• Motorola has returned to awesome

    bubble By toddj   Jan 11, 2010 4:28 pm
    tag Tagged as #technology #motorola #droid

    I’ve now moved into the “one week to one month” ownership of the Droid  on Verizon and I’m loving it more and more.  I can’t really compare it to the iPhone since I have never used it, but I can give a pretty fair assessment of the phone. Even with my complaints, the phone is still a solid phone and the Android operating system compensates for most of the bad things.

    Pretty Quick
    First, the operating system is fairly fast.  While on its own, it leaves a bit to be desired.  If you don’t have friends that constantly give you tips like mine do (thanks Cy), then you may be a little lost trying to figure out some things.  Like how sms notifications doesn’t give you any popup notification or anyway to set up reminders.  This is solved by the SMS Popup app.  Another gripe about the messaging from me: when in the notification area, it sometimes tells me a message is from someone completely different from who actually sent it.  Annoying, but doesn’t really hurt anything, because once you go into it you see who it actually belongs to.

    Multiple Apps are <3
    Multiple apps are a must for me.  I like to be able to run Meebo mobile and listen to Pandora radio at the same time.  But with this comes an entirely different thing that bugs me. I have my headphones plugged in to listen to some music while I’m bored, when I suddenly get a message (from either Meebo or just a text message), and the music pauses for a moment, plays my notification sound through my headphones, then continues playing.  Now this wouldn’t be that much of a problem if my friends could say what they what they wanted to say in one message instead of 5 one-word messages(thanks again Cy ;).  Another problem with multiple apps being able to run in the background is the battery being drained quickly.  If you’re like me and want to listen to music and browse the web and send text messages all day long, then you’ll be out of luck, as you might get 5 hours of battery life doing all of that.  Sticking with mostly texting and doing one thing at a time you should be good to last the day.  On the subject of multiple apps, you’re going to want to install Advanced Task Killer and occasionally go and killl things running in the background slowly killing a little bit more battery life.

    Battery life is “meh”
    Transitioning to battery life, there are a couple of things you can do to help keep track of your usage and maybe extend the life a bit.  Cy suggests using [insert app name], because it inserts your battery percentage into the top notification bar.  However, I prefer “Battery Widget” for a couple of reasons: 1. I don’t like having things in my notification area. 2. The battery widget provides shortcuts to kill things that might be killing your battery, like wifi, gps, or bluetooth.







(Reblogged from incuboring.)



  • Spice IT Up

    bubble By toddj   Aug 21, 2009 1:00 am
    tag Tagged as #technology #IT #Spiceworks #Freeware

    Since we’ve been taking on a few more projects at work, we decided it was time to push spiceworks a little more.  We have been using it in our branch since version 1.5 (now on version 4.1) and thought it would be a good idea to bring it to the main office and use it as our main helpdesk.

    We had no idea how many features it had and just how helpful the community is until we really started looking into it. Not to mention

    It’s Free

    Our Setup

    We have one main office in Clarksburg and three smaller branch offices.  What Spiceworks does for us is gives us a central location for people to send help request tickets.  Also, it inventories the entire network, not just locally, but over the WAN that we have.  In order to do this, we have each domain controller at all of the branch offices with spiceworks installed on it.  The branch offices have spiceworks installed in “Inventory only” mode, where it collects data from all of the network devices on the local network, then sends that data to Clarksburg.  We can then see all of the network devices, including workstations, servers, routers, switches, and etc.

    This helps because the details it can provide about each workstation, we can figure out many problems without ever having to make a visit to the machine in question when a ticket is formed.  We can see software installed, service tags, system information, hard drive usage and more.  It’s nearly limitless with all of its possiblities.

    Just try it.

    Download Spiceworks Free Network Management Software

    Trust me, there are many more features than what I mentioned.  The only way to see if it will fit your needs is to at least visit the site and read about what it can do for you.




  • Video conferencing

    bubble By toddj   Aug 7, 2009 6:04 pm
    tag Tagged as #technology #work

    Video conferencing has become quite important with the desire to save time and money in business.  This week has been quite the week as Caleb and I have been installing all of the necessary equipment to make inter-office communication a more viable option.

    With four office locations, we had a total of five conference rooms to connect.  While we did hit a few snags along the way, the project overall has gone very smoothly.  Today was the last installation and I’m quite pleased with how everything looks and runs.  Soon we will do provide a demo and a tutorial to show how the basics work so that we can start saving them travel time.

    Pictures soon!