Gmail Theatre Presents: Why Use Gmail? (youtube video). Recently, I’ve noticed myself merging more and more to my gmail account, since my personal domain email address receives over 300+ spam a day. Although Gmail is great at separating spam from legit email 99.9% of the time for me, I long for the day when spam is annihilated altogether, no need for another spam/junk mail folder/label. Another thing that I’m loving about gmail, is the ability to check pop3 mail from other accounts. Oh, and it’s also open to the public now.

I suppose this is actually old news, but like most people, I never received an e-mail from TextAmerica to inform me they were no longer keeping free accounts. TextAmerica was a free MoBlogging service, allowing those with camera cellphones to send their pictures to TextAmerica and then have them published on a blog hosted at TextAmerica.

I just recently purchased a new cell phone and went to logon to my TextAmerica account only to find out that my account no longer existed and was completely locked out with no way to retrieve my photos. Apparently they will only support paying accounts. However, their site does not inform you of this. It simply states that they aren’t currently accepting new registrations.

All isn’t lost though. My pictures were still available on their server, as my RSS badge of pictures was still working and showing my most recent photos. So I was still able to go directly to my RSS feed for my account and get some of my pictures back.

Get Some of Your TextAmerica Pictures Back:
All you have to do is add “/rss.aspx” (no quotes) to the end of your TextAmerica URI, and you will be able to access your RSS feed of recent photos. However, you will not be able to retrieve ALL of your photos, but you will be able to get some back.

Fortunately for me, I didn’t have many photos published to TextAmerica and was able to get all but maybe 3 or 4 of my photos. Which I’ll be uploading over on to Flickr now, as they support pictures by e-mail, allowing me to publish my camera phone pictures once again.

I don’t think TextAmerica will be around much longer. Seriously, you can’t charge for something that you were just giving away for free! You add a pro account!

Thanks for nothing TextAmerica!

CellTop is a new open-source app that Alltel recently launched for its mobile phones. CellTop is essentially widgets, called cells, for your cell phone, and is an Alltel exclusive. CellTop launched with 10 different cells, including my personal favorites, News Feeds and Weather.

The best part of this new app is that it is OPEN-SOURCE! Which will allow anyone to make their own cells. However, I’m assuming that it will have to be pushed through BREW/Qualcomm/Alltel first. Celltop is only available on one phone at the moment, the Samsung u520, but will soon be on the RAZR, KRZR, and the LG-AX245. Oh, and it is also FREE. The only charge you incur is when you refresh your cells, such as news or weather; it will count against your minutes, a whole 1 big minute to refresh your cells.

I purchased the Samsung u520 over the RAZR, specifically for the new CellTop app, however it comes packed with a ton of features that are very comparable to the RAZR. The Samsung also doubles as an Mp3 player with external control buttons, and an expansion slot for MicroSD memory cards. It has a ton of other features and it only cost a mere $50.00. (I’ll post a more in-depth review of the Samsung u520 later)

There are plenty of cells in the works, quite possibly a Digg.com feed and a Gmail cell.

I’ve become quite attached to CellTop, as I constantly find myself reading the news on my cell phone throughout the day. I look forward to hopefully a customizable RSS cell.

This is by far the coolest thing to hit cell phones, in my opinion.

I love my Mac Mini. It took a bit to adjust to OS X at first. My only memory of being on a Mac prior to my Mac Mini was playing Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? when I was just wee one in elementary school. Once I learned to stop resisting and allow OS X to work for me, it wasn’t long before I became very attached to my Mac.

While I was still adjusting to OS X, my 40 GB hard drive seemed almost like too much space. But then the more I used the Mac the more it started to become my default desktop. I passed my 15″ FPD from the Mac to my Debian box and gave it share rights to my 19″ FPD with my main PC desktop. In a matter of weeks my 40 GB hard drive shrunk to 8 GB of available space. :gasp:

Where the hell did all that space go? Using this handy tool, Disk Inventory X, I was able to see graphically what was clogging up my drive. Obviously: music, videos, pictures, and software.

Much of my music and videos can be burned and deleted to free up space, however, having a more permanent place for such things is beginning to be more appealing than the infinite number of disks that I have that get stuffed into drawers.

It was time for an upgrade. I love taking things apart and I’ve wanted to take apart the Mac Mini since the day I got it, but have never gotten around to actually doing it. But instead of just upgrading the hard drive and having another spare drive used as a paperweight, I decided an external drive would be a great solution. Not just to free up space on the Mac but essentially freeing up space for all the computers on the network and keeping all of our media in one place.

Thanks to Danielle, for Xmas I received the LaCie 160 GB fire wire hard drive. The LaCie drive is designed to be stacked under the Mac Mini. Brilliant.

Keeping the LaCie drive formatted with HFS+ Mac format, I used MediaFour’s MacDrive on my Windows computers to allow the new drive to be seen under windows and the ability to read and write to the disk, I now have a drive strictly for media storage that everybody can use.

Now that I have a central storage place for all of my different media files, I needed to change my library location for iTunes and iPhoto so that everything will now be stored on the external drive. An easy task for iTunes:

Changing Your Library Location for iTunes:
I just copied my original iTunes library over to the new external drive, deleted the original folder, then in iTunes under Preferences->Advanced-> Change folder location. Or you can do it the proper way.

Changing Your Library Location for iPhoto:
In iPhoto, there is no option for changing the default folder location. I have no idea why. But if you hold down your Option key while clicking on iPhoto from the dock, it will prompt you to create a library or choose a library. So first, I copied my iPhoto library to the new location and holding down the option key and launching iPhoto, I chose the new library. Ta-Da!

The LaCie drive is an excellent solution to maximizing storage space for both Windows and Macs, more specifically, the Mac Mini. I recommend it to anybody looking to expand storage space.

Southwest is giving away a coupon good for one free movie download from Movielink.

WIDGETS! One thing I missed when I abandoned Debian/KDE were widgets. You know, useless and useful desktop apps that can do pretty much anything from to-do lists, clocks, wifi signals, alarms, weather, the lists go on and on.

Now there is Konfabulator, which runs on Windows and Macs. They already have a large gallery that keeps growing. So go give it a try.

Let me know what widgets everyone’s using.

BugMeNot.com - “Bypass Compulsory Web Registration”. Instead of having to register to read certain websites (i.e. New York Times), pick up a public login for virtually everysite from BugMeNot. Which currently holds logins for 35,036 sites.

If that doesn’t help you and you absolutely must sign up for something but don’t want to be bombarded with spam, try the Mailinator. You don’t have to sign up, you just make up any e-mail address @ Mailinator.com, go visit the site, login under the address you made up, and check the mail.

I thought I’d share a small list of free programs I’ve been using lately.

AWStats - This is an awesome log file analyzer for your website. It has a huge list of powerful features to keep track of your site’s stats. Very impressive software.

RealVNC - Since I don’t own a KVM switch I needed something quick to help admin the server and I came across VNC. With VNC it’s possible to fully-interact with one computer from any other computer or mobile device anywhere on the Internet.

Stellarium - This is a neat astronomy program that renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real time. Because we love space!

Very small list, indeed.

As Google continues to expand, new features seem to be popping up left and right lately. Google now has SMS.

How it works is, you send a text message to 46645 (GOOGL) with your text message being your search. Then Google will text message you back with the results. They have a sample page of all it’s different uses.

A few useful things being business and residential listings. Pretty neat.

VideoTwo Boys Reduced to Screaming Girls While Playing Doom 3 - A little over dramatic but still hilarious.

Interesting News
George Michael discovers a stalker has been living under his floor

New Sex Crimes? - Man Tries to Charge Wife for Domestic Abuse for not having sex with him for 5 consecutive days

Celebrate your first day on jury duty by getting drunk before you go - Supreme says its okay, “no different than a virus, poorly prepared food, or lack of sleep”

Saving the best for last -

Schwarzenegger outlaws sex with corpses - This ones too easy to make fun of…discuss amongst yourselves.