Picture taken off the fort “El Morro” in San Juan, Puerto Rico

I always find myself looking for deals for things I don’t need on craigslist, and I always forget what I emailed about when I actually get a ‘real’ reply from someone.  I usually use crazedlist.org to search for other cities around me (or cities I’ll be visiting soon), so when I get back a bunch of craigslist emails, it can be time consuming to find the link to that specific listing to remind myself what I inquired about! 

This greasemonkey script I wrote will auto add the URL of the listing to the mailto: link in all craigslist ads.  So now, when you click the listing’s email address, and it creates a new email in your client (webmail, outlook, etc), it will not only auto fill in the TO and SUBJECT fields like normal, but will also add the URL to that listing in the BODY so you can easily reference it when the seller replies to your message!

Download it here:  craigslist add email url

WinPlay.com just released Guitar Hero Mobile (direct link) for mobile phones, so, being the Guitar Hero fan I am, I had to buy it and try it out!  What did I think? — It’s definitely worth the money ($15 one time purchase, $5/mo subscription)!  I chose to go with the one time buy because I could easily see my self playing this after 3 months, assuming it’s good, and I hate to waste money, haha.   

The game play is very similar to that of the “non mobile” versions, such as on playstation or xbox, other than it’s only 3 keys instead of 5.  At first I thought it would be way too easy with three keys, but when playing expert it was hard enough to be fun.  You start out with 15 songs, 4 to begin with, and like the real game, you have to play through career mode to unlock the other 11.  Here is a list of differences from the mobile version to the console version:

• 3 keys instead of 5
• Songs are not nearly as long and fade out in the middle of the song when done
• Fewer characters and guitars
• No vs gameplay
• No ‘buying’ songs

Other than those items listed, the game is pretty much the same as full blown guitar hero!  You have the note streak count, star power, rock meter, different venues, requirement to beat career mode to unlock songs, etc.  Playback was not completely smooth, but I do not know if that is an issue with the video drivers on my HTC phone or what, but it’s good enough to play and enjoyable.  It comes with a good variety of songs, game play is intuitive and hard enough to be fun, and works in portrait or landscape.

One thing that bugs me is that each time you play a different song, it has to download it and then delete the song you just played…  To get around that, at least in windows mobile, is browse to your guitar hero directory and make that song read only!

Conclusion?  Go buy and download it!!  Check out my youtube review here which has gameplay, side-by-side comparison for easy, medium, and hard, and more:

Pros:

• Just like the console version
• Hard enough difficulty to be fun
• 3 new downloadable songs every month
• Landscape and Portrait support

Cons:

• Not free (haha)
• Playback is a LITTLE choppy
• Cannot assign buttons

A couple years ago, I posted how to fix your Dell XPS m1210 keyboard if it had a bulge in the keyboard.  A few months after that, I changed webhosts and managed to loose all the pictures, and today when searching through www.archive.org, I was able to find the thumbnails of all those pictures!

http://www.jrin.net/2006_06_06/why-the-dell-xps-m1210-has-a-flexablebulging-keyboard

go check it out if you happen to still have an m1210 which also happens to have a bulging keyboard (or just check it anyway for fun!).

Today, www.giveawayoftheday.com is making available Evernote Beta for free!  Check it while you can — Of special note, one feature I think is great is it’s ability to index any notes you take (copy stuff from the web, take digital pictures of rebates/business cards/etc) and it can make any text in those images (even handwriting) and make it searchable / indexable!

Direct link:  http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/evernote-beta/

Evernote Beta lets you capture any information from your real and digital life and then find it all easily anytime.

 

The latest version of Evernote, currently an invitation-only beta, gives users more options than ever before to create and find their memories - a Windows version (main download links), Mac version, Web version, Windows Mobile version, Mobile Web version, browser web page clippers, and more. All clients can be synchronized to one another via the web, ensuring that anything created in one place is accessible from all others.

 

In addition, all users now have access to Evernote’s powerful image recognition, which recognizes text inside of images so users can take camera phone snapshots of anything from whiteboards to wine labels.

Here’s a youtube video explaining what it can do:

Finally, a FREE and working desktop app to sync your outlook calendar with your google calendar!  This is especially great news for windows mobile users (among any other applications that use an outlook calendar) cause now both gcal and outlook can sync up with your pda/phones!  Now, if only there is a way to trigger a sync update when activesync syncs with a device..!

Direct link:  http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=89955

(image above was distorted for effect — the bulge is NOT like this, haha)

So, you just spent probably more than $1000 on your fancy new Dell XPS m1330 and expected perfection!  I know I did.  However, you open the box to find that you have a bulging keyboard!  Needless to say you are quite upset (again, I know I was). This reminded me of when I bought my first m1210, it had an even worse bulge in the keyboard, and it turned out to be the cause of the touchpad cable being improperly routed under some plastic of the chassis.  So I googled for people who have had their m1330’s come with a bulging keyboard too, and I found others post about it from notebookreview.com.  I have also since ordered 3, my roommate has also ordered 3, and ALL of them have had the bulging keyboard.  

BUT you are in luck!  Assuming you still want to keep the laptop (it’s a great laptop sans this keyboard issue), there is a way to fix it!  Turns out, it’s another cabling issue and I’m here to show you how.  Granted, even after this fix there still seems to be a SLIGHT bulge, to which I think is due to the the case itself which would be hard to fix (I explain this later), but it’s MUCH better after fixing the WiFi cable — good enough to finally be happy with it.   So here we go:

Continue reading ‘How to fix the Dell XPS m1330 keyboard bulge’ »

Just saw this posted on lifehacker, tried it out, and had to spread the word!  This freeware smartphone app will turn your wifi enabled smartphone into a wifi router (ad-hoc, aka: computer-to-computer) — in other words, you can take your windows mobile phone, and if you have a data plan and wifi, you can have any other wifi device connect to it as if it were a router!  I could definitely see this as being useful when my Comcast connection goes down and my roommates and I all need to have simple access to email and such until it goes back up!  Not just that, but also if you have a laptop (or any device) that doesn’t have bluetooth to utilize the bluetooth internet sharing in wm6, you can just use this as devices are more likely to have Wifi than bluetooth. 

Continue reading ‘WMWifiRouter, turn your wifi smartphone into a router’ »

I just got an HDHomeRun (product home page) for Christmas and this is one of the greatest things since the internet! — now if only there were more HD (high definition) channels broadcast in clear QAM (cable) or OTA (over the air / antenna)!  I’ve been using it for about a week now, and love it — I’m able to watch live HD on all my networked (wired) computers, while only paying for standard cable!  Just make sure you have good cable signal (or antenna reception)!

Continue reading ‘Review: HDHomeRun, a networked (QAM and OTA) dual HD tuner’ »

Ever since I read the first posting about the Eee PC, I’ve been wanting to get one and try it out, and today, mine finally came in the mail.  I read a few reviews about how small it was, but I can never appreciate the size of a device through most people’s pictures, so I figured I’d write a little about it here with some of my initial thoughts while including some size comparisons and unboxing pictures! 

My initial thoughts after using it for a few minutes?  — It would be GREAT for traveling with, even though it doesn’t have a very long battery life, at 2.5 (or upto 3.5 w/the more expensive model), it would be good enough for basic travel usage.  It’s small and light enough to not really notice it in a backpack or simply just carrying it around in any kind of bag. And with enough software and power to do your basic web browsing, music listening, word processing, etc you’re set for basically anything you’d probably do while not at home (in other words, not playing games, video editing, or doing hard core document handling/manipulating).  Yes, the screen size is small, but it’s still large enough to do such basic tasks - however, with the most common screen resolution recently being bumped up to 1024×768 (up from 800×600), many websites will have horizontal scroll bars on this size screen (see pictures below).  If that doesn’t bother you too much, then you are golden (and if it does, perhaps you could try seeing if those sites have a mobile version made for pda’s).  

Continue reading ‘Review - ASUS Eee PC’ »