Ok, Here is my list of what I have installed right now.  I’m going to try to keep this list updated as I install new apps and remove others

Also a quick rundown of each app and how i find it useful.

3CX Phone – VOIP soft phone that works on the SIP protocol. It connects to my VOIP server so im pretty sure that you wont have issues with connection to yours. Call quality is obviously going to be based on WIFI / 3G signal and bandwidth. I have tested this with one of my buds and i would say that 85% of the time there aren’t any issues with it. The sound quality on the me the callers end is a little more “tinny” but tolerable.

Astro – This is a must. Its a file browser that also lets to connect to network drives and copy files to and fro

Barcode Scanner – This is one of those apps that i rarely use but for some reason keep installed. You know its to scan bar-codes etc. Again this one might be the first to be thrown in the Trash.

Battery Time lite – Not to shabby little battery information app. Tells you what you expect at your current battery level. (like how long it would last on a phone call , watching media etc. also has a notification bar info telling your the percentage (which i like) as its not built into the default batter icon.

color note – This is my note taking app. pretty straight forward here. It can use color labeling but I don’t really take that many notes so basic text for me.

connect bot – If you work in the tech industry or are an administrator etc. this is essential. connect to your systems via telnet or ssh. nuff said.

ebay – Decent, search bid, sold, watch. pretty decent.

google finance – Watch your stocks take a dive with this google finance app, keep track of how much money you have lost and if you should buy or sell something else.

four square – tells you whats around, and if your friends have it installed you can “check into” locations and it will notify them where you are. I would be cautious with this one if you are wanted by the feds.

gesture search – neat, but finding it less useful as it doesn’t integrate with the native Android OS, let make gestures that search your phone for contacts etc. e.g. spell letter S with your finger on the screen and it will bring up contacts starting with that letter, emails, etc. This would be cool if they could integrate it somehow with the native home screen. This is also official Google app.

gmote – Really neat app, you install the client software on a pc and then u can user your phones screen as the touch pad and keyboard. nice if you do alot of presentations or if you are easily ammused.like me.

ipcalc – IP subnet calculator. there are tonnes of these take your pick. Mine is free cause all i need is to do the math, there are some that have IP port scanners etc.

keepass – Store all your important passwords, URLs’, and numbers in this universal password storing app. Works across platforms. MAC/WIN/LINUX. A winner.

listen – If you like listening to podcasts and keeping a subscription. Then this is the app for you, i use it all the time when im bored with the music and want to listen to a podcast or book.

flixster – Movie Trailers, reviews, box office times. Nearest Movie theater.

my tracks – track your run, walk, cycle pretty much anything, I havent used this yet but will shortly and post my results.

remote rdp – RDP app for managing those pesky windows based servers, i actually bought this from the developer back when i was using my G1 , good to see that its still alive and developer is maintaining updates.

ringdroid – Create your own custom ring tone. Haven’T used it yet but will.

rockpalyer – Ummm supposed to support more file types than the standard Mp4. haven’t played with it much yet.

setcpu – This app rocks the house, scales your CPU and desired times to reduce battery life. def check this out, requires ROOT access. i get prob an additional 50% of battery life by using this.

td bank – My online banking needs, but should support email transfers.

torrent fu – kinda cool lets you remotely stop start torrents on your PC at home, also let you browse RSS feeds, works well but some RSS URLs don’t seem to work.

touchpal - Hmm another keyboard imput method, this one might go soon. I’m getting used to the stock android keyboard.

tweetcaster – twitter, this is free they have a paid app that lets you use multiple accounts. might switch this up.

vlc remote – Control your VLC player from your phone (requires web UI be turned on in VLC player) works quite well use it pretty commonly.

wifianalyzer – Neat, shows you the wifi SSIDs and what channel they are using. This will help you choose the best channel to broadcast your AP on.

wordpress – Straight forward, although don’t think your going to blog long posts from your phone.

wyse - another RDP client – probably going to get un-installed.

why?…keep reading…

More than anything because apple still likes to keep a strangle hold on everything. You probably heard this a million times but its the truth, while Apple likes to play this way, there are other kids on the playground that actually play well with others. i.e. google. Our friends at google like to give you control and say hey check this out and play with it. They don’t even really care if you root your phone to make things work faster and better for you. All the apps that require “root” access aren’t banned from the market, they exist there like all others.

Google has taken even a next step to this and introduced App Inventor http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/. Giving the most novice programmer the chance to play with the android platform and make simple apps that don’t require the traditional tools that would typically be involved. Hats off ! Also Google does not take any money from app sales, they charge a 25$  one time fee…apple well lets just say 30% of all sales. plus i think there are other fees involved.

My first Android experience was with the G1 hardware and Android 1.5 ; the hardware was really my only choice because here in Canada we don’t get much selection. Anyways i automatically thought OK its not 100% polished but i can already do leaps and bounds more than on my iPhone 3G, this is of course because of the open-ness of the platform. I Was able to root my very underpowered G1 device and flash it with a cyanogen ROM, which made the G1 tolerable for a longer period of time…:) I regret that after about 3months I had to go back to my Blackberry as the G1 in shape/form and processing power was just not working out. but I’m back baby, i was actually able to purchase a Nexus One from the official site about a month ago, and all the memories of the great android platform immediately seeped into me and wondered why I ever left it in the first place.

Now that you have some background I’ll go into a little further detail  from my previous experience to now.

I don’t want to compare having a G1 to my Nexus as that wouldn’t really be fair…so im just going to type whatever comes out at this point. I know people say charge the battery while the phone is off…forget that i cracked her open and turned it on. WOW what a screen, brilliantly sharp and beautiful. Within about 5 seconds it was prompting me to install the 2.2 (froyo) update. Sure thing! done and done. After the reboot the first thing i noticed was the speed of the thing. (coming from a G1 this was night and day) I know the Nexus One has a great processor but it also felt like something underlying had changed since my time with the 1.5 device. The phone is incredibly snappy and does not seem to slow down after time. Fantastic.

The market: This has changed to be more of a pleasant experience , also the fact that you can purchase apps right from the market was also new to me. i had previously had to purchase directly from the developers website. So this was a good seamless integration. Also I’m noticing new options like automatic update of apps.

Email: the ability to have multiple Google accounts and send independently. This for me is great as i am a google apps premier user so switching between accounts is great. Also the integration with Exchange (active sync) built in is never a bad thing for those corporate email accounts.

Apps: We this had not changed much from what i see, but now there is the option to install apps to the SD card to free up internal memory. This again major improvement for limited memory devices (though the app needs to support this feature) Oh ya and much more apps in the market. more apps the better. Oh ya and most of the apps are FREE and in allot of cases better than the paid (thanks to the developers)

Camera / Gallery: Again the Nexus One has a superior cam to the G1 and it’s very noticeable, also the new gallery is quite impressive and adds to the eye candy of the phone. Also the quick sharing button allows you to upload the pix or video to mostly any service that you want to integrate with.

Root Access: While its not a button that they integrate with the phone it is not really discouraged, to tell you the truth the only reason i did it was because i wanted to install SETCPU and this requires being root. Other than that app i don’t think i has any reason to root the phone (although having root in the terminal has its advantages

The future of Android:

I thought way back after the first run of Android phones that it was going to be hit or miss, mainly miss. I admit defeat at this point. Android is fearlessly growing in adoption and there are many, many handsets now running some flavor of the OS. I only think at this point it will gain in strength and popularity…i also see a backlash towards apple’s closed platform..if you see what is possible with android and appreciate the freedom Apple is in much trouble. Take a look at these devices and tell me apple isnt in trouble. DROID X EVO 4G NEXUS ONE GALAXY S

I hope to bring you more on Android and my personal experiences. So check back soon.

TF

Well guess what, i don’t really have time to follow up on this one. I got most of the hardware, but then someone’s power supply went south so i gave them the one from the box i was going to use. ya im a nice guy. So maybe in the near future i can continue this one.

)))))))))

Recently i had a friend of mine mention PFsense firewall / router, since im a security geek mainly implementing Cisco/juniper. I figured that trying out PFsense at home might be a good idea.

I used to use monowall/smoothwall years ago and thought they were pretty good at what they did, back then i didn’t have alot of $$ to purchase hardware to make a dedicated box.

so here is my current setup and my new plan:

I currently have  a linksys RV042 load balancer with 2 wan connections going into it. 1 is cable modem, the other is DSL, they are currently in a load balanced situation but i have all HTTP / HTTPS traffic going out 1 line as there are issues with sticky connections (this router does not seem to support it) Now I’m not really sure that im going to see a large increase in performance, but there are some great features that PFsense has to offer including snort IDS, squid proxy, captivate portal. now i know these would have limited use for me at home but depending on how this performs at home it may be a viable alternative for some of my customers.

My Internet speeds are pretty crappy, mainly cause i live in Canada and the choices on providers are slim. My providers are currently 3web (cable) and teksavvy (DSL 5mb/800k)

my cable modem

dsl modem and router

its Saturday morning here are current speed tests from teksavvy (http)

http://www.speedtest.net/result/777995659.png

The plan:

using a spare box my friend is willing to give me p4 dual core, 1Gb mem x2 intel nics x1 onboard. I will post exact specs when i get it. this will be a mini atx board and case.

i will setup pfsense with the 2 wan’s in a load balanced scenario and use the on-board for LAN connectivity.

i will try to gather some baseline tests from my current setup so that i have some things to compare.

Once i get the hardware i will update the post.

Technorati Tags: pfsense dual wan snort firewall

My G1 is the new proud owner of Cyanogen 4.2.1 ROM.

IF you are CM fans, you will know how great this ROM is as compared to some of the others in the 4.1.9xxx territory.

Now, my G1 had some problems with 4.2….they are listed below.

no matter what I did, wipe, flash.  wipe, flash,wipe. wipe,flash recovery,flash,wipe, fix_permissions….my problem did not decided to leave, it wanted to stick around. The problem, browser, and market, along with opening emails just closed the app altogether.

after checking on XDA-forums for multiple hours, someone had the exact same problem as i did. He referenced re-copying  the file located in /system/bin named libwebcore.so , so i extracted that from a ROM that i knew it worked with 4.1.99. so down to a terminal i go and “adb remount” then “adb push libwebcore.so /system/lib” and reboot!

Volia! everything is working great and with the speed of 4.2.1 I must say this injects new life into my G1.

Technorati Tags: 4.2.1, cyanogen, g1 htc, rogers ROM

yesterday i finally purchased Remote RDP for my G1 android. Not too shabby, it does a pretty good job at RDP connectivity even over 3G (WIFI is more stable of course) but this app is pretty great!  Now i can connect and make the changes i need to on my windows server boxes from pretty much anywhere.

The full version supports multiple saved connections, resolution, audio and SD card integration. Try it i think you will like it especially if you are an admin like me

check it out at http://toremote.com

Ok while i must admit that i am new to this whole blogging thing, the amount of comment SPAM this site is getting is rediculous! terrible really.

While the SPAM plugin is taking care of the 95% that is coming in, i still get about 10 comment posts / day that are complete garbage, i dont really mind deleting them but I cant help to think that my analytics on the site are going to be totally skewed when all the connectng spammers IP s are parsed.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with this problem?

OK, so i thought that being able to follow Kevin on twitter would be great http://twitter.com/thatKevinSmith. Maybe this would be a good way to get the know the man better WTF is going! While i understand and appreciate that he is trying to respond to his fans…i mean literally he’s been posting every 2min today and filling up my view with SHIT.

Messasge to Kevin,

While i am a big fan of all the movies well…90% of them (i’ll keep you guessing which  i think you were more intresting PRE twitter, now you just seem to be annoying and rather having my image of you tainted by your constant tweets. I have thus decided to unfollow you and look forward to your next flick !

Keep it real.

Regards.

Technorati Tags: kevin, smith, thatkevinsmith, twitter

Well yesterday I signed up at 99designs. I heard a little about it and thought id giver a try. Looking to redesign a site that I have for one of my businesses.
How it works (from what i gather) is u pay a fee, depending on the package you choose, they open your project to all their registered designers they can choose to work on ur site. You then review all the people that submit entries and choose a winner. Which ever site you choose is the site you end up purchasing. My entry only lasts 7 days then im not sure what happens if there are no submission or not enough?

what happens if there is only 1 submission? eh.

I chose the mid tier package (wordpress based) and opted for coding as well. So I think I’m in for about 1000 USD for this, don’t know what to really expect. But will keep you updated check it out. They do logos and other items. 99designs.com

- Update Sept 2 2:20pm

so far no entires!

Stay tuned.

- Update Sept 7 and my contest is ending in hours.

Very interesting thus far, most of the designs didnt start coming in until the last couple of days. needless to say the designs are better and more targeted to what i was looking for.

leaving feedback is crucial and found that updates to the designs were happening in real time, and i was tough to get off the computer! i found myself responding to queries and comments all day. Now there is a different issue. i rated a design i liked the most so far then everyone just started ripping it off. so now i am faces with a moral dilemma…do i choose what i like or the person that came up with the original design PRE rip off.

stay tuned yet again.

- Update – contest has ended.

contest has ended and I now have 14days to make a decision on who will be chosen the winning design. So i will take a couple of days to think and I will let you know how the POST experience is using 99designs. I have also chosen thier coding services so lets see how that goes.

the designs were OK, they look like slightly modified templates that i have really already seen around, i am anxious to see if there are any hurdles to overcome to get the finished product up and running on my host.

Technorati Tags: web site design 99 designs wordpress

As of now 4:20 EST time, since about 3:40pm GMAIL is Down.

Taken from the status page.

We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 4:53:00 PM UTC-4 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

Technorati Tags: 2009, down, gmail, offline, sept

In short PS freaking T’s

As of now have been sitting here for 30min while i do a backup of someones mailbox, so export to PST and who knows how much longer and it will be complete at some point i suppose. While outlook is exporting the Disk I/O is pegged out rendering the machine pretty much useless until it’s done. Then i will end up with a 2-4GB file that may or may not be corrupted.

I rather much enjoy my Gmail experince, no bluky client, fast, incredible search and not having to worry about backing up my data.

Google – 1 (no need to do backups)

MS  - 0 (need to do backups for sanity sake, and incase your HD dies)

Technorati Tags: hate, microsoft, outlook, pst, time, waster