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!!

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!

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 !!!

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.

In my case, I was already using domain name forwarding through a domain name registrar to forward www.olddomain.com to www.newdomain.com/olddomain, a subfolder located at my new domain name.

But now, I wanted all the requests for www.newdomain.com/olddomain to go to www.newdomain.com/newfolder.

So I had to add the following line of code to the .htaccess file at www.mynewdomain.com/.htaccess:

Redirect /olddomain http://www.newdomain.com/newfolder

And voila, problem is solved.

I had a bunch of old Windows XP computers that would only see certain other comptuers in the network, not all at the same time.

Install the Microsoft TCP/IP version 6 protocol in all computers by going to “Manage Network Conections’, clicking on both your LAN and your WLAN, and finding the protocol in the  properties dialogue window. It should be there in the list of protocols to install, install it, and then restart.

My old Sony Ericsson W580i, and New Apple iPhone 3GS POS

I have found in the 2 short days of owning this phone that it gets very hot, as early reports indicate, too hot to use on occasion, and no, it was not left in a hot car or out in the hot NC weather. Forget about the cute, lime green protective cover made out of that stretchy, rubbery silicone stuff. It makes the phone even hotter. And supposedly, if you own a white iPhone 3GS, the phone gets so hot, the white back cover cooks itself until it turns golden brown.

When I worked as a cell phone transmitter designer for a major cell phone manufacturer, the small size of the phones, combined with a small PCB area for heatsinking the power amplifiers, caused headaches for engineers trying to remove heat that is always produced by the amps when transmitting. Ususally the heat would find its way out of any holes in the phone’s case, including the earpiece holes near the top of the phone, which is not the ideal solution, but at least the heat got out of the phone and did not damage the electronics.

In the case of the iPhone, the heat problem appears to be associated with the batteries, given that the brown areas on the back of he phone correspond to the battery area.  So as an engineer, I would guess that either 1) there is too much heat being generated in these phones becuase of all the new features added, combined with the fact that there are NO openings in the case for the regular phone components like keypad buttons, and add on top of all that a huge, heat generating backlit display, or 2) battery problems, 3) it’s something else.  Engineers always know to add option #3.

Here is a link to an excellent article to help you decide if you should get the new iPhone 3GS.

In any case, I loved the ability to listen to radio stations using the WunderRadio app that I otherwise could not receive while at my gym. Using their public WiFi, however, the phone got so hot while using it with an armband, I had to turn it off for a while lest I have an Apple logo burned into my upper arm.

I love the Facebook and Tweetdeck apps, and email, but I HATE the lack of MMS picture text messaging support. Come ON AT&T and Apple, I want to send other AT&T users photos using picture text messages, not email, since, duh, the other phones don’t support email too well…Right now, I am using the PicFree app from Pinger to do this task, and it works ok with other AT&T MMS-enabled phones.

So overall, I want to ditch this phone and go back to my Sony Ericsson W580i. I think I will.  Now I need to figure out how to do that.

******UPDATE**********

My iPhone 3GS has not had the overheating problem since I turned off the GPS locating feature.  (The “WunderRadio” app wanted to turn on ‘location services’ to see where I lived, allowing it to determine my local radio stations.)

I just did a Google search on ‘iPhone GPS overheating’ and found this link, which confirms that another user has found that turning off the GPS will keep your iPhone from cooking itself.

So when you are finished using an app that wants to turn on the ‘location device’, make sure to go to ‘settings’ and turn off the location service. This will improve your battery life as well.  A cell phone radio engineer friend tells me sometimes GPS circuits can use as much current as the phone does in transmit mode.

I have also had a problem with the iPhone overheating  in 3G mode when left in a purse or gym bag if one of the apps was accidnetally left running (accidentally left WunderRadio on during my swim while the phone was in the gym bag with a weak 3G signal!) Others indicate this also causes heat a problem for them.

So the moral of the story is:

1) Put phone in Airplane mode when not using

2) turn off WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS location services when not using

3) ditch the cute silicone covers, they will not allow heat to escape from the back of your phone

4) Remember to check to make sure all apps are turned off before placing your phone in your purse or pocket. A good way to do this is to use the Activity Monitor App from Recession Apps. (what an aptly titled company).

1. What Anti-Virus Engine Ya Runnin’?

The first thing I do when working on a ‘slow’ computer is see what kind of anti-virus and anti-spyware programs are installed, and I do this for 2 reasons.

Reason 1: if there isn’t an anti-virus program installed, or if the anti-virus program’s database is out of date, there could be a virus on the computer that is causing it to be slow.

Reason 2: if there is an anti-virus program installed, the anti-virus program ITSELF could be slowing the computer down.  A 64 bit Vista machine I recently looked at was rendered so slow as to be unusable by the Spybot antivirus program.

Solution: Uninstall any existing anti-virus programs first, then download, install, and run the free version of Avast anti-virus software, and the free Windows Defender anti-spyware program.  These programs will update their databases when installed, then continue to update themselves automatically.  Scan all drives and remove any viruses and spyware.

2. Remove the crap.

I LOVE a program called CCleaner, which supposedly stands for Crap Cleaner.  It is THE best, fastest way to get all the crap off your hard drive quickly.  It removes temp files, browser caches, and also cleans your registry if you choose.  Download and install CCleaner. Run it and use the default settings, as it will detect all of the browsers installed on your computer automatically.

3. Remove MORE crap.

Windows also contains a program called Disk Cleanup Tool. Run Disk Cleanup Tool (start menu ->programs->accessories ->system tools) and choose the ‘remove files from all users’ option. Use the ‘compress old files’ option under the ‘more options’ tab to save space on your hard drive, along with whatever other options you want, including ‘remove old restore points’.

4. Repair the registry and deactivate unused services automatically.

Purchase, download and run Registry Mechanic from PC Tools. This will be the best money you ever spend if you want your computer headaches to go away.  After installing this program, scan your registry first and fix any problems found.  Then run the ‘Tuneup Your Services’ option, and choose the recommended solution.  This will deactivate any unused services that are running on your computer, and should speed up performance noticably on an older computer.

5. Run Windows Update.

Now you are set to run Windows Update and get the latest updates and fixes for your version of Windows.

6. Defragment the hard drive.

Defragmenting your main hard drive will speed up disk access times.  You can use the Windows defragmentation tool, or my favorite defrag program, Diskeeper.

If you still don’t have enough space left on your C:/ drive after doing all of the above steps, you can also do the following:

7. Move the “My Documents” folder to another hard drive on your computer.

Follow these instructions (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310147) make sure you also do the ‘move documents’ step at the end.

8. If you are using Outlook or Outlook Express, archive your old emails, and move your email folder to another hard drive on your computer.

This link explains how to archive all your old emails, and move your email file (.pst files) to another drive.

9. More ideas:

Here is a link to a blog with more disk drive space saving ideas.

Good luck!!

This latest problem started innocently enough.  I bought the upgrade to MS Expression Web, version 2, because it had PHP support, which I really needed. I had been using PHP Designer, but I decided to give Expression Web 2.0 a try.

But Expression Web 2.0 would not install, no matter what I did.  It seems Expression Web becomes a part of the MS Office suite when installed, and somehow, I have no IDEA how, my install of MS Office 2007 got corrupted. As a play on the the old saying “A fool and his money are soon parted”, my husband jokes that “A computer and Vivian and lots of software are soon together”.  So yeah, I put a lot of software on my computers.  I admit it. But Office had been working fine…

SO anyhow, after getting calling the Microsoft help line, and exchaning several emails with them, the solution was to do these steps below IN THE EXACT ORDER LISTED:

1) completely uninstall Expression Web 1.0.

2) uninstall MS Office 2007.  But, to completely uninstall MS Office 2007 correctly, I had to use a special tool from MS, even more secret than the Windows Clean Up Utility.  This was emailed to me by MS support.  It’s called Offscrub07.zip. Don’t use this tool unless you are sure you need to.

3) Install Expression Web 2.0.

4) Install MS Office 2007 again.

Good luck if you are having this problem.  This caused me days of frustration.

In trying to update my Windows Live programs on my Vista computer, I ran into yet another problem with Windows Vista.  

I wanted to update my installations of Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Messenger, but now, these programs come packaged in a GIGANTIC installer program from Microsoft, that also offers to install a bunch of other stuff you may or may not want to install at the same time as you upgrade your Live programs.  

The install would get about 83% finished, then rollback completely after it got to the Windows Live Photo Gallery part of the installation.

It took days, but I finally found the solution, and posted it here: Windows Live Installer Error 0×80070643