Ive mentioned my disappointment with the iPhone on my other blog several times, but I do own one, and paid a good deal of cash for it…uuuhh not really, got it for free. A few weeks ago, I decided to Jailbreak it using WinPWN and started playing around with some of the third party apps that are available. Still didn’t find anything too interesting…until today.
It was about lunch time and I decided to go out to get something to eat. Wasn’t sure what I wanted so I remembered a little iPhone app that I downloaded called Streetflow. Streetflow is really a cool little app. I loaded it up and it used the iPhone’s fake built in gps to find out my location then it list all the restaurants that are near me.
Even though Ive been living in this area all of my adult life and was familiar with most places, I did find a restaurant that I had never been too. It also had reviews from other restaurant goers about that restaurant. Yes you can also submit your review of places that you visit to help others that may be in your area looking for somewhere to eat.
Once you find a place to eat, you can click on that place and it will give you more information about that place, including a phone number and street address (all these pics were taken later not the same places I went to earlier)
After getting something to eat, I decided to look at other places that are in my area. I found a place listed that recently closed, that did have a good review so I quickly decided to add a review to let others know that the place has closed.
All in all, this is the first app I found that I would say is clearly worth jailbreaking the iPhone. Maybe this will get added to iTunes when third party app support is finally added. If you have jailbroke your iphone and want more info, you probably already know where to get it. (through the installer). For more information about using Winpwn, you can check out this website.
Tags: 3rd party app, iPhone, Jailbreak, StreetFlow, WinPWN
02.Jul.08 
How is it..., Software, jonespc 
Comment (1)
A few weeks ago, I was sifting through my blog spam and wondered if it was even worth having my comments "Do Follow". I wrote about it and several commenters jumped at the defense of having blog comments "follow". One even had this to say…
do follow is like some prize that commenter’s deserve to get after leaving a good comment
Commenters should get a "prize" for commenting???
Every since I made that change to my blog, my comment spam rate skyrocketed. Most dont make it through askimet, but some that do, arent that valueble. Some you can obviously tell that they didnt read anything Ive written, and some are even random and completely off topic.
Reading through my blog I came across these set of comments when I was talking about GFW magazine, tell me if you see anything wrong? (click image to enlarge if needed)
The commenter copied and pasted my comment as his comment.
He didnt even try to come up with anything of his own mind. Thats just lazy. When I first saw this, I just laughed. When I see things like this, I ussually go in and delete it but this one I didnt cause it was just too funny. Pretty much supports my thoughts that "Do Follow" blog comments maybe not such a good idea anymore.
13.May.08 jonespc Comments (5)
Yesterday I talked a little about where you can go to set up a free hosted blog, today Im going to talk about another option that you have if you want to set up a blog.
Wordpress
I know what you are thinking, I talked about wordpress yesterday. That was the free hosted version of wordpress at wordpress.com. If you head over to wordpress.org, you can download the wordpress blogging framework and host it wherever you want. Dont get me wrong, this wordpress download is also free, and it is free to use wordpress but setting up your blog this way will cause you to spend a little money. If you want to host your own wordpress blog, these are the things you need to do…
Get a domain name
Domain names aren’t that expensive, you just go to a domain registrar like Godaddy.com and start searching for available domain names. If you’ve never looked for a domain name before, youd notice that it is hard to find one, your first choice is probably going to be taken. The good thing is you can keep trying names until you find one available that you like and you don’t have to pay anything until you found one. The cost on the domain names from Godaddy.com are usually around $8.99 a year, but the prices vary depending on what type of domain you choose to buy. If you find one you like, its a good idea to go ahead and get it, even if you aren’t ready to do anything else just yet. Tomorrow it might be taken.
Find a host
If you are just starting out, I would recommend that you get some type of shared hosting. Shared hosting is when a company divides a server up to host multiple websites. They are usually inexpensive, from $5-$20 bucks a month. Godaddy.com also offer shared hosting. What I use to host this blog is 1and1.com. For more information about finding a shared host, check out this post I wrote a while ago. One thing you have to make sure is supported when you are looking for a host is that it is compatible with wordpress, which means PHP. Most of them are so its not anything that you will have a hard time doing.
Find a template
The next thing you will want to do is find a template. A template is the overall look and design of your blog. you can purchase templates from various places, even have a custom made template that will be unique to only your blog but those options can get pretty expensive. What I would suggest is to check out the templates that are available at Wordpress.net. There are a lot of them so make sure you have a little bit of time to go through with it. One thing to remember is the template you choose is free and available to everyone so chances are others will have the same template you do. I usually try to get templates Ive never seen on a popular blog, or ones that I like that looks like it hasn’t been downloaded a ton of times.
Download Wordpress
Like I said, you have to go to wordpress.org and download the wordpress framework. its a really small file so it shouldn’t be too hard to do.
The last thing I would suggest doing is getting a FTP program. you will be doing a lot of uploading through FTP. I use CuteFTP, but there are plenty out there to choose from.
After you have all those things, you are ready to set up your blog. check back tomorrow when I give a brief tutorial on doing so.
17.Apr.08 Blogs and blogging, jonespc Comments (2)
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me about setting up a blog for him. I figured so many people are blogging these days that everyone would know how to start a blog. Guess what, not everyone know where to start. I haven’t gone over to set up his blog yet but I thought creating a little tutorial would be a good thing to talk about here at Jonespc.com. I’m going to do this over several post so stay tuned to get the full tutorial.
What do you want to blog about?
Many people have interest in topics that they want to talk about on their blogs but the first thing you should do is find a subject that you want to be the main focus of your blog. Its your blog, so when you write you can write about whatever you want, its ok to go off subject sometimes but you do need to narrow it down to a subject that you are interested in and have enough knowledge and passion to write about.
After you’ve picked a topic, check the web to see how many people are writing about that topic. This is basically just for your general knowledge, but it would be a good idea to know what the playing field looks like. If you want to make a little money blogging, through advertisements etc, gaining readers will be really important to you. If you pick a topic like Video games, you’d find that there are already tons of video game blogs out there, so getting large amounts of readers will take a lot of work. If you pick a topic that only has a few blogs, it will be a little easier to get a good reader base (if the interest in that topic is out there). Its hard to predict interest in your topic until you try it out, but you can find out if a topic is "overblogged‘ already.
You have your topic, whats next?
Now that you’ve picked a topic and done a little research, you have to decide how you want to set up your blog. Here Im talking about what blogging platform you are going to use. There are several choices available to you, this tutorial will go over one way of doing so in particular but right now Im going to go over a few of the options you have.
Free or hosted blogging platforms
You can get started blogging absolutely free by using a hosted blog. 2 of the popular ways of doing so is by using blogger.com (blogspot) or wordpress.com. Both of those platforms are pretty easy to set up and involves going to those sites and signing up. They are completely free and looks like any other blog you find out there. For examples of a blogspot or blogger blog, visit justanothertechblog.blogspot.com, or artnudes.blogspot.com. Both of these blogs are hosted by blogger.com and is completely free for that blogger to set up and run. As you can see, they both look just like any other blog.
For examples of a wordpress blog, check out macnwin.wordpress.com, or designxpert.wordpress.com.
As you can tell by the examples that I have given, most hosted blogs can look just like any other blog and have most of the same functionality. The only difference is the actual URL. If you notice, most hosted blogs have the platform URL in the web address with the name that you choose as the subdomain. lets say you wanted to make a blog about flowers and want to call it "theflowerblog". Using one of the free hosting platforms your URL would be theflowerblog.wordpress.com, or theflowerblog.blogspot.com. For most people there is nothing wrong with that type of set up but there are some reasons why you wouldnt want to set up a blog that way.
If later you decide you want to change blogging platforms, you would end up with a whole new URL. That would also mean that you may loose some of the search engine indexing, or pagerank that you had built up. Also, when you go to monetize your blog, youd find that there are a few money making options out there that require you to have your own URL and not a blogspot or wordpress URL.
For the most part, its not that big of a deal and is really a matter of personal preference.
Tomorrow, I will talk a little more about some other options you have to start your blog.
16.Apr.08 Blogs and blogging, jonespc Comments (3)
I currently have a Games for Windows Magazine subscription, had one for years. Pretty sad day, I happen to break away from my vacation this morning to read GFW is no more. No more as far as a print publication. Yea it looks like the magazine is going away and it Games for windows will be a completely online only publication. That pretty much leaves only PCGamer, if you want some PC gaming news on the newsstand.
As of right now, seems like everything else is business as usual. The GFW podcast is still going to be produced, which is a pretty good podcast.
For me personally, the closing of Games for Windows: The Official Magazine is not just a business decision (though, obviously it’s exactly that in reality), but feels more akin, in fact, to the passing of a loved one. Drama much? Well, you can scoff if you want, but the fact of the matter is that I have poured my heart and soul into this magazine, month after month after month, for over 10 years now. Every four weeks for 10 years I have done my best to get a quality magazine out the door, and the fact that I don’t have that deadline now is not in any way, despite the temptation to go for gallows humor, a source of relief. It feels like a giant gaping hole in my life. -Jeff Green GFW (read Jeff’s full post)
10.Apr.08 Gaming, Web, jonespc Comments (6)
How important is shredding your documents before you throw them in the trash? Is that something you do? Do you ever think about it much? I am currently writing a blog post about a product on my other blog that made me think of a little story. It actually made me pay better attention to what I put in the trash.
Where I live, we have city issued trash bins that we put out on a certain day every week. If you have trash that doesnt fit in those bins, or larger items that needs to be thrown out, you can sit them on the curb in front of the house and a different truck comes along to pick that stuff up. I’m usually pretty mindful of the days that second truck comes, mainly because the only time I put stuff out for that truck is when I cut the grass, or throwing out old furniture or something like that. I usually wait till the day before that truck comes before I put that out so there wouldn’t be junk in front of the house for days at a time.
Towards the end of the summer (07) I started cleaning out a lot of old things that I had no use for in preparation to sell my house. That cleaning left me with a lot of things I had to put out for that second trash truck. Old furniture, water heater, boxes etc. While doing that cleaning, I had a lot of important mail that I had been holding on to for one reason or another. It actually wasn’t important anymore, but I still had it (yea I can be a pack rat at times). I had a box with old magazines and books in it that had some space, so I took that old mail put it in a trash bag and stuffed it in that half full box of trash. The trash truck was coming the next morning so I put all of that stuff out by the curb.
After I was finished, and was watching a little television, I heard a vehicle in front of my house. I looked out the window and there was a man in a pickup truck picking up my old furniture and other things tossing it into the back of his truck. I was thinking “no big deal, its all trash anyway”. Then he grabbed that box that had my old mail. I rushed out and told the guy it was just trash. He said he knew and picked it up, starting to load it on his truck. I kindof panicked, thinking about all the personal information about me that was in some of those mail items. Account numbers, social security numbers, phone numbers. Pretty much a identity theft starter kit. I went out and grabbed the box away from him, and explained that I want the items in this box to go to the trash and that he couldn’t take it. He understood and went on his way.
Right then I looked at my hardly used shredder under my desk and thought “I better start using this thing”.
07.Apr.08 Randomness, Real life, jonespc Comments (6)
I am really loving the whole internet and online video evolution we are seeing. I think it sortof started with podcast, then people realized they can do the same with video so now there are tons of online video shows for you to watch. The internet is a really good place for video if you have the connection speeds to take advantage of what there is to offer. The traditional television stations see it also. Many of today’s TV programs can be found online. Most of the major networks have their own websites where you can watch shows. or you can go somewhere like iTunes, Amazon Unboxed and Hulu.com to either purchase or watch free streaming full length TV shows.
Of coarse we all would like to watch our favorite TV shows online, but the internet is its own entity. On the internet, the TV networks are guest, there are already Internet based video and media networks that started online and are the owners of the space. The problem, the way it seems…
TV networks will eventually snatch that ownership away from the people who today are the pioneers of online video entertainment.
Why do I say that. Well its really our own fault. "our" meaning people who consider themselves "internet people". When you look at who online is doing it big with online video a few places come to mind. Of coarse Revision 3, Podshow, Cnet and a few others. Each having some pretty popular shows.
First lets take a look at the advantages of having an online show. Before that, Id like to mention that when I say online show, I’m not talking about the clips you see at sites such as Youtube or Break.com. Well, creating an online show takes a lot less money. You can get by with lesser cost in camera and lighting, you are pretty much in control of the content. Although bandwidth cost money, you can publish and distribute the show yourselves, sometimes for free. Those advantages make creating an online show accessible to a lot of people (which is why there is so many out there).
Now lets look at the problems with online shows, and the reason why I think Traditional television may eventually take over the space.
1. The Talent (or lack there of)
Most online shows are about a specific topic or niche, and the people hosting are usually people that are really knowledgeable on the topic. but you have to remember, every geek is not an actor. There are a lot of personalities out there, which is good for the types of shows we have been seeing. But to go beyond what we have been seeing, it has to go beyond personality and subject knowledge. This makes more sense after you read the next step.
2. Every show is the same
This is the biggest holdback I see. When you go check out all of the shows, they are basically the same thing over and over, with different subject focuses. I mentioned it before as having a "The screen savers" style show over and over again. 1-4 people sitting in front of a camera talking about thier favorite subject, interviewing people, holding up a product. The only differences in these shows are the subject, the personality, and how well the video is edited on a Mac. I hate to pic on Revision 3 because I love their shows and think they are the best at what they do right now, but check out their shows
- Diggnation - 2 guys sitting on a couch talking about top news stories
- The Giga Om show - a guy and a girl sitting on a couch talking about the tech industry with the occasional interview
- System - 1 or 2 guys in various locations talking about fixing, building, hacking various tech items or equipment.
- Tekzilla - 1 or 2 people sitting at a table evening news style, talking about tech with the occasional on location spot or interview
- Pixel perfect - a guy talking about photoshop and photo editing techniques.
See what I mean? Internet Video has to one day go beyond that format and start having a little variety. How about a comedy, a drama. Imagine creating a show with an ongoing story that people couldn’t wait to watch every week? If we keep making the same shows over and over, like how it is going now,we will undoubtedly hand over the potential "internet Tv as an alternative" to the traditional tv networks. Why couldn’t a Revision 3 rival ABC on the same level? The question we want people to be asking is this.
Should I watch "Lost"on ABC or "Crossed" on Revision 3? ("crossed" being a completely fictitious name, but Kevin feel free to use it if you want, just mention me).
But the question we may end up with is this..
Should I watch "Lost" on TV or online?
27.Mar.08 Web, jonespc Comments (4)
The past 2 days I was talking about blogs, bloggers, and blogging. Today I want to talk about another part of the internet that is pretty useful. Message boards, or Forums. Many useful bits of information is found on message boards. As a matter of fact, almost every "social thing" to come about with the whole Web 2.0 moniker has basically been some sort of message board integrated with something else.
What I want to talk about today is more of a tip. Well an awareness, or even a complaint. Heres another little story…
My mother owns a local store and do a lot of business on the web. Most of what she needs the web for is stocking, and ordering supplies. Sometimes she may need help with the software that she uses, which is mostly used for various printing/advertising functions. To tell you a little about my mother, She is a pretty straight forward person. She is a Christian and believes in trying to maintain her life and everything she does a certain way. My relationship with her has always been a strict mother-son relationship. At age 35, I still wouldn’t use any profanity or drink any alcohol or anything along those lines around her, and I cringe if I see or hear anyone else doing so in a personal situation.
She is really a beginner when it comes to the web and using computers, I mean a straight up newbie. So of coarse, she will come to me from time to time with questions or needing help doing certain things. One day while she was at my house, she asked about a problem she was having with a website where she was trying to order supplies. I cant remember exactly what the problem was, but I remember that it was something that I had read about before, that can be resolved with a tweak within Windows. I couldn’t remember it exactly so I started searching for the answer.
My search lead me to a message board. On that message board, the answer was spelled out with complete directions on how to solve that particular problem. I read them to her as she looked over my shoulder at the screen, then I moved so she could read it. She was a little hesitant to sit at the computer, and asked me
"What do you have me looking at?"
I assumed that maybe the directions was a little too complicated for her so I told her that I would email them to my dad and maybe he can figure it out. My Father is also a beginner but he is at the point where he can do certain things. I figured this was simple enough that he could do it. My mother then said….
"Why would you send that to your dad, where are you reading this from"
I then pointed to the text on the screen that listed the directions, she then saw the directions and was like OK. Then she said
"Theres so much other junk on the screen that I didn’t know what you were reading, I thought you pulled up a porn site by mistake"
Right then, I looked at the page on the screen. It wasn’t until then did I notice the avatars of the people posting on the message board.
The first avatar was the one you always see with George Bush holding up a middle finger. The next was an animated GIF, a topless woman, oiled up, rubbing her hands in a circular motion around her - well you can guess. The third was another animated GIF of 2 women engaging in a repeating make out session. The fourth was a simple picture of Dave Chappelle. And last but not least, the last Avatar on that thread was a very XXX rated animated GIF involving bodily fluids.
Needless to say, I was a little embarrassed, but further more, I started to think about who else could’ve been at the computer when I was looking for those directions. At that moment, and many times when I’m searching, I tend to have a bit of "Avatar blindness" along with my "Ad blindness". Once I stopped focusing on the text on that web page and looked at it, I noticed that the page was filled with tons of "adult oreintated" material, from the avatars, to the advertisements on the page. It was actually the forum section of a Bittorrent website that I had never heard of.
Anyway, that little situation was something I thought was interesting. It has made me more aware of what link in search results I click when someone else is watching over my shoulder.
26.Mar.08 Blogs and blogging, jonespc Comment (1)
About 5 years ago I was at the car wash waiting on my car to get washed and a guy that was also waiting on his car casually started a conversation with me. It started off as just small talk, 2 guys waiting on their cars passing time. Eventually I noticed that this conversation was more than just casual, started to feel like an interview. Just when I was about to move away from the “random guy” because of the way the conversation headed, his purpose was made visible to me.
He was trying to recruit me.
He started telling me about how he was “Upper Management” for a new company in the area and he was looking for people to bring in to help get things started. He wanted me to come to an “interview” and meet the other people involved with the Company. He never told me any details about the company and the company name didn’t sound familiar but I suspected that company was some type of pyramid Style "get rich quick" Company (more on that in a minute). I went to the interview, and found out that the company was exactly what I was thinking, and it was just a waste of my time showing up.
Many bloggers may be offended, but I see a lot of similarities in blogging (for money) and those pyramid scheme companies. Not so much in the way it operates, but in the overall success rate and popularity of the blogging.
When it comes to those “get rich quick” schemes and companies, there are a few traits that are pretty similar to bloggers, and blogging. The first and most significant similarity is the ease of getting started. Those companies usually involve something that anyone can do. Any training you would need could be given on the job. And you would be in control of how you work. Blogging is the same way, anyone can get started, many times for free. There is plenty of information out there that you can almost train yourself as you work.
Now when I say blogging, I mean blogging as a means to make money. Yea there are plenty of people that blog “for fun”. But I’m talking about the people that got into blogging because they heard about “so and so” making $5000 a month blogging and figure they can do it too. Blogging as a business.
Every time you hear about those schemes to make money, it makes sense. You can see how that idea can make you money and there are some people that are rich because of those schemes. But by the time you hear about it, it’s usually too late to make you any money. The rest of this is all my own theory (not to say that it isn’t anything that hasn’t already been said by someone). Blogging has its own pyramid, take a look at the picture below and I’ll explain what I’m talking about.
The height of the pyramid and each individual section represents the number of people involved, the width of the pyramid represents the amount of money made (wider means more money).
- The people on section A are the founders, usually the people that started things, they have made the most money, and they have the least amount of people. The thing about those people, they don’t stay around long. After they make their money, they usually move on to the next thing.
- Section B is where most of the A-Listers are. That group is a little larger and they still make a decent amount of money. Towards the end of that section is when many started hearing about blogging as a money making tool.
- That brings us to section C, fewer people, money is still being made but you really have to work at standing out.
- The next section, Section D, is where I think we are now. That’s when it becomes mainstream. Only few people are making any real money from that section and bloggers are a dime a dozen.
The problem now is that blogging has become so common that it’s really time to expand onto something else, which is what brought on all the thoughts I’ve been having.
What’s next? I don’t think blogging is going anywhere, but there has to be something new soon as its starting to feel “old hat”.
Lets talk about the Section D for a minute. There are reasons why I think right now blogging in general is in Section D. The other day I was browsing a few blogs. One blog post in particular I thought was very interesting and I decided to leave a comment. Before I left the comment I read over the other comments that were already left and I noticed something. Out of the 34 comments, 30 were from other bloggers. Of coarse I wouldnt know how many people has read that post, but from going by the comments, it would appear that most of the readers of that blog post were bloggers themselves.
Being that it seems like everyone has caught on to blogging. I would guess that the people that are becoming really succesfull, to the point where blogging can or will be thier main source of income are hard to come by now adays. Of corse, the bloggers that started in section B and C are still doing what they were doing all along. Mind you, I say blogging right now is in Section D, but the effects of section D only applys to bloggers that started blogging in Section D. If you were lucky enough to jump in before Section D started, and was successful before Section D started, that success shouldbe followed you into Section D. The Section D bloggers will have to be a bit more creative in finding niche topics if they want to make any money.
Bloggers make money by advertising, in one form or another. Now that we are in Section D, and looking at how online advertisment spending is starting to flatline. This pose another problem. Advert money is either going to start being spread too thin, or adverts are going to be a bit more picky. Since there are so many bloggers out there, blogs are starting to duplicate themselves. Meaning instead of 2 or 3 sneaker blogs with a lit of readers, there could be 15 sneaker blogs with a lot of readers. Many with the same content, same news, same info. Probably with the same visitors. Advertisers will probably start to just pick the top 2 to advertise with. The rest stuck with just Adsense.
I really think the next area to be explored is online video production. Internet shows. If I used the same pyramid from above, Id say that we are still in Section A, just about to pass over to Section B. There is another problem there though that I will talk about later on this week.
24.Mar.08 Blogs and blogging, Web, jonespc Comment (1)
What do these have in common.
Travel agent
Car salesman
Real Estate agent
Insurance agent
All of these are people that you would hire to perform some type of service. The service often involves them being the mediator between you and what you want to buy, sell, invest, repair etc. They usually are paid some sort of commission or fee for performing this service. Many times it’s a service that you wouldn’t know much about, so they also serve as guidance and advice givers.
That’s not why I have them listed, and there are a lot more to this list, I just didn’t want to go on forever. There’s another thing that all those people or positions have in common. They are all jobs that has almost become obsolete or has had their roles lessened due to the internet.
Years ago, these positions were really important. When you went to buy a house, it was almost completely up to the Agent to tell you what’s for sale, show it to you, get your financing…things that a lot of people didn’t know how to do on their own. Now with the internet, you can find houses yourself, get your own financing, and find out all types of information that you would normally rely on the agent to tell you. Now the real estate agent in a lot of cases would just serve as the person that does the paperwork or the key holder for the house you are going to look at.
About 10 years ago, I bought a plane ticket. It was the first one I’d ever bought on my own. I used a travel agent. Felt like I got a good deal and he did all the work as far as finding the best price etc.
A couple of months ago I was planning week long trip that includes plane tickets and hotel stay. I found all of the information online, did all the research myself and found the best price on a well known online trip planning website. All I had to do was put in my credit card and I would’ve been on my way. I decided to go with a travel agent to ease the minds of the other people going on the trip that wasn’t too comfortable with planning something like this on the internet.
So far the trip is booked, the price was maybe a little more than the online price, not by much, but a little more. I’m 3 weeks away from the trip and other than times, I don’t have any plane tickets or anything. Of coarse I have called the resort/airport to confirm everything myself. If I bought the tickets/reservations online, I would already have all the credentials/tickets I need.
There are a lot of situations where the internet is replacing or lessening the need of some of those services. I can only imagine online services eventually taking over some of those functions completely. What will happen to those people making a living in those jobs? The internet is sortof a double edge sword, making some things easier and more assessable for some, and making it harder to make a living for others.
13.Mar.08 Web, jonespc Comments (2)
