4th of July is still a week away, but everyone’s already making plans. A few minutes ago, I heard fireworks going off outside. It’s definitely that time of year. On July 4th, America’s Independence Day, families and friends will get together in back yards, parks, and roof tops to BBQ, party, and watch the dazzling fireworks displays. This year, take your celebration to a whole new level with some geeky tech additions.
Swashbuckling BBQ Sword
Sure, you could just be normal and manage your meat on the BBQ with tongs or a skewer, but who wants to be normal? Handle those dogs like a pro with the BBQ sword from Think Geek. You can wear an eye patch if you want, but remember to take it off before the fireworks show. $24.99
Patriotic Headphones
Show up with these US flag headphones on and nobody will ever doubt your patriotism. Go the extra mile and have some patriotic music read to go for anyone who asks what you’re listening to. $39.90
Build A Fireworks Launch Center
Adam at Addictornics wanted to safely launch fireworks from a distance, but he didn’t just phone this one in. With some time and patience, you can create an awesome fireworks launch pad like his. Just don’t forget the launch codes.
If someone in your family is sick, you don’t like crowds, it’s raining, or you simply want to stay in on the 4th, you can still enjoy a fireworks show in your own living room. This fireworks projector from Sega Toys creates a simulated fireworks show without all the smoke. It’s not the same as the real thing, but you’ll have the best seat. $173
July 4th iPhone Apps
There are tons of iPhone and Android apps to help you get into the patriotic spirit, keep mosquitoes away, and find awesome yet simple BBQ recipes. A fun little app that can help keep the kids from asking “when are the fireworks?” for two hours before the show is the I Love Fireworks app. You just tap the screen to make fireworks appear. $0.99
I love to travel… I don’t get to head out of town often, but when I do, I need my technology. Being away from my computer for more than a few hours gets me a little twitchy, so road trips have traditionally been hard to deal with. With the iPhone and the almost unmanageable list of applications to choose from, things have gotten much better. I just got back from a road trip from Phoenix, AZ to Long Beach, CA, where Michelle and I stayed on the Queen Mary for an extended party, and my iPhone helped a lot when it came to relaxing and getting things done. Here’s a list of ten must-have iPhone applications for your road trip.
Google Maps
One of the original built-in applications in the iPhone’s OS is the Google Maps app. With it, you can quickly search for your destination and map your route to get there. With your trip all mapped out, you can relax and just check in once in a while for any freeway changes or other details. Of course I’m still waiting for Google to give us turn-by-turn directions on the iPhone for free (yes, I AM that spoiled by Google), but there’s a few (not free) apps out there to try as well. I use Google because it’s incredibly simple and I can jump right to street view to see what the building I’m looking for looks like.
Pandora
My favorite source for streaming music on the web is also my favorite source on my iPhone. What I didn’t know was how useful it could really be on a road trip. I intended to make a note of where in the desert it stopped working, but it just kept working the whole time. Other than a couple times cutting out for about 30 seconds, Pandora streamed brilliantly over AT&T’s 3G network the entire drive. Now if AT&T could just get my phone to reliably make phone calls where I need it to…
Email
Another standard app on most smart phones is an email application and the iPhone has a pretty complete email program and it handles multiple accounts. The thing that I used to hate is coming back home to find thousands of emails to go through. This weekend, I was able to keep up with my two important email accounts and respond to people in a timely manner while removing all the spam from my server to only sync valuable emails when I get home.
TweetDeck
While I tried to enjoy my vacation more than Twitter, I still have thoughts and photos I want to share while out of town. Vacations also offer lots of fun things to tweet about. I’ve tried a few of the top Twitter iPhone apps, but this one is my favorite. Just waiting in line for tickets to the aquarium, I was able to check for new tweets, mentions, and DMs and reply to a couple in just a couple minutes. Then I globally marked the rest as “read”. Easy.
Weather
It’s always important to know the weather where you’re going, and if you’re on a long road trip, this can be tricky. When we drove to Detroit and back last summer, we passed through several states and the weather app was very useful to plan out our wardrobe as well as touristy events.
Safari
Despite the completely unexplainable fact that I still can’t view flash in a web site in Safari on my iPhone, it’s still a great browser. It’s pretty fast and renders very nicely. Best of all, it’s as close as I’ve ever gotten to a real web browsing experience on a phone (except sites with flash). Wireless access in many hotels will run you about ten bucks a day and in the Queen Mary, it didn’t matter because I got almost no wifi signal in my room. Browsing the web over 3G in my room was a huge convenience on many occasions.
Gazette
I read a lot of blogs. I try to stay on top of industry news and events and still read blogs of colleagues and influential bloggers. I could lock down an hour in my room to do this on the laptop, but then I wouldn’t be vacationing, would I? Instead, I prefer to skim my preferred feeds in the frequent spare moments when I’m waiting for Michelle to get ready, the elevator is taking forever, or, dare I say it… the bathroom. Catching up in these otherwise wasted spare minutes leaves that hour free for vacationing.
Camera
I have a digital camera and it takes better pictures than my iPhone, but it also runs on AA batteries, is inconvenient to tote around, and lacks the luxury of instant sharing. With the iPhone’s camera, I can snap off a shot any time and I can take thousands before I run out of space. There’s tons of ways to share my photos, from the Facebook or MySpace apps to Twitter apps to Flickr apps like the one mentioned below. Additionally, with the 3G S, I was able to shoot video, which I found myself doing a lot more on this trip.
FlickIt
One of the apps I use the most, vacationing or not, is FlickIt. It just uploads your photos right to your Flickr account. You can add detailed information and tags to each photo, but I usually just do that later from a PC. The only thing missing is the ability to upload videos to my Flickr account. Then it would be perfect.
WiFiTrak
WiFi is almost always a better option than 3G in terms of speed, but when you travel, you often have to wait until you’re at the hotel or near a hot spot and even then, it will usually cost enough to make you grimace a bit. One way around this is to leech off someone else’s WiFi. Just fire up this app and find a suitable (and open) connection and use it. As seen here, you won’t always find an open router, but when one is nearby it helps to have a fast way of knowing and connecting to it.
Bonus : RDP
What if that piece of information, email, phone number, etc is only available to you from your home or office computer? This happened to me over the weekend. I can’t think of a better test case. Servers were about to be moved and I needed quick access to some IP addresses that were in a list only on my computer at the office. I was on the beach with no other electronics than my phone, but I opened the RDP app and connected to my computer at the office, got the information I needed, and went back to enjoying the beach. The alternative would have been to catch a cab, get back to the hotel, fire up the laptop and pay for the WiFi access. I have only needed this app twice and it could use a little bit of tweaking, but both times it was a life saver.
As I have mentioned in the past, I rely on Windows XP for my television needs. I have cable coming into the PC, which acts as a Tivo-like digital video recorder and then feeding the source back out to my TV. It’s cheaper than Tivo (I don’t pay anything per month to record), and I can play downloaded media, etc. on it. The only downfall is that I’m tethered by a corded mouse and keyboard. In fact, I have to be right in front of it to do anything. With a 52 inch TV, that’s a bit of an eye (and back) strain. Those days are over. Keep reading and watch the video to see what I mean.
A discovery
A week or two ago, I came across something called the Air Mouse. It’s an iPhone app that communicates with a server instance to become a wireless air mouse for whatever computer the server instance is running on. It’s a great idea, but I’m always busy and quickly pushed it aside for another time, thinking the install would take forever and it wouldn’t work that well anyway. Boy was I wrong.
Installing Air Mouse
What’s worse than having to go through a long, tedious install? Doing so on a computer with a barely-working input system. This was part of my hesitation. I bit the $6 bullet and installed the iPhone application. This was the easy part. Then, I downloaded the server application to my laptop and then moved it over to my TV PC. I then ran it and the install took about 90 seconds total, which was a nice surprise. An even nicer surprise was that the they communicated right away and just started working. Awesome! Well, not totally… Keep reading.
Using Air Mouse
Using this thing took a little fumbling around, but that’s because I missed the link to their Air Mouse help page. This page is refreshingly complete, full of all the information you could want about how the app works, unlike some apps I’ve installed.
With the application, you can use your iPhone like an actual air mouse, waving your mouse around to move the cursor, or like a laptop’s touch pad, moving your thumb across the surface to move the cursor. The touchpad option is much easier to jump right into, giving you more control right away, but the air mouse option would be ideal in terms of flexibility with the learning curve trade-off. Whichever you choose, it’s simple and it just works well. On top of all the mouse goodness, it comes with a built-in keyboard that they promise we’ll be able to hide when we’re not using it. I no longer have to get off the couch to type in a web address on the TV.
Because I am the only one who really does anything other than watch TV on my TV PC, the fact that MY iPhone must be used for it to work is fine. In the 1/2 hour I’ve had it installed, I’ve already done a few things on that machine that I had been putting off due to the mobility constraints posed by my previous mouse/keyboard solution.
This is probably the best money I’ve spent in the iPhone Apps store. Here’s that video of the Air Mouse in use.
There are tons of iPhone and Android apps to help you get into the patriotic spirit, keep mosquitoes away, and find awesome yet simple BBQ recipes. A fun little app that can help keep the kids from asking “when are the fireworks?” for two hours before the show is the I Love Fireworks app. You just tap the screen to make fireworks appear.
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