Technology Posts

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 for my Macbook Air while in Thailand. I simply logged into Thai version of the Apple store and had the item shipped to me in Thailand. […]

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 Pro 3.0 is now available! If you’re interested in picking up a copy, then head on over to the main WPtouch Pro 3.0 product page and purchase a copy. WPtouch Pro 3.0 has a 7-day refund guarantee, so you can test […]

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. The service I use to do this is StrongVPN, and an account costs around $55 USD per year. The sign-up process only took me about ten minutes, and another five minutes […]

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. 10:45am – speakers in the doors are being removed 1pm – Installing tweeters and 5x7s in the doors, along with the crossover 2:30pm – I wasn’t going to replace the deck in my car, but the guys convinced me it will sound a lot better than the stock unit, and doesn’t require the use of a line voltage converter to match the stock components. Plus, the new unit would have built in Bluetooth and function better with the existing audio – something the after-market Bluetooth unit I […]

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 shop. It worked better there, but it was still a bit spotty. I left there and went to Starbucks, where the internet didn’t work at all. In fact, Starbucks probably has the worst […]

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 result of encoding an already encoded message, which produces the original plain text. For example, one could simply replace the letter “e” with the letter “i” in a document (and vice versa) and send it to a friend. Obviously it’s a pretty crappy form […]

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, my dad purchased for me), a little blue Kindle cover, so my Kindle looks a lot like a normal book or maybe even a daytimer if you didn’t know what it was […]

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 it useful for communicating with friends and family back home. And because it uses the data network instead of SMS, you don’t have to pay SMS fees for each message, which can save you a bundle of money when you’re traveling abroad. Unfortunately at this […]

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 suggestions on a board, and everyone votes on what they’d like to hear about. It’s a great concept, and most people come away not only learning about new concepts, but also helping others to learn new concepts. Tomorrow night is the party down at the […]

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 with the iPhone 4 though it’s not possible to replace the glass by itself, since it’s firmly glued to the LCD. So, you generally have to replace the LCD unit at the same time. I’m going […]