Iomega MiniMax

We have been using our Mac mini a lot recently. In addition to the kids using it to play games, I am using it for iPhone development, and we use it to manage our photos and family videos. Since I keep it behind the monitor, it is a pain to get to the USB ports. I normally, just leave the cables for the USB devices connected to the USB ports on the back of the Mac mini, and just make the other ends lose and acceptible without moving items around. The problem with this is the Mac mini only has 4 USB ports. With the external hard drive, iPhone cable, standard USB cable for digital camera, there aren't enough ports for the mouse and keyboard.

So I went looking for a USB hub that would have the same footprint as the Mac mine.  I found the Iomega MiniMax Hard Drive.  This external hard drive has both USB and FireWire hubs.  It fits perfectly under my Mac mini, and has allowed me to to everything that I have wanted.

Google Voice for cell phones

I have been having a problem receiving my voicemail on my iPhone.  My wife would leave message on my cell phone, but my phone would show no indication of a waiting voice mail message.  Also when I call in to get my voicemail, nothing appears their either.  I think that this is a problem with AT&T and not my iPhone.

Google made it available to use Google Voice with existing cell phones.  With this you can now have your voicemail sent to Google voice, and you can listen to it from your phone or your computer.  Also Google Voice will create a transcript of your message, and you can received that via email or sms.

I have been using Google Voice for a little bit, but this functionality allows me to receive messages from callers that don't know my Google Voice number in my Google Voice inbox.

[via Engadget]

Ping!

On Friday, I saw that the Ping! iPhone application was available for free. Ping is an iPhone application that let's you have SMS or instant message conversations with other people with iPhones or iPod Touches. Ping! uses Apple's push notification service, so don't need to leave the application running to keep receiving messages.

The benefit if using push over tradition SMS messages is that it is cheaper, if you only want to talk to people who also have iPhones or iPods.  This is also especially true if you have a limited number of text messages per month on your plan.   Also for iPod users, since they don't have access to SMS, this may be a viable solution.

I don' think that I will be using this application that often. Since I already uses SMS with people who are not using iPhones, I don't know if it would be worth it to use a separate application for the subset of my contacts that have iPhones and also have Ping! installed.

Disabled gallery2

I have disabled our installation of gallery2, as I hinted to before.  We have changed to use flickr and facebook to share photos with our friends and family.  The main reason that I disabled it was because all of our photos, that we decided to share, were publicly available.  gallery2 does support user authentication, but it is hard to have family create accounts on the site.

Since most people that we are sharing photos with have flickr or facebook accounts, that was a hurdle that we didn't have to go over to allow us to restrict access to our photos.

RSS_PHP

I have been using Magpie Rss for a while to parse rss feeds in php.  It has worked pretty well for me.  But recently I have been working on some projects where I need to parse tags that have attributes. Some examples of tags with attributes in rss are enclosure tags for podcasts or cloud tags for rssCloud.  Magpie Rss doesn't support attributes, but only support values within begin and end tags.

I found RSS_PHP which looks to do what I want.  This library does support rss attributes and extensions.  I will pay for the commercial version if the free version continue to works as well as it is now.

Install Ubuntu Netbook Remix in VMWare

I like playing with different distributions of Linux, and am pretty curious about distributions that are geared towards netbooks.  I was curious about checking out the latest version of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, but I wanted to check it out in VMWare Workstation before actually installing it on my netbook.  Unfortunately, the installer is intended to be copied to a USB thumb drive and installed from there.  This doesn't work in VMWare.

This page has instructions on how to install UNR in a virtual machine.  These instructions create a disc image that can be mounted our burned to disc.

rssCloud

RSSCloud is an interesting concept.  The idea is to define a standard way to push notification of changes in rss feeds.  I have installed the RSSCloud Wordpress plugin, just so I can write a service that listens to these notifications.

[via Mashable]