Just a quick post to wish everyone a merry Christmas and that I hope everyone is enjoying themselves this holiday season. I write this from my blackberry using the program Blackberry Meta Blog which allows posting to xmlrpc capable web platforms. Very handy but not the most efficient way ti do it. The reason why updates have been posted in the past week is that in my haste to leave for the holidays I forgot much of the tech equipment that I had set aside including blackberry chargers and thinkpad charger among them. Thus my blackberry has been my sole internet access for the last 4 days which has been hard. It is also a great tribute to the blackberry as I have not gone insane from internet withdrawl.

Here comes part 3 of my essential Blackberry apps list. Yes, I am an App whore. Yes, I love my Blackberry. No, I do not want an iPhone (I use copy/paste, lol).

• Poynt (Free) – Poynt offers 411 service, movie times and directions. I have only tested the service in Canada which works fantastic. I imagine it works in other countries also but you will have to check. The local business listing is fantastic. A couple days ago I needed to do some last minute Christmas shopping for my wife. I used Poynt (which can use your GPS to determine your location and proximity to businesses) to search for the local store which I needed to order the gifts from. It was the first result of the query. I scrolled to it, pressed menu and there is a call number option which connected me to the business. Fantastic! No messing with GOOG-411 or Berry411 which did not work properly when I tried it.The movie times also worked just as good. Poynt searches your area for local cinemas and can show you movie show times after selecting the theatre. Cant recommend this one enough. UI fantastic, fresh and works better than expected.

• BBNotePad (Free) – I have alot of files I need to share between my PC’s and Blackberry. Many of them are plain old text files. As the name suggests, BBNotePad is a regular text file editor for Blackberry. It is a simple application and works just as you would want it to including search support. I prefer using this to Memopad as I can save my Txt files to my media card and easily transfer it to other machines or as an email attachment.

• Opera Mini (Free) – Everyone knows about this one but I had to add it. The only thing I wish I could do is make it my default browser or use it to load Blackberry applications (but I know this is out of Opera’s hands). One thing I recently learned is Opera Mini receives all of your requested web content back through a proxy server that filters your pages and internet so they are better suited for your mobile device. Very cool.

• Qik (Free) – Qik is a fun service that allows you to stream live video straight from your device to the internet. I dont know how useful this is for me but never the less it is fun. With Qik you can create apage which contains an embedded video which always displays the latest video you stream. Users can also view all your public videos from you profile page on Qik’s website. This will be fun the next time I see a crazy mullet.

• MidpSSH (Free) – This SSH client may not be as useful as some of my other recommendations for most people but I couldn’t leave it out. This program allows me to SSH to remote servers just like I would Putty from my desktop. I can send any command I would from my desktop except its just harder to read! Fantastic app if I have to restart Vmware or Apache or whatever on the go.

There you have it. That is my official “Best Blackberry Bold Apps”. I will make another post with my runners up and other apps that I keep installed.

Nobody ever wants to sign up for yet another page they may use once or twice then forget again. Or some people refuse to sign up for sites because they have one password for everything and using it on your site is posibly adding another way for their identity to be stolen. Never fear, Facebook connect to the rescue!

Everyone and their mom has a Facebook account. Well my Mother doesnt, but she does have a notebook with hand written instructions on how to turn on the computer, load Firefox and get into Ebay. But you get my point. In an effort to get some discussions or feedback on certain posts, I have implemented the ability for visitors to login to my blog via a Facebook account, an Open ID account or a plain old WordPress account. This means you dont have to create another username and password for some dudes blog. Yay. Also Wordpress and OpenID account avatars are taken from Gravatar. (more…)

I actually got these last month but haven’t posted till now. New case, new sound card and new Nvidia GTX 260. I actually posted about it here. Well here are some pics of the new case. I needed one with a lot more cooling considering the GTX 260 is half the size of my Xbox 360 and restricts airflow. The Coolermaster 680 is an awesome case. I just wish it was a tad bigger but other than that I cant recommend it enough. (more…)

Jeff Atwood and the guys at Stack Overflow posted about their dilemma as they try to scale: to host their own servers or pay a management company to do it for them. Tough decision? Yeah right.

I like to tinker with my computer. Since I was a wee teenager I played with Linux. At 15 I was given access to a Linux shell and charged with maintaining multiple Quake 2 servers running on a sweet sweet OC12 at Qwest and serving hundreds of players daily. During these years I thought it must have been the coolest job to get paid to tinker with servers all day. Since I have become enlightened in a number of ways… (more…)

Drupal makes me want to break things. As much as I wanted to resist the move to WordPress the transition was easy, quick and painless. The new 2.7 interface is actually very nice. The blog looks great in my opinion and I look forward to posting much more content.

I have included a WordPress plugin called MobilePress that provides content nicely to mobile devices and I have added my Xbox tag and many social media sites to the right sidebar. Feel free to add me and expand your and my social network.

Essential CrackBerry Apps Part 3 coming soon…

Welcome to part 2 of my BlackBerry application list. I have included Twitter links so you can follow the progress and updates of the apps you decide to use. I also added my Twitter feed to the left of the blog. You are also welcome to follow me.

• BerryStore (Twitter) (Free) – I wish I would have found this app a few days ago. This app is fantastic as it has a nice interface to find, rate and download Blackberry apps straight from the program. Many of my essential apps can be downloaded directly from BerryStore.Dont let the name deter you, the vast majority of programs included in ‘”the store” are completely free. Download this right away.

• Vlingo (Twitter) (Free) – Vlingo is voice recognition and command software for the Blackberry. You assign the left or right convenience button to ‘record’ and speak instructions to the device. This includes sending emails (including transcribing the subject and message text), voice dialing, adding to-do tasks, texting, launching programs and more.This was one app that made me say “holy crap this is amazing”. There is no training the recognition software, there is no cost and it works pretty awesome. The actual app is very professionally done. A++ on this one.*Note* – This can be downloaded via BerryStore

• jmIRC (Free and Opensource) – This one took a while to find as it seems there are a few IRC clients out for BlackBerry that all seem to stem from one original project. Although the codebase hasn’t been touched in years, this IRC client offers much of the expected functionality of a basic IRC client.I told one of my friends (who has an iPhone) tonight how cool it was for me to be able to connect to Freenode.net from my mobile. Apparently it isn’t that exciting and I am a “Super Geek” but I am still very excited about it. Now I can participate in programming

• Viigo (Twitter) (Free) I mentioned in my last post that I was disappointed with Google’s Mobile version of Reader. It is pretty terrible and makes me want to cry. Viigo comes to the rescue! Sign up for a free account and you can download this app and you have a very nice UI in which to view weather and all kinds of new sources including custom RSS feeds INCLUDING support to load and update all your Google Reader subscriptions. This allows me to add a RSS feed to Google Reader and the next time I launch Viigo the feed I just added will be available. Very handy feature.The application has a disabled menu item called Audio & Podcasts. It appears and has been said that the program will soon support the ability to download Podcasts via RSS feed. I am anxiously awaiting this as I currently use uTorrent to download the current Hanselminutes to my PC and manually transfer it over to my PDA (Now BlackBerry).*Note* – This can be downloaded via BerryStore

• XBerry Live (Twitter) (Free) – I found this app trolling through BlackberryForums. This is an exceptional app that makes use of the private Xbox Live API. The app is brand new and sports an interface to match Xbox’s new branding with current gamertags, avatars and the everything. Using this app you can view your Xbox Live friends online status, see which game they are playing and even launch your browser to send them messages via the web. Fantastic app!*Note* – This can be downloaded via BerryStore

Still got a bunch more. Stay tuned.

I just purchased my first Blackberry, the Bold. As a techie I have scoured the Internet looking for custom apps, tweaks and just about everything I can do to tinker with my new pda/phone. I have gone through a dozen IM programs and a dozen others looking for high quality and useful apps for my new Blackberry. Here is my list of essential apps.

• TwitterBerry (Twitter) (Free) – Great minimalist Twitter client. UI is the best of the alternatives (TinyTwitter, BlackBird) and the most responsive. Now that Twitter no longer is offering SMS service to the UK or in my case Canada, Twitter on the BlackBerry is essential. TwitPic support is built in (although I was having some issues with it) and I cant figure out how to add new people to follow but overall it works great.Update: I have found a new Twitter / Facebook status application that has replace TwitterBerry for me. It is called SocialScope and it is in an opt-in beta program right now. You can sign up at their site here.

• KeePassBB (Free & Opensource) – I am a die hard user of KeePass which is a program which manages all your passwords. I use a different password that is randomly generated for every account that I use. My Keepass database has over 300 entries in it. Up until this weekend, I did not even have my Gmail account password memorized because with Keepass it can automatically enter it into websites for you or you just copy and paste the password.If I wasn’t able to get the passwords from my Keepass database the Blackberry would have almost been worthless to me. Luckily there is an open source project that brings Keepass to the Blackberry. It is functional, the UI needs some work but the author said he accepts patches and I looked at the code and it appears to be easy to follow. Maybe soon I will jump on into mobile development?Anyways, I synchronize my Keepass db from my Pc using a program called Syncback SE. This I use almost daily to synchronize data between my PC and USB key or my PC and Laptop, now between my Blackberry and desktop. I also use a Free Syncplicity account to store online copies but unfortunately they do not have software for the mobile. They DO however have a mobile website so you can access your files from your Blackberry web browser if you forgot to Sync a file.

• Google Mobile Apps (Free) – Google provides a suite of Blackberry software for many of its products including Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Maps, Notes, News, Photos and Synchronization.
  • Gmail – Great interface for email, better than Blackberry’s email program but it doesn’t download emails nearly as quickly. For this reason I have both Gmail and Blackberry BIS hooked up to my Gmail account. This Gmail program allows me to use Gmail drafts, sent messages, contacts, etc
  • Reader – It sucks really which is disappointing considering how much I use Google Reader. I cant mark uninteresting posts without actually going into them and read items don’t seem to synchronize properly with regular Google Reader. Sharing and Starring seems to work fine though.
  • Calendar – Very basic but functional. Kind of sucks actually. See next entry.
  • Maps – This is where the Google Mobile Suite shines. Works just like the regular online version but makes use of your GPS as your current location. I have Mountain Equipment Coop in my Blackberry contact list with the full address. I go into Blackberry contacts, click menu –> Show on Google Maps and it shows me a map of the address. I can get the exact same directions as the full web version offers by entering the address of start and destination or by making bookmarks. Very handy.
    
  • Docs – A slim/read only version of Google Docs. Decent enough to view them.
  • Photos – View Picasa pictures from mobile account
  • Notebook – A nice way to quickly take notes and store them online if you need a reminder to check such a link on your desktop pc. Or to transfer a long url to Blackberry/PC.
  • Sync for Mobile – This synchronizes your calendar and contacts with the Google version. This is great for when you make changes on Google Calendar and want those changes to be on your handheld.*Note* Must visit with default Blackberry Browser to install.

• SyncMyCal ($30 USD) – This is actually a desktop app but a requirement for me. As you can tell by the Keepass entry, I like to have things Synced which means the freshest and latest copies of my files on all my devices. This includes my contact list, my calendar and my task list. The Blackberry software synchronizes with my Outlook 2007 very well.I use SyncMyCal to Synchronize my Outlook 2007 with my Google Calendar and Contacts. This allows me to edit calendar entries and contacts on my Outlook which is must faster than using the Google equivalent. I also prefer to view my calendar in Outlook when I am on my home PC. Google versions are for when I am on my laptop or a public machine. SyncMyCal allows me to do this 3 way syncronization Outlook <—> Google <—> Blackberry which is so far working extraordinarily well. Hopefully no problems.*Note* A word of warning for those who decide to go with it. Make sure you set your options to Google precedence or be prepared to lose your Google contact list and calendar.

• JiveTalk (aka BeeJive) ($30 USD) – This isnt cheap for IM but so far appears to be worth it. No longer do I need to be checking Google Talk or Microsoft Live Messenger for contacts, this program integrates them into one nice concise list with user avatars and chat protocol icons on the right. You can add custom alerts and change the colour of the Blackberry top right LED so you know that you have received a instant message instead of a email.*Note* As of December 2008 a beta version is available which integrates JiveTalk into the BlackBerry Messages Application. Essential. Obtain the beta at JiveTalk Blog. To be continued (I’m not even half done yet) ….

Here is a quick example .config of log4net that does basic logging to the console and to a text file. I found a great tutorial outlining the config here but it didnt have a full example anywhere from what I found. (more…)