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With the Windows Mobile 5.0 smart phone platform you need an exchange server to get push synchronization of your information. Most small businesses and up have an exchange server on site, but what if you do not? That is where a hosted exchange account will unlock your devices full potential. (more…)

This past weekend I took a short trip down to the Florida Keys just to get away before the beginning of a fairly large project. Since I was only going for two days, I thought seriously about leaving my laptop behind. But, part of my job is staying in touch, so in the end I decided to take it along.

Of course, I never leave home without my cell phone, and since I have a brand new Audiovox XV-6700 from Verizon, I was interested to see how well I could stay in touch, and how often I would have to pull out my PC. I was amazed at just how much I could get accomplished with only the phone, in fact, there were times when I could not have been connected without it. (more…)

If you own a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) like TiVo, you have probably come to love the enhanced viewing experience that it creates. However, it one major limitation: a TiVo can only be connected to one TV. If you want to use it in more than one room, you have to buy additional TiVos, each requiring another monthly fee. I have a different solution to this problem which will let you use your TiVo in every room of your house. This solution can also be applied to “extend” any media device (DVD player, VCR, digital cable, satellite TV, even a game console) to your entire house. (more…)

Intuit is not a Mac friendly company. They make an OS X version of Quicken, but it is artificially crippled in order to try to get banks to pay them money. Intuit will only let you import files from banks that pay extra to let their customers download transactions into Quicken for Mac. The fact that you paid for Quicken and the bank paid for a Quicken server isn’t enough. They want the banks to pay another fee for their Mac users–even though there is no additional hardware or software involved. The end result is that Mac users get a product that will only work with a handful of banks. This article discusses a method to get around this limitation. (more…)

There are two basic ways to enter the world of the Personal Video Recorder (PVR): through a dedicated hardware unit, like a TiVo or ReplayTV, or through a software-based PVR that runs on your home computer, like Windows: Media Center Edition (WMCE) or MythTV. In this article I will compare the most popular form of each platform, TiVo and WMCE, to help you figure out which one would be best for you. (more…)

There are several situations where you might want to dump a DVD to your hard drive to watch later. For instance, I get significantly better battery life when watching a video from my hard drive than I get when watching it from a DVD. If I’m stuck in a plane for several hours, having my movie on the hard drive can be the difference between finishing the show, or running out of power halfway through. I use a PowerBook and in OS X 10.3 and earlier you could just use the built in Disk Utility to copy a DVD to your disk, but it stopped working in 10.4. However with a few free tools you can accomplish the same thing and more.
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Have you ever sat down in front of the TV after a long day, hoping to find an interesting show, only to end up surfing channels for a few minutes and then turning it off? Have you ever caught yourself saying “I have 70 channels, and there is nothing on!” Friends, there is a solution to this problem: the Personal Video Recorder (PVR), the most common version known as TiVo. (more…)

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You don’t really understand the importance of backups until your hard drive crashes. With most backups, you’ll need to reinstall the operating system and then restore all of your data. OS X comes with a handy tool that will let you create a live copy of your hard drive that can be started up and run just like it is your computer. (more…)