What is Dynamic DNS?

First a step back.

Communication on the internet happens because every end-point has an IP address. IP addresses are like phone numbers on the internet. But IP addresses such as 192.168.245.123 are a little hard to remember for every website you visit so we have domains and hostnames. In order for an IP address to be associated with a hostname a computer will ask a DNS server (or Domain Name System server) which resides somewhere on the internet what IP address is associated with a certain hostname. When one DNS server doesn't know how to answer a specific request, the DNS server is setup to ask other DNS servers for help.

Now we have 1 problem. Say you want an easy way to access your home network. Different routers will allow you to access different items within your home. But because your IP is constantly changing due to how your ISP's network works, you can't easily setup a traditional DNS record to associate the IP address your ISP gives you.

Enter the invention of Dynamic DNS. Services such as no-ip.com provide your router a way to edit DNS records on their DNS server when the ISP assigned IP address changes. You put in your account information, the DNS record you want to keep up to date and the router does the rest.

So if you need remote access back to your network check out the following websites. Both provide free dynamic hostname options and are supported by most home router manufacturers:
http://www.no-ip.com
http://www.dyndns.com

What is a good mouse for those with wrist pain?

A couple months ago I asked myself this question. As most people know, I've suffered from chronic wrist pain in both my wrists. I've had to do a lot to get through some of the pain. Yep, I most certainly have the highly recommend star ship enterprise keyboard aka the Microsoft Natural keyboard. I've had that keyboard for years and has greatly help putting my wrists in a more natural position when I type (imagine that).

Around the same time I bought the keyboard I also bought a Logitech mouse that I thought would be a good ergonomic mouse. It did help a little with the pain in my right wrist but eventually it got to a point where I knew I needed something different. So I did some research. I saw all sorts of mice and read reviews giving one opinion or another.

Some say that trackballs are the best for wrist pain. Eh. I'm not really interested in that learning curve.

I found some mice that look more like a joystick to keep your wrist in a more vertical position. This seemed like a good idea to me except that it was very bulky.

Eventually I found the Evoluent Vertical Mouse. After reading a lot of reviews of people who saw improvement and decrease inflammation after a week or so of use, I decided to get it. It's quite pricey but when you're talking about pain, you're left with little choice as to what you're going to do.

After receiving the mouse I found it a bit cumbersome at first. Its a large case that requires a rather large hand to use. And as the other reviews said, it will force you to learn to use your shoulder to move the mouse. Myself its more of a shoulder and wrist movement, but its more natural movement. Instead of first twisting your arm to allow for more constricted space for your nerves, the Vertical Mouse gives you that natural position and nerves have more space. More space equals less inflammation.

After learning how to use the mouse, I was very happy with it. If you are suffering from pain caused by inflammation, you need to give this mouse a look. Everybody is different but I feel this is a safe bet if you're looking for something to help the pain.

Below I've listed a way to look at the wireless version. Feel free to take a look at the other reviews and see if its something that would help you.

Apple vs Principle

With the recent passing of my desktop computer and the diminishing health of both of our laptops, its becoming clear that my wife and I are going to need to get a new computer soon. That said, I'm at a loss as to what I should become serious about purchasing. I love Apple computers. I'm typing this up on a true soldier, my old iBook from well before Apple could spell Intel. I also love the macbook pro I use for office work.

But I feel its coming down to principle. You know the recent news. Apple has made a bunch of big moves recently to say "Screw you world, do things our way". Examples. There are the changes to the iPhone/iPad developer stuff making it illegal to make iPhone/iPad any other way than the official Apple way. And there's the news today that they denied an app from the App Store that used multi-touch to browse photos stating that only official apps are allowed to do that. Those are just two brief example. Come on Apple, these are just silly.

So what do I do? Jobs, I think your laptops are great. I want one with reliable hardware and good battery life. I've also already invested in Logic for my recording software and don't really feel like investing in another product. That said, you're a jerk.

Alternatively we could go ahead and get a Windows based laptop that costs a lot less. There are a lot of options and I'm sure we could find one at a decent price. However you get what you pay for. My HP desktop lasted less than 2 years with less than frequent use. My wife's laptop has been having power and screen issues for quite a while now and its about as old as my laptop.

Where to go from here?

Why is Google Voice so awesome?

I'll admit that I barely use the Google Voice service's feature list. I don't really need another phone number nor all the call routing. The thing I love about this service though is the voicemail. Its feature packed and even more so since I have a phone with the Android OS.

First, a recent feature that Google implemented is being able to use your Google Voice voicemail as your primary voicemail on your mobile phone. Setup is easy. Just hit settings which should land you on the phone tab. Next to each of the mobile phones you have setup you should see a link to "activate" or switch that phone's voicemail. It will guide you and about a minute later the swap will be done. You can do this to multiple phones and combine all your phones' voicemails.

Now it operates just the same as your old phone voicemail. You can call it and get your voicemails (lame). Why lame? Cause there are other ways to get your voicemail now. Log into your GV account in your browser and you get the transcript along the recording in an easy to use fashion. Or if you're using a Chrome browser you can install the extension to get continual access.

OR....

The Android app gives you the same in a fashion that rival's the iPhone's visual voicemail. The Google Voice kicks the iPhone's butt because it gives you the transcript. As a message is playing back it highlights words as you read the transcript which helps with those hard to decipher recordings. Of course its not exact so if you can't understand it there's a good chance the servers at Google can't either but between the two you should have a good idea what the other person is trying to say.

Another cool feature is the free SMS. Doesn't sound like such a big deal but if you're on a budget you can make sure that your friends send you SMS messages to your GV number and not see a charge. And just as it is with the voicemail you can do this from the web, Chrome extension or Android app. On the Android app if you start a text message it will ask you if you want to use the phone's messaging service or Google Voice's.

The last feature I will bring up is the call blocking. I don't know about you but I still get a lot of 800 numbers calling me. I refuse to answer them. After they try their ploys to get me, I can log into Google Voice, see my call log and hit block on those 800 numbers. The next time they try to call they'll get something that sounds like the phone company's "We're sorry, this number as been disconnected" message. I know its fighting an uphill battle but gives me more piece of mind when fighting against people that are wasting my minutes.

Most of the other features are advertised a lot more and you can easily learn them from the Google Voice site. You can see them here.

Google Voice

Regarding the RT contest on Twitter, I will pick a random retweeter Monday May 10th.

EDIT: I'm going to extend the contest to anyone who "Likes" my page on Facebook. I'll combine the two lists and draw a random winner. Thanks in advance! Hopefully the link below will work.
Chad's Brain Dump on Facebook.

Why I choose a Canon camera

Most people that I talked to when finding their first SLR their question is "Do I go Canon or Nikon?". Online research will lead you nowhere because they're both great companies that make great cameras.

Both companies offer a ton of choice when it comes to the camera bodies, lenses, flashes and other accessories. There is no lack of options to give you the perfect combination for your photography.

So for me my decision came down to past experience. My prior camera was a 3 megapixel Canon point-and-shoot camera and I personal felt it had great color saturation. After digging through a lot of the customer pictures on Amazon I found that the trend continues with their higher end products (as one would expect). When I looked at the Nikons, although I thought they took excellent pictures, I didn't feel they had had the same color saturation. So really it comes down to artist influence. My recommendation for you is to try and get your hand's on a friends SLR whether it be a Canon, Nikon, Sony, etc and just see if it works for you. If you can't get the color you like or if the flash doesn't seem to accent your subject just the way you want it, etc., then move on. When I tried the Rebel, I loved it and that's what I went with.

To those who side with Apple because of issues with Acrobat

(in reply to a comment thread on Facebook)

Its interesting to hear that people have been having issues with Acrobat. But do I follow the news regarding Acrobat much? Actually, not at all. My focus has been in the Coldfusion/Flex area of the Adobe product line. I use CF to produce PDF's all the time for different client senarios and not once has anything every come back to me about PDF's causing such problems. When setting up these PDF's I'm testing on my screen which I believe is running at 1920x1200 and never experience an issue nor have I seen it lock up my computer.

Regarding the licensing issue, yeah, the CS products are really expensive. It something that business have to deal with. I would love to have a copy of Photoshop and possibly Dreamweaver but the budget won't allow for it. I get it. But honestly, are we not talking about SOP for any major software vendor? I do know in the recent past Adobe has done wonders to make licensing easier for companies. Now the EULA for CF includes the ability to use the key for an unlimited number of development boxes along with bonus licenses for another install of CF in the cloud. Also I know a lot of their EULA's allow for a second installation of their software for home use.

I can only say good things about the CF/Flex people at Adobe. They're all about their customers and are constantly thinking of new/easy innovative ways to make the like of a CF/Flex developer easier. And unfortunately this issue with Apple vs Adobe has directly effected the areas of Adobe's business I use daily.

With the increasing demand for mobile content many in our community were rejoicing when Adobe announced stuff like the SWF to iPhone compiler and AIR to run on the iPhone/iPad. This move really hurts the App Store and iPhone/iPad users as developers across the board may start to give up on development for these Apple devices because as many have described, the technologies/languages that Apple has made available to develop their apps are quite illogical. That's why other companies have developed other products like Titanium mobile and Phonegap. Plus with the rise in the number of Android devices out there, I suspect that many will focus mobile efforts elsewhere.

As far as mobile browsing to deliver content, it seems Apple is depending on the HTML5 standards that are still unknown to many. A quick search over at amazon shows that authors aren't going to get books out on the topic until this summer.

All this to say, sorry about the issues with Acrobat. Hopefully one day the Acrobot team will hear your cries.

What do I think of the iPad?

Having never touched one and after only reading some things online about it, I'm not a fan. My hope when this thing was rumored was that it was a tablet form of the macbook air. With an actual computer operating system, the device would have a lot of potential. Instead we got the iPod Touch XL and the Touch's limitations. No real ability to multitask, no native printing, applications based on the iPhone model and more. You tell me the price would have soared. Fine. At least then I could see the device having some sort of application beside a gaming console or eReader you can't use in the sun.

What type of application do I see it in? It would be perfect for the custom software industry; industries that need to flip through data but are not doing a whole lot of entry. These applications are done for private companies and the applications have no business in the itunes store.

So I can hear it now, build an html application to run in the browser. Ok, I can take as a perfectly acceptable solution. A large part of my life right now is spent building web applications rendered using html. Lets get real a minute, do we want to base interactive web applications on an html/ajax solution? First its a mobile browser. That means we have the same rendering issues we do on the desktop...and more. Plus, I know I'm not a great programmer with ajax frameworks but I know there's a point that the browser says "enough, hit F5 now or I give up".

THANKFULLY, Adobe has no want to sit on the sidelines of the iPhone/iPad development scene. Adobe's Flash Professional CS5 will compile to iPhone apps and there have been videos out there of AIR coming to mobile devices including this one I saw today. These are great and will help us programmers out, but we still have to wait on an official release and the applications compiled from Flash are still subject to Apple's approval before distribution. I can't speak for the coming AIR apps but I can only assume the same and this isn't very condusive to the many internal apps I could make to make the lives of coworkers and clients easier. I understand that I can probably push the app down to select devices through the SDK but I'd really like to have them sit in an install directory on a server and download them to the device.

Aside from Flash/AIR there are other frameworks for iPhone/iPad/Android development but they either are a nice wrapper for a web app or have awful documentation. I would love to dig into the Titanium framework more, but I don't have time to figure it all out. Yes I know that they recently did a lot of work on the docs, but still leaves a lot to be desired in my opinion. And again, these are subject to Apple's approval.

Moving on...

Most people complain about no camera on it. I don't know if I join them or have a different but similar request. I want to see a camera on front. This device seems like it would be great for video conferencing via Skype, Adobe Connect or whatever. Also there is a plethora of other situations printing would be great but as this article states, there is zero native printing.

So what you or at least I would be left with is a want of a netbook. There you would have Windows, a keyboard, printing, choice of browsers, etc. If you want the form factor there are competing products coming soon. As this article state the forthcoming HP Slate is coming to enter the market but will run Windows 7 that gives you access to a lot more options. The price is steep, but again, I'm ok with that. If you really want this, you should be willing to put up the dough for something that's actually useful.

I could go on but I think you get the gist of what I'm thinking. I know I focused a lot on the application side of things so if you'd like me to continue, let me know.

Motorola Droid and the 2.1 Update

Being impatient for the update (my wife is still waiting and I'm out of town) I manually updated my Droid to the 2.1 update. The directions are clearly outlined here:

http://www.androidcentral.com/how-manually-update-your-droid-android-21

This update was to give the phone a lot of the features that you see on the Google Nexus One. Clearly we couldn't expect everything that the Nexus One has in 2.1 because it has about half the processing, but I'm a little disappointed with what we did get. Here are the big updates.

• Voice input on the keyboard
• News and weather widget/app
• Live wallpaper
• Nexus One Gallery
• Slightly different music player

Voice input on the keyboard

This feature is awesome. There is now a new button on the onscreen keyboard to start the speech to text engine. Say a few words like you do with a voice search and bam, it puts those words in for you. Same accuracy as the voice search. Not 100% but does the job. The disappointment here is this feature is not in places that helps me in the car. Voice search doesn't help me find music on my phone or anything. With all the bluetooth going on in my car, this would be a huge plus. But it doesn't. STINK.

News and Weather widget/app

I believe this is a feature is something that came with the Nexus One. Gives you a widget to see the current weather and headlines in various categories and then an app to drill in and get more information. The news part is a bit lacking, you can only customize it based on keywords. I think the best part of this app is the weather features. Tap the weather part of the widget and it gives you the 7 day forcast. Hit today's weather and it gives you a great bit of info on whats going on outside. This includes a temperature and humidity graph that you can scroll to see what these items will be in the next 24 hours.

Live Wallpaper

At the moment, this is strictly an "ooo-ahh" feature. Gives you wallpaper with animation and maybe, just maybe some useful information. The most you can get out of one of these wallpapers now is the google maps wallpaper that shows your current location. This seems dumb as it will probably drain your battery using the gps. But, I haven't tested so I don't know for sure. Right now I have it set to a wallpaper that shows some blades of grass blowing in the wind along with the sky which is based on the time of day. Noontime its bright blue, night time you get a dark sky with stars. Its kinda neat but I wish it would go further to base the sky on the current weather at your location. All in all you can't ask for too much from this feature and it does add some flair to the phone.

Nexus One Gallery

The photo gallery got totally revamped for the Nexus One and now its on the Droid. It breaks your photos up a lot like iphoto or picasa and gives you a nice gesture based navigation to view them. The REALLY nice feature is that it now pulls your picasa albums in automatically and puts them in the navigation as if the photos existed on the phone's memory. Great for showing off a large number of pictures.

Music Player

There really isn't much to say here. Some of the navigation flow on the player is still awkward and it seems the biggest addition to the player is the zune like use of an albums cover-art when browsing songs. I think I would still rather use another music player or just be lazy and power-up Pandora.

All in all the update did make my Droid better as a whole. Its a bit more flashy (not to confuse you, still no adobe flash on it). I do think that the phone operates a little better and seems less laggy. The biggest disappoint is no Adobe Flash. I'm a Flex advocate, I want my apps to work on my device's browser. But its coming soon (so I'm told). Also no additional home screens. The new pieces that we did get did not live up to the hype of the update as a whole, but are greatly appreciated.

If you have a Droid, install the update when it comes to your phone (being pushed out slowly). Or if you're like me, do the manual update listed above. My only problem doing it manually was that I needed to hold volume-up then camera to get to the boot menu. Otherwise it worked spot on.

Time to revisit and revamp...

So, I haven't used this blog in a long time. Blogging started to become sooo 2003 to me but recently i've realized how much of my day is spent doing two things: searching for answers in blogs and trying to answer questions that people randomly ask me. Seemed to me that if somebody has the question and I somehow get the answer, it should be shared. So that is going to be the main focus of this blog from here on out. I will try to update it a lot more consistently now and hopefully make it a revenue source for my wife and I. That being said you will see I've added several ads boxes to the page. Sorry, I don't want to do this for free! ;-) Along with these random questions I may pass by I will also try to anticipate future questions by breaking up the blog into other pages like product/music reviews.

Also, I don't know how often I will be posting to the blog but if you want to keep track of it, please consider subscribing to my RSS feed. I recommend using Google Reader for tracking your RSS feeds on the web. I've been using it for months now both on the web and on my phone to follow sites like philadelphiaphillies.com, androidcentral.com and toothandnail.com. RSS feeds are awesome. Getting off the soap box now.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the ramblings. Look for this to morph in different forms, maybe find its way off of blogger into something new or maybe getting a big name change. Who knows. The web gives us lots of possible sharing avenues.