As most of you know I absolutely love my Garmin Nuvi 750. I don’t get lost anymore nor do I have to spend hours printing off maps that usually are erroneous. It will even tell me exactly where in the US I am at almost any given moment. I love it—I highly recommend it but I am so frustrated that I could say a few bad words and have in fact.

Garmin seems to be under the impression that my 60 year old brain is encoded in some way to know the rest of the instructions that were not printed by the printing company and that their proof reader missed. As well, they assume that my bifocal contact prescription for my old eyes allows me to read the smallest serial number ever printed in the history of mankind in the most absurd place I have ever seen. The reason we started this blog was to address just these problems so hold on—here we go.

The Garmin instruction booklet is written in pretty simple terms but leaves out so much that all you can do is pick up the thing and explore all the buttons. I did this with the fear that I might fry it at any moment but I am happy to report that it withstood my crazed punching of buttons and button combinations. I found out how to do just about everything I wanted to know how to do but I am left with a feeling that there are really good things I am missing. As I find out more I will share them with you and of course if you have any questions now please feel free to e-mail them to us and I will find the answer for you. I am trying to do this without help so that I may speak confidently on what was left out of the instructions so please let me try to help you bypass that frustration.

My Garmin sent me a New Years message—it said my information and maps might be over a year old and suggested that I visit their website to obtain new maps. Goodie!! I thought some of the information was old and some places were missing so I am all for new maps!! So I went to the website and couldn’t just find out how much my new maps were going to cost unless I had registered the unit and had my USB cord at hand. I didn’t want to download it at that time I wanted answer to a simple question—HOW MUCH! So many companies assume that we are all techno zombies and that anything new will just open our wallets—but not me. Cost has to have a balance in value for me—will that $69.95 reduce my frustration level significantly? The jury is still out on that one—I may wait until after my first two business trips this year to decide so stay tuned. I still have some brain cells left.

The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas has made it clear that the age of the Internet connected TV is definitely upon us.

It would seem that every HDTV manufacturer is coming out with a TV that interacts with the Internet in one way or another.  Whether it be streaming content from a site like Netflix, getting information from Yahoo Widgets, or even interacting with social networking sites like MySpace, there seems to be little bits of the Internet popping up all over the place.

LG

LG Electronics is going to be building the ability to stream the Netflix Watch Instantly service right into their units.  The only problem is that you are looking at a $300 boost to the price for the privilege.

Samsung

Samsung is going the extra step by allowing you to not only connect to your home network via an Ethernet cable, but they will support 802.11a/b/g/n wireless networking capabilities via a wireless USB dongle.  Depending on the placement and size of the dongle, this may cause a problem with TV placement, but we will have to see.

The new networking feature will be called Internet@TV and will allow you to use the Yahoo Widget Engine for all sorts of content like Flickr, news, weather, sports scores and so on. Also, with connection to your home network, you will be able to stream music, video and pictures from other computers in your home.

Sony

The Sony BRAVIA line doesn’t list all of the services it will be working with, but it does mention Amazon Video on Demand, Flickr, Slacker, Yahoo Widget Engine and YouTube.

Toshiba

Later this year, Toshiba will adding a lot of computer goodies to their REGZA line.  You will be able to add widgets to your TV for things like local weather, top news stories, favorite sports scores, stock quotes, pictures, videos and more.

They will also be adding support for Microsoft’s Extender for Windows Media Center.  This will allow you, via your TV remote, to control the video files on your connected computer, and play them directly to your television.  No more having to go through a third item like an XBox 360.

Vizio

Vizio seems to want to really leap out in front of the competition, and is cramming streaming compatibility for just about everything you can think of into their television sets this year.

Their sets this year will, besides putting in the Yahoo Widget Engine everyone seems to be adding, include Accedo Broadband gaming, Amazon Video on Demand, Blockbuster OnDemand, Flickr, Netfix Watch Instantly, Pandora and Rhapsody.  Controlling all of this should also be a breeze as you can see from the picture of their remote.  Who would have ever thought we would see a TV remote with a slide out QWERTY keyboard?

Conclusion

While all of this is very exciting, all of this technology is still in its infancy.  Prices this year will be inflated, and you are almost guaranteed that the 2010 models of these televisions will have major improvements over the ones released this year.  I personally would recommend not rushing out to purchase any of this technology quite yet.  Give it some time to mature, and for the prices of the included hardware to drop.

There is no doubt that this is an exciting time in the advancements of TV technology, and it almost makes you wonder why we will even need cable or satellite television providers some day.  The TV is moving in to a new age where it is not merely a way to display a signal you receive from an antenna, but in to a true, self-contained entertainment provider.  There is quite possibly a day coming where people will buy a TV and an Internet connection, and leave the programming providers completely out of the equation.

Cable companies and satellite providers need to start getting very, very nervous.

The beta version of Windows 7 has officially been released, but it is certainly not for everyone.

The vast majority of people like to be on the cutting edge of technology.  If its shiny and new, then they want it.  With the official announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that the beta version of Windows 7 is now available, there are sure to be many people rushing to try it out, but the question is if this is for you, the average computer user.

The shortest answer to this is a resounding “no”.

To expand on this, I have always likened changing versions of Windows on a PC to trying to change the table cloth on a table AFTER you’ve set the dishes.  It is inevitable something is going to break.  Especially with a beta version, meaning a version that is unfinished and almost certain have bugs, you are definitely going to run into problems with your existing programs and drivers.

There is also the issue that this beta has a limited life span that expires at the end of July 2009.  So after you’ve gotten this on your PC, you’ve gotten things to run somewhat correctly, you will have to either revert back to your previous operating system or pay for a fully licensed copy of the final version of Windows 7.

If you are someone with only one PC, then I definitely, and vehemently, do not recommend you try doing this.  Sure it may be tempting to run the new system, but if something goes wrong during the upgrade, you could very well end up with a dead computer.  Even with multiple PCs in my life, it is doubtful I am going to try this because I can’t think of one machine that I am willing to sacrifice to this test for one reason or another.

For now we suggest you remain content with whatever you have because it is probably working.  If you really want Windows 7, you can try it, but we highly suggest you wait for the finished product.

The brave ones amongst us can find the beta version here.

It look like AT&T may be following in the foot steps of Sprint by offering their customers in home cell phone base stations.

According to a report on Ars Technica, AT&T has been asking in a customer service survey if they would be interested in a femtocell base station for their home.  A femtocell station is a device that allows your cell phones to communicate with an in home device that connects to your Internet connection, and then transmits all of the data over that line.  The best known example of this technology so far in the USA is the Sprint Airave, but it is still relevantly unkwnon.

The exact wording of the question being asked of the customers may give some idea of why AT&T is finally pursuing this service line.

AT&T’s new product is a small, security-enabled cellular base station that easily connects to your home DSL or Cable Internet, providing a reliable wireless signal for any 3G phone in every room of your house. The device allows you to have unlimited, nationwide Anytime Minutes for incoming or outgoing calls.

While the Sprint Airave has the ability to service the more common CDMA phone band, the fact this specifically mentions 3G makes you wonder if this might be an effort to boost sales of the iPhone 3G more than anything.  Many people have by passed getting the iPhone because of a lack of 3G service in their area, but if they could now get full advantage of their phone at least in their home.

While this is obviously a technology that helps the phone companies by taking some strain off their networks, and helps them not have to build more towers, they still end up charging you for the physical device, and then they charge you a monthly service fee for being provided with a service… that helps them and works off of your Internet connection.  There is no doubt that as a Sprint Airave user myself it is nice to finally have five bars in my house, but the math doesn’t always add up as to why I pay so much more to use my own phone.

There is no information on when testing might begin on the AT&T devices, but apparently they are already in use in the homes of their employees.

The placeshifting leader, Sling Media, is prepping support for Apple’s iPhone at long last.

With it’s beautiful screen, and ability to stream media from other sources, it seemed like that Sling Box technology was a natural fit for the iPhone, but yet we weren’t seeing an appearance of an application for it.  However, it does seem that good things come to those who wait as they have finally announced that we can expect a release in the first quarter of 2009.

For those unfamiliar with what a Sling Box does, with just a few cables, and two little infra red emitters, you are able to login to your player from anywhere in the world, and watch your home television.  Say you are on a trip to South America, but you want to catch up on your soap operas while you’re away.  If you have an Internet connection, you can be watching your home television in a matter of moments, and even accessing yoru DVR, setting up future recordings and more.

This is not the first mobile device Sling Media has released an application for, but it is probably one of the most anticipated.  The application will be free to use during the beta test, but will cost $29.99 when it officially launches.

Macworld, the annual expo dedicated to all things Mac, was launched today in San Francisco.

The announcements of new upgrades was a mixed bag, but we’ve rounded them all up for you to digest in one easy read.

GarageBand ’09

This year GarageBand is going to get beginner friendly with the addition of learn-to-play features.  The software will come packaged with 9 beginner lessons for guitar and piano, but you will then be able to purchase “Artist Lessons” from a built-in store.  At a cost of $4.99 a lesson, you can learn how to play particular songs from the likes of John Foggerty and Sting, produced exclusively for GarageBand.

iLife ’09

As shocking as it may be, iLife ’08 has gotten an update into iLife ’09.  How do they come up with these names?  Hours of research, I’m sure.  While there were no Earth shattering updates to this, iPhoto ’09 did get two new features in the form of “Faces” and “Places”.

Faces will allow the software to do facial recognition so that you can organize your photos by people.  Say you want to bring up all of the pictures you have of your cousin Sue.  Just start a search for Sue by clicking on one image of her, and the system will try to find all of the images you have that she is in.  Sure there will be some mistakes, but still a very handy tool for organizing your photos.

Next up was Places which will allow you to geotag your images.  A goodly number of camera now support geotagging, and this feature will now allow you to organize photos by location.  If your camera doesn’t support this feature, you will be given the option to enter location information manually.

iMovie ’09

Video enthusiasts will get lots of new toys to play with this year in the way of image stabalization, new themes, effects such as aged film, move the audio track from one clip to another and so on.  Sounds like there are ton of new features this year for the amateur film makers out there.

iWork

The Apple produced office suite saw a lot of updates this year.  While Keynote, their presentation application, got new effects such as transitions, the most intriguing update was the remote app for the iPhone and iPod Touch.  Once installed you will be able to connect to the presentation on your Mac, and then show the entire presentation file right threre on your device.  Very handy for people on the go, or say you are doing a lunch meeting.

The big announcement, however, was the launch of iWork.com.  You will now be able to click a button, enter an email address, and share the document with that person for review.  They can also make edits to it, you can share notes with each other about it and so on.  For now you can sign up for a free beta test of it, but it will eventually become a paid service.

MacBook Pro 17″

MacBook Pro 17″ models saw huge technical advancements, especially in the field of batteries.  Depending on the style of video chip you choose, you can expect 7 to 8 hours of life from a fully charged battery.  This is 30% ahead of the industry standard, and you will also get 1,000 charges from your battery, which is three times the normal amount.

While the new features of the MacBook are impressive (2.6 GHz, 4 GBs of RAM, 512 MB of video memory, etc), the price is a jaw dropping $2799 for the basic configuration.

iTunes

iTunes got the coveted last announcement spot with the news that songs will now be priced at $.69, $.99 and $1.29, but all of them will be DRM-free.  There are currently 8 million songs available without the draconian copy protection, and by the end of the month that number will grow by 25% to ten million.

iPhone users will also be able to now purchase songs no matter where they are via the 3G network.  You will get the exact same quality as you would buying it on your computer, and you will be able to synch it off your phone to your computer next time you attach the two.

Conclusion

While there were some interesting new features to the existing products, where was the Mac Mini?  The entry level Mac has not seen an update since August 2007, and while Apple sold a record number of Macs in 2008, their entry level options are sorely limited.  Disregarding the now severly outdated Mini, your cheapest option for an up-to-date system is the $999 MacBook.

I have said for years that Apple would be dangerous if they would pay more attention to budget conscience consumers, but yet they ignore them once again, even in this current economy.  Bad move, Apple, bad move.

It may be an extreme point of view, but I think that phishing attacks may be the thing that finally tips Twitter in to the pool of, “Well, that was fun while it lasted.”

The phishing attack that happened to Twitter this past weekend has opened the flood gates to a whole slew of new problems, and as much as I love Twitter, I think this may be the beginning of the end.  Pete Cashmore of Mashable made a very astute observation this weekend as he also wrote up the attack.

Ironically, this may be a coming-of-age for Twitter: nobody phishes where there are no phish to catch. In other words: while stealing passwords is a vile activity, the fact that such attacks are being embarked upon would indicate that Twitter is now large enough to be a viable target…even if its savvy early-adopter audience may be wise to such scams.

And he was right, it was a sign of coming of age for the service.  It wasn’t so horrible that you couldn’t ignore it, it was just fairly annoying, and it kind of made you laugh as every direct message you received from people with the attack in it was like a signal, “Hey, I was stupid enough to fall for the scam!”  At least you got a laugh at their expense.

Where I crossed the line into feeling like this was a sign of doom for the service was when I received this following direct message (DM) twice tonight in a 20 minute span.

hey. i won an iphone! come see how here http://helloiphones.com

Folks, the spammers have found us.

One of the things that has made Twitter such a valuable tool to so many is that it was a fairly pristine means of communication.  If you got a (DM) it meant that someone was really trying to get a hold of me.  I have my DMs set to go to both my cell phone and my email because the volume was low enough that it was never a nuisance to receive them.  However, walking through Walmart tonight doing some late night grocery shopping, and having to fish my BlackBerry out of my clothes twice in a short period of time just to find out how I could get a free iPhone, well, that has definitely made me reconsider having those messages go to my phone.  This cuts down on the chances people have of getting a hold of me, and it was a nice way of text messaging people without having to give out your cell phone number to everyone and their brother.

If the trust is lacking, what does have Twitter left to build on?  If it becomes rife with phishers and scammers, then it loses its place as the golden child of the social media crowd, and they will move on to the next thing.  Even the massive outages that led to the infamous Fail Whale being seen on a regular basis were tolerable because you wrote it off as growing pains, but endless iPhone scam messages might very well make people want to just throw the towel in and walk away.  How car behind can the Viagra and online pharmacy ads be?

There is an even bigger potential casualty of this whole debacle, and that is the third-party Twitter app companies.  These people rely on you trusting them and giving them your Twitter password to make their services work.  The number of these has grown so much, we have even seen the launch of a site, Twitdom, dedicated just to keep track of them because there are so many of them now.  How will any apps survive when everyone is wondering if they can trust like you say they can.

Chris Brogan made a good point tonight on his blog about how we can end this current round of annoyances by simply stating, “Log Into Twitter And Change Your Password“.  It really is just that simple to end this whole mess if everyone goes in and changes the password they just gave out to some untrustworthy site.  What about the next time, though?  And the time after that?  This is not a problem that is going to go away any time soon, I fear that it is hear to stay, and Twitter is never going to be the same because of it.

One of my favorite communication tools now feels dirty to me.  I am no longer going to be able to use it as I want to use it because I don’t want to receive a DM text message at 4:00 AM telling me how I can witn an iPhone.  Never will I be able to look at the service in the same way, and I fear that I am one of many, and that, my friends, is why this could be the fall from grace of this once mighty networking behemoth.

Macworld expo is this week, and as with any Apple event, there are sure to be announcements of exciting new products.

Each January Apple holds a conference called Macworld in San Francisco where the Macintosh faithful gather to talk with developers and see all of the new company and third-party products for their favorite computing system.  So what is on the agenda for this year?  Apple always play their cards close to the vest, but there are some hints to things we might see this year.

iPhone

While the annual iPod announcements are usually made in September at a separate event, the iPhone was first introduced at Macworld 2006, so it isn’t inconveivable that we may hear some news about what to expect from the third iteration of the popular smartphone.  3G was considered a major hurdle, but that was introduced in the second version of the phone, so it is anyone’s guess what we might be seeing this time around.

There has been some speculation of an iPhone Nano, a smaller version of the phone, but that seems a bit out in left field as a true option.  How will you talk on an even smaller device let alone type on it?

iMac

There are numerous rumors running around that the iMacs will receive updated chipsets, and this could be announced at Macworld.  Will it be a huge update?  Doubtful, but there will probably still be some sort of tweaking to the all-in-one computing solution.

iWork & iMovie

The Apple office suite is rumored to be moving to a cloud computing version.  This would be a direct attack on Google Documents, and would also bring them in to line with Microsoft’s latest movements with Office.  There is also some talk of iMovie, Apple’s popular video editing program going into a cloud computing version of some type, but this seems to be a little less certain than the iWork rumor.

Mac Mini

The entry level Mac hasn’t been updated since August 7, 2007, and it seems to be a foregone conclusion that it will be seeing a new version at the expo.  Rumors have circulated that it will receive a new form factor that will make it look more like the current iMacs, but there is also word circulating that there may be a new option that will allow you to purchase it without an optical drive.  Will this actually save you money?  That remains to be seen, but the previous versions ran $599 and $799, and if those prices dropped, you could almost certainly see Apple’s market share of the home computing market rise.

Conclusion

Is any of this a certainty?  Of course not, this is Apple after all.  At best these are educated guesses based on rumors and past trends of the company.  All of the news will come out on Monday, and we will be sure to update you as soon as possible with all of the news.

Popular microblogging service Twitter appears to be undergoing a phishing attack.

Phishing is an attempt by scam artists to acquire personal information about you and your login to popular sites by mimicking official information of another site. In this particular case you will receive a direct message from one of your contacts on the service that says:

hey! check out this funny blog about you… http://jannawalitax.blogspot.com/

Luckily the website has not been blocked by Google as you can see from the image below that you now receive when you go there.

When the page was unblocked it did look exactly like the Twitter login page and asked you to submit your username and password that you could see this “funny blog about you.” The problem here is that these particular scammers undercut themselves with anyone that is the least bit web savvy by directing you to a blogspot.com blog and then asking you to login in to your Twitter account which has no connection whatsoever with blogspot.

According to Pete Cashmore at Mashable, part of the problem in this particular case arises from people who have their direct messages set to be delivered to them via email.  If you were to click on that link inside of a piece of mail, you might be more likely to go ahead and sign in with your user information.

As always, you need to be careful with any site you visit that then asks for your login information for a site.  Does the web address look correct?  How did you get there?  All questions you should be asking yourself before you give any site your information.

UPDATE: They have already changed their message. The new one is:

Hey, i found a website with your pic on it… LOL check it out here http://twitterblog.access-logins.com/login

UPDATE #2: They have changed their tactics again.

hey look at this funny blog http://rosalierebyb.blogspot.com/

UPDATE #3: You have to give them points for their persistence.

fixed it.. hehe here is that blog i wanted to show you http://twitterblogs.access-logins.com/login

While we have already warned you about extended warranties, you also need to be warned about all of the little extra services companies will try to sell you.

The folks over at Dvice (which also take credit for the picture shown here) are warning their readers about an apparent scam being run by Best Buy.  They will show you two HD televisions shown the same image, and you can clearly see the “calibrated” unit has a much sharper image.  For $300 they will help you “calibrate” your set to get the best image you can.  The problem is that it appears the better image is being shown via an HDMI connection while the poorer picture is being transmitted by either composite cables or other standard definition means.

This is not adefinitive example of the problems with add-ons ervices, but it sure looks like it.  It is, however, another perfect example of how you should research things online.  Go on a search engine, search on “calibrating your HD TV” and you can probably find people telling you how to do it, or if you even need to bother.  And this goes for any and all services that stores might try to sell you.

Remember, stores want to sell you as much as possible, but you always need to ask yourself if you really need what it is their selling you.