I’ve used some of these myself, others just get rave reviews from every single person that ever talks about them. Furthermore I was trying to think of things with broad appeal, not games, geek toys, or professional rendering software.

BusyCal and BusyToDo are very highly spoken of amongst Mac-using professionals, even though the Mac comes with a calendar program (iCal), and to-do list (integrated with Mail and iCal). I haven’t used these, but then again I don’t use iCal or Mail’s to do list either. Apparently they greatly improve on their standard Mac counterparts in the areas of syncing and compatibility with Google Calendar and other calendaring software.

Rogue Amoeba makes several useful audio utilities, but the one I paid for and love is Airfoil. It lets you send audio from your Mac to speakers attached to any other Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, or Airport base station. This is similar to the functionality built-in to iTunes, but works with any app, and more devices than just Airports.

Smile Software makes several useful utilities, but one standout is Text Expander. It lets you type abbreviations anywhere and have them expanded to whole words, sentences or paragraphs. I couldn’t have made it through high school without it, seeing as I did a ton of typing back then.

Circus Ponies’ product called Notebook is a great note-taking app, letting you collect video, audio, and text-based snippets of data together in virtual notebooks. Good for organizing thoughts.

Very similar to Notebook but equally highly praised is Yojimbo from Bare Bones Software. While it doesn’t look like a notebook visually, it allows you to store, organize and search all kinds of bits of data.

This one’s hardware, not software, sosumi. Data should always be backed up. Mac OS X has excellent backup software called Time Machine, the only thing missing is somewhere to store the backup, so get an external hard drive, Time Capsule device, or NAS, and flip the huge Time Machine on/off button in System Preferences. If you want to use a NAS or other network share, see these instructions at Engadget.

For offsite backup consider Carbonite. You can backup an unlimited amount of data to “the cloud” for $55 a year.

Speaking of cloud services, the best cloud storage for Mac is still Dropbox. Dropbox comes with convenient sharing and remote access features, and is indispensable if you need to move documents back and forth between an iPad and a computer. You can get a 2GB account for free but you can upgrade to 50GB or 100GB for fairly reasonable rates. Dropbox also keeps 30 days (or more, if you pay) worth of history on all files so you can go back and grab a copy of your project from before you accidentally did a “Select All,” “Delete,” and “Save.”

Update: And the winner is Ethan! He got 16 of 26 prop bets correct, tying with Timothy, but winning by virtue of picking the total score exactly.

* If you only count accepted (non-declined) penalties it’s still Pittsburg with a false start.

Every so often I decide that I’ve found a query that Wolfram Alpha might actually be able to answer, and every time it fails. Tonight it was “What movies have both Mae Whitman and Michael Cera?” (Yes, I tried lots of terse and not-so-terse forms of the question.) Fortunately I found the IMDB page which supports this particular type of query. Here’s the answer.

I wonder if a more “exploratory” interface might be useful. For example, I start by querying for one actor, and with the basic results I get a list of related queries that I could try, one of which is “What movies has Michael Cera acted in?” (or equivalent). The resulting list of movies is accompanied by a list of suggestions for narrowing the list, one of which is “starring ?” (in addition to “directed by ?” and such).

With each refinement of the results the interface could update the query to reflect the new parameters so users could learn to write the “magic bullet” queries that will yield these advanced results.

I hope you’re way ahead of me on this.

-Michael

I think a lot of adults have an obsession with teen culture and adolescence, and thinking of elementary school students as “preteens” betrays their opinion that what’s important about being 12 or under is that you haven’t yet experienced that life-changing rush of hormones, dating, breakup, social-alignment (my Dad calls this “Choose Up Sides and Hate”), and academic pressure that comes with today’s stereotyped teenage experience. Yuck. (This camp’s age group is 3rd through 6th grade, BTW.) Perhaps we should call the teenagers “post-children” or “kids who used to be cute.”

Sure, pubescence is a significant watershed in one’s development, but calling kids “preteens” implies a preference for kids on one side of it, and a devaluing of kids on the other. Kids will grow up whether we want them to or not; no need to rush it.

The movie’s most inspired humor is found in the villainous “Bart” played by Andy Dick. Bart is the founder of “Bartology,” a cult which brainwashes its converts with spiked cookies while cleaning out their bank accounts. Despite global ambitions Bart is fixated with taking over Slyde’s office space so he can control the entire office building that houses his headquarters.

I got through it and had plenty of laughs along the way, but the slow pacing and emptiness of the title character, especially during act one, almost had me reaching for the fast forward button so I could get to more Bart scenes.

I give it 3 out of 5… pediatricians.

I’m guilty (not in the legal sense) of using my phone too much while driving, but these “solutions” are too expensive and flawed. And good luck with making an iPhone version, even with iPhone OS 4.0; I just don’t think Apple is going to allow one app to inhibit others. Maybe they’ll let it change the pass code temporarily so you can’t get past the lock screen?

A better solution would involve the car manufacturers working with the cell phone makers, but the best solutions, I think, are those that make it possible to perform the distracting operations hands- and eyes-free: voice control, audio feedback, text-to-speech, even speech to text. Granted this may still distract and may even increase the temptation to play with the phone for some, but I think it’s a net improvement and an easier sell than telling someone to pay to brick their phone.

By the way, I’m excited about Apple’s purchase of Siri today (ok, it was just barely yesterday). This will lead to far better hands-free functionality, if only to spare us having to type as much on a tiny touch-screen keyboard.

Johnny Depp was entertaining but not memorable as he was in Pirates. I liked the choice of voices for the caterpillar and the Cheshire Cat (Alan Rickman and Stephen Fry) but their parts and performances weren’t really that interesting.

Anyway, the climax was fun to watch in spite of the fact that it made way too much sense and was essentially just like the end of every other lets-go-to-a-magical-world-and-put-power-in-the-hands-of-the-good-witch-instead-of-the-bad-witch kid’s movie. I especially liked that the Jabberwocky was brought to life and looked very much like the original drawing from the book.

So upon emerging from this mammoth of a movie I’m struggling a bit to remember what people and places in my world look like. It’s coming back slowly. The bottom line is I highly recommend seeing this movie in a theater in 3D; it’s incredible and I really hope this caliber of 3D catches on. (On the down side I feel my 2D TV becoming less and less impressive.)

As for the plot: I read the whole thing on Wikipedia beforehand and knew what to expect. Not that I’ve seen either of these, but it’s apparently quite similar to Dances With Wolves and Pocahontas. There’s the natives who’ve never heard of the seven deadly sins; they live in perfect harmony with nature, seemingly unmolested by disease, natural disaster, famine, animal attacks, harsh weather, or anything else that might inspire inventions like the wheel, fire, or rudimentary commerce. Then there’s the humans, who’ve destroyed Earth and now have their sights set on mining every last ounce of precious material from Pandora. They bring greed, guns and enough heavy machinery to build a parking lot over the entire planet. In case it isn’t obvious, they’re the bad guys.

But it looks great. So see it. As I heard from multiple sources beforehand, the 3D isn’t the gimmicky duck-before-the-low-flying-object-hits-your-face special effect we all know and hate, it’s a pervasive enhancement to the movie’s photography (and CGI) that makes each shot a little more real and convincing. I want more of that.

I am disappointed with the rejection of Google Voice applications from the iPhone App Store. I assume the rejection is rooted in the interests of AT&T or other iPhone carries since Google Voice provides alternatives to their services. AT&T has denied that they are responsible for the rejection, though I believe their statement is deliberately ambiguous and leaves open the possibility that they are indirectly responsible.

As a consumer I don’t really care who made this decision, but I know that Apple has to be involved in correcting it. The innovation provided by Google Voice applications will be available in cell phones sooner or later, and I really hope the iPhone isn’t late to that party.

-Michael Askew

This issue has generated such ire that the FCC is investigating. I’m not sure I want the government interfering on this one; all I really want is the features offered by Google Voice available on my iPhone, and integrated as seamlessly as possible. This could mean that Apple and their carriers implement their own version of these features, or they work with Google to make an application that adds features without circumventing too many of the carriers’ revenue streams.

The second issue was brought to light by David Pogue; he wants cell phone carriers to turn off the idiotic 15 seconds of instructions that play between outgoing voicemail messages and the beep that signals you to start talking. He solicited suggestions for a campaign motto and chose “Take Back the Beep.” Read his article for all the reasons why, but to put it succinctly this stupid message

• Is obsolete
• Wastes everyone’s time
• Generates tons of extra revenue for carriers by using up your cell phone minutes

Something I’ve been pointing out whenever I post comments about this issue is that I don’t just want the option of turning off this message on my outgoing greeting, I want it off by default, on all existing and new voicemail accounts. Since people started being vocal about this issue Sprint has tried to placate its customers by telling them that they already have the option to turn it off, and Verizon has even lied about offering this feature (and subsequently back peddled and said they just meant you could turn of voicemail, lame!). This sort of pandering just makes me more angry.

So I’m cranky, and complaining about small annoyances. Join me if you want. That’s all.