Step 1 – Use WPA or WPA2

WEP encryption is better than nothing, but it is easily breakable.  It can be done in a matter of minutes.  Setting up WPA or WPA2 will give you the stronger level of protection.  Do not use TKIP, as it has many flaws and can expose your data.  If your router has either an AES or CCMP setting, use it instead.

Step 2 – Choose a Long Password

It is generally accepted by those in the know that any WPA password under 20 characters long is easily breakable to someone who is determined.  The average password can be broken in a couple days.  Choose a password that uses numbers and letters and is over 20 characters long.  Don’t use words that are easily associated with you, such as your family’s names, your address, or sensitive information like birthdays or social security numbers.

Step 3 – Don’t Share WiFi

Sure, your neighbor seems like a nice guy.  But for all you know, he could use your password to listen in on your network and steal your credit card numbers, and start shipping things from the Home Shopping Network to your door while you’re at work, which he will conveniently “hold” for you.

If everyone followed these three easy steps, cases of drive-by identity theft would start dropping dramatically.

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1 – Feedback & Reviews

One of the great things about Twitter is that you don’t have to wait for someone to find your business to give it feedback.  If you have a Twitter account for your business, people can comment at any time on your site without creating an account on your site.

People are comfortable making comments on others via Twitter.  This can be as good or bad as you make it.  They will comment on you even if you are not on Twitter.  It’s better for you to be there and active than to sit back and ignore them.

As a business, you can benefit from good and bad feedback by promptly responding to critiques.  If people have a negative comment, listen to what they are saying.  Respond to them with ways to resolve problems.

When someone gives you a compliment or good review, thank them by retweeting their comment.

2 – Special Deals

Hardly anyone is going to “follow” you on twitter if you are just a business posting business news.  People obviously follow news and large corporations, but most small businesses would just annoy people.  However, if you offer exclusive Twitter deals, you are likely to get many people retweeting your ads.

I follow people who run businesses.  They tweet news and blog postings and occasionally post a special Twitter only ad.

These people mix business with pleasure and their business benefits from it, because I like their other content enough to put up with a couple ad posts now and then.

I retweet these ads if they sound good to me and I think other’s would be interested.  This is free advertising! Give those special deals, even if you are losing money on the deal, and count the losses as advertising costs.

3 – Build Relationships

On Twitter, you will notice that some people are big fans of your business and products.  Build relationships with these people.  Engage them to give you suggestions for improving your business.  Use Twitter as a free market research tool.

If you want to try something, tweet about it and gather the feedback.  Do customers like your shipping options?  Do they like your response times?  Are there days they’d like extended phone support hours?

4 – Competition

You may not want to “follow” your competition with your professional account, but you may want to create an anonymous account and follow the streams of your competition.  You can watch their deals and responses to their customers, and adjust your business strategy accordingly.

Respond to competitor deals with your own.  Directly respond if another business presents something negative about you.  Avoid getting into a “flame war” with anyone, be it a customer or business.  Online arguments are all public.  But make sure you stand up for yourself, or people will only hear one side.

5 – News

Use your professional account to retweet and comment on news items that relate to your business.  Remember, though, that this is a public feed.  For instance, if you are a baby items eBay seller, retweet baby item recall news and explain what steps you have taken to safeguard your customers.

If there are news items in your area, you can be a news outlet to your customers.  If there is a large fire near your store, tell your customers to avoid routes to your business that would take them near danger. Let your customers know if you are open or closed on holidays and snow days.

This will show your customers that you care more about them than just their money.

6 – Collaboration

Find businesses in the area that you work with and use Twitter to help promote each other.  Maybe you repair computers and another business sells Internet access or web hosting.  You can tweet for their services, and they can tweet for yours.

Collaboration of related businesses can overlap common services and products, but overall will benefit you both. Collaboration creates buzz.

7 – Direct Sales

Do you have an established customer base?  Do you have a customer who messages you on Twitter?  Conduct direct sales!  If you are a plumber and a customer messages “My sink is leaking, argh!” then give them a call and ask if they would like you to come out.  This is a business responding to their customers’ needs.

Be careful, and don’t spam people!  Don’t contact random people by doing keyword searches. This is spam, and people will publicly trash your image if you annoy them.  Stick to customers you have, and move the customer service to a phone call, email, or your website as quickly as possible.  You don’t want your customers trying to post their credit card numbers to you over Twitter.

8 – Charity

If your business does charitable work or donations, advertise it on Twitter.  On Twitter, you have to toot your own horn.  This good press will give your customers and critics a chance to see that supporting your business also supports charities that they may care about.

9 – Contests

If you want to take your business to the next level, you could try a Twitter contest.  An online car retailer, @CarMax, decided to give a free car away on Twitter.  All you had to do is “follow” them, and retweet (RT) their contest ad.  They allowed users to enter once a day for every time they sent the retweet.

This is a brilliant use of Twitter.  It gains the company many followers, each of whom are giving the company free advertisement.  Make sure you follow all local and state laws for any contest.

10 – Don’t Over Do It

Don’t send dozens of tweets a day unless they are substantial.  Successful businesses don’t tweet their customers and users more than once or twice a week.  If you post a lot of news and blogs, keep your ads to less than 5-10% of your tweets.  Even one advertisement per day will seem like overkill.

If you use Twitter responsibly, listen to what people are saying to you, and engage your customers in positive ways, you will find that Twitter can be an effective tool for all small, medium, large, local, national, and online businesses.

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If you seriously want to make money from home online, it’s going to take a lot of sweat and hard work.  It won’t be easy, but it can be done.

Realize What You’re Up Against

Before you decide to do this, realize what you are up against, and the challenges.  First, you are working against the millions of other people who want to work for home.  Many of them have the same ideas as you, and they are your competition.  There are millions of bloggers, eBay sellers, and candle makers.  These sound like easy to do home jobs, but if you are going to be successful, you are going to have to be better than most of them.

Long Hours

Most of us are used to working 8 hour a day, 5 day a week jobs making a decent per hour wage.  This is possible because you work for an established business with established customers.  Working from home means you don’t have an established business or customer base.  You don’t have a steady income to rely on.  Because of this, you are going to be working long hours with intermittent pay.  Some weeks, you may make more money than you ever expected.  And the next, you may make nothing at all.

When we work for an employer, we expect to have vacations, to work only one shift, health insurance, etc.  But when you work for yourself, every hour you are off is a hour that your business is closed.

I know many small business owners.  They enjoy the freedom of being their own boss, making their own decisions, and controlling the direction of their business.  But what they will also tell you is that they work longer and harder hours than they ever did at any other job.

Dangers of Many Jobs

Every job has its dangers.  Bloggers put their own personal lives out there for people to criticize.  They must worry about plagiarists, ad revenue, and popular topics.  Not all bloggers write on topics they want to write on.  While they may love knitting, there is not an extremely large market for knitting blogs.  If you want to make money as a knitting blogger, you will have to be one of the best knitting bloggers there are to make enough money to live on.

You may look at the collection of knick-knacks in your basement and think that you could make a living on eBay.  But what is your plan when the knick-knacks run out?  Can you sell every item for enough of a profit over what you paid to earn a living?  Do you know how shipping rates will affect your business?

Unemployment

One of the greatest pitfalls of working from home is the statistic that about 50% of all new businesses fail within the first 5 years.  Working from home, you will be a sole proprietorship.  Unless you are paying regular wages into unemployment insurance, you will have no safety net if your business fails.

Over-extension

You may expect that starting a home business will only cost a few thousand dollars.  This is far from the truth if you plan on switching full time immediately.  Your costs will include not just your business costs, but your own living costs.  While working at home sounds cheaper than purchasing a business with a physical location, you will find that a physical location comes with free advertising and foot traffic.  Working at home brings with it a diving into the complete obscurity of the vast Internet, something even the most hidden physical location doesn’t suffer from.

This can cause you to quickly learn that you must purchase advertising, affiliations, inventory, web design, and extra phone lines among other things.  You can quickly drain tens of thousands of dollars.  Many people are so convinced that their business will succeed, that they don’t think twice before mortgaging their homes.  They have read the stories of Wozniak and Jobs maxing out their credit cards to start Apple, that they think this is how all new businesses start.

Stress and Family

Many new home businesses are started by mothers who want to spend more time at home with their children.  What many do not realize is that they are trading in 8 hours a day away from home, to 12-14 hours a day disconnected from their family.  Running a serious home business doesn’t allow you the time to take care of a baby while working.  One will take time away from the other.  This causes increased stress and frustration.  Realize that while working from home has advantages, it is work, and does require your full attention while you are working.

Working as an eBay seller, for instance, requires you to usually be immediately available to answer questions and comments about your items.  You need to spend time researching your competition’s prices.  You need to research your purchasing demographics.  You need to purchase or make new products to sell.  You need to ship items on time to get good reviews.  Doing all this while changing diapers, and making trips to soccer and ballet practice is a juggling act.

Even jobs that don’t seem like they require 8 hours of straight work, such as being a blogger, are no piece of cake.  Bloggers, even specialists, need to keep up with current news and trends.  They have to moderate comments.  They must form affiliations such as trading “guest blogger” with other sites to help gain readership.  They must organize meticulously to scratch every bit of value out of every visitor.

Hard Work, Low Pay

You could say, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  Or you could say, nothing is free in this world.  These are both true when it comes to working for yourself online.

Let’s look at how bloggers make their money, advertising.  Prices for advertising are measured in CPM, or Cost per Thousand.

If, for instance, you are being paid a CPM of $0.25, that means you are only being paid a quarter for every 1000 page views.  In order to earn a $400 paycheck for the week, you would need 1.6 million visitors a week.  Blogging doesn’t look so easy now, does it?

Be Prepared

If you prepare yourself for all of the pitfalls of working from home, such as realizing that income may not be steady, you will not be able to play with your kids and work at the same time, and that you will probably work longer hours, you can become successful.  You just have to find your strengths, work hard, and have an entrepreneurial spirit.

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Before trying to teach your children to tie their shoes, it helps to have shoes that tie.  While your child is learning to walk, avoid Velcro strapped shoes.  For children, watching you tie their shoes is part of the learning experience.  As you tie them, sing a song for them to learn. Choose an easy melody, like “Pop Goes the Weasel”:

Folding over (child's name)'s shoe strings
Now make a big bow.
Circle the bow with the other string,
And POP it through the thumb hole!

After months and years of repetition, your child will have this song ingrained in their learning.  When it comes time to teach your child to tie their shoes, you may find that they already know how!

As a lesson, ask your child to not just tie their shoes, but to tie your shoes for you as well.  If your shoes are not tied tight enough, retie them where your child can’t see.  They may become discouraged and think they did a bad thing when they see you undo all of their hard work.

Don’t get discouraged if your child takes a long time to learn to tie their shoes.  At young ages, they are still adjusting to hand eye coordination.  Growth spurts make it even more difficult for them.

A child that learns to tie their own shoes also learns that learning is fun, and that they can be self sufficient.  It will bring them the same pride as learning to use the potty by themselves.  And by teaching them yourself, rather than leaving it to a stranger, you will have an unforgettable bonding moment with your child that will last for the rest of your lives.

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This is a question that will be asked by many people.  If you are deciding whether or not to quit your job, you will certainly hear this from someone.  It may be your boss, your coworkers, and your partner or spouse.

Before you decide if you are going to quit or not, you should be able to answer this question for yourself.

To help you get started, here are some common reasons.  Some are good reasons.  Some are not.  This may help you decide if you really should quit.

#1 – I hate my boss!

This can be a good reason or a bad reason.  Most people aren’t best friends for their bosses.  Nobody likes to be told what to do and when to do it.  The boss is the focal point of all of our complaints as employees.

But before simply saying that you hate your boss, ask how you really feel.  Do you dislike them personally or professionally? Do you work well under them?

The idea is to discover if your problems with your boss are personal, “I don’t like how she always talks about her kids,” or professional, “She always delegates the easy tasks to my coworkers.”

Professional problems are the ones that really justify quitting your job.

Some career coaches talk about working out professional problems with your boss before deciding to quit.  But the truth is, you may have already talked to them, or feel intimidated.  You should always try to talk to people.  This isn’t always realistic, though.

#2 – They don’t pay me enough for my work!

Are you sure?  Have you checked comparable regional salaries for your position and experience?  Do those numbers take into account the current job market and unemployment rates?

If you are sure, there is two things you absolutely must do before quitting.  First, get an interview and job offer from another employer who is willing to pay more.  Second, tell your current employer that you have an offer for X amount of dollars.  Give them a chance to beat it.

But remember, don’t take an offer that doesn’t significantly beat it.  They could always turn around after a month or two and cut your pay or fire you.  Then you’ve already burned the first offer or another employer by turning them down to stay with an employer that either couldn’t or wouldn’t keep you on.

So when doing this, have it in your mind that you really do want to quit, that you have alternatives, and you can tell them to give you a raise or you walk without bluffing.  Never bluff an employer for a raise.  More often than not, they’ll call your bluff.  Once they realize you’re serious, they will call you in for a last minute offer if they are serious about keeping you.

#3 – I can’t take the stress anymore!

This is usually a culmination of many problems.  While this situation is serious, it may have little to do with your job.  Before declaring that work is your source of stress, talk to a councilor.  Not only might you work through your stress, but you may find the councilor helpful in getting time off under FMLA.

Unless you work for someone like Google, asking to take a sabbatical is rarely granted to most employees.  But under FMLA, you could be declared medically disabled and take a badly needed period of time off to get past the stress.

Whether it’s a midlife crisis or postpartum depression, speak with a councilor before quitting your job.  The sudden loss of income may only make your stress worse.

Once you can answer these questions for yourself, you will be able to answer that spouse who has house payments and children’s food on their mind.

And remember, quitting a job is far less upsetting if you first find a new job to go to, much like putting the parachute on before jumping out of the plane, rather than after.

Be sure to read our related article: How to Survive Personal Crisis

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Now I know that many of you are reading this site and thinking, “What the heck is this site about? It looks like you just write random articles.  Isn’t there a theme at all to your writing?”

Well, let me assure you, there is certainly a method to my madness.  No, there isn’t a single article on here that was put together randomly.  I’ve ran a couple very successful blogs (success as measured by more than 100 unique visitors a day).  I’ve ran gaming and technology blogs in the past.

And in that past, I or those who worked with me sat down and thought long and hard about what people want to know, what we like writing about, what’s news, and what’s hot.  There are two kinds of blogs, those who write whatever they want, and those who write what they think people want.

Honestly, I’ve always written on topics that I wanted to write about and things I thought others would also find as enjoyable to know about as I do.  I’m lucky enough to be interested in things that other’s do like, and I don’t write horribly, so I’ve been able to pull together some successful blogs.

I’ve been out of the blog business for a while.  I’d wanted to get back in, but I didn’t want to do it for pleasure.  I can write for pleasure without having a dedicated website.  What I wanted, quite honestly, was to make money writing.

How I’ve done it is taken many months and studied how successful blogs make money.  And I’ve learned some very interesting things.  I’ve taught myself how to study what people want.

This is not a lesson on how I do what I do.  Call it trade secret.  Anyone who really wants to know can learn it themselves.  In fact, I found some businesses touting that they had this big secret to knowing what people want.  It’s not that big of a secret, really.  It just takes a lot of work if you are doing it by yourself.

I’ve seen these sites that will tell you what to write, and they’ll pay you a portion, a stipend. Rather than working for a boss who tells me what to write to make them money, I figured out how to figure out what to write on my own.  Instead of getting a small stipend for all my trouble, I get to keep it all.

On the other hand, until I’ve done a lot more writing, the site will look a bit schizophrenic.  But the numbers are looking amazing, really.  With no advertising except for my tiny little twitter account with only a few real followers, I’m watching the numbers rise, and rise, and rise.  That’s pretty good, considering nobody is retweeting me, nobody is mentioning my articles on their blogs.  Nope, these are pure search result hits.  And the average visitor isn’t just reading a single story either.

Admit it. You’ve never read this site, and you’ll probably never come back (not yet, at least).  But you found at least 2 stories of interest on here.  There may be no theme, and it may seem disjointed, but it’s working because most people are reading more than just one story, and the unique visitors continue to grow.

Hopefully in 2010, after these first tiny steps, this site will grow by leaps and bounds.  You may never be a “regular reading”, because that’s not what this site is about.  But you very well may come back here reading on a topic you didn’t even know I would write about.

Thank you all for a great start!

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The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.

- Albert Einstein

Thanks, Al, but I want to know more concretely.  Robertson said that the Haitians, those are the ones dieing by the thousands right now, had made a “deal with the devil” years ago.

Some equally stupid people are trying to spin this as taken out of context.  Unless you remove it from the context of the space-time continuum, you can’t really take it out of context of tens or hundreds of thousands of people dieing while a rich white preacher tells the world on TV that they are all going to hell.

Out of context?  Definitely not.  But has it touched the limits of  the vastness that is stupidity?

By ranking, it is not the stupidest thing anyone has ever done.  Many people do worse things, if you grade the relative badness on how much it actually harms.  Dropping a frozen turkey into a deep fryer and having it explode and burn your house down is far dumber.

Other idiots go so far as to kill themselves, so much so that a television show was created just to showcase the moronic ways to die, such as by snorting fire ants.

If one were to plot stupidity on a chart, death would be point that the line, yes, flat lines.

But can we make it more stupid (or is that stupider)?

The answer, unfortunately, is yes.  Rather than just killing yourself, your stupidity could kill others.  Every dumbass from pilots that drink before flying to texting train drivers have raised the bar for stupidity to new heights, or should we say lows.

But who has done the stupidest thing ever?  Who has shown us the limit of stupidity in all its glory?

To do that, I must say something that will cause China to add a filter on this site.  Sorry, Chinese citizens, you aren’t allowed to read this.

The stupidest thing ever caused the unintentional deaths (because intentional death isn’t stupid, it’s just plain evil) killed tens of millions of people.  That’s not a mistype: tens of millions of people.

Who could be so ginormously stupid to cause the deaths of tens of millions of people, and how did they do it?

The dumbest dummy of all dummies, the king moron, the master of stupidity is… Mao Zedong, leader of China during the period known as the Great Leap Forward.  His stupidity was to be so blind to communism, that he didn’t even heed the warning signs that collectivist agriculture was a failure in the U.S.S.R.  But, rather than back off, he pushed even harder than the Russians.  He also decided that farmers could do other jobs, since his stupidity extended to believing that farmers just sit around watching plants grow and should be put to other projects as well.

The result was the deaths of tens of millions of people due to widespread famine.  The famine was so bad, some resorted to cannibalism to survive.

Good job, dumbass!

There have been killers and warriors that have caused millions to die.  But only Mao was able to kill so many so fast by sheer ignorance.

In light of this, Pat Robertson certainly qualifies as a fool.  Ultimate stupidity?  Far from it.  But don’t let me discourage you from getting in line to give him a swift kick in the ass.  If only people could have lined up to kick Mao in the ass.

Well, he told them they could line up, but he just said that so that he could exterminate them for showing up for the line.  Yeah, he was a bad guy as well as stupid.

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Start by figuring out how big you want your pentagram to be. This is figured as the distance between opposite points. For our example, we’ll be making a pentagram with a line length of 100mm. We use millimeters to measure as this will produce the most accurate drawing.

One horizontal line at the bottom.

First, draw a straight line at the bottom of the paper using your ruler and pen. This will act as the base that the pentagram will sit on. Make sure the line is dark enough to see through the back side of the paper.

Now fold the paper so that the ends of the line touch. Smooth the fold down with your fingernail. Now unfold the paper and draw a line on the fold.

Two perpendicular lines.

You should have two perpendicular lines.

Now it’s time for a little math.

We’re using what’s called the Golden Ratio. It occurs naturally in biology, anatomy, architecture, art, and physics. Read here for more info on the Golden Ratio.

The ratio is roughly rounded as 1.618034… Since we started with 100mm we will divide 100 by the Golden Ratio. We end up with 62mm after rounding to the nearest millimeter. We now divide 62 by the Golden Ratio and end up with 38mm after rounding down to the nearest millimeter.

We now have 3 numbers: 100, 62, and 38.

Take the second number and divide it in half, which is 31. Set your ruler on the base line and line up the 31mm mark at the point where the perpendicular line meets the base line.

Now mark the 0mm and 62mm points of the ruler on the baseline

Add two points to the base line.

Three points forming a triangle.

Now move the ruler so that the 0mm point remains where it is, and the 100mm mark touches the perpendicular line. Mark the spot of the 100mm mark on the perpendicular line.

If you measure between the top point and the bottom right point, it should also measure 100mm.

Using your ruler, draw a straight line from the bottom left to the top point. Draw another line from the bottom right point to the top point.

You should now have a triangle of the three points.

The two midway points aren't "halfway" points. Make sure you use your third Golden Ratio number and measure along the line from the bottom.

Now we are going to mark midway points.

Using the third number, which is 38 in this case, measure from the bottom left point along the left line, and mark 38mm from the bottom point.

Repeat and mark 38mm from the bottom right point along the right line.

You now have two midway points on each line. They should both be 38mm from the nearest bottom point.

Now we are going to place the ruler with 0mm on the bottom left point. Lay it so that it crosses the right side midway point.

Make a point at the 100mm mark. This point will not be touching any line.

The finished pentagram and all points.

Repeat the other way by putting the 0mm mark on the bottom right point and laying it so that it crosses the left side midway point

Make a point at the 100mm mark. This point will not be touching any line.

Now using your ruler, draw a line from the bottom left point to the top right point

Draw another line from the bottom right point to the top left point.

Finally, draw a line from the top left point to the top right point.

Now you should be seeing a perfectly drawn pentagram!

For a clean drawing without the base and perpendicular lines, place a clean sheet of paper over your drawing. Mark the five points, and reconnect them using your ruler.

Inside the pentagram is a perfectly shaped pentagon that you can trace too, or transfer the points and make a shrunken copy of your pentagram.

Draw a circle around the pentagram, and you’ve created a pentacle.

You can now use your drawing as a sewing pattern, a wood carving or wood burning stencel, a paint stencel, or a metal cutting stencel for making decorative Americana decorations.  If you are a Wiccan, you can use this template to make your own jewelry or altar pieces.

Check out this video on how to make a pentagram with Gimp:

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I suppose people are waiting for the wow moments like the iPhone unveiling.  But all most of us long term smartphone users said when the iPhone came out was, “Neat, a touch screen.”  It was a touch screen, and it was from Apple.  Those two things alone caused pandemonium to buy one.  And the most significant part of this story is much like the story of the iPod.  Sure, they keep coming out with more memory, but are they wowing anyone lately?  Much like that of the fruit colored iMacs, the answer is no.

Does Google have to wow us?  Not necessarily.  If they have the best software on the best hardware, they already have the brand power to make it win.  Are they the best with the Nexus One?  Nobody could disagree.  It is the best hardware, and it is proving to not just be the best software, but the ever improving best software which Google is constantly upgrading with incredible new features like voice recognition, 3D graphics support, and others.

Google is also positioning for a multi-platform assault with Google Chrome for PCs, Chrome OS netbooks, and Android for smartphones (or superphones, as they call them now).  The tidal wave is coming.  Is the Nexus One a valid spearhead of all this?  I think so.  The New York Times isn’t so sure.  They give it a “weeeeell, it’s not bad.”

Just to get us all on the same page, I’m going to pull up the iPhone specs from http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html and Nexus One specs from http://www.google.com/phone/static/en_US-nexusone_tech_specs.html.

No tricks.  I’m going to take what the NYT said, and compare it to a little something I like to call reality.

First, the new phone. It’s almost exactly the size and shape of the iPhone. Like most HTC phones, it’s bland-looking. But it’s so thin and rounded, it feels terrific in your hand.

Really? Bland?  You mean like all white iPods/iPhones aren’t iBland?  The HTC phone comes with the Google brand on the back, compare this to an Apple symbol, both of which are highly sought after brand labels, much like Nike swooshes on shoes.  But the HTC also has a personal monogram plate.  It ain’t much, but if we’re comparing it to the iPhone, there’s no way you can call it bland when compared to an iPhone.  What would you rather have, something shaped like a potato with spray paint on it?

Let’s talk about size.  Apple prides itself on how thin their phone is.  Every new iPhone gets a hair thinner just so they can say, “Now even thinner!”

iPhone – 12.3mm Depth

Nexus One – 11.5mm Depth

That’s about 6.5% thinner depth.

iPhone – 62.1mm Width

Nexus One – 59.8mm Width

That’s about every 3.7% thinner width.

Those two things are key, because they determine how it feels in our hands.  The Nexus One is 3.5mm taller, but it also has a 3.7″ screen compared to the 3.5″ screen of the iPhone.

The NYT goes on to give the Nexus One a good review of the obviously superior specs on screen resolution, and other features.

But then they throw in this little nugget after saying how great the phone is and the fact that it has a flash and the iPhone doesn’t.

…although the photos are roughly on par with the iPhone’s.

What? Are you serious?  You’re comparing these under what light conditions?

iPhone – 3 Megapixels

Nexus One – 5 Megapixels

iPhone – VGA up to 30 fps with audio

Nexus One – Video captured at 720×480 pixels at 20 frames per second or higher, depending on lighting conditions

For those of you not aware, VGA is 640×480.  That means that it is not widescreen, but standard definition.  720×480 is widescreen DVD resolution.  VGA is what you watched Star Search on in the 80’s, if you were alive.  DVD resolution is what you probably watched The Matrix on.  There’s no comparison.

Yes, NYT, I’d call that “roughly on par with the iPhone”… and then some.  True, megapixels don’t mean everything.  But all other things being equal, more is better.  As I said, all other things being equal.  But when you add in a flash, that makes a big difference.  Taking a picture at a barely lit party will look radically different, and nowhere near on par.

This writer, David Pogue, wrote articles in the past years on cameras on the megapixel topic, which is all well and good.  But if you consider a with flash camera and without flash camera to be on par, you really are out of the loop on camera developments in the past 150 years.

Then the NYT drops this laughable bomb about voice recognition on the iPhone.

The free Dragon Dictation app for iPhone does the same thing with better accuracy, but you have to copy and paste the results into your other programs.

That is not the same thing, especially considering the iPhone hasn’t even had copy/paste available for very long.  If you had said Vlingo, I might have let it slide a bit.  But what Google is talking about is not dictating an e-mail or two.  As a young man, I tried Dragon Naturally Speaking, and they are wonderful.  But dictating long letters has never been the killer app of voice recognition.  Voice commands and short inputs are the killer app.

Google is talking about voice recognition for everything.  All inputs across all apps, without switching out to some third app.  All 12,000 apps on the Google store just became voice enabled apps.  Apple cannot say that for their apps.

Just browsing the web is radically different if you are just clicking and speaking, no typing, no keyboard (except for the passwords that aren’t yet auto-saved or for private moments in public).  Searching, updating Facebook and Twitter, and all the others… and yes sending SMS and email.

That is radically different for a phone, something none of them have ever done, ever.  How radical?  Google voice enabled a single app, Google Maps, and rocked the entire GPS navigation industry and sent investors in other companies into a panic.  That’s one app on less than a handful of phones.

After a few more points of praise, the NYT makes another mistake.

Despite the goodies, the Nexus is missing some important features that iPhone fans take for granted. For starters, the Google app store is much smaller, featuring 12,000 fun little games and programs compared with Apple’s 100,000.

Is that condescention I hear in your voice as you say “12,000 fun little games and programs”? Steve Jobs would be proud of you.  You should do one of those Mac vs PC commercials.

That’s not a “feature”, but I’ll bite.  This is noted as a missing feature.  Granted, the only way to satisfy this is to ask Google to sit down and write 90,000 apps before releasing a phone.  Please.  The iPhone didn’t have those 100,000 apps when it was released.  Let’s not forget the people falling over themselves to develop apps for all Google products, because of how easy Google makes it for them.

Not to mention that the Nexus One has an incredibly advanced processor, able to run apps the iPhone couldn’t dream of, especially in beautiful 3D graphics.  The author, like most tech authors right now, are underestimating the impact 3D Google Earth is going to have.  Useful?  Who knows.  It may merge with Google Maps, and become the unquestioning all time champion of the mobile map.  But the awe inspiring gazes as people see it in action will send them looking for a Nexus One, and that makes it a winner, as with all upcoming 3D apps for Android.  The 3D engine is going to kill iPhone on gaming, btw.

I do hope you all considered what that means.  Ah, you hadn’t.

Wait for it… Wait for it…

Now I can see the look of realization coming over your faces.  That’s right, kiddies, Google is going to be the king of mobile gaming platforms if they seize the lead in mobile 3D.  Forget $9.99 for a 2D app, people will be paying $30 or more for mobile 3D Halo-Droid.  And just imagine if it’s gps enabled, and you are roaming the streets of NYC in a massive city-wide game.  Cha-ching!

That may be a few generations away from Nexus One, but the groundwork being laid by Google seems very clear to me here that Google is poising itself to conquer mobile gaming without raising a single hint of suspicion from any of you tech writers, or the console makers.  Sorry, Microsoft, Google’s coming after a slice of XBox revenue, too.

But back to the point.

The iPhone is still unable to multitask.  I can only assume how many apps the Nexus One could run, and still run circles around a single iPhone app on speed.  What good are 100,000 apps if you can only run one at a time?

The NYT makes a good point about storage space to install apps compared to the iPhone, but a software upgrade could expand that to the full flash drive, which other phones have downloadable apps to do.  Still, this is a good point, as is the companion software.  Of course, that’s not assuming that the entire Google web empire can’t be considered companion software.

There’s no physical ringer on-off switch (you have to do it in the screen), and therefore no way to tell by touch if the ringer is off, as you can on the iPhone and Palm phones.

This may be useful to school children using their phones from their pockets, but us Blackberry users have lived without a ringer-switch for a while, knowing it’s just clutter.  We are free to pull our phones out and turn our ringers off, because we have no fear of the teacher seeing us pull the phone.  Seriously, are you just reaching for complaints to make your article look fair and critical?  If I did that, I could note the lack of side buttons other phones have compared to my Blackberry.

Sadly, the Nexus One also lacks a multi-touch screen like the iPhone’s

That is correct.  And for good reason, patent questions.  Hopefully this will be resolved.

There are a more critiques that are prone to someone using a beta phone, which will be worked out before production, like button response and wallpapers crashing.

The rest of the article is more of a rant against the state of the cellular industry.  I agree with most of it.  But I think the NYT has missed the same critical point that Apple has not gotten, which is why many people haven’t gotten an iPhone.  I may not like AT&T.   I may have my own carrier.  So regardless of what Apple does with the iPhone, I would never ever own one so long as it is AT&T only.  By making a truly carrier independent phone, I can do something you didn’t consider.

I can stay with my current plan.  Who doesn’t want a 2 year contract?  People who already have a good carrier, are already in a contract, or who for whatever reason just don’t want to change their plan.  Some people have locked in great plans.

Phones like this are for people like us.  We don’t want a contract, because we don’t need one.  We have a plan we like.  I’d like a new phone in a year or so, and unless something radically better came along, I don’t want to change.  I do have a carrier and plan I am satisfied with.  I am a Blackberry user, and I am smartphone plan ready for any phone.

I can go to Google’s site, buy the phone, plug in a SIM card, and just use it.  I don’t need to go to a carrier that may overprice the phone, then make it look like a steep discount to just start a new contract just to lock me in again.  Thanks, but no thanks.

The article completely overlooks the fact that the phone comes with a second noise cancelling microphone, the light and proximity sensors and a trackball/led.

David Pogue is a good writer, but I think he’s out of touch with who the real audience the Google Nexus One is for, like those who doesn’t text because they can’t work a real or touch screen keyboard.  Those who hate seeing the hour glass waiting on an app. Those who want those earth shattering apps that Apple is only good at rejecting.  Those who just want a phone built by people who love the technology more than those who just love looking at themselves in the mirror and make snarky commercials.

And quite frankly, that’s the point. We all get that Google is brilliant, and they don’t have to show a single TV commercial telling us how brilliant they are.  The company with the smartest people on the planet said, you know what, we’ll just make a phone OS and give it away.  Everyone laughed, until the phones started coming.  Then they said, you know what, why can’t we also design the phone, but do it all tricked out with the things we’ve been promised for years but never given.  There are some people still laughing.

There were some people laughing when they said Google would really threaten Microsoft.  Microsoft didn’t laugh, because they understood what Google represented.  And if you are Apple right now, you aren’t laughing either.  You aren’t laughing one bit.

Especially since today, the Google Chrome browser just surpassed Apple’s Safari browser in global market share.

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#1 Best Youtube Downloader

DownloadHelper

DownloadHelper is an addon for Firefox and one of the best ways to download Youtube movies and songs.  What makes it so great to use is that installs directly into your browser, and doesn’t require you to leave the Youtube page you are on.  It comes with a myriad of options.  You can download them as-is FLV, or convert the files into other formats like AVI, MPEG, 3GP (mobile), or MP3.  It is also cross platform compatible, which means that you can use it on Linux, Windows, or Mac.

I use it on Linux, and DownloadHelper uses the FFMPEG program to convert to any format without having to drop to command line.  Mac also uses FFMPEG.  The Windows version offers conversion software for download.

It also works on hundreds of video sites, so you are not stuck with Youtube.  It is likely that any video you see online, it can download.  It supports a safe mode if you want to block adult sites from downloading.

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Check it out: http://www.downloadhelper.net/

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VuClip

So you are on your iPhone, Blackberry, or Droid, and you want to download Youtube or other video site movies directly to your phone.  Never fear, VuClip.com is here.  It comes with integrated cross-site search, ratings, and other tools.  It will let you choose to stream, or download in either low or high quality.  It also supports an audio-only download, but this is in 3GP, not MP3, so it is not ideal for downloading music.

VuClip also allows you to browse the website from your computer and send videos to your phone.  It’s great for when you are not in 3G coverage, but want your Youtube goodness.

Check it out: http://www.vuclip.com/

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KissYoutube

If you want the absolute simplest solution to downloading Youtube videos with no frills, then you want to use Kiss Youtube.  It offers no conversion, no options, no frills.  But it couldn’t be any simpler to use.  Simply add kiss before the url and hit enter, and you’re done.

Example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o…

http://www.kissyoutube.com/watch?v=o…

Check it out: http://www.kissyoutube.com/

Who wins?

DownloadHelper wins hands down.  By relying on a converter on your PC, it absolutely destroys the others by offering unlimited conversion options and works as fast as your own broadband connection.  You to choose HD quality videos where available for the best possible experience.  One of the best features is that it allows you to queue up videos, so you can have unlimitted videos set to download and convert, instead of doing one at a time which could take hours of clicking and waiting.  If you want to download more than 1 or 2 videos a month, DownloadHelper gets it done fastest with the least amount of hassle and most options.

Honorable Mention

Video2MP3

There are a lot of Youtube to Mp3 sites out there.  99% of them are pure crap.  All of them are slow, full of ads, and many have spyware.  But one of the few that looks good, works well enough to endure the wait, and doesn’t kill you with adds is Video2Mp3.  It’s not as good as the Download Helper solution, but it does include a browser addon option.

Check it out: http://www.video2mp3.net/

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