My Ipad 2 - Smart Cover...or is it?

After much debate, with myself of course, I succumbed to my desires of owning the ipad 2 and made the decision to go ahead and purchase one.  Now the decision was made by myself and my company's co-founder to go ahead and treat ourselves with the new gadget, now mind you, I had the Ipad 1 since my wife bought it for me as a birthday gift back in September although I told her explicitly not to, but thats another post altogether.  The 2 in my eyes was not sucha  dramatic iteration over the current device, the camera's are strictly wizz bang for me with no real core value, the tablet is not very comfortable to do long form video with, and as for facetime, I have used it once on my iphone 4 with a friend to make sure it worked, if I really wanted to see you when I speak with you, I would come visit.  Now I dont want to be a total hater, because I do love the device, i like the fact that they made it slimmer, and the weight difference is unnoticeable unless you are holding both devices at the same time, asnd I do think i may have noticed some speed improvements, not like iphone 3g to iphone 4 speed improvement, but some nonetheless.

Now this post is not so much about ipad 2 as a device because they are thousands of posts out there regarding the features and side by side analysis and what not, but this is more so about the ipad 2 smart case or cover and lack of back protection.  Now my ipad 1 was eternally encased in Apples original black ipad case to keep it protected at all times on all sides, but the new smart case left a bit to be desired, namely the fact that one side of the device would always be open to the elements and unprotected.  Now whats a guy to do to protect their investment and still have the functionality of Apples ultra-cool smart cover.....well here is what what my research brought me and what I decided to do:

1. You can get the special invisible shields( a number of companies make different versions of a similar net product, Zagg invisibleShield, Wrapsol, gelskins and a number of no-named ebay knockoffs of equal quality that are made for the front and back and are supposed to keep the device scratch free). My take on them:  I never do the best job wrapping gifts and dont want to spend 30/40$ on a film that is going to end up all wrinkled, and the most important thumbs down for me is the lack of any shock absorption whatsoever.  I get the scratch protection and believe the videos and the claims, however,  if I dropped the ipad from waist level, I doubt the film would protect against dents or internal damage
2. Try one of the silicone or tpu cases being hawked on ebay for $10 or so and hope that it is thin enough that the smart cover magnets will still connect and help power the device on and off.  Well I decided to try this route first as it was less expensive, and it usually included a screen protector which i am big fan of (always use one on my iphone 4 and other iphones).  so i went with a clear TPU case that had concentric circles in the back, was somewhat of a matte clear and had a special circle to highlight the Apple logo in the back.  Ordered on Ebay from US shipper as the $1/2 i could save by ordering from Hong Kong and waiting for 30 days was no good.  It arrived within 4 days, I immediately stopped working and tried out the case, which fit pretty well and felt like it provided protection.  Outcome, the case would not allow the magnets to hold the side of the iPad securely and would not properly hold the device in the typing position.  It would still wake/sleep from the magnets, but the smart cover would easily fall off when being carried.  

You read it right, 2 options, at least as far as I could tell when the Smart Cover needed to be a part of the protection, 'wow Dave, terrible blog post, this went no where' you might say....and if I were done and had given up I would agree with you however, I was not willing to accept defeat.  So I went a got my x-acto knife, it was actually a box cutter but i would suggest the xacto knife if you are patient and/or have one handy, and a sharpie fine point marker.  I traced the outline of the magnets on the TPU skin took the iPad out and carefully I cut the TPU case so the smart cover magnets would grip the case as if there were no additional case.  And after a few rounds of trimming and cleaning up my cuts VOILA...a perfect fit, essentially it is the equivalent of a book cover, and actually resembles one.  The ipad 2 feels safe and secure, all the corners are protected from the sturdy TPU plastic/silicone whatever the exact material is, I don't worry about putting the ipad down on the kitchen table, or the floor or my glass desk.

I went with the TPU because it is fairly rigid, I am certain that if I bought a silicone case and cut it to accommodate the smart cover, it would have lost its form and no longer properly protected the iPad.  My new case protects the ipad from both the elements and from moderate bangs and bumps(only my suspicion as I will not be testing it by dropping it on purpose).

Here are some pics of the finished project, I did not do a step by step as it is a fairly straightforward project, but if you would like some help, just email me or DM me at twitter @DLoz

Miami Art Walk

While in Miami a couple weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to be there during the weekend of the Art Walk. For those of us Miami outsiders, the Art Walk is an event held the second Saturday of every month where all the galleries in the Wynwood (Downtown Miami) neighborhood open up in the evening, often times serving up free drinks and marketing their craft. The sidewalks are so crowded that many need to take to the streets in order to navigate all the wonderful art exhibits. There are all sorts of savory food vendors in the form of food trucks and beverage distributors in the middle of the streets, where you can get everything from Gorgonzola Blue Cheese w/ Green onions and bacon on sour dough bread at Cheezilitious (at least aas good as it sounds) to Chicken Quesadillas to slow cooked BBQ ribs with Rum Punch, or Presidente Cerveza's or a multitude of other options.

One of the highlights of the event was Miguel Paredes, his style is a mix of NYC graffiti and Pop Art. He grew up in Manhattan and was mentored by Andy Warhols right hand man during the days of the Factory, Ronnie Cutrone. Above is one of his pieces that caught my eye. Be sure to check out his website if you want more info.

I also purchased a gorgeous poster print called "72ND STREET PARADE" which uses what looks like a subway/NJ transit map as the canvas and has a wonderful contrast of black white and colors, a resounding theme in much of his work. You can find a picture of that and more of his work on his website here: http://miguelparedes.com/gallery.html

GTL - Battle cry of the Jersey Shore

How do I muster the strength to look away from this train wreck? I bet many people have found themselves thinking that same thought. The answer is you don't, not unless you want to miss the weekly fight on the boardwalk of Seaside Heights, or miss seeing a girl punched in the face full on by a grown ass man. I am not the biggest fan of reality shows although I write this while my wife "makes" me watch Frank the Entertainer, but when I heard they were going to do one about the Jersey Shore, I had to break out my velour Fila sports suit and my powder blue Kangol hat.

Honestly, I don't even know where to start, but I do want to say that this is more about 'how the hell did the Jersey Shore' become the most popular show on television and less about the actual show and "the Situation" or "Snooki."

By the way every time you see a space between paragraphs, it is not for grammar, but actually a chance for me to 'beat the beat' with my fist.

LOL. So all kidding aside I was at a business function with other 30 somethings and 40 somethings and I was bedaffled, I don't think its a word but appropriate nonetheless, at how many people were completely hooked to this terrible piece of wonderful television. I mean we are talking about VP's, CEO's and other senior level professionals,, albeit we are all in the media business, but who are completely in the know about all things 'Jersey Shore.' In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I too was Guido in my former life, now I need to qualify that statement by saying that I was 14 years old at the time, but that fist pumping in the air has continued to pump ever so quietly inside my heart.

So I get the Gym and Tanning, hell I wish I had the time to do that every day, but who goes to the laundromat every day, I mean I never saw them go to the laundromat at night to drop anything off, but nonetheless it is apparently clean by the time they are done tanning. Please join us silently beating our fists in the air in honor of the Guido's Valhalla.....'the Jersey Shore'.....fuhgeddaboutit!

Wannabe Triathlete

So for the last few years i have been looking for a way of reinventing myself while at the same time keeping myself from getting old. Couple years ago I decided that would be to compete in the NYC Nautica Triathlon, now I use the word compete loosely, I am looking to finish it without having a heart attack. The other reason I have wanted to do this tri is because it would force me to finally quit smoking, you would think that with two little children that would be motivation enough, and you'd be wrong.

Anyhow, last year I worked as a volunteer as that would guarantee me a slot in the NYC tri since this triathlon in particular sells out within a matter of minutes. With that being said, I went and plopped down my non-refundable/non-transferable $300 give or take and made the commitment. 2 months later I am in much worse shape than I was in when when I volunteered and certainly worse than when I signed up the day before Halloween. The race is July 18, 2010, which officially puts me 193 days away from having a myocardial infarction, JK. I know I can do it even if the only part of the race I could complete today would be the 40k bike ride, come race time, I am most certainly going to be ready, or die trying. If i keep making these death references and then something bad does happen, my wife is certainly going to be sorry she didn't stop me from racing. Again...........joking

Well as I said, I paid $300 for entry not counting the interest I am paying on that money since it went on my credit card, and I am pot committed, not even considering that I am probably going to have to spend 5 times that amount on equipment. I could probably get by with only spending a few hundred bucks, but if I am going to this I am going to sink or swim (literally, the first leg of the race is 1500m swim) and if I fail, I will do so gloriously.

Stay tuned for updates on how the training is coming. And oh yeah, I am on my third day of healthy eating and it feels great. If you want to be a cyber training buddy of mine, or if you're local please get in touch, the more the merrier.

Vizio Eco-HDTV

After many years of waiting for our kitchen TV/VCR combo to die, last week I finally got my wish, the tube television (you young kids don't even know what a tube television is) /eyesore by Symphonic will be going out in today's trash.

In its stead will be the sleek and beautiful and most importantly eco-friendly Vizio VX240M 24" TV that exceeds Energy Star 3.0 ratings by over 15% and that does not even come at the expense at quality. I can't confirm that it doesn't come at quality's expense, because I have yet to hook it up to my verizon fios hd box, as I am working errr... blogging, anyhow as soon as I have some feedback on how the TV does, I will be sure to update the quality and overall experience with this new TV.

So I got home, installed the TV very quickly and sat down to eat my first meal in front of it.....First impression is that its a very handsome TV with sleek lines, was basically plug and play, although it was set up in Spanish, so luckily I had 9th grade Spanish under my belt and was able to find the "ingles" option.

I have yet to tweak any colors or settings, and the only negative I have is that with the TV on top of a cabinet 7 feet in the air and my eyes at about 3.5 feet sitting down I must be exceeding the 170 degree viewing angle claimed by the manufacturer, if I had a protractor handy i would tell you the exact angle. I can say that it is unpleasant for regular at that viewing, so I went ahead and ordered an articulating wall mount for the TV which with budget shipping, should be here in time for the Super Bowl. I am hoping that the mount with its additional 20 degree tilt will create a perfect viewing angle to enjoy the TV wherever I may be in the kitchen.

And, there is a possibility that from my downstairs bathroom, given the right tv position and the right angle on my bathroom mirror, I may be able to watch CNBC while taking my morning shower. Now if that alone wasn't worth the money, then I dot what is.

Oh, before I forget, I found the cheapest TV mount site ever on the web, my mount for thew 24" TV was $6.95 plus 9 shipping and an annoying handling charge at the last page of 1.50, but nevertheless a wall mount, let alone an articulating one that also hides the cables for $17, I dare you to beat that.

The site is http://www.bestlinknetware.com

Good luck!

Home Network Infrastructure

So the other day I started thinking about how much hard drive space I would need in the house for the forseeable next few years. Think about all the video, and pictures and music files that we accumulate over the years, until recently this was in the form of a CD collection/dvd collection, and some cassette (yes I had quite the cassette collection).

Lately the profileration of digital media has brought a huge onslaught of external hard drive equipment over the last 5-10 years, and prices have gone down accordingly. Today you can get a terrabyte drive for just under a $100 bucks, but of course you would need at leat two for redundancy purchases. I mean you can't risk losing pictures forever, especially since we rarely ever print them, we instead stockpile the data slowing down our computers and wonder why our available local hard drive space is in the red.

Why now I do think about these issues you may ask, well I have recently become the father of two, no not twins, but damn near close, my daughter Isabella is 1 year and 5 months old, and our newest addition my son Mishka is only 2 and 1/2 months old. We have a 320 gig hard drive with no back up other than our locals, my wifes and my laptops, and I am looking at increasing our storage and can't decide which way to go, I think at the end of the day I am going to get 2 1TB harddrives, I expect that to last for atleast a few years, but I have to wonder that as our cameras approach 20 pixels and our video becomes only HD, how much storage will my kids need when they become teenagers? Is cloud computing going to solve all our problems, can it even become that inexpensive, will we all at one point or another have server rooms in our homes comparable in size to most small to mid sized companies today? Where can we possibly keep all the data? I don't trust third parties storing irreplacable items, at one point I thought about burning back up dvd's just in case, but where would you store them?

I know this is a lot of questions with no answers, but I should hope that within 5-10 years there will be 10TB SSD's (solid state drives) the size of a credit card for all our data needs, they will surely be available at Wal Mart at one of the end caps, for.......I don't know $39.99 sounds fair.

What kind of network infrastructure do you have at your home, or think you will need to have in the next few years?

Inquiring minds want to know.....

Fios v.s. TWC and IR extenders

About 5 months ago I switched from Time Warner cable to Verizon Fios. I had been a loyal TWNYC customer for 15-20 years when Verizon finally completed their fiber optic network in my area and began peddling their Fios TV package door to door and via aggressive direct mail.

I was instantly intrigued at the opportunity to have content delivered to me via fiber optic cable, I want my content delivered at light speed, and anything slower than that is simply unacceptable. :-)

The deal that finally got me to act on Fios was the free home media DVR for a year, this offer had a value of 19.99 per month and added up to a savings of almost $240 for the year, but to be honest with you, I would have went with Fios regardless once I had heard about the multi-room DVR, that was what finally pushed me over the edge. You see for a year or two my wife and I had discussed how great it would be to have a DVR in the bedroom, however, it would have added a cost of $13 or so a month and the fact that we would be recording the same shows in both the living room and bedroom seemed foolish. The principle of the matter just kept me from spending extra money on a bill that already exceeded $160/month (including Internet access).

So I got on the phone with Verizon, I had already missed the free DVR deal for a year, but I was able to negotiate a monthly discount of $10/month for a year, plus I got all the premium channels for free for 90 days and was told to check back monthly about additional free offers.
This seemed reasonable for me, especially since even at full price Verizon cost me less than Time Warner and was supposedly much faster with all sorts of bells and whistles.

The installer finally came in December and I had to send him away and reschedule since we could not find a proper place to install the box. During the week between the first and second installation appointment, I installed an outlet in my foyer that would make the installation seamless. Finally the installer came and we installed everything in matter of 3-4 hours, not the 8/9 hours they say it would take because I had laid the ground work during the week as to how we should do the installation.

Now mind you, with Time Warner I had Scientific Atlantic cable boxes and in my bedroom the box was hidden in a closet and had an IR extender wired so that we could operate the box with only the TV out in the open. Now Fios uses Motorola cable boxes or STB's (set top box) as they call them, and they truly are STB's, in that there is no OEM method to wire an Infrared extender to their box and in order for it to work it needs to be in direct line of sight with the remote.

I thought there is no way that a company like Motorola did not think about this problem. At first I tried to use the IR extender from my scientific box which uses a simple USB for power with the available USB's on the Motorola, but alas that did not work, and I was later informed that the USB connectors on the boxs were not live. Then I tried to jerry-rig the extender by using a USB-AC converter and directly powering it, but that too did not work.

My next step, I called Verizon, and they told me that they did not know what I should do. Then I said Motorola must have an answer, I mean they are Motorola after all, but once again I was wrong and they said I should speak to Verizon. At this point I realized I was on my own, and that I would need to come up with an aftermarket solution.

Time was limited as my wife was on her way home from Florida in a week and she said that she did not want to watch TV with an open closet door so she could have line of sight between the cable box and the remote, note that these were not her exact words were, she was more like "MAKE IT HAPPEN."

So I set off to do my research and my believe me there were hundreds of different solutions out there, most of which required that I purchase and IR receiver, an IR emitter, a switch box for the two and a power supply, this seemed like a messy and costly set up (about $90-$100), and all this to change channels from bed with a closed closet door?????? There had to be a better way......

....and there was, I found a product that converted the IR signal from your remote into an RF signal that was sent through the air, magically of course, to a little "UFO looking" like receiver which had an IR emitter attached to it, which would need to be placed in front of the cable box.
I was doubtful about how something like this would work, how does a little battery sleeve that goes into a remote magically convert IR into RF, I was amazed at the thought and baffled by the technology, was there a Noble prize for physics awarded for this technology and I missed the award show??? Was the person who invented this device the same person who invented the plastic on the end of shoe laces, the inventor of the post-it???? How had I not heard of this magic before?

This is the device if you are interested:

http://estore.websitepros.com/1373698/Detail.bok?no=8

I bought the device on amazon for $33, that was the best price I could find on it. It took literally 2 minutes to make it work, and this is not like the "2 minutes" most companies claim, I am talking 120 seconds or less (once you charge the mini battery) to be off to the races. The only negative I could see is that there seems to be a little lag in the device, not sure if it is the box or the extender, but I believe it is the extender and if you are a bedridden invalid (whom I have nothing against) you may want to invest in a different solution, but if you are a recreational TV in the bedroom watcher, then this is for you.

I love this device and gave it a great review on Amazon, I have since spent countless hours thinking about what other devices I would like to control from other rooms using this miracle of IR to RF conversion technology. My wife has prevented me from moving forward with my dreams of powering blenders and coffee makers from the backyard, but the day will come when I will control her hair dryer from the neighbors house.

You know how they say, when God closes a door, he opens a window, well my closed door was the Motorola STB that Verizon uses, and my window was the Next Generation Remote extender.

I have now had FIOS for 5 or so months, and have my complaints, but overall am happy with the product, the greatest feature of which is the multi-room DVR, I go from the living room to kitchen to the bedroom and Resume my recorded programs seamlessly. Well to be honest, there have been issues with the functionality, but with a little trial and error, I get it going and continue to watch my MTV wherever I am with Ninja-like efficiency. ( I am pretty sure that's not even a saying, but I like the sound of it. Throw Ninja in any sentence and it's just cool)