• Buzz Out Loud (website – iTunes)
  This is a daily podcast from CNET where they talk about the tech happenings of the day. I usually download about 6 of the newest episodes of Buzz Out Loud.
  
• A Life Well Wasted (website – iTunes)
  This podcast is a recent addition to my list. Their tagline is “An Internet Radio Program about Video Games and the People who Love them.” This isn’t your typical video game review show. It’s actual stories about people and video games. It includes stories about collectors, or interesting video game history, and is usually very intriguing.
• Macbreak Weekly (website – iTunes)
  This is a Twit podcast from Leo Laporte (of which I subscribe to a number). This one is kind of hit or miss with me. Sometimes I’ll listen, and sometimes I’ll just skip it until my next iPod refresh. It’s about all things Apple, and the quality of the show really depends on the guests of the episode. I find myself fast-forwarding through long Andy Ihnatko rants a lot of times.
• Security Now (website – iTunes)
  Another Twit podcast, this one deals with computer and internet security. I kind of pick and choose these episodes based on the topic discussed. There are also regular question and answer episodes that I’ll grab from time to time.
• Tech News Today (website – iTunes)
  Again, a twit podcast. I only download this one every now and then, and I usually don’t pull down many episodes. This podcast comes out every weekday and is similar to the Buzz Out Loud podcast listed above. In fact, the host (Tom Merritt) of TNT was a host of Buzz Out Loud up until a year ago, when he moved to Twit. Anyway, it’s a good podcast, the host does a nice job, but it’s not at the top of my rotation. I’ll pull an episode or two every time I refresh the iPod.
• This American Life (website – iTunes)
  This is a podcast of the NPR radio program “This American Life.” These are usually pretty good, and provide a view into a certain theme every week. Every now and then I’ll find myself fast-forwarding through a radio essay, or an author reading one of their short stories, but generally the topics are insightful and interesting.
• This Week in Google (website – iTunes)
  Yep, another Twit podcast. This one is actually about general cloud computing as well as Google. The hosts (Jeff Jarvis, and Gina Trapani) are very likable, and they usually talk about interesting things that have happened with Google (including Android), and the cloud in general.
• This Week in Tech (website – iTunes)
  This is the last Twit podcast I subscribe to, as well as the flagship program for the network. The premise for this podcast is a panel of tech-folk come together to discuss the prior week’s tech news. It’s pretty good 95% of the time, but also very much depends on the panel that gets brought together for a particular episode (sorry, can’t stand Jerry Pournelle).
• WNYC’s Radiolab (website – iTunes)
  This is probably one of my favorite podcasts. It is also an actual radio program from WNYC released in podcast format. The premise for the show is usually investigating some big science or technology question through experiments or interviews with experts. Just about every single episode is genuinely interesting, and I end up learning something. Some of my favorite episodes include investigations in to sleep, or if and how animals think, morality, or what makes pop music popular. I highly recommend this program.
• You Look Nice Today (website – iTunes)
  YLNT has not been released in quite a while, and may very well be dead, but it’s still one of my favorites, so I decided to list it. This is a comedy podcast, and is mainly made up of three guys sitting around BS’ing. That’s it… doesn’t sound like much… but it’s FUNNY. If you’re looking for a good episode, check out the one where Jonathan Hodgeman and Jonathan Coulton are guest hosts.
• 99% Invisible (website – iTunes)
  This podcast is a recent addition to my lineup. It’s a quickie podcast (most episodes are only a few minutes in length). The show is about design and architecture in everyday things. These things are usually overlooked because they’re done so well, hence the 99% invisible.
• Diggnation (website – iTunes)
  I used to listen to this podcast more than I do now. I don’t find myself downloading this one very often any more. It’s based on the Digg.com website, and involves the two hosts going over some of the top stories from the site. They usually only get through a few stories though, as their banter (which is why you listen to the podcast) normally takes up most of the time.

That’s my list. I’m always looking for new podcasts to download. What’s on your list?

I normally don’t do clothing/fashion reviews here, but I prefer to think of my latest purchase as an electronics accessory and not fashion, though I really do look hot in my new techie gloves. A few weeks ago I got my hands on (or rather hands in… HA!) a new pair of Isotoner SmarTouch Gloves, and they’ve turned out to be really handy (OK, I’m done with the glove jokes now, I promise). So what makes these gloves so special? They allow you to use touch screen device without exposing your hands to the elements with a bit of conductive thread on the thumb and forefingers. There are several types of gloves on the market that I looked at before deciding to go with Isotoner’s SmarTouch. I knew I didn’t want gloves with cut-off fingers so that left me with a few choices from gloves using conductive material. Out of those, Agloves and Glider Gloves were near the top of my list.

I didn’t go with the Agloves because I read several reviews that said they weren’t very warm. They were more a cool weather glove, and not a cold weather glove. The nice plus for the Agloves if you don’t need the extra warmth is that they are made entirely out of conductive material. So where the SmarTouch just have thumb and forefinger, the Agloves have the conductive stitching throughout. The stitching is actually silver, which is where these gloves get their name (Ag is the chemical symbol for silver on the periodic table).

After reading that the Agloves weren’t very warm, I dug up another type of touch screen friendly gloves called Glider Gloves. Glider Gloves are made by a company in Canada, who if you think about it probably know cold weather pretty well. Similar to Agloves, these are also made with the conductive material throughout the entire glove. They generally get good reviews on their performance, but I didn’t end up going with these either. I didn’t like how they looked. They’re much lighter in color than the Agloves, and have a lighter speckled look to them. I’ve got a black coat to wear them with, and just wanted something a bit darker. I assume they work really well, and supposedly keep you hands very warm, but totally based on my personal tastes on the cosmetics of these gloves, I didn’t end up choosing them.

In the end I ended up purchasing the Isotoner SmarTouch Gloves. They offered warmth (they are fleece lined) and the look (they are all black minus the conductive material on the fingers) that I wanted. I actually ended up ordering them twice because of some size issues. I measured my hand like the website instructed me to do, and came to the conclusion that I needed a medium-sized pair. Well, they arrived and were pretty tight on my hands, so I placed an order for large, which were just right. So the lesson learned here is that they run a little small, so I’d recommend getting a size bigger than your hand measurements tell you. Once I got the correct size, it was time to test them out. I expected them to be a bit finicky and need a little more pressure than just my bare skin on the screen. I was pleasantly surprised at how well they worked. I use these mainly with my HTC Evo 4G phone. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not the same as using your bare hands on your touch screen. They do have a little more bulk, and need a bit more pressure than your fingers, but it’s not bad at all. I can manipulate the phone just as well as I do with my fingers. That includes zooming in and out on the browser and even typing which I thought would tough to do with the additional bulk added to my fingers (those little letter buttons are kind of small!). On top of them actually performing pretty well, they are also warm. The fleece lining does its job. I have worn these for a couple of negative-temperature days and they’ve kept my hands as warm as my previous thick winter gloves. The gloves also have a nice rubbery mesh on the palms which help to keep my phone from sliding off my hand when I’m using it. All in all, I’m very happy with the purchase, and would recommend them to anyone who needs to manipulate a touch screen device while standing outside on a cold winter’s day.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The lens came in a blister pack which included the actual lens, which is pretty sturdy with a metal housing. It also includes a lens cap and a little magnetic bottom cap with a tiny lanyard on it. The way the lens works is by attaching to the back of your phone with a small magnet ring around the bottom. If your phone doesn’t have anything for the magnet to stick to, they include two small metal rings (like little tiny washers) with peel off adhesive on them that you can stick to the back of your phone. I ended up sticking it to the case I have over the back of my phone. The lens itself is made two pieces screwed together that change depending on the type of photos you want to take. The lower, smaller piece is the macro lens, and the upper wider piece, when screwed on is the wide angle.

I was somewhat skeptical of how well a lens for a camera phone would work, but have been pleasantly surprised with my experiments. I started with a few macro shots and it does a pretty nice job. See the examples below. I took some shots of a few small items I had laying around. For the macro shots, I took a normal shot of the Old Capitol, then one with the wide angle lens. The wide angle shots aren’t as nice as the macros, but all in all, it’s a nice little tool to have.

If you want to own one of these yourself, I bought my from Deal Extreme, but they are all over ebay as well.

I don’t use a whole lot of photo services, but did want the ability to sent multiple photos to multiple services at once with one fell swoop. The Pixelpipe app for the Pre does just that. First I set up an account on their site, and then add pipes. Pipes are connections to other other sites and services where you’d like to send your photos. For me, that just means Flickr, Facebook, and my blog (the “latest mobile photo” section in the upper right). If you’re looking for services beyond what I use, chances are Pixelpipe provides support for it. They’ve got a GIANT list of blogging and photo platforms to add pipes from. So once I’ve added my pipes and fired up the application, I can select multiple photos to send out to all my pipes, or just pick and choose which pipes I want to send the current set of photos to. I can then add a title and/or caption, hit send, and the images move their way through the pipes around the internets to all the places I’ve specified. It’s as easy as that.

So let’s say you don’t have a Palm Pre to install the app onto… no worries, they have tools for a large number of platforms (iPhone, Android, Nokia, IM, Windows, Linux, Mac). I’ve been really happy with this little app, and it’s taken a multiple step, multiple app process down to one simple app.

My Previous Solution
Before getting into what system I ended up with, I’ll got into a little detail on how I was backing things up before. First, what I back up is probably pretty common. I keep recent copies of my music, photos, and documents, as well as my e-mail in-boxes up in the cloud. I do this with a great little app called Alway Sync and Amazon S3. I set up three profiles in Alway Sync, one for documents, one for music and photos, and a third for email. I should probably clarify that my music collection is currently living on a separate machine serving music to all the computers in the house. That small piece was a bit of a sticking point for some solutions that I’ll outline below. Alway Sync watches certain directories (or mapped drives) for changes and then uploads those changes to my S3 account on a weekly basis. This solution has been working well for the past two or so years, and would probably have continued to work minus one small thing… price. Turns out I added too much stuff, and S3 charges by storage and transfer. Constantly adding to my music library, and taking photos (many times very large images saved in RAW format) has bumped up the storage I need to a level where it’s cheaper to go with another provider. Amazon S3 works great, but after getting my invoice for S3 last month, I decided to see if there was anything out there that was a little less expensive and provided the same level of backup and storage. Fortunately, I was able to find something, that worked just as well, and maybe even a little better than my previous solution.

Crashplan (my choice)
Crashplan is the service I ultimately decided to use. Feature wise, it was very close to  many of the other services I evaluated, but had a few things that put it over the top. Crashplan has a nice multi-platform application that doesn’t seem to be a resource hog. It also seems to give me a bit more control of the directories that I want to upload. It backs up your home directory by default, and lets you pick any other directories you want to add to that. The one thing that Crashplan doesn’t allow (outside of a somewhat messy hack) is the ability to select a mapped drive for backup. Initially I thought this would be a deal-killer, and ultimately ended up being the one piece missing from from all the other solutions I tried. It turns out I just wasn’t looking in the right place. Crashplan offers two types of backup plans. Once is individual – one computer, the other is a family plan that provides backup for several computers. With the family option, I didn’t need to figure out a way to back up the mapped drive from my primary machine, I could just set up an instance of Crashplan on the media server itself, as well as any other computer in the house. Storage-wise, Crashplan provides unlimited space, and doesn’t charge for throughput like S3 does. And pricing for Chashplan isn’t really any higher than any of the other solutions I looked at, and more importantly, it costs less per month than what I was paying for all my data on Amazon S3. Another nice feature in Crashplan in addition to backing up data to their servers, is the ability to backup to another computer somewhere else. So if you’re running the Crashplan app, and I’m running the Chrasplan app, we can select and approve each other’s machines as backup locations for the other (I’m not taking advantage of that feature, but it’s nice to have as an option). All those things put together made the choice easy.

Carbonite
Carbonite Backup is actually one of the first backup solutions I tried. They advertise on TWiT regularly, so I figured I’d give them a try. Features and price are just about the same as the other solutions I tried. They charge a little under $5/month, and have unlimited storage space. Where Carbonite fell a little short for my needs was in their software. The backup application seemed a little clunky, and as I mentioned above, didn’t give me the option to backup a mapped drive. They also don’t offer the family plan that Crashplan offers. Also, I felt their the software was a bit intrusive. It really gets it tentacles into your OS. It adds a little colored dot to folder icons in Windows showing the status of the update. Some people may thing this is a feature, but to me it took over a little bit too much of the OS. I guess I want the backup program to do it’s thing, and get out of the way. Carbonite looks to be a good solution, and seems to get good reviews around the ‘net, but it just didn’t quite work out for my needs.

BackBlaze
BackBlaze is very similar to Carbonite in terms of features and price. The service is $5/month for unlimited storage. It also does not back up mapped drives or network storage. They do at least provide an option for multiple computers, but they charge an additional $5/month for each computer. The other thing about BackBlaze (similar to Carbonite) that isn’t quite right for my purposes is the software. The software by default determines what it’s going to backup, and you have to go through and deselect the things you want removed. Again, this could be seen as a feature, it’s quick and easy right out of the box, but I didn’t want to deal with digging through the default directories. I think BackBlaze looks to be a good solution, just not for me. I’ve actually recommended BackBlaze to a couple people already.

Mozy
Mozy is the last solution on my list, and probably my least favorite. Mozy offers the same song and dance on price and features, $4.95/month for unlimited storage. Their software is OK, really not any better or worse than the others I tested. They are also lacking a multiple computer solution, or an option for network storage. Mozy was looking promising until I started reading some reviews. Apparently several people have had issues with restoring data from Mozy. One would think the restore (heaven forbid you need it) is the most important part of backing up your data. After reading these review, I gave up on exploring Mozy as a backup solution.

Good: WebOS
In one sentence: WebOS is great! I am extremely happy with the OS running on the Palm Pre. It is elegant, well thought out, and very easy to use. I’m a big fan of the multitasking, or the “cards” metaphor that it uses. You open an app by touching it, then simply swipe up and throw the card away to close it. The UI is really different than anything else out there at the moment. I found myself taking advantage of the the multitasking right out of the box when setting up my email accounts. It was nice to be able to have the mail application running as well as multiple web “cards” open to look up server addresses. The gestures have become ingrained, and I find myself trying to use them when my iPod touch before realizing that that they’re not going to do anything. The shining star of the Palm Pre is definitely WebOS. If you haven’t tried it out, go visit a Sprint store and give it a spin. There are a lot of nice little touches built in that are way too numerous to mention here, but WebOS is definitely a great OS to work with.

Good: Hardware
Before I bought the Pre, I‘d seen quite a few photos and videos of the device, but you really don’t get a sense of how sleek it is until you hold it in your hand. It fits really well in your hand, and has a nice heft to it. The screen is a nice size, and the touch screen responds really well. The slide-out keyboard (another selling factor for me) works really well. I’m coming from a Treo 755p to this device, so I’m using to having a physical keyboard. The Pre is a bit smaller than the Treo, but I had no problem getting used to it very quickly. I like that there is a physical keyboard that I can slide out when I need it, but can leave it folded in when I’m just interacting with the touch screen alone.

Good: Browser
Apple set the bar very high for a mobile browser with the iPhone. Palm has taken most of the things that make Mobile Safari great and put them into the Pre. If you’ve ever used an iPhone or iPod Touch browser, you know what I’m talking about. Getting a full desktop browser feeling into the palm of your hand is probably one of the nicest features of the phone.

Good: Notification Bar
I honestly think this is one of my favorite parts of WebOS. When you get a notification for something, such as an email, or a text message, they show up really elegantly at the bottom of the screen in the notification bar. When they first appear, they pop up with a one-line description in the lower portion of the screen, keeping whatever application you have open. You can then touch it to make it larger (see more information about the notification), or you can swipe it away and go on with whatever you’re doing. If you get multiple notifications, they pile up in the lower portion of your screen, and show simply as tiny icons indication their type, allowing you to select later to go into the actual app, or swipe them away and ignore them. The notifications grab your attention, but don’t interrupt what you’re currently working on.

Good: Synergy
Synergy is the name that Palm gave their pull-everything-together-from-the-cloud-into-the-phone system. In a nutshell, what it does is pull contacts from various locations around the net (google contacts, Facebook, outlook, etc) and merges them together into the address book on the device. It sees that you have a Facebook friend named John Smith, and a Google contact named Jonathan Smith that share an email address. It assume they’re the same person, and makes one contact entry for them pulling all the contact data from either source. If that data changes, either on the device, or in the cloud, your phone is updated accordingly. This also works with the calendar, pulling all your calendars into one place, yet allowing your to split them up or view whichever you’re currently working on (i.e. home/work/holidays). It’s a really nice way to bring everything into one place, and keep it up to date. One area where it could improve (and I presume it will get added later) is more sources for data. Currently the Pre works with Google (docs/calendar/talk), Facebook, Microsoft Exchange, and AIM. I’d like to be able to hook in Yahoo and Microsoft (Hotmail/Messenger) as well, but I’m willing to bet that’s coming soon.

Good: Touchstone
Technically this isn’t part of the phone. It’s an accessory that you have to buy extra, but it is totally handy. The Touchstone is an induction charger for the Pre. So, you slap on a special back (battery cover), and drop the phone onto the magnetic touchstone, and it charges it for you. No messing with cables, just drop it on and charge. Even though it’s a great addition to the phone, I’d drop it in the “Bad” category for the high price tag. Luckily I had a gift card, so it wasn’t as painful of a purchase as it could have been. Ssuper-handy… but super-pricey.

Good: Quickies

• Fast!
• Screen is beautiful!
• GPS and TeleNav (turn by turn navigation)
• Email client is great!
• WiFi/Cell data switching works well (FAST)
• Good clear 3 mega-pixel camera (see photos from the Pre in my mobile gallery)

Bad: Battery
The Pre battery life ain’t that great. It isn’t unusable, but it’s not wonderful. I am probably a heavy user, and it gets me through the day… but just barely. The battery life is a tad bit worse than my Treo 755p (which wasn’t that great either). It gets me through the day, and I guess that’s good. There is definitely room for improvement (c’mon firmware update!!).

Bad: Note Sync
This one is really easy… notes don’t sync. You’d think with all the great synergy mumbo jumbo going on there would be some way I could enter notes (hello google notes?) without typing them manually into the phone.

Bad: Apps
The apps aren’t really that bad, in fact the apps currently available in the App Catalog are actually pretty good (woo hoo Evernote!). It’s the low number of apps that is bad. Again, the phone is young, and they haven’t opened up the SDK yet. I just need to have a little patience and wait a little longer. Palm has said the SDK will be released by the end of summer, so that will hopefully open the floodgates on the App Catalog.
UPDATE: The SDK has now been released – new apps added to catalog “sometime this fall.”

Bad: Bluetooth
There is bluetooth on the phone, but it can only be used for audio at the moment. It is stereo, and it does work with my bluetooth headset, but I’d really like to be able to transfer files with it… like I’ve been able to do with every single phone I’ve ever owned. This is nothing a firmware update can’t fix – the capability is there, it just need to be pulled out in the OS.

Bad: Video/Audio Player
The video and audio players do what they’re supposed to do, but are missing some polish in some certain areas. First of all, they don’t remember where you left off when playing media. I listen to a lot of podcasts (which the Pre can’t download BTW), and don’t want to have to fast forward (there is no scrub bar) to the place I left off in an hour long podcast. It is also missing a way to delete audio from the device from inside either player. I’d like to be able to remove a file without having to plug the phone into a computer. I think (hope) some of these features will come, but probably don’t use these apps as much as I would if they were there. I still carry around an iPod Nano when I want to listen to music of podcasts.

Bad: Quickies

• Can’t search email messages
• No data tethering
• The calendar app is a bit sluggish

Everything considered, I think the Palm Pre is a great phone. Is it an iPhone killer? I don’t think so, but I do believe it raises the smart phone bar, and does a good number of things better than the iPhone. I think any sort of real competition is good, and the Pre is the first phone that has really presented a challenge. There are some areas that need a bit more polish, but fortunately most of them should be able to be taken care of with a firmware update. It’s really just a matter of Palm actually doing it, and bringing the Pre up to the level it can easily be. I think many of the items in my “Bad” category can be chalked up to rushing the device out the door. Like I mentioned in my last Pre post, it was do or die for Palm with this device. They couldn’t afford to wait any longer to get it out, and some things may have suffered a bit because of that. So did Palm hit a home run with the Pre? I think they came pretty close, and time will tell as the device evolves and moves forward.

Book Army is a new site that focuses more on the recommendation feature, and less on the cataloging/tracking features that I use in LibraryThing. It is much closer to a Last.fm type service in that it looks at your likes, and suggests other books based on other people who like the same books. I spent a little while entering ratings on the books that I had been tracking in LibraryThing the past few years to see what I’d get back. There were a few good books that came back in my results – more than what I was getting from LibraryThing. I’m sure the service will get better over time, as the number of users goes up, and as I rate more books on the service. The things I like about Book Army recommendations is that it provides reasoning for a suggest book (you may like book X because you enjoyed books X, Y, and Z). The other nice feature is you can correct suggestions. If a book is suggested that looks incorrect for whatever reason, you can tell Book Army, that it was a bad suggestion to help it get even better data about your reading tastes. Since this service is new, the “Book Army” is still being recruited. We’ll see if recommendations improve as the size of the army increases. Who knows, maybe my tastes are just so eclectic (it certainly isn’t working for me in Netflix) that it’s hard to determine what I enjoy.

Asus Eee Keyboard [images via TechwareLabs.com

ASUS Press Release – Eee Keyboard
Being the first multi-media center enabled by ultra wideband HDMI, the Eee Keyboard is not only a fully-functional PC; it also serves as a hub that wirelessly connects all multimedia devices to utilize any monitor or TV as a viewing platform.

More info and photos:

• Asus releases EeePC Keyboard with Integrated Screen @ CES
  [TechWareLabs.com]
• Eee – that’s a lovely keyboard, pet!
  [beyondstandards.com]
• ASUS to reveal ‘Eee Keyboard’ with a 5-inch touchscreen and 32GB SSD
  [aving.net]
• Eee Keyboard: An Entire Touchscreen Home Theater PC
  [gizmodo.com]
• Cruchgear hand-on video of the keyboard in action

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

Evernote allows you to throw just about any sort of information you’ve got on your computer up into the cloud to retrieve it whenever it is needed. There are desktop apps for just about every platform. There are web clippers for just about every browser. There are even cell phone apps that let you send information from the road. Whatever it is you capture, it all gets synced to your Evernote account. So, I can log into the website or pull up the Evernote app to get anything and everything I’ve added. Once the info is up there, you can tag it and organize it however you ‘d like. It also does text recognition on images you upload, so everything is searchable. Given my back and fourth situation, Evernote really helps me keep track of what’s goign on.

Given everything above, I don’t think we’ll be buying one of these. My wish came true that I mentioned at the enf of the Entertainment PC Software post. A plugin for Meedio was created to deal with Netflix. As I’ve mentioned before, we have an Entertainment PC that controls all of our media (music/video/tv/etc.). Meedio is the application we use for the main interface on that computer. An incredible plugin author (UFGrayMatter) created one that can handle all aspects of Netflix. The plugin is called MeeFlix, and works really well. We’re able to manage our Netflix Queue, and also view any of the Watch Now streaming movies right within the (remote control friendly) Meedio interface on our TV. So now our Entertainment PC does the same thing as this new Netflix Roku box and doesn’t cost $100.

Video of MeeFlix in action