It’s been a while since a wrote a blog post for the cool stuff category. I’ve got 3 or 4 different things I’m dinking tinkering (this was updated as it was pointing out dinking has a pretty negative meaning in the urban dictionary) with these days so I thought I’d just write a quickie blog post highlighting the coolness of these things:
#1. The AT&T Tilt.
I’ve been using the Motorola Q (old habits of a former company man) for the past two years because nothing better was available. For me, activesync is a must. It’s amazing how having push access to your email and the web on your phone can make something like a 4 hour shopping day at the mall seem not only bearable but productive!
I’ll be making a few blog posts about this little gizmo. You can hack the hell out of this thing and I intend to push it to the limits (and hopefully not brick it). It’s got a built in GPS, 3Mbps data access, touch screen and Windows Mobile Professional 6. Oh and it’s heavy as hell but the tradeoff seems reasonable.
#2. JungleDisk.
Not many know that I maintain and have since probably 1996 the domain thejungle.org for personal projects. So JungleDisk was something that peeked my interesting. JungleDisk creates a local disk volume/mount on your company back to Amazon’s S3 service. S3 is amazon’s distributed storage service and what’s cool about it is that they could lose several servers and your data would still be recoverable. Think of it as raid at the server level and not just drive level.
Can you say cheap online backup solution?
#3. Mozy.com.
Since we’re talking online backup. I decided to start dinking with Mozy. For $5 a month unlimited storage is a no brainer. I haven’t quite figured this one out but they are backing up currently all of my personal photos (about 30GB uncompressed I believe). I can say it’s pretty slow going and the backup tool, like almost all online backup tools is meant really to just backup your documents and is not a full bare metal restore tool.
#4. Kigg.
Kigg is definitely cool and I’m dying to find a use for it. It’s a digg clone created using the MVC pattern of development (that’s all I know on that subject so I recommend checking out the awesome Scott Hanselman’s blog for more info).
Something I’ve wanted for a while is my own personal de.li.co.us or whatever the url is bookmark directory. This project has promise.
#5. Becoming a Daddy.
Yeah, I haven’t mentioned it here. But my wife is now 6 months pregnant and I’m learning all this for the first time. Fortunately, I’ve had some experience taking care of babies and know the basics there. What I didn’t know and what no one tells you is that when your wife is pregnant you’re in for ONE HELL OF AN EXPERIENCE! Women go through a lot of changes. This part is all new to me and keeping me very busy.
That’s it.
Those are the cool little gizmos and doohickeys I’m playing with these days for personal/fun projects. There’s a whole other list of business related projects but we won’t be listing them here, you can check the appliedi blog for those details.
