The easiest way I’ve found to get my contacts from Outlook to my Droid X … check out transferring contacts between Outlook and Gmail .
Decidedly low tech – but it was much easier than retyping 
To sync your calendar – try Google Calendar Sync.
Good luck!
What a pain the Droid X is turning out to be. I can’t live with it, and I can’t live without it.
It’s like a pair of shoes that look and feel amazing, but just don’t fit quite right. You spend a lot of time hoping your feet were of the right size 
It’s actually one of the most amazing devices I’ve ever owned – the display is simply gorgeous, and the interface is amazing.
So what’s not to like? Well how about its battery life? My battery drains even while the phone is inactive. And, by drain, I mean it goes down by as much as 40% while it sits on my bedstand.
My workaround? Turn it off before I go to bed – or leave it charging all night.
And, by default, the Wifi turns itself off when the screen is turned off. Then when you turn the phone back on, you don’t get online without waiting for anywhere from 5 to 15 to 30 minutes. Even your 3G is powerless to help.
My workaround? I found this on a Moto forum – go into advanced settings and choose not to turn off Wifi when the display is turned off. I’m guessing this will eat up battery – but it’s much better than having to wait for Wifi to kick in.
Will I return this phone, and get a Droid 2 or the Incredible instead? I’m not sure – ask me in 2 weeks.
For now, I’m folding my feet so they fit into these shoes. Maybe I’ll get used to walking this way
Just noticed this review over at DZone – http://java.dzone.com/articles/tomcat-6-developer’s-guide
Folks who know me are aware that I’m easily distracted. Turns out all my good intentions of reviewing Roxio Creator 2010 were put on hold when I went home on Friday to find a book on video editing waiting at my front door. Soon after I opened the package, I was hooked, and Roxio was soon a distant memory.
The book was interesting enough that I read it over every free moment I had (even while at a basketball game) until it was done.
I assess every book that I read using a very simple yardstick – “Was it worth the investment of my time in reading this book?”. I’m willing to overlook minor issues as long as this basic test is met – and this book passed that test with flying colors.
So what did I learn?
First – make sure that you shoot only as much video as you think is absolutely necessary. With how cheap it is to shoot video, I’m often tempted to “overshoot” – and this is a major hassle in post production and archival. On a recent vacation, I ended up with over 2 hours of video, that I’d like to edit down to 20 minutes. Even after I eliminate all the obvious shaky camera and bad exposure bits, I’m still stuck with too much video to consider.
Second – focus on telling a story. With this vacation, I probably should have shot establishing shots of us arriving at the airport, at the resort, at major events during the stay, the kids having fun, and the final departure. Instead, I had a hodge podge of sequences that is a challenge for me to edit into any form of story. At least Mr Cameron has no competition from me in this regard.
The subtext of this book is “Storytelling with HD cameras”, and sure enough the author demonstrates obvious knowledge and depth of understanding of all things High Def.
For instance, I’ve always been quite disenchanted with 24p video and couldn’t quite figure out why I wasn’t as excited about the “film” look as everyone else seemed to be. I found the strobing at 24p to be so annoying, that I almost never use that mode. This book finally explains why 1080p @ 60i can make video seem smoother than at 24p.
There’s a lot of good stuff here – right from how to pick your first camcorder (no, resolution is not that critical; and yes, auto mode is the devil), to picking your accessories (an entire section on tripods!). In my opinion, this should be a must-buy purchase before you get yourself a new HD camcorder.
This is the kind of book that will need repeated visits in order to internalize its advice.
For a more detailed review of this book – check out my review on Amazon.com.
I’m supposed to review this software for the Vine program, and I’ve been working on it off and on since I received the software on Tuesday. I’m a sucker for video editing tools – there’s something very satisfying about assembling a “watchable” video out of a mess of home video footage.
Fortunately, I had over 160 minutes of HD footage from a recent vacation (Jamaica!), that was screaming out for treatment.
The only fly in the ointment? The Roxio software has some rather pitiful reviews – with tons of complaints about buggy installation/operation. Since I’m going to be doing a “semi-professional” review, I decided to see for myself how this software would fare under fairly adverse conditions. I installed it on a laptop that has decidedly seen better days, and … so far so good.
After a fairly painless installation sequence, during which it fetched SP1, I’m yet to experience a crash. Fingers crossed. I’ve imported about 60 minutes of footage, have been playing with scene detection (VideoWave) and automatic movie creation (CineMagic – I hate it!), and audio/video capture from the web.
The bulk of my review will be done this weekend. I’m looking forward to seeing how rendering works.
Watch this space for updates!
Its the old tale of the cobbler’s children, I guess, but my wife says my web site looks like it was done by a 10 year old.
So, I went looking for options to pretty it up without taking up any more of that resource that I already have a deficit of … Time.
The options were quickly narrowed to using Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress.
Given that most of my content takes the form of blog posts, I chose to give WordPress a whirl first.
And, I’m glad that I did. What a marvellous piece of software this has turned out to be.
But, since this is not a review of the software – that’s all I’ll say about it for now.
I needed a book that would get me started quickly, and show me the ropes, without bogging me down in the details. There’ll be time for that once I decide that this is the way forward.
So, one weekend with the book, my hosting provider, and the software – and I’m already knowledgeable enough to be really dangerous!
I really enjoyed the book – it provided clear explanations of all the various options available within WordPress, without the unnecessarily cutesy graphics and vapid attempts at humor. I particularly appreciated its no-nonsense, practical, workbook style.
I’m now seriously wondering whether I even need to try out the others.
WordPress seems to have everything that I need, and with the tremendous supply of customized themes, widgets, and plugins, the web site should now at least look like its been done by a “competent 10-year old” :0)
Click here for a full review of this book on Amazon.
I used to be rather proud of my generational backup system, and my techniques for off site storage, until I accidentally formatted my backup drive proving that no backup solution is idiot-proof.
After spending almost $150 to purchase hard drive recovery software (File Recovery from Seagate is also highly recommended), I figured that spending $50/month was not such a bad investment after all.
As an inveterate comparison shopper, I began my quest by running a Google search for reviews on all available online backup solutions.
Note that I wasn’t merely looking for an online file storage solution – I wanted to be assured that my system was going to be backed up regularly – whether or not it was a conscious action on my part.
Google apprised me of the obvious choices – there were Mozy, Carbonite, and a bevy of others.
However, the one that caught my eye, and which I decided to go with was iDrive. While there were not too many comments/reviews for this service, there were a few features that simply made it a no-brainer.
First, iDrive is one of the rare services that let you back up an external drive.
Second, iDrive does not delete any files from your online account, unless you explicitly do so by forcing a sync with your computer/external storage.
Third, iDrive is almost a version control system, as it stores versions of your file. In addition, only the changes between versions is stored, so the full file size doesn’t count against your storage limits. Needless to say, you can pick the version of the file to restore.
Its hard to overstate the importance of these features. Carbonite Regular, for instance, automatically deletes files after 30 days if it no longer finds the file on your computer. This means that if you were to run out of space on your computer – you have 30 days to go upgrade your hard drive before the files cease to exist on the Carbonite servers. You’d have to upgrade to Carbonite Pro to get service that matches iDrive. I hated the fact that this critical piece of information was not clearly called out on most services.
I shoot in Camera RAW, and my hard drives are always bulging at the seams – so having all those files on my computer forever, was simply not an option. iDrive seemed ideal for my situation.
In addition, the system uses two levels of encryption. First there’s the login that is required to access the account, and the use of the secure HTTPS protocol to transmit your files over to iDrive. Second, there’s an additional password that iDrive claims is not stored anywhere on the iDrive servers, which is used to further encrypt the files with 256-bit AES encryption.
There’s also very convenient access to your files using a web browser interface.
I’ve been using iDrive for about 6 months now, and I must say that I’m relieved not to have to actively think about storage and backup.
I spent some time last night installing and configuring the Netgear WNDR3700 router, and was blown away by everything that this little device does. In addition to serving as a gigabit and wireless router (its raison d’etre), I now have an installed NAS device, and a DLNA-compliant media server to boot!
The highlight of this device was when I copied some photographs and music over to the attached USB drive and ran over to access them on my PS3. Accessing media without having to leave a media server always on is going to be great!
If you’re going to try this at home – note that setting a read-access password seems to disable the media server. It took me a while to figure this out … an hour of my life that I’ll never get back
Obviously any device that tries to do too much makes certain design tradeoffs, and that’s the case with this router as well. The access to the NAS drive is fairly slow, and there are issues with securing access to it. However, its safe to say that I’m a convert now, and have gladly retired ol’ faithful – my Linksys WRT54GL.
(For more details, see my review on Amazon.)
