apps to run more slowly over time until you ‘reboot’ your iPhone.  But with System Activity Monitor, you can force that memory to be freed up, as well as see what programs are currently running, and look at disk allocation.  5 stars plus

5) Tweetie 2 – the best Twitter app I have used, and I have used over 4 of them.   4 stars

6) Toodledo – A to-do list that can be sync’d with an online version. 4 stars

7) Google app with voice search – Lets you do Google searches on the iPhone just by speaking into the microphone; it has incredibly good speech recognition capabilities.  5 stars

8) WiFiFoFum – Find all the WiFi hotspots around you. Includes details on encryption, and a radar map showing locations of the hotspot. 5 stars

9) WSJ/CNN/iDruge etc- All the news apps for iPhone are excellent. 5 stars

10) TFLN – Texts From Last Night is a humorous collection of mostly drunken texts from college.  5 stars for humor content

11) Ontri – triathlon training log, includes GPS feature to log how far you ride/run, along with an online companion program. 4 stars only because it’s hard to log weight lifting.

12) Swim Log – If your kids swim, this can be a helpful app to track their times. 4 stars because it doesn’t remember names of swim meets and you have to re-enter them for every event.

13) iFitness – if you travel a lot, this is a great app to use for ideas on exercises you can do to keep in shape outside of the gym. 5 stars

What are your favorite apps? Appcraver.com is a fun website if you just can’t get enough apps.