JamesBehnke.net

Several weeks ago at this point, I heard about Apple’s product refreshes by following a real-time blog update on the Macworld Web site. It was very happy that Apple decided to make the 8 GB 3G iPhone available for the “bargain basement” price of $99 (plus a two-year AT and T contract - too bad if you want to use another carrier).

I’m in the market for a smartphone. Given the benefits of having a phone/iPod/PDA combination device, the arguments against getting one of these gadgets has grown fairly thin; besides, Jim Cramer of “Mad Money” fame has declared that smartphones in general are about to turn from techno-indulgences to a necessities.

I’d feel better about purchasing an iPhone at the new $99 price point, even though, in the grand scheme of things, spending the extra $100 for one of the new 16GB iPhone 3GS devices wouldn’t be that big of a deal considering the fact that I’d be shelling out $30 per month data-access fees for the entire lifetime of either device anyway (the lifetime of the device being equivalent to the length of time it would take for the non-replaceable battery on the iPhone to die).

Overall, though, I’m OK with the “obsolete” 8GB model if for no other reason that none of the features of the new iPhone 3GS, while very neat and amazing (better performance, video editing, compass in case I get lost in Manhattan or something,…etc.), are enough to make me want to pay more to own the latest cool gadget of the moment. I think that people become too enamored with getting the newest technology when in many cases simpler, proven devices would be more practical; although now they practically give them away in Cracker-Jack boxes, my current RAZOR smartphone wasn’t exactly the top-of-the-line in technology when I purchased it. I was, however, a vast improvement over what I had at the time, and the $100 cost was reasonable for a delicate device that stands a good chance of being lost or broken (its survived being dropped several times to date).

I think that Apple’s next move should be to push for more affordable data plan contracts from AT and T, Verizon, and others. From a family budget standpoint, the cost of the data plan is the biggest factor when deciding whether or not to purchase an Internet-enabled smartphone; for this reason, I may even opt to defect to a Palm Pre.

I’ve recently begun to contribute to the Fordham University I.T.A.C. (Instructional Technology and Academic Computing) blog on a weekly basis. My contributions revolve around creating brief screencast tutorials and background information detailing the use of university I.T. systems and other information technology resources for the university community.

My latest post, written in collaboration with Ms. Kristen Treglia of I.T.A.C., is intended to introduce Fordham University faculty members to the concept or RSS and provide a brief demonstration of how to subscribe to an RSS feed using Google Reader.

Subscribe to the Fordham University I.T.A.C blog at http://itac.edublogs.org/feed/.

I went the the New York City Botanical Garden on Mother’s day to celebrate the holiday had a great time exploring and taking pictures of this scenic and interesting location.

I’ve only been the Botanical Gardens on one other occasion even though its relatively close to my former home in Paramus and directly across the street from my current place of employment at the Rose Hill Campus of Fordham University.

View Larger Map

It takes about a half an hour to get to the Botanical Gardens from Paramus via the George Washington Bridge and Route 95 North.

Located in the heart of the Bronx, the Botanical Garden ranks with Central Park as one of those indispensable “green areas” in a city that could have turned into an unlivable continuity of concrete had its early founders not exercised some restraint when it was being developed. For aspiring home landscapers and gardeners such as myself, the Botanical Garden is a treasure trove of information and inspiration. It contains of one of , if not the, last remaining plots of old-growth forest remaining in New York City, and its staff actively participates in scientific studies involving global warming and acid rain.

One of the most fascinating tidbits of information that I picked up on this trip had to do with how valuable flowers were at one point; the current arboretum exhibit features bulbs that, several hundred years ago, were traded for the likes of entire homes and country estates. I had heard of the “Tulip and Bulb Craze” prior to seeing the gardens and still find it interesting that things like flowers and spices (e.g. cloves) were once so valuable and exotic.

I took quite a few photographs with my relatively venerable Canon Digital Rebel 300D. The midday light wasn’t ideal, but the subject matter was very forgiving.

While telling some friends about my trip, I inadvertently learned of the existence of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and hope to make a trip there sometime soon.

I’ve been looking for an easy way to post a photo gallery to my Wordpress blog and seem to have found a workable solution in the Flickr Gallery plugin.

It’s been a while since I’ve even looked at my Flickr account and was pleased to find some old photos from my wildlife-photographer phase. Unfortunately, lack of time and the fact that I’ve already photographed most of the interesting wildlife in my New Jersey suburban town has caused me to dial-down my habit a bit.

The plugin seems to work well enough and even displays my photos in a nice Flash-powered “lightbox”.

I spend a lot of time looking for free on inexpensive alternatives to popular (and often expensive) commercial programs for use both at work and at home. The creators of “Alternativeto.net” are apparently trying to capitalize on the idea that a lot of people are doing the same thing.

The site allows you to search its database for an application that you’d like to find an alternative to presents a list of possibilities ranked in order of popularity by site members.

A quick search for alternatives to Adobe Photoshop led me to a nice-looking free application for Windows (”Paint.net“) and an interesting, inexpensive image editing application for the Mac (”Pixelmator“) that I had never heard of. A similar search for alternatives to Adobe Dreamweaver led to the discovery of something that I’ve been interested in locating for a long time; an inexpensive CSS editor for OSX (”CSS Edit” by Macrabbit).

AlternativeTo.net looks like a nice tool for locating decent-quality, low-cost software that’s a bit out of the mainstream and does the same job as better-known applications. It provides the additional benefit of easing the transition to alternative applications by contributing the opinions of its members.

The Weblog “Books, Computers, Education, and Libraries” by “Technomediaman” (I love the name) recently posted a brief article reviewing PC Magazine’s new feature “The Best Free Software of 2009“. A cursory examination of PC Magazine’s list of favorite programs revealed a few interesting-looking applications that I wasn’t aware of previously:

Banshee: an open-source iTunes-like application for Linux and Mac OSX. The Mac OSX version of the program is reported to be in beta and somewhat unstable at present (although I can’t see why a program like this would be necessary for the Apple platform in any case given the presence of iTunes on Mac OSX). I’ve been contemplating the merits of the Ubuntu Linux operating system for typical users for a while and am looking forward to trying this program on my Ubuntu virtual machine.

Songbird: a Mozilla.org open-source project aimed a producing an iTunes-like music player. At first glance, it doesn’t look as full-featured as Banshee, but its nice to see that multimedia support for Linux is growing.

Driveimage XML: I actually did know about this program at some point in the past and was happy to re-discover it. This program provides a lot of the same functionality of Norton Ghost in that it allows Windows users to create full backups of there systems that can be used to restore their computers in the event of a catastrophe. While browsing the site, I located another interesting looking, free program for creating backups called Shadowcopy that I intend to investigate.

DabbleBoard: A free, Web-based collaborative whiteboard application that can be used by two people to interactively edit simple vector-based drawings in real-time. This service seems like it would be a nice compliment the also-free Skype communication service, as it could allow two users to video-chat while working on a drawing collaboratively.

There are many more categories of software listed by PC Magazine and too little time at present to explore them all; this topic will be revisited shortly.

I’m usually not one to spend a lot of time playing with Web-based games and looking for “funny stuff” on the Internet, but in this case I had to make an exception.

On this election day, I was sent an electronic card from “JibJab“. I remember this site from the Bush / Kerry election for its very funny satire, and it seems that they’ve improved their offerings since then. After viewing the card, I decided to spend a few minutes on the site and was pretty entertained by what I found; see the video posted below for a sample of what can be created with a free JibJab account and a WebCam (and I was starting to think that WebCams were a waste of money).

I apologize if the content of this extremely satirical video offends anyone…I have to say that I think its pretty hysterical.

A few months ago, the hard-drive of my brand-new Dell desktop died. In addition to housing all of our critical financial and household data, the hard drive contained years worth of irreplaceable photos along with several hundred dollars worth of paid-for music from iTunes.

Luckily, I had subscribed to a Web-based backup service called “Carbonite“. For $45 per year per computer, the service allows me to install an “agent” program on my PC that automatically and securely uploads backup copies of all of my files to Carbonite’s servers. Once this is done, the agent program monitors my computer and automatically backs up any new or updated files. The $49.95 annual fee pays for unlimited storage space.

Although the process of uploading gigabytes of data to Carbonites servers initially took several days to accomplish, the end result was that a copy of all of my valuable information was able to be retrieved after my defective hard drive was replaced. This process downloading all of my files also took several days, but everything was accounted for.

I should have had an external hard drive dedicated for backup in addition to the Carbonite service; ideally, this would have been my “first line of defense” in case of a hard drive failure. But an external hard drive or other on-premise backup device wouldn’t have done me any good if it was stolen along with my computer or destroyed in a flood or fire.

For my MacBook, I’ve subscribed to a similar Mac-compatible service called Mozy and use an external hard drive with Apple’s Time Machine backup software for additional security.

See below for a brief video report from “Tekzilla” that mentions the Carbnonite and Mozy backup services.

Carbonite and Online Backup

One of my favorite sources for random tips on the latest and greatest technologies is “LifeHacker“. I subscribe to this site’s RSS feed and usually find something interesting every day; its replaced ZDNET as my preferred source for interesting technology tidbits (although ZDNET is still a very good).

Given the quality of the free alternatives currently available, why do home users and students keep paying for general office productivity software?

I use Apple OSX at home and have gotten into the habit of using OpenOffice 3 as my general-purpose word processor and spreadsheet program. OpenOffice 3 is also available for Windows and Linux operating systems.

I have yet to try Office 2008 for Macintosh, but I’ve been using MS Office 2007 for Windows for a while and it seems like a fairly decent application (given my field, it is a given that I need to be proficient in the use of MS products). I also own and occasionally use Apple’s Pages 2 word processor and Keynote 2 presentation graphics program and think that both of them are good at what they do (Keynote, in my opinion, is much better than PowerPoint). That being said, I think that, especially given current economic conditions, all of these programs are a waste of money for most people given the availability of OpenOffice 3 .

At the moment, I’m interested in working with programs used to produce Web-based training materials and documentation. Many of these programs are free, open-source blogging programs (WordPress), learning management systems (Moodle) , wikis (MediaWiki), and other Web based systems. Other programs that I’m interested in include proprietary programs like RoboHelp and Captivate. The open-source programs cost nothing, and the others are highly specialized, professional-level tools that can run in the hundreds of dollars (but are fortunately available for short trial periods).

If the need for it arises, I will pay software that is necessary to do a specific job at a professional level. In the case of general word-processing, spreadsheet, database, and presentation software like MS Office and OpenOffice, both have the features needed to perform general office tasks but are too weak to really substitute for dedicated page layout, statistical, database, and screen-capture applications.

The new version of OpenOffice seems to be roughly on par with what MS Office XP was in terms of features. For students and casual home-office users running Windows or Mac OSX, I would recommend downloading OpenOffice 3.0 and giving it a try. If it does what you need it to do, save your money and spend it on software that will give you an edge in your chosen field.

Note: at the time of this writing, I was unable to access the OpenOffice 3 Web site at www.openoffice.org. Instead, I was greeted with this message:

“Apologies - our website is struggling to cope with the unprecedented
demand for the new release 3.0 of OpenOffice.org. The technical teams are
trying to come up with a solution.

Thank you for your patience.”