My new ibook

I've had my new ibook for a little less than a month now, and I really enjoy using it. I added as much RAM to it that I could, and bumped the standard 40 gig hard drive up to the 80 gig one. Its got built in wireless, bluetooth, and a decent battery life of around 4 hours.

I really just wanted to highlight one feature of the new ibooks that I find particularly amazingly useful: you can use the track pad to scroll up and down on pages, just by using two fingers instead of one. Its really like having the scroll ball of a mouse whenever you want it. Instead of going over to the little arrows and clicking them up or down, or even using short cut keys, I can just lower my index finger slightly and I am scrolling. Pretty cool eh?
I'll be sure to get back to the coolness of my ibook in some other posts, but that is my favorite feature so far.

Men who Know

I was looking at old war posters tonight, and couldn't help but post about this one I found.
It's pretty funny

Who knew, there are a TON of posters about syphilis!

Check out this great resource Here

Says that they are mostly in the public domain too!
Here is a better way to search through them

My current Podcasts:

Coverville -- My favorite, does a 40 min show of covers of other songs. Very cool.
Ebert & Roeper -- Not bad to hear two old guys bicker about movies
IndieFeed -- I like the Indie version, but whichever one you like, its free music, and cool music.

Podcasts and itunes

So, you've downloaded the most recent version of itunes and installed it right? Good.
Open the program, and look around a bit. What we will be interested in is the new menu item that says "Podcasts" with that wierd purple icoon next to it. Click on it to take you to the podcast menu.
You will see an empty library as you have not gotten any podcasts yet, right? right.
In the lower left had corner of the main window you will see a link titled "Podcast Directory".
Click on that, and you'll be wisked away to the podcast section of the music store.
On the left you will see "Today's Top Podcasts" and in the center is a few podcasts that apple wants to showcase for whatever reason.
Today's Top section is a great place to look for good podcasts, as there are alot of crappy ones, and sometimes its hard to tell what's worth downloading and whats not.
So try clicking on one of the top podcasts. I'll try the "Ebert & Roeper" movie review one.
That will take you to a page where you can gain some more info about your podcast of choice.
In the lower section, you will see the podcasts that are availible for download. To the upper right is a link to the podcast's website. And near the center, is a button that says "Subscribe" click on that.
FYI the word "subscribe" isn't a very good choice as it implies that you will be purchasing something, like a magizine. But I ensure you most of these are free. They should have gotten a better word for that, or made up one of their own... like "Podscribe" or "Podgrab" or whatever.
They will pop up a little message asking "are you sure?" and click ok to start getting your podcast!
So it will return to your podcast library, but NOW you will actually have a listing in your directory. And your itunes will be churing to download your new podcast. Once it gets done, you can start listening to your hip new podcast right now.

To mess a little more, click on the "settings" button in the lower left hand corner, and see what you can see. I like changing the the "Keep:" option to "All unplayed episodes" but thats just cause I don't want to fill up my new ibooks hard drive. But you do what you want.

IF you get bored with your podcast, or pick a lemon, simply select "unsubscribe" and its gone.
On the otherhand, if you want more of your podcast, click on the little black arrow next to it's name and you can select other episodes to "GET"
so go getting!

Podcasts are good for you

Podcasts are getting even bigger and cooler, so I thought I might mention them. The latest iTunes program (4.9) comes with built in support for the downloading and management of podcasts. Also the latest firmware of ipods (you are updating your firmware right?) include support for podcasts as well.
But what is a podcast? According to the coolest online encyclopedia around, wikipedia.org, Podcasting is a method of publishing audio broadcasts via the Internet.
Basically, a podcast is a radio show that is online instead of the radio. This method of distribution, the Internet that is, makes it possible for just about anybody to make a podcast for their own. That being the case, it is far more likely that you find a podcast that perks your interest rather than a true radio show.
Another benefit to podcasts over real radio, is that you can listen to your podcasts at any time you want. And if you have a ipod (where podcasts get their name) then you can listen to them where ever you want as well. If you want you can listen to them over and over again, as they are downloaded to your harddrive just like a song in itunes.
And best of all, almost all of them are free, and pretty simple to use.
So thats why you need to start listening to podcasts. Next post, I'll describe the procedure used to "subscribe" to a podcast from itunes.

Test of DashBlog

This post is coming from the cool widget "DashBlog". It allows you to blog from a little widget in tiger. Very cool. Too bad xanga isn't cool enough to do this!

Xanga Sucks

I'm just amazed that people actually use xanga (including all my friends and family).  The basic version sucks so much compared to any other blogging service:  no spell check, no posting by email, no nothing.  Just a look at the list of "premium" features and see how many are given to us by blogger for nothing!  I'm not going to post stuff on it anymore.  I'm just staying with blogger, thank you very much.