TekkieBob - All Things Tech!

Verizon Prepared to Handle iPhone in 2010 — If Exclusivity Ends with AT&T : " If Apple ends US iPhone exclusivity with AT&T in 2010, could Verizon handle the handset that currently crushes service in data-dense cities like San Francisco and New York? BusinessWeek scored the quote from Verizon Wireless Chief Technology Officer Anthony Melone: “We have put things in place already. We are prepared to support that traffic.” “It comes down to backing that process with money. We’ve been more consistent than any carrier in the last 10 years investing year over year.” “We will handle it if we ever get it.” To make sure we’re absolutely crystal clear, no one is saying Verizon will be getting the iPhone next year, Verizon is just claiming their network is up to the task if they do. When reached for comment on that claim, AT&T wouldn’t address it directly but offered: “We think we are leading the way in how people use their wireless phones. We operate a great network....

The idiot's guide to Google Wave | News | TechRadar UK

Blu-ray 3D disc specification finalized : "The Blu-ray Disc Association announced it has finalized the specification for 3D content on Blu-ray discs, meaning games, movies, and television series...

New 3D cities: Tucson, AZ, Cleveland, OH and Florence, Italy : " Google has just released three more cities in 3D, along with thousands of new user-generated models. The three new cities are Tucson, AZ , Cleveland, OH and Florence, Italy . You can read details about the US cities on the SketchUp blog . They mentioned Florence in a tweet , and it indeed had quite an update as well. Google offers up some nice suggestions for places to visit, such as the University of Arizona in Tucson or The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Between the huge imagery update a few days ago and now this, there is a whole lot of new stuff to check out. Are any of your favorite sights now in 3D? Tell us about it in the comments. "

iClarified - Apple News - How to Create Goo.gl URL Shortlinks Without the Google Toolbar : "Two methods for creating Goo.gl URL shortlinks without the Google Toolbar have surfaced online. The first method by Alexandre Gaigalas is a simple webpage which takes the long url as input and spits out the Goo.gl url in return." More Googley goodness....

How to Manage a Group Project in Google Wave - Google Wave - Lifehacker : "The XMPP Lite Bot: One of the issues with adopting Google Wave into your workflow is the whole 'yet another inbox' problem. If you're working on a project in Wave but forget to check it every day, you can get notifications of wave updates via IM. The XMPP Lite bot can GChat you as project waves get updated. To use it, add the bot to your contacts (its Wave ID is wave-xmpp@appspot.com), and then add that same contact to your GTalk contacts list. Add the bot to any wave you want IM notifications from, and click the Subscribe button."

Mag+ Digital Magazine Reader Concept : " The guys over at Bonnier R&D , who are part of the Bonnier Corporation that publish a range of magazines which include Popular Science, have come up with a concept for a digital magazine reader, the Mag+. As you can see from the photos the Mag+ looks pretty cool, and it features all the design elements you would see in a traditional magazine, in a digital format. Magazines have articles you can curl up with and lose yourself in, and luscious photography that draws the eye. And they’re so easy and enjoyable to read. Can we marry what’s best about magazines with the always connected, portable tablet e-readers sure to arrive in 2010? It certainly looks like an interesting concept, and if digital magazine readers end up looking like this one I would definitely buy one. Berg via Crunch Gear This is a post from Geeky Gadgets , who bring you the latest cool Gadgets.

Stunning virtual cruise tours : " The folks over at PlanetInAction.com have just released a stunning bit of work for CleanCrusing.com . Clean Cruising tasked them with finding an innovative way to show the itineraries for thousands of cruises -- nearly 6000 in all. Using Google Earth, combined with 3D models of each ship, PlanetInAction has done just that. They have hand-built models for dozens of cruise ships, all with amazing detail and accuracy. Now that the ships are rendered and the technical challenges resolved, they've started building out some of the itineraries. To see them in action, check out the 42 night Cherry Blossom Cruise (seen below) or the 7 night Western Caribbean Cruise , or just watch the video below: The actual Google Earth tours are not yet available, but they hope to release them soon. In the meantime, you can watch the high-res videos of the tours at the links above. Below is a tour of the 'Oasis of the Seas', the largest cruise ship in ...

50 terabyte flash drive made of bug protein : "A prototype USB drive using bug protein to store data in the neighborhood of around 50 terabytes worth of data could be here in less then 18 months. This idea first started out by coating DVDs with a layer of protein so that one day solid state memory could hold so much information that storing data on your computer hard drive will be obsolete, says Professor V Renugopalakrishnan of the Harvard Medical School in Boston while reporting on his findings at the International Conference on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in Brisbane this week." One wonders how much memory a mosquito really has!

Tekkie Bob Blog Archive Dock Slider – Loading dock bumper : "Dock Slider – Loading dock bumper This is an interesting idea to prevent loading dock bumpers from ripping off the wall. Sometimes the simple ideas are the most ingenious.  Not a computer technology, but it is a neat idea."

What goes up.... Virgin Galactic Ready To Unveil SpaceShipTwo : " After more than five years of waiting, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo is ready to be unveiled to the public tonight at a ceremony in the Mojave desert. Following on the success of SpaceShipOne in 2004, the six passenger SpaceShipTwo already has a backlog of more than 300 passengers who are waiting for their ride into space. Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, legendary aerospace designer Burt Rutan and a host of VIPs are gathered at a hangar at Scaled Composites in Mojave where SpaceShipTwo is set to have the covers removed later this evening. The spacecraft has been built in almost total secrecy starting in 2007. The vehicle to be unveiled tonight is expected to be the first of six or seven that will make up a fleet of spacecraft operating out of the Virgin Galactic space port in New Mexico. SpaceShipTwo is larger than its predecessor, SpaceShipOne, the first private manned spacecraft that won the Ansari X-Pr...

Google Voice Blog: Upgrade to a Google Number Seems the folks at Google have done it again!

From TUAW: What is your favorite? Most popular free Mac apps of 2009 : " Filed under: Software , Freeware Lifehacker has put together their list of the 15 Most Popular Free Mac Apps of 2009 . Keep in mind, these are Mac OS X apps, not iPhone apps. The list is based on the popularity of apps they've covered in 2009 and don't represent total download numbers. Here are some of their choices (in no specific order): Magnifique Picasa for Mac Pollux doubleTwist Thunderbird Google Chrome PwnageTool / QuickPwn Namebench Quicksilver Glims While I don't agree with all their choices, it is a rather interesting list. But what about you guys? Tell us your favorite Mac apps of 2009 in the comments! TUAW Most popular free Mac apps of 2009 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink | Email this | Comments "

Let's hope we see more from the galactic Google Empire... Perhaps CardDAV support?? Clean Up Duplicate Contacts in Gmail : "In January, Gmail's Product Manager Todd Jackson said that Gmail will include a contact deduplicator . 'Jackson says a de-duper is on the way and that contacts will have more of a presence both in your inbox and in conversations.' 11 months later, Gmail added a feature that detects and merges duplicate contacts. 'To clean up your contact list in one fell swoop, just click the Find duplicates button in the contact manager , review the merge suggestions (and uncheck any suggestions you don't want merged), and hit the Merge button.' If you have many contacts, it's a good idea to consolidate them and to have a single contact for each person. Other popular webmail services included this feature a long time ago: Yahoo Mail and Hotmail added tools for cleaning up duplicate contacts in 2007. "

From the "competition is heathy" desk... Google Nexus One Phone Hardware Specifications Revealed : " Since we heard about the Google [GOOG] Nexus One mobile phone a few days ago, we haven’t really had any details about the specifications on the Google Phone, until the guys over at These Are The Droids analyzed the Android 2.1 ROM for the Nexus One. They have managed to identify a number of interesting specifications from the ROM, which include a Snapdragon processor, so it is probably a 1GHz processor, plus an auto focus camera with built in LED flash. Other details include OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics, a built in accelerometer, a magnetic compass, WiFi, Bluetooth, a stereo FM speaker and a noise cancellation chipset. So it looks like the Google Nexus One will also come with a built in FM tuner, and it looks like the WiFi will be 802.11n as opposed to 802.11g which is in the majority of smartphones available today. Another interesting feature is a built in proximity sensor, ...

iClarified - Apple News - Qoppa Software Launches PDF Studio 6.10 An alternative to Adobe Acrobat. I find that Preview (Mac OS 10.6) is good enough of an editor for me, but for serious PDF users this may be the ticket.

Google Chrome Extensions: Blog This! (by Google) : "Once you add the BlogThis! button to your browser toolbar, blogging will be a snap (or rather, a click). Click the button to open Blogger in a new application window. The new post is pre-populated with a link to the web page you're on, as well as any text you've highlighted on that page. Edit the post to your liking and post it instantly to your blog!"

Brilliant observation! Read on from www.theinvisibl.com: A piece with a lot of screenshots about the close tab behaviour in Google Chrome : " Ah, tabs. Tabs, tabs, tabs. The specialist subject of UI experts everywhere. Should tabs just rearrange horizontally or also detach? How much vertical scroll buffer should a tab have before it detaches? Under what circumstances should it detach? What about reattaching? This is a short piece concerned only with the different behaviours when closing tabs in Google Chrome, as I think these behaviours are fantastically thought through. Closing tabs: a masterclass by Google Chrome Let’s start by looking at some tabs in Safari (which was once what Chrome is before Chrome was). If you add a number of tabs over the course of a session you will get something like this: And in Chrome you will get this: Closing tabs from the right The first difference to notice is that Safari puts the ‘close tab’ control on the left of the tab, while Chrome has it on...

Analysis: AT&T iPhone users irate at idea of usage-based pricing : "With AT&T hinting that it could move from an all-you-can-eat data plan to usage-based pricing, analysts wonder what impact that might have on iPhone users. My comments: This is something Apple should be worried about. If AT&T does this what will happen to iPhone sales? Unless of course, Apple does what Google is doing and just sell an unlocked piece of hardware. That would cause major competition among service providers to get you on their network, thus driving down prices. Think 1980's when AT&T (Ma Bell) was broken up and you could use Sprint or another long distance carrier.

This video is simply amazing.  Genius invents a $300 system to interact with physical objects.  Long video but worth a look!

I found this to be a very interesting read: Why the Cloud Won’t Seduce Me From My Mac, At Least Not Yet : " The rhetorical question du jour on the Mac Web seems to be whether the traditional Mac advantage is eroding due to increased reliance on “the Cloud,” or not. Are online applications and utilities, such as the impressive suite of free functionality marshaled by Google, making the rationale for owning a Mac instead of some bore bare-bones Web access device obsolete? After all, that’s at least the theoretical argument (aside from low-ball pricing) for the PC mini-note or netbook phenomenon, and it’s certainly resonating with some. Recently, blogger and Mac veteran Mike Doyle announced that he is “dumping Apple” after 15 years as a Mac-user, saying he’s finally lost patience with what he calls Steve Jobs’ “you’ll use your computer the way we tell you to use your computer method of customer relations.” A Thorough Purge Mike is doing a thorough purge, switching to Gmail and Googl...