Blodget’s Blog

I am loving my new Touch, but typing on it is a pain – the sound of one finger poking. I wish somebody made an external keyboard for the thing.

My 12 favorite things to do with the Touch:
1. Browse the web – it comes with the Safari browser. You can tap twice to zoom into a column of text. It’s very readable and easy to maneuver.
2. Read my RSS feeds in Google Reader. They have a mobile version which works great.
3. Read email. It comes with a Mail program. You can also access your Google mail in Safari
4. Keep a calendar. It syncs with iCal. You can also use Google calendar which is what I do because I’ve combined my office calendar with my personal calendar on Google Calendar. I love the way you can type “Meet with Loraine 1 to 2 on Thursday” and it puts it in the right time on the right day. Very cool.
5. Watch videos. You can watch YouTube videos and, of course, you can watch your movies and tv shows you’ve downloaded in iTunes. To try it out I downloaded a Pixar short “For the Birds” and two Daffy Duck cartoons. Here’s the best part. You can connect the iPod up to your TV and control it remotely with an Apple remote. Next I need to try ripping a DVD.
6. Read books. There’s a free service called Readdle which lets you store up to 20, 5 Mb files on the web which you can read in the browser. Upload Word docs, RTF, PDF, TXT files and it converts them to HTML for instant viewing. You can bookmark your place and come back to where you left off. Very handy.
7. Read Google Docs – word processing, spreadsheets, and PRESENTATIONS. Unfortunately you can’t see them on a tv. The Safari browser doesn’t show up for some reason.
8. Listen to music. Don’t forget it’s an iPod and it can store your whole music collection.
9. View photos. You can sync your iPhoto collection with the iPod and carry all your favorite photos with you to show friends and family. It even does slideshows with music.
10. Look things up. You can check the weather and there’s a mobile version of Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database.
11. Get directions. Google maps works wonderfully.
12. Play games. Turns out there are lots of free games and puzzles that are Web based. You don’t have to download them to your iPod. You play them in the browser.

So, as you can tell, I’m having fun.

iPod Touch

Originally uploaded by jimblodget.

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Check out http://www.cameroid.com/ . It’s basically Mac’s Photobooth

online.



Webcam Fun

Originally uploaded by jimblodget.

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I just discovered the free web service called Talkr.com which provides a MP3 recording of your blog posts. Just create a free account and point to your blog’s RSS or Atom feed. If you have a WordPress blog you can install a free Talkr plug-in. This will place a “Listen to this Post” link at the bottom of each post. People can also subscribe to your Talkr feed in iTunes. This way they can listen to all your text posts as a podcast. You can subscribe to my blog’s Talkr feed by copying this link and pasting it into the “Subscribe to Podcast” feature in the Advanced menu of iTunes.

You can listen to this post with this mp3 player:

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or click the “Listen to this post” link at the bottom of this post to link directly to the mp3 file.

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