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How dare you act like you care.  There was a time where you were there for me, but that hasn’t been the case recently.  As a matter of fact, it’s been too fucking long since I can remember a single friendly thing that you have done.  You just use everyone until they’re all used up.  You stole my idea, and you don’t give a fuck about me, how I feel.  You get everything you want, and you take it for granted.  I can’t take it anymore, I don’t fucking need you.  I got enough backstabbers, form a single line, see look, I can do just fine without your knife in my back.  Oh wait, there it is, still there from the last time, thought I forgot about that?  I covered for you when you didn’t deserve it.  I thought I owed you my life, but I don’t owe you shit.  I’m done with this game, I quit, you win.  The ain’t even something I ever wanted to be in.

Menstrual pad jokes aside, I was thoroughly disappointed of Apple’s long awaited tablet PC announcement.  I can see what they were going for in the iPad, and it all seems like a great idea, but there’s simply nothing that I need it for that isn’t already fulfilled by another device.  A portable, touchscreen based, web browsing device with the backing of a huge app store is great, and I’d love to have one of these if it would simply fit into my pocket so that I could take it anywhere with me… oh wait, that’s right, I already have one of those.  Now, I don’t want to attack the Apple brand, there are a lot of things about them that I do not like, but I can always count on them to deliver a great user experience in their devices, and Apple products always look sexy.  I’m just finding it difficult to see what I can do with an iPad.  It’s not quite a full-fledged computer, but it’s a bit more than an iPhone, and yet loses the portable edge that the iPhone has to offer over netbooks.

Another similar product that might be worthwhile to check out once it hits the market is the JooJoo formerly known as the CrunchPad before Fusion Garage walked away with the product and left TechCrunch out of the equation.  The benefit being, that it’s Linux-based, and is likely to be more useful than the iPad.  The JooJoo claims full HD support, and is capable of streaming from websites like Hulu.  It appears to be just as slim as the iPad, with a larger screen, albeit less memory, but unlike the iPad it’ll likely have an expansion slot.  Also unlike the iPad, the JooJoo will have a built-in camera!

I’ll buy the first tablet that has a hybrid OLED/E-Ink capacitive touch screen, internal flash memory, expansion slot, built in HD video camera, with 3g (or 4g) data, and built on an open platform.  I’m hoping that Google decides to enter this market, and that they get it right.

I cannot begin to describe how infinitely useful the iPod touch is after being jailbroken. It’s the type of thing where, until you’ve done it, you have no idea what you’re missing out on.  I couldn’t imagine using my iPod touch without the customizations I have tweaked.

First and foremost, my number one recommendation is Winterboard, which quite simply an app to change the theme.  There are countless resources for pre-built themes or for the artsy you can make your own.

Beyond the visual customizations, there are a few apps that simply make the OS more useful and organized.

SBSettings adds a slide in UI that can be activated by sliding your finger across the top of the screen from anywhere.  It gives you quick access to turn on/off settings like bluetooth, wifi, 3g, and others to save on battery life.  There are also addons for more functionality like managing resources and enabling SSH access to your device.

Backgrounder and Kirikae work together to add the ability to multitask apps as well as quickly/conveniently switch between different apps simply by double-pressing the home button.

I have apps installed to enable downloading of any file type in Safari, and one to download YouTube videos for offline viewing.

Lastly I have emulators installed for all of my classic gaming needs from NES to PSX.

There are a whole lot more apps that would be more useful to iPhone owners that tweak SMS/MMS capabilities, and one that enables WiFi tethering.  I’m still pretty new to this whole thing, but thus far I think JB Apps pretty much adds all the functionality that I had always wanted my iTouch to have.

For iPhone 3.0 users the easiest way to jailbreak is using blackra1n.  The process takes under a minute, and is as simple as plugging in your device and hitting a button!

Awhile back I purchased an HTC Hero. It was my first Android handst, and I was thoroughly satisfied by the Android experience. Inevitably, I ended up returning the phone, for several reasons:
1) The Hero’s SenseUI was custom built on top of Android. There was no set date that the Hero would be getting OS updates (like Android 2.0). Until recently, neither HTC nor Sprint would say whether or not they would be pushing the update at all.
2) It was a very solid phone and fluid user experience, but the internally, the phone was running last-gen hardware. It’s not that big of a deal, but I want to be able to purchase something top of the line that will be sufficient for most of the 2-year contract period.

With that being said, here are what I believe to be the main advantages of the N1. It is running the latest version of Android of any phone on the market (Android 2.1). The hardware is the best of it’s kind on the market (snapdragon).

The touchscreen is slightly larger than the iPhone, and it’s still a very slim phone. It has one of the best cameras of cell phones (5 megapixel), and out of the box supports standard things like picture messaging, copy+paste, stereo bluetooth, gps, and video which first gen iPhone users can’t even do. The GPS Navigation software is standard on Android phones, unlike the iPhone whose software for turn-by-turn is added to monthly service or the TomTom software’s initial costs are about $100.

Overall, I think that the N1 is the first all-around Android phone that rivals side-by-side any other smartphone out right now. The only Android disadvantage is the lack of quality apps, which should hopefully change over time, remember, the iPhone has a headstart by a few years.

As I had posted last month, I built my first computer from scratch.  So far it has performed exceptionally well for media playback.  As soon as I had all of my media players configured and codecs installed, my computer handled 1080P HD Playback flawlessly.  The next phase of my testing was to determine the gaming capabilities of a relatively current game.

I purchased Dragon Age about a month ago.  I won’t go into too much detail about the game itself, but it’s a great game.  Initially I setup the game on it’s highest settings which would be 1080P resolution, high texture, anti-aliasing, and high graphics.  The game was playable, but it lagged quite a bit which was a major pain.  Inevitably I gradually lowered the settings to see how much my system could handle where I could play the game comfortably.  I’ve lowered the resolution to 720P, textures to low, anti-aliasing off, and graphics details to low.

Overall, I’m a bit disappointed in how poorly my system handles games, but at the same time I’m not surprised.  Nowhere has atom/ion been advertised as a gaming processor.  So I still say my system does well in what it was intended to do, which was be my HTPC.  It functions perfectly running Windows Media Center, and I can still game at low settings if I choose.

Still, I might have my family inherit this computer once I start my next build sometime next year.  I’m looking to go Quad Core i7 this time around.