photo credit: n. panelo

Make sure to RSVP for my going away party next week!

Catch the live show at AskAdria each Monday at 6:30pm Central (That’s 4:30pm Pacific, 7:30pm Eastern, 11:30pm GMT)

Perception is a strong thing, like  a spider web.  Once caught, you don’t feel you can escape but for the bugs who don’t give up struggling, there is the chance of making it out alive.  That struggle is the rudder in your life to steer your ship.

Learn how you can start making changes today that allow you to lead the life you feel is out of reach.  That may sounds like some “space age” type talk but it works if you open your mind and focus on what is truly important to you.

Today’s topic at AskAdria is:

“How To Change The Course Of Your Life In 10 Minutes”

Monday, February 8th at 6:30pm Central

Join me over at http://askadria.com/live

Photo credit: *ian*

I got a question today from someone on how to change your feed source on Feedburner. She has moved off of Blogger and onto her own WordPress.org install. You want to change the second box that says, “Original feed” to reflect the new location.

DO NOT change the “Feed Address” (third box) as your feed will be broken for your readers

New post 1/2/2010 Dell XPS 8000 Discontinued? What The Hell Dell? [VIDEO]

This shiny new desktop arrived Tuesday just after I was getting over not feeling so well. When the Fedex guy showed up, I felt instantly better! I unboxed it on Wednesday night over at AskAdria.com.

Specs

• Quad Core Intel i7-860 2.80GHZ
• 8GB DDR3 Memory
• 1.5 TB 7,200 Seagate Sata hard drive (I selected a 1TB)
• nVidia GeForce GTS 240 1024MB GDDR3
• Two 16X CD/DVDRW-+ drives (I only ordered one)
• Windows 7 Home Premium
• Dell 6-button Laser mouse
• Dell keyboard

First, let me say this monster is FAST!  I had plans to install Windows XP, the 64-bit version but found out it has been discontinued for service pack maintenance.  I successfully avoided running Vista on any computers I’ve owned.  I’m not too happy about Windows 7 but hear from reputable tech folks on Twitter it’s a great operating system so…I’ll give it a try.

When I ordered, I thought it would just take a few days to get the system built.  I wanted to order before the holidays so I wouldn’t be waiting weeks.  Well, I was wrong!  It took nearly 2 weeks to ship and Dell overestimate the build time so that once I placed my order, it had an arrival date of December 2nd!  Now, I was initially ticked off at this but since I’ve ordered a lot of systems for my clients, I figured Dell was just covering their backend.

Now I was surprised to find that they had upgraded my hard drive capacity by 500GB and thrown in an extra CD/DVDRW for free!

It’s been a long time since I had a new computer.  My current system is a 2.6GHZ single processor, small form factor (SFF) Shuttle XPC with 2GB of Ram and 2 Sata drives.  Nothing fancy.  I pretty much did remote connections to my client’s systems, work in a text editor and made Skype calls.  It wasn’t until I got the webcam and started doing AskAdria that my technology needs increased.

I stubbornly put off upgrading because I didn’t want to believe I needed some crazy, overpowered system.  Plus, I was getting the itch for a Mac.  As fate would have it, this would be the year that I went to 6 blogging conferences so I had to prioritize attending and put off a new system.

Let me take a moment to thank my conference sponsors for Blogworld; Zendesk and Logmein!

Now how the HECK did I determine I needed such a monsterous computer system?  I mean, 8GB (upgradable to 16GB) is just insane sounding.  Or is it?

Turns out that other people who do web based shows have similar “rigs”.  Two folks I consulted on this decision were OhDoctah of IQMZ and Nic of Filmsnobbery.  They both put out videos on a regular basis.

I came across OhDoctah (Owen JJ Stone aka OhDoctah) last year when Googling for who knows what.  I found his site, AskOhDoctah and was amazed with the honesty and emotions he shared in his videos.  OhDoctah is doing a lot of interviews this year so he needs to process his videos once he returns home.  He calls his computer, “The Beast”.

Nic is a film critic and a darn funny one!  He not only reviews movies but also offers advice to up and coming directors, producers and actors.  He puts out a weekly show and takes time to plan his show with a script and then does quite a bit of post production to insert segways and sponsor call outs.

They both assured me I would need a quad core.  Seemed a bit silly at first but after reading on the i7′s hyperthreading ability which would allow my computer to processes multiple tasks at the same time, I agreed.  I selected a higher grade video card that has a whole 1GB of memory on it.  I’m stoked to see how well my weekly technology show, AskAdria looks as well as my Skype video calls.  In addition to better output, I expect that I will be able to render video faster so tutorials that I put together in Camtasia studio will zip along.  I’m also expecting that multimedia that I view will no longer freeze, skip or refuse to play.

I’d like to thank both of these guys for taking the time to help me spec out my new system and understand this new fangled video stuff!

This Thanksgiving weekend, I’m installing apps and moving over my data.  I can’t believe how much memory this thing has!  We’ll see how well it performs once I have my applications I use to run my business installed including:

• Adobe Flash Media Encoder
• Audacity
• Firefox
• Snagit
• Camtasia Studio
• Picasa
• Keepass
• Yahoo Widgets
• Flickr uploader
• PDFCreator
• Affixa
• Cepstral
• DiskAid
• Evernote
• Google Desktop
• GoToMeeting
• Logmein
• PUTTY
• Quickbooks (Sorry Freshbooks)
• RocketDock
• Skype
• Speedfan
• StreamRipper32
• Teracopy
• TortiseSVN
• VirtualCloneDrive
• VMWare
• Webex
• WinDirStat
• Winmerge
• WinSCP
• Avira
• Spybot Search and Destroy
• Logitech 9000 Pro webcam
• Canon MP780 Printer
• All my website development tools including EditPad Pro, XAMPP, Filezilla, Acetext and more.

Now you may be saying, “Adria, you’ve got Windows 7 Home Premium?”.  Why didn’t you get Windows 7 Ultimate?  Because, good things come to those who wait a bit.  *smile*

I ended up talking with the Microsoft guy at Wordcamp NYC (argued really about open source vs talking) and he had a bunch of Windows 7 Ultimate licences with him.  Too bad they were 32-bit and this monster computer is 64-bit…but he said to email him and he would do his best to get me a 64-bit version before year’s end!  Whee!  That saves me $150 that I could of paid to Dell.

I did get a 2 year warranty with this system and may extend that to 3 years because I truly believe that hardware warranties pay for themselves with piece of mine.

Are there any apps I’m missing that I need?

I jailbroke my 1st Generation 2G, two 3G iPhones for a client and my 3GS up to version 3.1.2 via the iPhone Dev Team’s Pwnage Tool.

Yes I was drinking.

Yes I had fun!

Pytey of the iPhone Dev Team graciously Tweeted about the video and I’ve seen 2,000 visitors today. Thanks!

[ad#googleadsensepost]

Unboxing Video of Macbook Pro

Here’s the video I did and I can barely control my excitement as I unbox the laptop I’ve been drooling over the entire summer!

Here are the specs on the 13″ Macbook Pro

Size and weight

• Height: 0.95 inch
• Width: 12.78 inches
• Depth: 8.94 inches
• Weight: 4.5 pounds

Connections and expansion

• MagSafe power port
• Gigabit Ethernet port
• One FireWire 800 port (up to 800 Mbps)
• Mini DisplayPort
• Two USB 2.0 ports (up to 480 Mbps)
• SD card slot
• Audio in/out

More Tech Specs

• You get Wireless, Bluetooth and 100/1000 ethernet
• Same NVIDIA GeForce 9400M video card in the base models in 15″ and 17″
• All Macbook Pro’s come with the built-in iSight camera
• 8x SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• You get iLife which includes iMovie, iPhoto, Garageband, iDVD and iWeb
• Plus the latest version of the Mac OSX, Snow Leopard (10.6)

13″ Macbook Pro Models and Cost

I went with the base model which has a 2.26GHZ Dual Core processor, 160GB hard drive, 2GB of DDR3 Ram.  This has a price of $1199.  To get the 2.53GHZ Dual Core processors with a 250GB drive and 4GB of memory would be $1499.

I got the base model for $999 by going through Apple’s refurbished store.

Which Macbook to Buy?

I asked people on Twitter, via Skype and email their thoughts on if I should get a 13″ without Firewire or wait it out.  I wanted a small laptop ever since I went to NYC for 2 weeks in 2004 and had to leave my laptop because bringing it along with me to the city would have given me a backache.  At the time, I had a Dell laptop that weighed about 7lbs.  The 13″ Macbook was 4.5lbs.  I’m glad I didn’t get on in the spring because in June Apple released a 13″ Macbook Pro! Oh how I began to drool and plan how to make this little Macbook mine…more on that in a later post.

Macs Are For Video Editing

I first thought about getting a Mac this year when I began to experience frustration editing video on a PC.  When I started doing live streaming at AskAdria.com, I didn’t think past connecting with my audience and figured it would be easy to pick up video editing.  Wrong!  I struggled with file types like .flv, .mov and .avi as well as video dimensions, FPS (Frames Per Second), lighting, editing software, HD widescreen and adding things like title clips.  I started using Sony Vegas.

Chuck of The Uptake helped me create a video contest entry for my coop, “Keeping It Fresh, Keeping It Real” where the 1st prize was a Macbook.  I didn’t win but it really got me thinking that I needed a Macbook.

When I was in Chicago for one of the blogging conferences, I stopped in at the Apple store to ask about the different Macbooks, the video editing software and if I really needed a “Pro” to do the type of video editing I wanted to do.  The staff person was super nice and took the time to show me how to add a title clip in iMovie, drag in video, merge clips and preview.  I thought, “Wow!  That seems really easy!”

Later, I was at a BBQ for The Uptake and heard the same message about Final Cut Express and iMovie from folks who did video editing often.

Summary

I am in love with this little notebook.  I think it’s sturdy, easy to work on, compact, user friendly and a great value for someone who needs a reliable mobile computer to work on.  Since I enjoy learning, I signed up for the Apple One-To-One training where I can attend live events at the Apple store for one year and learn about how to work on a Mac.  Some technical folks feel they’re too proud to be taught but I subscribe to the school of thought (haha) that in order to teach, you must be teachable.

Click here to view the embedded video.

AskAdria Ustream logo for my live, weekly technology show!  You can watch it each Monday at 5:30pm CST

Windows XP will be supported until 2012 2014.  It’s going to be the business mainstay for the next 5 years irregardless of Vista and Windows 7.

iPhones were built to be jailbroke.  This allows you to run additional software that you wouldn’t find at the App store.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation thinks Apple lost some marbles and that this is no different then when people modify their cars.

ThinkGeek makes awesome tech t-shirts for women!  In addition to geek stuff, they have jewlery

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform in the world!  Major newspapers including the New York Times use it to run their blogs.  WordPress also can run your website

Eventbrite is the best way to register for conferences and webinars!  It makes the promotion and sales for your events easy.  Post your event and get paid.

Ubuntu is an operating system.  It’s a specific flavor of Linux.  It’s become one of the most user friendly and popular Linux distros in the last 4 years.

Tux is the the mascot for Linux.  Yay penguins!

Moo makes awesome business cards.  I get lots of compliments on my business cards so I keep reordering from Moo!

Firefox is a web browser for the world and is made by Mozilla.  It now makes up over 25% of the browser market as more people get sick and tired of using crappy Internet Explorer.

Timebridge makes meetings happen.  It streamlines the process by allowing you to send multiple times to everyone you’re meeting with.  They all click on the best times and Timebridge adds the confirmed time to your calendar.

Google is the most popular search engine in the world and they took the time to take photos of the planet Earth and share it via Google Earth.  Sweet!

Dell is a great hardware platform if you’re going to stick with Windows.  It’s a solid choice for business desktops, servers and home systems.  You can net a sweet deal on a refurbished Dell for $300 with a 3 year warranty for your business.  I picked up my 23″ Samsung monitor from Dell because they had the best price.

Apple makes great laptops.  I have seen these macbooks last for years, find them to be made of high quality parts and most importantly, have excellent power management vs many pc based noteboooks which I won’t name.  I will be getting a 13″ Macbook pro in the next few weeks (fingers crossed) and will rejoin the computer world as a cross platform IT person.

Lijit is a custom search plugin for your blog or website.  It crawls your site and provides visitors with a Google-like results page.  Lijit will also list content from folks on your blogroll.  Pretty cool stuff plus @tarable and @micah work there!

Flickr is a social networking site based on images.  It has huge Google juice so if you care about SEO for your website, find a way to incorporate Flickr.  I have their pro account which allows me to upload a lot of images.

Netflix is a superior alternative to renting movies from your local video store because there are no late fees, you can queue up movies, no shipping charges, a much larger selection and they launched “Watch Instantly” in 2007 so you can watch movies on your computer.  I’ve been using Netflix since 2003.

I didn’t mention two companies as I’m waiting for their logo banners but I’ll mention them here:

Zendesk is a web based helpdesk ticketing system which centralizes IT support requests and will save you time and money.  It’s scalable so you can be a single consultant or helpdesk with 200+ support folks.  I started using it last year, Twitter copied me this year as did MSNBC (probably because I was on The Rachel Maddow Show) and Viddler.

Harvest and is one of THE BEST solutions I’ve used for easy time tracking and invoicing that is cross platform.  They support Quickbooks export, you can Tweet your time and they talk to Zendesk so I can bill right from my tickets.  Did I mention they recently added the ability to collect payment via Paypal and create reoccurring invoices?

Friday night I upgraded my first generation iPhone from 3.0 to 3.1 and recorded it on Ustream.  If you’re thinking of jailbreaking for the first time or upgrading like I did, this post will walk you through the steps.

Background on Jailbreaking

iPhones are wildly popular smartphones made by Apple.  Time magazine named the iPhone, “Invention of the Year” in 2007.  As a phone, the primary phone carrier is AT&T.  This isn’t true in other countries and as popularity of the device grew, people wanted to use other providers…

The first jailbreak to an iPhone occurred less than 2 weeks after the iPhone launched because someone wanted custom ringtones.  After that, it was open season on the iPhone.  The iPhone Dev Team emerged as the primary freedom fighters and brought jailbreaking to the masses with their GUI based jailbreak tool, Pwnage.  Apple quickly “patched” their software to prevent the security hole.  A race between patching and jailbreaking is still going on today…

As of today (9/19/2009), if you want to do a fresh jailbreak or upgrade, you need to go to version 3.1 as Apple has blocked restores below 3.1.  It can only be done on 1st generation (2G) and the 3G on a Mac via PwnageTool but a new version that works for the 3G S and on Windows using the redsn0w tool from iPhone Dev Team will be available soon.

Now Corvida of Shegeeks.net had a good point today on the phone.  If you can acquire the .ipsw file from an already jailbroken iPhone, you can restore it to yours and merrily be on your with with OS 3.1 running on your phone.  The iPhone Dev team discourages this and would prefer people to not upload the .ipsw files (which are usually 300+ mb) to various files haring sites like Rapidshare and megaupload as their motto is, “patch, don’t pirate!”

Update 1: Please do not put links to custom IPSWs in your comments, because the software in them is copyrighted by Apple.  The Dev Team motto has always been “patch, don’t pirate!”.  And you’ll just make things harder for your friendly moderators angiepangie and Confucious

Ready to get started?

Your Tools

iPhone 2G or 3G – For this jailbreak tutorial, you will need a first generation (2G) or second generation (3G) iPhone.

iTunes – I did this upgrade with iTunes version 8.2.1.6

Jailbreak Software – This is the software you will run that will take you through the jailbreaking process.  For today’s jailbreak, I’m using PwnageTool 3.1 for the Mac.  You can download it from the iPhone Dev Team blog.  This will be a .dmg file  (About 20mb)

Firmware – This is the Apple firmware you will be using to create your very own jailbroken version that you will restore through iTunes.  You can download it via the link in iPhone Dev Team’s site on PoorLad maintained by @webrob.  This is an .ipsw file (About 300mb)

Boot Loader – If you are jailbreaking for the first time, you will need two bootloader files.  My iPhone is already jailbroken so I didn’t need these but if you do, Google and you will find them.

The Steps

I followed the tutorial over at iClarified to:

Prepare your jailbreak file
Launch the PwnageTool
Click “OK” on the notice
Select “Expert” mode and click “Next”
Select my iPhone from the 3 choices and click “Next”
Wait for PwnageTool to find the unmodified .ipsw file and click “Next”
You will be presented with 6 options before you build your custom .ipsw.

Here’s what I went with:

General

• Already checked - Activate the phone
• Already checked - Enable baseband update
• Increased root partition to 635mb

and click “Next”

Bootneuter settings

• Already checked – Neuter bootloader
• Already checked – Unlock baseband
• Auto delete BootNeuter .app

and click “Next”

Cydia settings
I didn’t add any items (packages) here as I plan to add my Cydia items later.  Cydia is like the open source version of the App store.

Custom logo settings
I left these at the default of being checked.  Stylizing my iPhone is not that big a deal to me.  I use the iPhone to be more productive and get real time information when I’m out and about attending conferences, parties and events.

Build your jailbreak file
You will be asked to save your shiny new .ipsw file so pick a good spot.  I saved mine to the desktop.  This is the file you will restore via iTunes to complete the jailbreak.

Time to build so click “Build” and click “Next”

Now this will take a while…

If you were jailbreaking for the first time, this is where you would replace the boot loader files…

You will be prompted to enter your administrative password

You will be asked if the iPhone has been jailbroke before.   This is because you don’t have to put the iphone into DFU mode if it’s already been jailbroke thus why i didn’t download the bootloader files.  They would be “injected” at this step and you would get the oh so fun task to holding down the power button and home key in some twisted thumb dance which reminds me of the game “Twister”.

Let the Jailbreak begin!
Now it’s time to get this jailbreak on your iPhone!

Connect your iPhone to your Mac
Make sure it is detected by iTunes
Click on the iPhone icon on the left in your iTunes application to select your iPhone

Hold down your “Alt/Option” key and then click restore.  This is similar on a PC where you would hold down “shift”.  Doing this will cause iTunes to pop up a file window, asking you point to a restore file.

Select your shiny new .ipsw you saved a few steps ago and hit “Choose”
This process will take a while….
Your iPhone will restart
You can check your iPhone software version by going to Settings > General > About

You are all done!

Notes

You should NEVER need to pay for jailbreaking software.  The iPhone Dev Team does not charge for it, does not accept donation and does not place advertising on their website.

While waiting for the jailbreak build, I read an excerpt about Bill Joy, founder of BSD, Sun Microsystems, the VI editor and Java from the book, “Outliers: The Story of Success”

I do a yoga pose near the end and talk about how yoga can help keep back pain at bay.

Thanks to Corvida for inspiring me to do my first jailbreak on a Mac!

Why I Jailbreak My iPhone

I jailbreak because I want the freedom to choose what goes on my smartphone.  I credit my mom attending Woodstock as the fuel that drives my desire to jailbreak.

I also want to keep T-mobile as my cellular provider.  In order to be able to insert my T-mobile sim card and make phone calls, the iPhone needs to be “unlocked”.  In order to unlock an iPhone, it need to be jailbroke.

T-mobile has been an amazing cell phone company.  I’ve tried Verizon, Nextel and had a few months using Sprint via an IT contract.  All of those companies sucked in terms of customer service, plans and phone technology.

Resources

iPhone Dev Team

iPhone Firmware files at iCommunity Poorlad

iClarified Tutorial on jailbreaking to OS 3.1 using PwnageTool on Mac for 2G/3G iPhone

Folks, the great news just keeps rolling in!

Today when I signed in to do a live show of the iPhone OS 3.1 jailbreak on my Ustream channel, I was notified that I had been selected to be featured on the iPhone mobile version!

Get Live Ustream On Your iPhone

Download the app from the Apple iTunes store and watch live streams on your iPhone!  I just tried this out again and Ustream has really improved the quality of the stream!  I tested it while my iPhone was on wireless so not sure of the quality if you’re using the data plan.

No Cussing, Nudity or Unlawfulness

So in order to be listed, I had to agree to in order to be listed on the iPhone version.  I wonder if jailbreaking is considered a breach of the Apple iPhone terms and conditions…

I forgot to mention here that I am also listed a a featured show in the main Ustream website so that means when I stream a scheduled show, I appear on the front page.  There has been just so much going on that it’s been hard for me to make sure I plan, participate and then blog my experiences.

Of course, sponsorship from tech companies will help with this  because I always work better for others than I do for myself *hint* *hint*