Category Archives: Tools

Tools, Tutorials

How to clean your Blackberry’s track ball

A user on Lifehacker has recently posted a video on how to clean the little track ball on a blackberry. (I would say it works for any mobile device with a track ball).

I tested it out on my Blackberry which was having issues scrolling to the right and it fixed it up.

All that required is a blank piece of white paper and you just need to rub the trackball on the paper to clean it. Check out the video

[YouTube via Lifehacker]

Another method that I used just after Christmas involved pulling out the track ball assembly and cleaning the rollers.

News, Tools

Painful Exercises for better health.

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Embody Herman Miller
Embody Herman Miller Chair

Unfortunately for many of us life has left us sitting…rather quite literally in a chair at work each day. but this leads to poor posture which creates all sorts of physical back and neck problems. Which I’m told in turn effects all sorts of strange and wonderful parts of the body. So the bottom line is: Improve your posture.

It’s one of those things that hurts to do before you see any results, but it worth it in the long run. Today I received an email in my inbox about this short ~10 minute video that provides some basic exercises that you can do practically anywhere.

The Video is titled “Strength and Structure with Pete Egoscue, Back Into Alignment: Taking Charge of Your Core Muscles” and can be found on Tony Robbins site here: Strength and Structure with Pete Egoscue

Be warned that doing something healthy may actually hurt.

Another useful tool that I find helpful when sitting at a computer all day is called WorkRave. It’s a cross platform software that forces you to take breaks…small micro breaks for 30 seconds, and longer extended rest breaks for 10 minutes. The software allows you to customise the timings to suit you. Grab a copy at WorkRave

How do you stay healthy at your chair? Let us know in the comments below.

Quick Links:
Video on Improving your posture
WorkRave – Software that makes you slow down and stop

Photo: HermanMiller  Embody – Reviewed as one of the most comfortable office chairs. Check it out at http://embody.hermanmiller.com/

News, Tools

Legal Uses for BitTorrent…Facebook??

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Server RackIt appears that BitTorrent is useful for Legal uses after all (we all knew that didn’t we). It turns out some of the major Social Media sites such as Facebook and Twitter use BitTorrent to roll out code changes to their several thousand servers around the globe…in a matter of minutes.

You can find a list of other companies that use BitTorrent  on Wikipedia

[Via DownloadSquad]

[Photo thanks to pleeker]

iPad, Tools

iPad Mail App Review

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I have been toying with my new iPad for just over a week now, and one of the features that I have been testing out extensively has been the Mail application.
Mail appears to have the same support in the iPad as it does on an iPhone. Supporting: MobileMe, Google Gmail, Microsoft Exchange, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL and with IMAP and POP email systems.

Setting up a breeze, just enter in your name, email address and password and Mail will go out and try and configure the device for you, if it can’t or fails, or needs additional server information it will ask you for it and finish off setting it up.

I have my iPad successfully connected to a Google Apps account (same as gmail) and a Microsoft Exchange server.
The exchange server took more work to setup because I had to add the additional server settings, whereas the Google Apps account worked its self out straight away.

Emails are great to view, when in horizontal mode, the current folder that you are viewing appears on the left, while the email that your reading appears on the right hand side of the screen. When it comes to writing an email it appears as a pop over box over the top of the dual panel screen.

To test out the mail attachment support I sent myself a number of test emails from my laptop to my ipad. These included 2 different word documents (both 2007 format, one was fairly basic while the other had more formatting and pictures inserted into it), a excel workbook with multiple spread sheets, and a PDF. All files types opened without an issue and in some cases looked better on the iPad than on my laptop. One thing I noticed with the Word Documents were that they blend all the pages together and remove the white space, rather than just leaving it blank like the desktop version of Word does. The Apple iPad site lists the following files as supported for viewing:

Mail attachment Support

Viewable document types: .jpg, .tiff, .gif (images); .doc and .docx (Microsoft Word); .htm and .html (web pages); .key (Keynote); .numbers (Numbers); .pages (Pages); .pdf (Preview and Adobe Acrobat); .ppt and .pptx (Microsoft PowerPoint); .txt (text); .rtf (rich text format); .vcf (contact information); .xls and .xlsx (Microsoft Excel) (Source: http://www.apple.com/au/ipad/specs/)

Microsoft Exchange:

The calendar and contacts integrated beautifully with the calendar and contacts application on the iPad, with no known issues at this time. We shall see over the coming weeks how well this continues. A down side to note is that it won’t support any more than one exchange account on the iPad at any time. The alternative to this, is to use Outlook Web Access which works as well as it does in lite mode (such as when accessing it in firefox on a computer)

One issue I did run into is not being about to open eml (Forwarded emails from certain applications) on the iPad.

To wrap up, Mail on the iPad is great for when you’re away from your mail desktop/laptop or just want to quickly write an email/view an email. At this stage, I probably won’t be solely relying on it for my email, but rather leaving my email in the cloud and have the ability to access it when required.