Jason Poole

I woke up this morning and got a little surprise when I grabbed my Droid to check messages. I found I did have a message, but it was no ordinary message, it was a message asking me to allow my phone to be updated.  Finally after delays due to the OTA update, 2.1 is now installed on my Droid and I have to say, first impressions, the phone seems a little faster.

The first thing that I needed to test out was, does multi-touch work…   and yes it does.  I was very happy to find that it works in Google maps and the web browser. Also works beautifully in the image gallery.

Speaking of the image gallery, there are some major improvements there as well. I love the new display of the image gallery and it also finds images I had saved to Picasa (which I forgot I even upload photos there). The image gallery even found some images and video that were attached to applications.

One thing I am still a little disappointed about the update (or the phone in general), is that there is still only three screens for shortcuts. This is a minor issues since it does not hinder my use of the phone, but I would still like to see more screens. Also, if I add widgets to the screens, they usually take up quite a few slots and limit my shortcuts to applications even more.

All-in-all, I love this phone and the new update makes it even better.

Ok, I know…  it has been over a month since I last posted to my blog, but I promise more is coming.

I should have had plenty of time to write here since I was pretty much snowed in for over a week. I live in the Washington DC area (actually, I am 40 miles NW of DC) and we got hit with one of the biggest storms recorded in the area. So far this season, we got around 72-74 inches of snow this season. Our typical snowfall for the season is around 22 inches, so needless to say, we aren’t prepared for it.

So what’s coming up? I am glad you asked.  I am going to start recording my video netcast called Public Poole(see link in the menu bar). I am going to try to get on a regular schedule of recording the show at 11:00pm EST on Sundays. You can watch live at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/quanack and join the live chat at irc.jasonpoole.com. Hopefully I can keep the schedule and I can get some people to watch and contribute. Should be fun.

I have a couple other shows that I would like to do, one on PC and console gaming, and one on ice hockey. I should get one show on schedule before I commit to more, but I am a planner.

That is it for now. Hopefully I will see you online.

I guess it has been almost a year ago that Mac Heist 3 took place (I think it started in January and ended in March) and it is a great bundle of apps for a very low price. If you have a Mac, make sure to visit the Mac Heist site and sign up for the newsletter…  you don’t want to to miss out on the great deal.

Anyway, this is really not about Mac Heist…   it kind of is in a round about way. In the bundle of great applications that was in Mac Heist 3, there was a great tool called BoinxTV. With this application, you can make broadcast quality video transitions and effects that will rival multi-million dollar studios. This software is somewhat expensive with a sponsor edition costing $199 and a full version costing $499. Back to Mac Heist for a moment to let you know what a deal I got, I paid $37 for 13 applications, with one of them being BoinxTV.

I don’t know about your financial situation, but $499 is not in the budget for a hobby item, let alone $199. So where does the common hobbyist go to find an affordable solution to video production? Well, while looking through the documentation on the Boinx site about streaming to the internet (link), I found a pretty good solution with CamTwist.

This is a very cool application with a very cool price point…  free. You can do just about anything that a big production studio can do right on you Mac.  I am using is with a 3 year old MacBook Pro and it works very well. In the above picture, you can see a guy named Benjamin Higginbotha who does an excellent podcast call Space Vidcast, and he does some great screencasts of how to use CamTwist Studio.

I played around with the application for a few hours last night and I was totally blown away. I kept asking myself, how could you give this away for free. I will be producing a show over the next couple of days and I will use CamTwist for video switching and effects. It can make an amateur look like a pro.

John Carlson, Washington Capitals property, scores his second goal of the game with a OT game winner to beat Canada. It is so great that they won it up in Canada.

Check out the IIHF site for more details.

It has been almost 2 weeks since my last post and I though I should post a Happy New Year post before February comes.

Here are the top 5 games and movies, according to me, for 2009.

• Top 5 Games:
  1. Borderlands
  2. Dragon Age Origins
  3. Forza Motorsports 3
  4. Assasin’s Creed 2
  5. Scribblenauts

• Top 5 Movies (disclaimer: I have kids and don’t get out much):
  1. The Hangover
  2. Inglourious Bastards
  3. Up
  4. Night at the Museum 2 (this may have been a 2008 film)
  5. Planet 51

Hope 2010 is a good year for all. And remember, we only have 2 more years left according to the Mayans.

While listening to the TWIT #225 (This Week in Tech) podcast Jason Calacanis of www.mahalo.com mentioned a new service that is similar to Four Square. Basically, these site allow people, using there GPS enabled phone, like the iPhone or Droid, and update their location in hopes to meet up with similar interest people. They also let you earn special achievements for checking in at certain locations and how often you check in. That is the very simplified explanation of the services.

One of the issues with Four Square is that you need to be in a location that is listed in their city list. This is great for people that are in a metro area like San Fransisco, Los Angeles and New York, but what about people outside of the metro area. This is where Gowalla really differs. Gowalla does not require you to be in a city area. In fact, you can really be anywhere.

Gowalla allows you to mark your location and you can earn rewards for visiting other’s spots. There is a possibility to earn special stamps for visiting certain locations or completing certain check-in tasks. Check out the site by clicking the logo and explore.  It could be a lot of fun.

NOTE: Those of you that are familiar with the Pack Rat collection game on Facebook will notice that the look of Gowalla is very reminiscent. That is because it is from the same developers of the Facebook game, Alamofire. As with the Pack Rat game, this is somewhat of a collection games as well. If you like Pack Rat, you should like Gowalla.

I purchased the Droid on December 1st, 2009 and I had very high expectations of this phone (handheld computer with built in phone). I was replacing my Blackberry Storm which was only 9 months old, but I was very disappointed in the performance of the Storm, even with the OS upgrade to 5.0. After having the Droid for about 3 weeks, I can honestly say that this is the best phone I have ever owned.

The first thing that you notice about this phone is the screen. You need to see the screen for yourself in real life, because words cannot do it justice. It is beautiful and I was very impressed. Google maps looks incredible and Google’s navigation system is better than my standalone GPS.

Another thing that really impressed me was the Google search feature, more to the point, the voice recognition search. It is rare for the system to get words wrong and usually if does, the search is close enough to find what I am looking for. It does a phone and Google search, so if you are looking for a number in your phone book, you can just say call (say name).

Ok, so what’s not to like about this phone. My biggest complain is that it only has three screens for quick launch icons or widgets. The screens are split up into a grid of 4 x 4 boxes, each icon taking a box.  Most widget take up more than one box, like the Google search, for instance, takes up 4 boxes. Three custom screens is just not enough. Also, scrolling from one screen to the next is choppy and a little slow. This slowness does no take away from the phone experience, but takes a little getting use to.

I was a little concerned when I heard that the phone only had 256MB for applications. All I could remember form the advertisements was that the phone cam with a 16GB memory card, that that 16GB is use mainly for videos and music. I think that the concern for space was all for not.  I have loaded up my phone with quite a few apps and I still have over 160MB free.

All-in-all, I love this phone and being on the Verizon network makes it even better. Sure, the iPhone is a better phone (not by much), but AT&T is a horrible provider. I traveled to Cupertino, California for business and I had great service from Verizon, but I had a few iPhone owners that dropped calls or just could not get service. If the iPhone would have been on Verizon, I would probably have one, but if I were to come out now for Verizon, I would stick with my Droid.

Welcome to the new Jason Poole site.

It has been some time since I had updated my site from the old static look (I think I originally made the site back in May 2002). I felt like I would try to accomplish something in 2009, so I decided to set up my site as a WordPress site.

So, what can you expect from this site?  To tell you the truth, I don’t really know. I am planning on doing a few podcasts, which I will post to this site. I also plan on posting photos I take and just generally writing posts about what goes on in my life.  I hope to get some interaction from people following my site, but I guess I will have to post something worth reading first.

You can follow me on Twitter (quanack) and also on Facebook (quanack). I will post when I am doing a live podcast and also how to interact with me. I am planning on video streaming using Ustream.

OK, now I am going to get back to the “redesign” and I hope you like the new site.