MagicPrefs Adds a Little More Magic to Apple’s Magic Mouse

In October, Apple released it’s newest mouse offering, the Magic Mouse.  I wrote a review of it in November, here.  At first, I was worried that it was a little too low profile, but after about a week or so, my hand got used to it and I’ve loved it ever since.  The momentum scrolling is phenomenal, and the multi-touch gestures are fantastic.  They make navigating the web extremely easy while the momentum scrolling makes scrolling through large documents a breeze.  The only problem with it, however, is that Apple sort of crippled it when they shipped it.  It only supports a single two-finger gesture out of the box, and very basic, regular one-finger gestures.  The tracking is also incredibly slow. (more…)

iPhone Icon Christmas Ornaments

After seeing this post online about plexiglass iPhone app icon ornaments, I knew I wanted a set.  But, I didn’t want to buy them online from Belgium.  Not to mention, those ones were incredibly small; they were less than 1″ by 1″.  Working at Fox Chapel Area School District gives me access to a lot of incredible technology, including a laser saw.  So I figured, why not try and make a set myself?  I figured it couldn’t really be that hard… I just needed to find a high-res photo of an iPhone (thanks, Apple press images), and cut out each icon. (more…)

Firefox World’s Most Popular Browser

GigaOM is reporting today that Firefox 3.5 has finally surpassed Microsoft Internet Explorer to become the world’s most popular browser.  All I have to say is: FINALLY!  And congratulations to Mozilla!  Although I’m a Safari user on my Mac, Firefox is my primary browser on all of my PCs.  It’s simply phenomenal, and this is well deserved.  Kudos, Mozilla – my hat’s off to you.

Original GigaOM Story

‘Readability’ by arc90

Here’s yet another amazing product I’ve found at the mercy of reading David Pogue’s blog (the first being the Zeo, of course).  Readability is a super cool piece of javascript that turns any webpage with text and/or an article, like CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC, etc. into a nicely formatted page that looks like a Kindle screen or newspaper.  It eliminates all of the clutter around the article and lets you focus your attention on solely that – the content; the article. (more…)

Google Wave Invite Giveaway!

I have 10 Google Wave beta invites to give away. Thats right; 10 lucky people will get Google Wave beta invites, courtesy of myself and Noah Purdy.  Noah is a fellow CIS student at RMU.  He’s a super nice guy, and I thank him for helping to make this possible.

Google Wave is a communication tool aimed at making it easy and simple to collaborate with multiple people. There’s really no other way to describe it besides to direct you to this video, and to the site, which has a nice introductory video on Google Wave and what it’s about.

To be entered in this contest, you’ll need to do one of two things: tweet the post, or comment on it.

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Technology and Education: We need to better integrate the two, and fast!

Technology is something that almost everyone is at least semi-familiar with. Be it something as simple as turning on a television or a computer, or something as complicated as editing a kernel extension in Terminal, we’re all familiar with some sort of technology. Regardless of skill level, the reason we all are experiencing technology in our lives every day is because we’re living in the 21st century: the digital age, the millennium, the conceptual era. One place that has yet to really see the full potential of technology is education.  In the education sector, technology seems as though its trying to be used as a way of learning, not as a tool for learning.  There’s quite a large distinction between those two uses, and many educators are unsure of the dividing line. Our schools aren’t transforming student learning or differentiating instruction through the use of technology.  They’re simply throwing devices into the classroom without a clear plan or vision as to how they plan to use them.  In fact, our schools haven’t changed much at all over the decades.   (more…)

Google Announces Chrome OS

Google held a rather small event today to announce its new Chrome OS.  The OS isn’t even in beta yet, but they wanted to give developers and members of the open source community a very early chance to check it out.  Rather than type out a really long post about it, I’m just going to give a bulleted list of all the important information.  Much courtesy to Engadget for initially summing up the live event.  I will say, however, that the concept is interesting, if nothing else.  I’m still very wary of our society’s increasing reliance on the cloud.  GMAIL goes down often, for example.  Basing an entire OS off the cloud and storing absolutely nothing locally, quite frankly, scares the crap out of me.  Google said that the limited cloud downtime should equal or be far less in time than that of the average computer downtime due to viruses or other headaches.  Never, ever, have I been unable to access my files on my Mac because it was “down.”  I just wanted to mention that. Click through to get the bulleted list summarizing most of the announcement.

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