I really like my HTC Incredible mobile device. It runs (for now) the Android 2.1 operating system, and I really like a lot of the hardware and software features on my phone.

One of the things I missed the most about my old HTC Touch (Windows 6.1) was Spb Software’s “Spb Phone Suite” that let me set my ring tones and notification sounds to different things depending on the time of day (my review) .

I transitioned to a nice phone in between the HTC Touch and the HTC Incredible, but being a “dumb phone” I didn’t have the option to change my settings automatically. I really missed the time-based switching of Spb Phone Suite, and I also missed the ability to whitelist certain callers, who would ring through no matter what time of day.

Setting Profiles, a program made by Probeez, handles the profile switching that Spb Phone Suite did, except it adds a really useful twist: it adjusts the profiles by a multitude of criteria, including my location — all automatically.
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I love my Rosewill 8500 wireless mouse from NewEgg.com. I like it so much I bought an extra for work, and one for my desktop machine.

I’ve used the mouse quite a bit over the last three months. Two things have happened since then:

1) I killed the battery that came with the mouse.
2) The scroll wheel started to “jump” down about half a click when I used it.

The latter was a big deal. Sometimes I would scroll down a particularly long Web page and then the screen would move about two paragraphs. This was distracting and I often lost my place.

Even more annoying was that the problem with the scroll wheel didn’t happen all the time. At first it was every one out of ten spins. Then it was one in four. Then it was a 50/50 crap shoot for random scrolling insanity.

The Rosewill 8500 comes with a 30 day replacement guarantee from NewEgg, and then a year warranty from Rosewill. I didn’t want to mail in my $30 mouse and then be charged for a repair, so I decided to crack open the mouse myself to see what I could do.

If I succeeded, I’d have my favorite mouse back. If I failed, I had several others to replace it — and it’d make for an interesting Gibberish entry.
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If you want to see me fly way off the handle, harm a child. The AMBER Alert is a system used to notify the citizenry in the case of a child abduction. Typical information includes the child’s name, physical description, and supporting information (if available) such as a description of the abductor(s), any vehicle used in the abduction, etc.

In the United States, AMBER Alerts can be sent to your mobile phone in the form of a text message free of charge. I am a Verizon Wireless customer, and I stumbled upon this functionality due to curiosity. It’s free and easy to do. Here’s how.
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I bought the i-Rocks IR-8100 USB hub and card reader about two and a half years ago. It has worked flawlessly all this time, and I appreciate having more USB ports within easy reach as opposed to the back of my computer.

It works great, but it has an external power supply and is a pain to take with me when I travel. I hated having to pack yet another power supply, and it sucked to unplug a bunch of peripherals every time I left the house.

I decided to try i-Rocks again, and bought their IR-5400 USB flash memory card reader.
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A little over three years ago, PayPal and eBay announced a way to further protect your accounts with their Security Key initiative.

The premise of the Security Key is simple. A single, hardware key is assigned to your account. Every sixty seconds or so, a new numeric key is generated using RSA’s Securid technology. Essentially, your key uses an algorithm to create a big-ass unique random number, which is truncated down to six digit number. PayPal and eBay have software that calculates the same number, which again is unique to your card. You then log in with your normal username and password, followed by your random six digit number.

I was among the first public folks to get a key, and have used it ever since.

That is, until I lost it in February.
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Touchpads or multi-points are okay for navigating your laptop’s screen in a pinch, but any serious use is made easier by a mouse. My friend Bond uses a Logitech VX Nano wireless mouse, and it is really well made. However, it’s about $50 – $60 and getting harder to find as new Logitech models are hitting the streets. Since I’d need to buy two mice, I needed something that was both inexpensive and reliable.

As usual, I turned to NewEgg.com and started browsing.
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I picked up an Acer Aspire 5740 laptop a few weeks ago. Thanks to the forums over at Ars Technica I considered purchasing a Solid State Drive (SSD) to replace the traditional hard drive. Based on their recommendations, I picked up the Intel G2 X25M 80GB Mainstream SSD. The sale price was $220, down from the suggested retail of around $280.

Installation was very easy, and I put a fresh copy of Windows 7 on. Installation time was pretty fast. I got the impression that the SSD was faster overall, but was it worth $220 and 1/4th the storage capacity of my stock 5400rpm laptop drive?

Overall, life with the SSD was faster. I was interested in increasing my battery life, and decreasing my startup and resume times. I didn’t really care too much about faster reading and writing speeds, except how it related to opening programs and waking my computer up from sleep.

Benchmarks for SSDs concentrate on raw disk performance, but I didn’t really care about that. What was the impact of an SSD for a casual, daily laptop user?
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About a month and a half ago I wrote about the HDE wireless USB infrared remote control that I bought for my home theater personal computer (HTPC). If you haven’t read that review yet, here’s the short story: it sucked.

My dissatisfaction with the remote led me to buy the Lenovo wireless multimedia remote with keyboard, which I bought at half off. The Lenovo is very well built, does many things well, but still had room for improvement. I thought the full retail price was too expensive, and the device needed a backlight very very badly. The device is very difficult to use if you are watching TV in a dim room.

I was given a chance to review the iPazzPort wireless touchpad remote by Unisen USA. I was not compensated for my time in any way other than the chance to mess around with the remote. I sent the remote back after the completion of my three week evaluation.

Originally, I was going to compare the iPazzPort to both the Lenovo and the HDE. But let’s be honest: the HDE is a non-starter. It’s garbage. So how does the iPazzPort stack up against the Lenovo? Let’s take a look.
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Funny how Facebook has become the Switzerland of instant messaging among my friends. Some of us were on AIM, some were on Yahoo! Instant Messenger, and some were holdouts on ICQ. Before, in the ICQ/YIM/AIM days, the client and the protocol were the same thing. If you wanted to talk to someone on YIM, you had to use YIM. There was some “openness” to the various protocols (although a lot of it was reverse engineering in the beginning), and you saw clients like Pidgin able to talk on multiple networks.

Then Facebook came out and folks started spending a lot of time on there. Eventually Facebook implemented its own instant messaging chat.

The problem with Facebook’s Web-based chat is that it was that you had to be on Facebook all the time. Furthermore, it was always a little flaky. Sometimes messages would get stuck in “sending” mode, and sometimes friends would drop on and off without reason. I also think a fair number of chats were terminated because a user would navigate — accidentally or on purpose — away from Facebook.
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Here’s a nice problem to have: too many high-definition doo-dads and not enough high-definition ports on your television. That’s the situation I was facing on both of my televisions. I have FiOS TV, an Xbox 360 and an HTPC on both sets. I have two HDMI ports on my upstairs TV, and my downstairs television only has a single DVI port.

I picked up an IOGear 3-Port HDMI switch from Amazon last week for about $25. There are cheaper, no-name switches out there from sellers I’ve never heard of, but I was new to HDMI switches. I wanted to be able to return it easily if there was something flaky about the technology.
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