Curtiss Grymala Archive

As you probably know by now if you read HTMLCenter or CenterNetworks on a semi-regular basis, I am a happy user of the Virgin Mobile MiFi 2200 with their $40/month unlimited Broadband2Go plan. It’s been a fantastic resource over the last 5 or 6 months; enough so that I even canceled my satellite Internet service in favor of it. Unfortunately, that may be coming to an end very soon.

Virgin Mobile dispatched an e-mail earlier today informing me that the terms of the “unlimited” plan are going to change in February. No longer will the plan really offer unlimited data; instead, each plan will have a cap of 5 gigabytes/month. That’s pretty standard for a mobile broadband plan. However, instead of cutting off your service or charging you exorbitant amounts of extra fees for going over your cap, they’re going to follow the path laid out by satellite Internet providers. They’re going to reduce the speed of your service.

At this time, they haven’t really said what speeds we’re supposed to be getting on the current plan, nor what those speeds will become if we go over our 5 gigabyte cap.

The thing that concerns me most is the accuracy of their bandwidth tracking application. At one point last month, their website was reporting that I had used almost 5 terrabytes of bandwidth during the month (which is obviously way off). If the usage reporting is going to be that far off, I’m worried about how quickly they might think I’ve used up my 5 gigabytes. Continue reading “Virgin Mobile Unlimited Data – Not So Unlimited Anymore” »

After using an iPhone 3G for about 2 years, I gave it up last week. This week I picked up one of the new Windows Phone 7 devices (the HTC Surround). Following is a brief comparison of the two from my perspective.

Table of Contents:

• Buying Apps
• Interface
• Media
• Buttons
• Web Browser
• Camera
• Email, Contacts
• Other
• Conclusion

Buying Apps

The iPhone has the famous App Store, Windows Phone has the Marketplace. While the iPhone obviously has exponentially more apps available than Windows Phone does, a lot of the major apps were available for Windows Phone from day-one. I can’t, in good conscience, say that the Windows Phone Marketplace even compares to the iPhone app store in terms of apps, yet, but things do look good for such a new system.

Both systems allow you to buy/download apps through your computer or through your device, so they are basically equal in that regard. I do think that the Windows Phone will need to find a better way to arrange and organize the apps and games once the marketplace starts to really take off, though.

One place the iPhone has the Windows Phone beat, hands-down, right now is the fact that you can’t view what apps you currently have on your Windows Phone when using your PC. You can only view and manage your apps through the phone. Continue reading “In-Depth Comparison: Windows Phone vs. iPhone” »

As you are no doubt aware, a major update for the iPhone/iPod Touch operating system was released by Apple last week. The first day it was released, I downloaded the large update file (almost 300 megabytes) and attempted to install it overnight on my iPhone 3G. Unfortunately, when I woke up in the morning, I was confronted with an iTunes error indicating that the backup was not completed successfully.

Later that evening, I tried again. I started trying to update around 6 p.m. on Tuesday evening, and finally cancelled the process around 11 p.m., having made very little progress in the backup process.

I tried a few more times over the next few days, and kept experiencing a similar problem. At one point, Windows decided to restart itself in the middle of the backup process because Windows updates had been installed.

Finally, overnight last night, I modified my Windows power settings, making sure that my computer would not go to sleep for at least four hours (just in case that was the issue) and attempted the update one more time.This time, the backup process completed successfully, and the software update was successful, but the process of restoring my applications and files failed. This morning, when I woke up, I told it to try restoring my files again. It took a little over two hours (causing me to be an hour late to work this morning), but that process finally completed, too.
Continue reading “Upgrading My iPhone 3G to iOS4” »

Up until a few months ago, the only way to use the Quickbooks Online interface was to do so through Internet Explorer. The interface did not work at all for people using browsers other than IE, which meant that it was wholly unavailable to Linux users and Mac users (I have no idea whether it worked on Mac’s version of IE or not, but I’m fairly certain it didn’t).

Then, in October, the application was updated to begin working with Firefox on Windows and Safari on Mac. This was a step in the right direction, but still didn’t make the interface available to Linux users.

A few weeks ago, however, I noticed two major changes in the Quickbooks Online application. Normally, in order to enter my time into Quickbooks, I would start up Windows XP in VirtualBox, then open Internet Explorer 6 (as I keep that browser installed in my virtual version of XP for testing purposes). At that point, I was confronted with a warning message, informing me that Quickbooks would soon stop supporting IE6. Within that message, however, I found something a bit more interesting: in addition to IE7 and 8 and Firefox, Google Chrome was listed among the supported browsers. Now, the message I saw indicated that only Windows-based browsers were supported; but when I tweeted about it, someone from Intuit informed me that Mac browsers are also supported.
Continue reading “Quickbooks Online Available to the Masses” »

Earlier this week AJ Batac posted on Friendfeed about Pubwich, an “open-source online data aggregation PHP application.” I was intrigued, so I decided to check it out. The application is still very young, with a lot of work to be done, but it’s a great idea.

Initially, I was hoping that Pubwich would actually aggregate data from multiple sources into a single interface (the way Friendfeed does), but I soon learned that it actually just allows you to place information from multiple sources on a single page. Still, though, I think it’s a great idea and shows a lot of promise. In my case, at work, we have five Facebook fan pages, a Twitter account, a Flickr account, a YouTube account and at least two major RSS feeds. Rather than simply providing our users with links to each of those accounts, Pubwich provides me with an easy way to show our newest information to our visitors in one place. Continue reading “Aggregate Your Social Data With Pubwich” »

You’ve probably already heard about this, but in case you haven’t, I wanted to share this. Google’s engineers have done a quick port of a Java version of the classic Quake II video game so that it works strictly with HTML5 resources. No plugins are needed to play Quake II in your browser.

I’ve seen a few people talk about the fact that it’s not extremely impressive to port a game as old as Quake II into HTML5. However, from my standpoint, it’s a pretty incredible achievement. Sure, Quake II isn’t the most advanced game in the world, and Flash is probably capable of quite a bit more right now (though, judging from 99% of the games currently available in Flash, I’m not sure about that). However, the fact that this game can run without Flash (in HTML5, which means it will probably work extremely well on the iPhone and iPad before much longer), means that the possibilities for doing similar, tangentially-related projects. Continue reading “Frag! Google Ports Quake II to HTML5” »

As I’ve mentioned a few times before, I am stuck with a satellite Internet connection at home. DSL and FIOS are distant fantasies, cable comes to the end of my driveway and stops (they refuse to run it any further, and won’t let me run it myself) and a T1 line is just way out of my price range. So, I’m stuck dealing with huge latency and bottom-of-the-barrel “high speed” Internet service.

For everyone else that moves out to the boonies and might have to make the switch to a satellite provider, I thought I’d provide this quick list of five things you shouldn’t (or can’t) do when you’re using a satellite connection. Still, I am thankful that I’m at least able to get some sort of “high speed” connection, as going back to dial-up is not something I want to even think about. Continue reading “5 Things You Shouldn’t Do With a Satellite Connection” »