Other than the odd time when I’ll go down to Future Shop and make a purchase, I do almost all of my shopping online these days. Part of that reason is that I live in a small town that really doesn’t have a great selection for many items. The other reason is that I’m often busy, and so I can simply make an order online and have it show up a week to ten days later. The same can be said when I travel too. Other than the markets that you find all over the word, and the odd mall, some things on the road are still best to purchase online. A good example of that is when I bought a new DVD drive ...

I’ll do a big post about the launch of WPtouch Pro 3.0 in a few days, but for now all I’ll say is that it has been a fairly massive undertaking that we started almost a full year ago. We’ll be revealing everything on Thursday, but for now everyone will have to make due with a quick teaser: If you’re interested in being notified when we launch in a few days, head on over to BraveNewCode.com and sign-up at the bottom. We’re definitely looking forward to pulling back the veil and showing everyone what we’ve been working on for quite a while now. WPtouch Pro 3.0: Now Available WPtouch ...

As many people know, I tend to travel quite a bit – over the last 18 months I believe I have visited on the order of 13 or 14 countries. And while there are always interesting things to do in each new city or country I visit, sometimes I miss some of the comforts of home (such as english TV or movies). Back home when I am bored I typically watch Apple TV or Netflix. Unfortunately when I am outside of North America and I try to access Netflix I often end up with a message like this: One way I’ve found around this is to simply tunnel all my traffic through a VPN server in the United States. ...

I’m down at Driven Audio down in Abbotsford right now getting some new speakers, an amplifier and a subwoofer put into my Mazda 3 sport. I’ve been meaning to upgrade the audio system for years, but have never gotten around to it. Considering I’m heading off on a bit of a road trip next weekend, I thought now would be a good time. Driven Audio Mostly Disassembled Mazda 3 Sport 10:45am – speakers in the doors are being removed Mazda 3 Sport Audio Makeover 1pm – Installing tweeters and 5x7s in the doors, along with the crossover Speaker and Crossover Installation 2:30pm – I wasn’t going ...

I’m not sure why, but the internet in all of Buenos Aires seems to be on its knees. It’s definitely worse in my apartment, but it’s sporadic all over the city right now too. The first two months I was here it was slow, but reliable for the most part. It would take me 10 hours to download something that would take me 1 or 2 back home, but you could always get online when you needed to. It’s been getting worse over the last two weeks, and these last few days have been pretty brutal. The internet in my apartment went down this afternoon for a while, so I went across the street to a coffee ...

It’s been a long time since I did a technology post, but I’ve recently had security on my mind and thought I would give a quick primer for SSL. For those of you who don’t know, SSL stands for secure socket layer, and is the technology on the internet that makes all eCommerce and web security possible. And here’s how it works. First, you need to understand the two different types of encryption. Symmetric Encryption Symmetric encryption is any encryption that involves one key and can be decoded in exactly the same manner that it was encoded. In fact, often decoding a message is simply the ...

I came to Buenos Aires with an iPad, a Macbook Pro, a Canon DLSR, a 28mm lens, a Kodak Playsport HD camera, and a Canon something or other point and shoot camera – quite the load. Here’s a little update on how it’s going. The Good The iPad is great for reading at home, but it’s not so good for reading out in public in a city with a lot of petty crime. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen a single iPad down here since I’ve arrived. As a result, I’m thankful I brought my Kindle with me, since it blends into a coffee shop scene far easier. Right before I left Canada I purchased (or rather, ...

While SMS is great when you have a package that includes unlimited SMS messages, it can be extremely expensive to either send or receive international SMS messages, often to the tune of $2/message. Here are a few alternatives that are available for the iPhone to help reduce costs. Kik Messenger A few days ago, my friend John recommended that I grab a copy of the Kik Messenger application on the iPhone. Kik is an SMS-like application that allows you to have real time text chats with your friends over data or WiFi. Because it supports push notifications, it’s as real-time as SMS is, which makes ...

BarCamp, Photo by John Biehler Tomorrow is the kick-off party for BarCamp Vancouver. While I do indeed have a ticket, I’m not entirely sure I’m going to be able to make it at this point. I’m right at the end of a huge client deliverable, and my attendance will depend on whether or not I can get it all done tomorrow. In addition, I’m also hoping to start moving things into storage this weekend if I can. That said, I’ve been to a few other BarCamp Vancouver events before, and am hoping to make an appearance at the party if I can. BarCamp is an unconference – attendees put conference ...

So, we’re on day four of seven in the Caribbean, and so far it’s been a lot of fun. Other than one cloudy day, the rest of the vacation so far has been hot and sunny, which is great. As it’s still low season, the resort isn’t as packed as we’re used to, which is fine because we’ve been required to spend a lot of time doing work due to some projects we have going on back home. Unfortunately for me, I dropped my iPhone 4 yesterday and ended up cracking the front-side protective glass. In the iPhone 3G, it would cost about $15 and some sweat and tears to replace the glass. Apparently ...

I’ll admit, I don’t get it. It’s been four years now and yet Twitter is pushing forward with an advertising based revenue model (at least, pushing forward via a 3rd party). I’m not Twitter, and for me to sit on the sidelines and recommend a revenue model for a service I’m not a part of is pretty weak. But that said, I honestly think people would pay for a Pro twitter service if Twitter would simply offer one. I think back to my days in the BBS era when we would all pay $50 (this is back in 1990, so probably more like $100 now) simply to have a (+) next to our BBS name. That’s a form ...

We had a customer email us today saying they were having some issues with PayPal. For the most part, PayPal is pretty reliable when it comes to purchases for us, and we don’t notice any hiccups. But today it seems like something was amiss within the computer walls at PayPal. The post on PayPal’s blog today said: Anuj from the PayPal comms team here. I wanted to let everyone know that we’re experiencing an issue on PayPal.com. It started at 8am PT today and means that almost all our members are having difficulty logging into their accounts and sending or receiving money from PayPal. We are ...

It would be pretty hard to call myself a Migratory Nerd if I wasn’t in fact a pretty big technology nerd. Thankfully, I have enough photography and technological gear around here that it’s pretty easy to describe myself as a nerd. In a perfect world, I’d be able to bring everything along with me. But given that I want to travel with a 40L backpack, I’m not really going to have a ton of room in there. The following is a list of the technology I’ll be bringing along on my little adventure. 13″ Macbook Pro The idea that people used to once travel the world for months at a time without ...

I’ve said it before, but I’m going to say it again: I think the iPhone would be a lot cooler if it had a temperature sensor on it. In terms of technology, all it is a single temperature controlled resistor (called a thermistor), probably worth about 5 cents. But it would be cool to be on a patio and be able to see how hot it is. I also think that if everyone opted in to given this data to a central repository, that it would be possible to increase the accuracy of our existing weather models a great deal. Currently weather models are primed using sparse initial conditions. For example, in Vancouver, ...

When I posted about the iPhone 4 a few weeks ago, a few people thought I might be smoking crack to think that people buying unlocked phones would have any impact on the cell phone industry in Canada. While that still remains to be seen, Rogers just announced that they’re willing to sweeten a 3 year contract by $100, which in my mind is a direct result of the lack of people signing up (or extending their current contract) to a 3 year contract compared to previous iPhone launches. Obviously that’s just my gut feeling, but it’s in line with my previous thinking regarding people wanting to jump ...

I spent the majority of the day yesterday waiting in a huge line-up at Vancouver’s Pacific Centre Apple store. Doors opened at 7am, but thanks to a late night wine-filled game of Cranium, yours truly wasn’t quite up to snuff at 7am. I strolled down at around 9:15am or so, only to be greeted with a line that not only snaked all the way down the halls inside the mall, but had spilled out onto the streets, wrapping down Granville for about 3/4 of a block. I ran into my friend Dave at the store. Despite a level 4 hangover, Dave managed to get there around 7am and secure a pretty nice spot in line. ...

Yes sports fans, it’s almost that time. On Friday the highly anticipated successor to the iPhone 3GS is released. My experience so far with Rogers wireless this last week, as well as on launch days in the past, seems to indicate that Friday is going to be a complete gong show for everyone involved. Unlike the previous launches, we now have an interesting option in Canada: we can purchase an unlocked phone from the Apple store. Unless I’m mistaken, I don’t believe we’ve ever had that luxury in Canada, at least not with Rogers. I remember getting my first Motorola phone back in 2000 – ...

As we all know, oil has been gushing out into the Gulf of Mexico now since April 20th, nearly six weeks now. It’s an unprecedented environmental disaster that will damage the economies of many of the communities along the affected shorelines, and also impact the wildlife in those areas. 11 people lost their lives in the original explosion, and I can’t even fathom how many birds and fish have probably died as well. This is an accident that many people believe should not have happened. In an ideal world, there would have been multiple blowout preventers and a chain of quick-to-implement disaster ...

Seriously. It’s a massive slap in the face to be on hold for over an hour with a company while they’re playing on-hold advertisements talking about how much better their customer service is than everyone else’s. My internet has been slowing down consistently month after month to the point where it’s become nearly unusable. I’m paying for one of their higher end packages which is supposed to give up to 15 Mbps downstream and up to 1 Mbps downstream. Here’s what it’s been like for the last few weeks: Right now I’m getting 4 Mbps downstream, and only 76 kbps upstream, with ping times ...

We’re in the process of moving some servers around right now, and one of the things we need to do is move mail accounts around. I’ve been a big fan of IMAP over POP for a few years now, mainly because the messages are kept up on the server, which ultimately keeps every machine looking roughly the same. The unfortunate aspect of that is that when you move servers you have to find a way to get the messages over to their new home. One of the more obvious ways to move messages is to proxy them through your own personal machine. To do that, you simply need to set up both accounts in a mail program ...