On Saturday we had a pretty huge (freak) snow storm here on the East coast. In October no less! It was one of those times when all the elements aligned perfectly to totally and completely ruin the weekend. (Why don’t nor’easters ever show up on Monday mornings?) Seriously – it wouldn’t even have been able to snow if it weren’t for a phenomenon called “dynamic cooling,” wherein heavy rain drags down colder air from the upper atmosphere, which allows said precipitation to freeze and fall as snow. Heavy, tree-brach-and-power-line-demolishing snow.

The power went out at around 4PM as I was fleeing the office in an effort not to get stuck there all weekend. As I arrived home, the temperature continued to fall rapidly. Layering sweaters and ridiculously huge piles of blankets can only take you so far. We went out to get something to eat and watch the football games (it was Sunday, after all). While we were out, I tried signing on to LogMeIn from my iPhone to check and see if the network had come back up. JCP&L had predicted that we would get our power back sometime in the next five days. I was getting anxious and searching for a hotel, when I had finally come up with a way to get notified the moment our power came back on.

Enter Find My iPhone. If you don’t have it already, get it. It’s a free app created by Apple. The functionality is built into iCloud, and the idea is this: “if you misplace your iPhone, [or] iPad[…] the Find My iPhone app will let you use another iOS device to find it and protect your data. Simply install this free app on another iOS device, open it, and sign in with your Apple ID. Find My iPhone will help you locate your missing device on a map. You can then choose to display a message or play a sound, remotely lock your device, or erase your data on it.” The most important thing left out of the write-up on Apple’s site is that in the event iCloud can not locate a device, you have the option to receive an email once the device has been located. And this is the feature that saved me from a third world apartment country.

I tried to locate my iPad, which was at home in the apartment in standby mode, presumably at the low-end of it’s recommended ambient operating temperature. Fortunately this would most likely improve upon the iPad 2′s already awesome stand-by battery life. Knowing full well the iPad would not be found without a working wireless network at home, I chose to have Apple email me once the iPad was located. Not three hours later, I received an email from Apple telling us that we could finally return home to power, heat, light, and civilization.

If this is any indication of how the rest of this winter will go: enjoy the white Halloween while you can.

One night this week I was hunched over my keyboard strolling through Groddle Forest, and decided that there has to be a better way of navigating the world of Glitch. Please don’t misunderstand; I am enthralled by Glitch and its potential, however I am simply a console gamer by default spending most of my gaming time on Xbox Live via the Xbox 360. A lightbulb went off over my head when I realized that I have a Microsoft Wireless Xbox 360 Wireless [Controller] Receiver for Windows in my tech drawer just collecting dust. I imagined all the awesomeness of a globally available browser-based game plus the ease, accessiblility, and portability of a controller input system.

I've been tinkering...

In the video below, I give a short demo on how this all works. I’m locally remoting into my PC with my iPad using the app SplashTop. The iPad is a perfect partner for this setup to provide touch-screen access when you have to choose a map destination or interact with a street vendor. To map the XBox 360 controller buttons to keyboard input, I am using a free program I found at deinmeister.de called JoyCur. (Please note, I have nothing to do with JoyCur except for the button mapping profile. I am redistributing as-is, unmodified.) For the time being, the joysticks don’t do too much – this is something I will continue to work on in an effort to bring a full control-scheme to Glitch. Another forthcoming addition (*if possible) is the ability to integrate the XBox 360 chatpad for in-game chatting without the need to switch back to the keyboard.

My wishlist for Tiny Speck goes like this: it would be awesome it if there were a hot-key to switch into a vendor window, pop-up dialogue, and the map. If this key existed, the mouse and keyboard could just about be replaced entirely.

Longwinded story short: Tiny Speck, please give me more keyboard hotkeys to map. This would make me super nerd-happy.

Video Demo

Button Mappings

	Movement		Map (M)
	Jump (Space)		Quest Log (L)
	Back (Esc)		Switch to Chat Panel (Ctrl + Enter)
	Interact (Enter)		Mad
	Backpack (B)		Happy
	Rock Menu (F)

This is a video that I shot when I went to see Dance Gavin Dance play a show at Irving Plaza. They are performing their song “The Robot With Human Hair Part 2 1/2″ off their album Downtown Battle Mountain II.

Corning – A Day Made of Glass from WESTERNIZED Productions on Vimeo.

I am convinced this is something like what our future could look like. With all of the recent advancements in technology – I can see something just like this coming to fruition in our lifetime. And I can not wait.

Recently I have become completely fed up with Outlook.  Don’t get me wrong, Outlook does a good enough job;  however I am of the internet generation and a tech to boot.  I have been using Gmail for almost six years at this point, and feel like when on Outlook I am working at half speed.  Gmail’s advanced labeling system, cloud access, and advanced search features make it a superior client so I spend less time searching and organizing, and more time actually working.

The most useful feature by far has to be the labels.  Simply drag an email to a label, and it acts like a folder and “tags” that email with a that particular label.  Need to find something under a particular label?  Use the search operator “label:label-name” to find everything under that label, which can now even be nested just like folders in Outlook thanks to a new Gmail lab.  Labels become even more powerful when coupled with Gmail’s advanced filtering system.  This lets you to run test searches on your email, then allows you automatically apply labels, archive, forward, or even auto-reply to emails that meet the filter criteria.

Set up is a breeze, like most of Google’s products.  To get started, just create a Google Apps account and configure an email address.  For mine I already had a Google Apps account set up and ready to go – I just created myself a new user name and Gmail inbox to keep my work email separate.  Then all I had to do under the Settings area was configure the incoming email server (POP3), the outgoing email server (SMTP), and my company’s email footer and I was in business.  Google has even created a utility called the Outlook Email Uploader which uploads your entire email history from an Outlook .pst file to Gmail for future searching.

Now my inbox is clean and easy to read, and I search faster and spend significantly less time crunching through large volumes of email.  My contacts don’t even see a change in the way they send me mail or receive mail from me.  I can action emails from any internet connected browser anywhere in the world, even on my iPhone.  In a nutshell:  food tastes better, air smells cleaner, I feel more at peace with the universe, and life is generally better.  Thanks, Google.