Added as an update to this post:

As of Dec 20, the new version of the Currents app does work on my iPhone 3GS, so I can actually see that the published edition of the site is working correctly. The published edition of my other site, however, seems to be pulling a months old version of the RSS feed, so maybe not all the bugs are worked out just yet.

I’ve written many times that I’m very appreciative of tools that allow me to post to various networks, with one-step. RSS feeds, for example, are great to feed from WordPress to Twitter or Facebook to allow a new blog post to show up in multiple places without any extra effort from me.

In that same vein, one tool that isn’t really new, but that I’ve only recently started playing with is Instagram. On it’s face, it’s a neat little add-on for the iPhone camera, that allows you to take photos, apply some neat filter effects, and share those photos. It’s behind the scenes that I really see the value though. After taking a photo, and applying a creative effect, I am then presented some options to Geotag, and share across other networks.

In my own workflow, I can take a cool little photo of a place we are visiting, like walking around the campus at Furman.

Now I can push the photo out to Twitter and Facebook, letting folks know where I am, what kind of cool things I’m seeing right at that moment, and I can also store a copy of the photo along with my other online photos at Flickr.  And, I can do all this in one iPhone app, not by making visits to a bunch of different networks.

To me, having the ability to share information to the people who are interested in seeing it, wherever they happen to be, without me having to take extra time, is a huge benefit. Instagram gets that.

As I’ve said before, a ban will keep people from using cell phones while driving, it will not make driving safer. Eliminating a symptom of bad driving will not make good drivers. But, I’m pretty sure it will happen, because it allows politicians to say they have “done something”.

As many of you mat be aware, Google recently announced their new reading app, Currents, for tablet and smartphones. It seems to be a bit like Flipboard, or other apps that make a nice, magazine-style layout for reading your favorite online content.

Being the curious techie that I am, I wanted to both check it out, and see how I could work with my own sites to “produce” editions for Google Currents. If you’re interested in adding this site to Currents, I think you can at this link.

The reason that I say that I think you can add it there, is that my attempts at actually using Currents on my iPhone were largely unsuccessful. I haven’t seen any official statement from Google that an iPhone 4 is required.  (The system requirements mention needing at least iOS4, and my iPhone 3GS has the latest OS, just not the latest hardware.) However, I’ve seen some unofficial reviews mention it not working on a 3GS, and it most assuredly did not work on mine. It runs, and I can get into the program and add editions to my library, however when I go back to the home screen to read them, the library is still empty, asking me to add items.

So, if you have an Android device, newer iPhone or iPad, have you used Currents yet? What do you think of it? Are you able to add the edition at the link I gave earlier? I’d love to know if it actually works.

Update: As of Dec 20, the new version of the Currents app does work on my iPhone 3GS, so I can actually see that the published edition of the site is working correctly. The published edition of my other site, however, seems to be pulling a months old version of the RSS feed, so maybe not all the bugs are worked out just yet.

When we moved into our new place at the end of October, and it turns out that the only available cable TV/internet bundle available to us is through Charter. It would not have been my first choice, given experiences I’ve heard from others, but it is what it is. I had U-Verse in my apartment, I want U-verse to get their stuff together and extend out to the new place, which is only 10 minutes away, but I digress.

Once we had the installation done, it was my turn to take their modem-to-PC connection and add our networking stuff to it. Yes, they make you clone the MAC address, which was easy enough. In Columbus, we had a similar setup, the cable modem connected directly to a Hawking router, and then I also had a Linksys WRT54G router that was set to work as an access point. This gave us the luxury and freedom of wireless, but also the ability to have a hard wire connection to the internet that was not touching the wireless part of the network.

I set things up here the same way, but after a couple of weeks of having to power cycle the Hawking every 4 hours, I decided to try and troubleshoot the problem by removing the Hawking router. With the WRT54G acting as the router, connected to the cable modem directly and with the desktop machines plugged into it, the problem went away. So it works.

On the other hand, the curious side of me can’t help but wonder what happened? Did the Hawking somehow get damaged in the move? It’s been a steady, stable router for almost 10 years. It’s not impossible that it has gone bad on me, but it seems odd that it would suddenly have problems after a move, it seems even odder that it would work fine for 4 hours, and then lose it’s WAN IP address.

Or, is Charter doing something with DHCP that the older router was having trouble with? Given Charter’s reputation for attempting to “solve” any connectivity issues through a network by selling you their wireless router, it’s certainly possible that something odd is happening there. Though it does appear to be working with the WRT54G, so if they are doing something, is it only affecting older routers, or are they simply using a newer DHCP technology and innocently causing problems with older routers?

Truth is, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll never know, but like most technical things, so long as it works, I probably shouldn’t care, right?

IT Elf: “Santa, you have 3 billion unread emails”

Santa: “Can you print them out for me?”

Who knew Santa was an attorney?

You’ve probably noticed the weekly “links” post that gets dropped into the feed and picked up in other places like Facebook and Twitter on Sundays. If you’re interested in seeing those same links, only in real time when I add them individually instead of in the weekly wrap up, you have myriad choices to do that as well. They start out on my Diigo account, then through the magic of If This Then That, they go out on both my Twitter, and the Facebook page for this site.

If you’re following either of those, you’ll see the links as they get added, give or take 10-15 minutes. You’ll also see various other things I share as I come across them in those channels, that aren’t necessarily showing up here on the blog.

Speaking of the Facebook page, for what seems like years now, I’ve been feeding the blog posts to both the Facebook page, and my own Facebook profile. I’m toying with the idea of stopping that, and only linking to select posts on my own profile, letting the page be the place to follow the blog in it’s entirety on Facebook. This way my friends and family don’t have to see every new post. Any thoughts on that type of change? Would you “like” the page to see the blog posts on Facebook, or are you already getting them elsewhere and don’t care where I post them on Facebook?

I’m also toying with a few other ideas, but not ready to commit to them just yet, and trying to figure out how a Google+ page fits in here as well. I’m trying to use it more, both my own profile and the pages, but that lack of automated import is hard to get over!

I’ll be sure to keep ya’ll posted!

This being the Thanksgiving holiday here in the US, it’s a good chance to take a step back and remind yourself all that you have to be thankful for. I’m not going to bore you with a list of all the things I’m thankful for, but this year, with all the changes that have gone on, this is especially poignant. It can be difficult to pick up and make major changes in your life or career. As exciting of an adventure as this has been, I also know it’s been difficult to start over in a new place, leaving behind many of the friends and family that I depended on.

Luckily, it’s 2011, and staying in touch with friends all over the place has never been easier. Luckier still, the people I count among my closest friends are more than willing to stay in touch even if it is electronically, for now.

The Internet, and social networking tools in particular, have really changed the dynamic when it comes to making big changes. Yes, I miss the people I used to spend time with more often, but they are still part of my life, and maybe now that we’re settled in, they can even come explore this new area too. Technology allows us to maintain relationships that would have required so much work before. It also allows me to build new relationships and connect with people regardless of physical location. I know a great many people through my websites, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., and have come to consider them friends, even though we’ve never met. I’ve learned from them, shared with them, laughed with them, and even disagreed with them sometimes, all online. We truly live in an amazing time.

It may not be the easiest of times, and god knows it’s difficult to keep up with all of the changes that are constantly being thrown at us every day, but we are capable of doing things that were nothing more than dreams just 15-20 years ago. There’s certainly something to be said for being thankful for that!

So, I hope you all enjoy a great holiday, and never take for granted the people in your life, whether they be right there to celebrate with you, or miles away. Either way, it’s easy to let them know how important they are to you.

The other day, my wife was driving us down the road and we happened to be behind a guy driving a truck with a website URL on the back of it. It was an interesting business name, and we were guessing what it was when I decided to pull out my iPhone and find out. I was met with a blank website, which led me to assume it was Flash-based, and therefore inaccessible to anyone using an iPhone. (Which seems an odd decision, given the listing of the site somewhere you would be much more likely to use a mobile device to look up, but whatever…)

Now that Adobe is completely ending development for mobile Flash, the situation I foind myself in will soon be common to Android and Windows Mobile devices as well.

So, all you photographers, musicians, and graphic artists with cool looking Flash-based sites may want to consider moving to HTML5 or some other format, or live with limiting your site’s exposure to people who are more and more viewing internet-based information from mobile devices. Seems to me that you would want to make your site as accessible as possible in order to increase the number of folks who see it, especially if you’re doing any advertising of it offline. (Business cards, brochures, signs, bumper stickers, t-shirts, etc.) You want folks to see the site when they are thinking about it, instead of having to go home and get another computer.

By the way, I did go home and look at the site, it was a recording and graphic design studio. I’m not a marketing expert, but I can’t help but wonder how much of their target audience uses iOS devices quite frequently.

Thanks to some fellow Friends in Tech members, I learned over the weekend that Box.net is giving away upgrades to 50GB of storage if you download their iOS app and log in to the service.

Now, there are some limitations to the Box.net service, as laid out over on the Mac Screencast Guy, but 50GB of free storage is still 50Gb of free storage, right?

You never know when that might come in handy.