Sometimes something so wacky comes along that ceases being stupid and just turns in to cool.

A company named onOne has submitted an iPhone and iPod ouch application to Apple for approval that will allow you to control your Canon EOS DSLR camera from your favorite device.  Well, okay, it isn’t QUITE that straight forward.

• You need either an iPhone or an iPod Touch
• You need a supported Canon EOS DSLR
• A laptop or desktop computer running the free companion DSLR Remote Server software
• A USB cable to connect your supported Canon EOS DSLR camera to the computer running the free server software

Once released, the application will come in two versions: the $1.99 Lite version will only control the shutter release, and the pro version for $9.99 will control multiple functions.

As someone who used to play around with photography as a hobby when I was younger, it sounds cool, and would be especially useful to someone like me who could never hold a lens study to save his life, but it has a few too many steps for my taste.  Any time you add another component to a set up, you just add that many more chances for something to fail. This sounds cool and useful, but it also sounds like something that could frustrate you fairly quickly when one little part doesn’t work they way it’s supposed to.

In a move that is sure to send fear into the hearts of cell phone executives, Skype is prepping to come to the BlackBerry.

In an announcement on the Skype forum, the company has announced they have launched their closed beta test of a Skype appication to work with various models of BlackBerry smartphones.  Unfortunately they have already closed the test to new applicants due to the overwhelming number of responses, but this is a good sign that an official application is not far off.

The question now is if this will work only over Wi-Fi, or will it also work over cellular networks?  The number of BlackBerry devices that offer Wi-Fi is fairly limited, so it is doubtful Skype would put a lot of work into a product with such limited appeal, but cell phone carries don’t exactly thrill to their bandwidth being used for calls they make no money from.  When Skype on the iPhone launched, it was Wi-Fi only for calls, but seeing as every iPhone has that built-in, it wasn’t such a big deal.  There is a third party application called iSkoot which can handle Skype calling on the BlackBerry, but seeing as it isn’t official, it is doubtful the issue has been adressed yet.

Either way, Skype is preparing for their launch, and soon BlackBerry owners everywhere could be enjoying Skype calling on the go.

Will wonders never cease? It appears that Twitter may finally be getting around to monetizing themselves.

Biz Stone, one of the founders of the popular Twitter service, has finally discussed what the company plans to do to monetize itself.  However, according to Reuters, it does not involve selling ads.  According to an address Mr. Stone gave to the Reuters Global Technology Summit via videolink, “There are a few reasons why we’re not pursuing advertising — one is it’s just not quite as interesting to us.”

What the company plans to do is by the end of the year they want to introduce add-on tools and services for the businesses and professional users of the service.  What these tools would be comprised of was not discussed in the chat, nor what they would cost.  He did hint that they are looking into analytics for heavy users, and possibly a directory of verified businesses that are using the service, but the main focus of the company would still be on the free aspects of the site.

This may be the long rumored “Twitter Pro” accounts people have mumbled for ages, but seeing as he specifically said “add-on” tools, it almost sounds like they will be actual software.  This of course leaves the question of what will happen to the ever growing community of third party applications built off of the Twitter API, but that seems to be a bit down the road still.

While selling ads would probably be the quickest way to generate a revenue stream, Mr. Stone just doesn’t see that as an area they want to focus on.  “There are no people at Twitter who know anything about advertising or work in advertising. So we don’t have anyone there to make or take those calls.”

Because, you know, hiring an experienced sales team is so difficult.

It’s amazing how legal troubles can change a company.

Between June 1999 and July 2001, Napster was the scourge of the music industry.  It was the first peer-to-peer music sharing service that took off, and people traded music with one another, in violation of copyrights, with wild abandon.  After they were shut down due to numerous legal problems, mostly centering around the heavy metal band Metallica, the brand name was sold off to another company who recognized that the name had become synonymous with online music.  The site reappeared shortly after the company liquidation, but this time it was 100% legal.

Now in an odd move, they are offering a new subsctription plan that is only $5.00 a month and will give you access to unlimited streaming of their over seven million song library.  The oddness comes in that each month you will be allowed to download five songs at CD quality levels, and keep those forver.  Considering that $.99 is the average price of buying a song through stores like iTunes, this is somewhat of a bargain as you get the unlimited streaming thrown in on top of it.

Your subscription gets you”

• Get five MP3s each month to download, with their choice of songs from the Napster MP3 library that covers all types of music from all the major labels and includes the largest catalog of independent artists available.
• Listen to any track, as often as they like, in CD quality from Napster’s catalog of more than seven million songs.
• Choose from more than 60 commercial-free radio stations and more than 1,400 expertly programmed playlists.
• Discover new music and artists through personalized recommendation tools.
• Enjoy the top hits from more than 50 years of Billboard charts. Want to know what was popular when you graduated high school? Now you can.
• Play MP3s on any MP3 player, including iPod, iPhone and music-enabled MP3 mobile phones.

It seems like a pretty good bargain actually, but it is still a bit odd to think this is coming from the brand name that used to epitomize online music piracy.

It seems some people at Microsoft are starting to get the idea that Vista was a bad idea.

Okay, it’s not quite that dramatic, but, according to Computer World,  Bill Veghte, Microsoft’s senior vice president for Windows business, made a keynote speech this week, and said the following.

If you’re just starting your testing of Vista, with the [Windows 7] Release Candidate and the quality of that offering, I would switch over and do your testing on the [Windows 7] Release Candidate, and use that going forward.

Well, yes, if your company is just starting to test Vista, then you need to pick up a technical journal once in a while and realize that Windows 7 is in heavy testing at this stage.  The new version is expected to make it into consumer level PCs this fall, so enterprise desployment would probably start in late 2010 or early 2011, and with Windows XP support having been extended to April 2014, this would give them plenty of time to do a full roll out in a company.

However, there is one small problem with this entire idea in that apparently you can not upgrade directly from Windows XP to Windows 7.  The upgrade appears to only work from Windows Vista to Windows 7, so companies that are still filled with Windows XP machines… good luck on figuring out that workaround.  I would imagine they can just wipe the systems and start over, but then you have questions about hardware configurations.

This is where my personal gripe with the whole Microsoft plan comes in.  There is a reason Apple just keeps extending Mac OS X: it works.  The same could be said for Windows XP, even with its numerous bugs, those could have been ironed out and they could have sold incremental updates, just like Apple has done with great success.  However, Microsoft doesn’t always like to make sense it would seem.  Why sell just a small update when you can sell a whole new operating system and cause headaches for consumers at all levels?  Yeah, that’s some bright thinking there!

As much as I don’t want to hate Microsoft, they just keep doing stupid thing after stupid thing.  Yes, Windows 7 may be more stable than Vista, but isn’t that kind of like saying “Well this boat leaks… less.  It still leaks, just… less.”

Any way you slice it, all PC users will eventually be forced into Windows 7, just some of us will have been lucky enough to have skipped Vista.

I always knew electricity and computers don’t mix well, but static electricity is a pain in the behind also.

As I mentioned the other day in my post on the Kirksville Tornado, when I returned to my office that evening, we began having a computer problem.  My primary computer is a Dell Vostro 200 mini-tower, under 1-year-old.  When the tornados began to hit I started shutting down our systems, but when it came time to unplug them (as you should during a storm), the tornado sirens started sounding and that meant it was closer than I thought, so I left without unplugging.

When I got back to the office a few hours later and went to turn my Vostro on, I got the Dell logo screen and then… nothing.  No function keys worked, nothing changed, it would just sit locked on that screen.  Finally I bit the bullet and called Dell tech support since I was still under warranty.

The tech agent, who was actually one of the nicest I’ve ever dealt with, told me to remove the side panel of the computer tower.  After that was off, he told me to locate the main power cord connection that runs to the mother board.  I did so, and I did look it over for signs of damage, and it looked perfectly fine.

Secondly he had me remove all four of my RAM chips and then reinset them.  At this point I knew where he was going with this, and it was more than likely that my system had received a shock of static electricity.

It was the next thing we did that I would have never thought of.  If you’ve ever opened up your computer you’re sure to have noticed a round silver battery on your mother board.  This is the CMOS (Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) battery which helps your system remember things like the time and date while your system is shut down.  He had me remove that battery from the mother board and leave it out for over a minute.  We then popped it back in and tried to boot the system.

We did get the system back up and running, although we did keep getting an error message.  The technician had me go into the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) system, and it seems while the battery was out, the system convinced itself it should have an old 3.5″ floppy disk drive.  Why it thought this we had no clue, but we reset that and the computer is working great now.

Oddly, it is actually working better than it did before the storm.  We had been having a weird problem with it not shutting down programs properly, and at times we would have to confirm each one by hand when shutting down the system.  That problem has not appeared once since we did this reset.

Now, this isn’t something I would recommend doing just for the heck of it when you have a computer problem, but it is best to know that this is a possible solution that your tech support may recommend for you to do.

Two other lessons to take away from this:

1. Yes, you should unplug your computer when possible, but the tech guy quickly added when I told him the sirens had gone off, “Sometimes your life has to come first.”  If you can unplug your system, do so, but don’t ever risk your life for it.
2. I am a big believer in remote backup services, and seeing as I use one extensively now, I can’t tell you how much panic and stress that takes out of a computer crash.  Even though my system was down, and it would be a pain if I had to set it up all over again, it was a relief knowing all my documents and files were safely stored somewhere on a remote server.  If you haven’t started backing up your systems yet, do it, you won’t regret it for a second the first time you have a computer problem.

All in all it was a good learning experience, if also a bit frightening.

We all may love our gadgets around here, but ever we have to say there is a time to put them down.

If you feel a burning need to have an application on your iPhone that will give you a video feed of what is in front of you as you walk, today is your lucky day!

A company named Phase2 has released a free (for now) iPhone application that will let you write emails on your phone with the background image being a live video feed of what your built-in camera sees.  Email n’ Walk (iTunes link) will let you see everything going on through the camera so you can walk and type at the same time.

My concern is that there is actually a market for this?  Has anyone ever heard of just putting the phone down for 5 minutes?  Or, if you prefer, stop under a nice tree to type out your message!  I can’t believe this is actually all that useful, and I imagine you stop paying attention to the feed in fairly short order.

Seriously, put down the crack pipe phone, and try to enjoy your surroundings for 10 seconds.

An interesting lesson was learned yesterday on how to use technology during a pack of tornadoes coming at you.

For those who have not heard, the home town of StarterTech, Kirksville,MO, had a pack of four tornadoes come at us yesterday.  You can read my more personal account of the event at May 13th, 2009 Kirksville, MO Tornado on my personal site.  As we hunkered down in our basement with our dogs though, we found technology was easing our fears some.

As I ran for the basement (and I do mean literally “ran”), I realized I still had my BlackBerry 8830 and iPod Touch on me.  Luckily our power stayed on with just a few blips, but if it hadn’t, none of this would have mattered.

Thanks to our Sprint Airave, my BlackBerry continued to receive five bars of signal strength even in the cemented basement.  This allowed me to get messages out to people as to what was happening via the handy Gtalk app.

As for the iPod Touch, I was able to use the Weather Channel application (iTunes link) to check the radar to see where exactly the storm cell was.  (right on top of us)  That was a mixed blessing and curse knowing the storm was about to tear my town apart.

We did learn a few lessons also.

• We really need a battery operated radio in the basement.  All we had was one connected to power.
• We also need a phone down there that doesn’t run on electricity.  If we had one, and had lost power, we could have still gotten phone calls out and in.
• You can never have too many flashlights, as we discovered we had none down there.  We also moved some chemical light sticks down there later, which are great in a true emergency.  (every house should have some)

Again, luckily we did not lose power, and our home was untouched.  Sadly, two people in our town did lose their lives, over 40 homes were damaged or destroyed, and a car dealership was decimated.  If you want to learn more about the Kirksville tornadoes, please make sure to visit For actual news I suggest you check KTVO TV 3 and the Kirksville Daily Express for all of the latest local coverage.

Our only damage was a computer, which is a post of its own coming later as it is now working and we learned some valuable lessons even we didn’t know.

In short, keep your gadgets on you as they can be a vital lifeline during an emergency.  Also, old school (battery operated or no power needed) gadgets still have their place in this world, and that is something none of us should ever forget.

Sling Media has finally made its way on to the iPhone and iPod Touch,but with a hefty price and several restrictions.

People have been anxiously awaiting the day they could use their placeshifting SlingBoxes with the iPhone and iPod Touch, and as of today they can download the SlingPlayer Mobile application (iTunes link) from the iTunes store.  Now, before you get excited, there are three caveats for you to consider.

AT&T has said the app can’t be used over its 3G network, but yu can use it over their Wi-Fi hostposts.  They did issue a statement regarding the decision.

Slingbox, which would use large amounts of wireless network capacity, could create congestion and potentially prevent other customers from using the network. The application does not run on our 3G wireless network. Applications like this, which redirect a TV signal to a personal computer, are specifically prohibited under our terms of service. We consider smartphones like the iPhone to be personal computers in that they have the same hardware and software attributes as PCs.

That said, we don’t restrict users from going to a Web site that lets them view videos. But what our terms and conditions prohibit is the transferring, or slinging, of a TV signal to their personal computer or smartphone.

The Slingbox application for the iPhone runs on WiFi. That’s good news for AT&T’s iPhone 3G customers, who get free WiFi access at our 20,000 owned and operated hot spots in the U.S., including Starbucks, McDonalds, Barnes & Noble, hotels, and airports. AT&T is the industry leader in WiFi

So there was one hope squashed rather quickly.

The other issue is that the application does not support all models of the SlingBox.  The Classic, AV and Tuner models are all out of luck.  You can do an upgrade program that will give you a $50 discount on changing to a newer model, but it definitely feels like a slap in the face to the earlier adopters of the technology.

And the last problem is the price.  No matter how nice the app may be, it costs $30.  So, you’re paying $30 for an app you can only use around Wi-Fi, thanks, but I think I’ll pass.  It just isn’t an enticing offer to pay that much for an app you can only use at certain times.  Maybe it will change down the road, but for now it’s just handicapped in its abilities.

It would seem that too many celebrities on Twitter could summon the Fonz and force him to jump the Fail Whale!

Don’t worry if that made no sense to you, it is just the plot of the second Twitter-based cartoon from Twitter.  The first of these appeared back in March in Twitter Explains It All, and this one is more subject specific than the last, but it makes some great points.

We’ve been raising questions about the oddities of celebrities on Twitter for some time now, and it just seems to be getting odder by the day, and it just seems to be getting worse.  Ever since Ashton Kutcher pushed to be the first account with a million followers, and then Oprah dedicated an episode to her setting up her own account, the site has been enjoying stratospheric growth.  The only question is what is it doing to the Twitter community?  This cartoon attempts to answer that question… and actually arrives at a surprising conclusion.

Make sure to follow me on Twitter… because I’m still having fun. @seanpaune