Do you like music?  Do you have rythm?  Are you sure?  Try the iPhone App Tap Tap Revenge.

Tap Tap Revenge sends dots down lines and you have to touch them before they go off of the bottom of the screen.  The dots come in different patterns that are somewhat matched to the beat of the music.

You can compare your score with others on the internet too.

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Here is a very simple app on the iPhone that is one of those things that is just ingenious.  The app is called Level and as the name says….  It is a Level.  You know one of those things that have a little air bubble that is in the center when it is level?

Start up level and turn the iPhone lengthwise or leave it standing up and you will get a level with a little bubble.  Using the built in accelerometer in the iPhone, the Application can determine what angle the iPhone is at.  It tells you the angle in degrees as well as a virtual level on the screen.

Oh, and there is more.  Set the iPhone on a flat surface facing up and you have another level.  This is a round bubble level.

So next time you are handing that new picture, no need to run to the garage and try to find that level, reach for your electronic best friend, your iPhone.

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One of the fun things that I do is review different toys… I mean electronics. This review is for the Aiptek HD 1080P camera. Before I signed up for the review, I had already purchased 2 of these camera.

I had a project where I needed to create a 3-D video. Part of making the 3-D video you need 2 cameras to record the video in stereoscopic format. The trick is the center of each lens needs to be about 2 1/5 inches apart. There are not many cameras that you can put together that closely. So I went in search of a camera I could do this with.

I found the Aiptek at Best Buy when I went looking and settled on them for the project.

Let me first say that if you are looking for a professional High Definition camera, stop reading now. There are the furtherest things from even a pro-sumer high definition camera. I picked them up at Best Buy for about $160.

The old saying “you get what you pay for” fits here. But let me just say, for $160 they are not horrible cameras. In my review process I recorded some video at a carnival of my nephews and when I edited the video just about everyone commented how clear the video was.

The cameras come with very limited build in memory for video but can take SD cards. I purchased 2 8 Gig SD cards, one for each camera.

Here is a review of the camera features:

• Record at 1080P @ 30 FPS
• Record at 720P @ 30 FPS
• Record at 720P @ 60 FPS
• Record DVD (NTSC) @ 60 FPS
• Record for the web @ 30 FPS
• Take still shots at 3, 5, or 8 Megapixels
• Night recording mode

That is a long list of features. Now the more technical side of things…. As far as the lens… There really is no lens. There is a small plastic cover that protects the sensor. The sensor is very small. It looks even smaller than the sensor that is on my iPhone.

Now one word of warning about the 60 FPS. I use Final Cut pro HD and am running the latest version. It had problems editing the 60 frames per second videos.

After I figured out the problems with 60 frames per second and started recording in HD at 30 FPS, editing was a breeze. To transfer the videos you can remove the memory card and use a card reader to remove the videos. Or you can plug up the camera to a PC with the USB and it will show up as a new drive on your computer. When connected to the USB, the battery gets charged.

There is no image stabilization in the camera and you can really tell when you are shooting in High Def if you do not have a steady hand.  I suggest using the camera mount and putting it on a tripod or monopod if you can.

There is a removable battery however, there is no batter charger sent with the camera. The USB is the method of charging. The camera also comes with cables that allow you to hook it up to a TV.

For the price, this is not a bad camera but it does not feel very sturdy and is low on the spectrum as far as quality goes.  If you are looking for a fun cheap camera that you will not be upset if it breaks, then this is not a bad camera.

But if you are looking for a long term camera or a camera to do some professional or semi-professional work then I cannot recommend this camera.

For the fun project of making 3D movies the camera worked great for me.  But it cannot be used to do any of my other projects.

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it is no secret that I am a huge Mac fan.  I am not a mac only fan.  I am a big unix fan (mainly linux and sun) and I also like Windows too.  Each operating system has it good and bad sides.  For example, I really do not like quicken or quickbooks on a Mac but I really like it on Windows.

So you like the simplicity and reliability of the Mac but do not want to have to give up your Windows programs.  Well, with the Intel based Macs you no longer have to give up your Windows applications.

One solution is to use boot camp which comes with the Mac.  The problem with boot camp is you can only have either Windows or the Mac booted up but not both.

I bet you have heard of Parallels for the Mac that lets you run Windows apps.  In this blog I am going to compare Parallels for Mac and VMWare Fusion.

Both applications create a virtual machine that allow you to install Windows inside of the Mac operating system.  This allows you to run Windows inside of a window on your Mac.  There has been some confusion around some of the marketing for Parallels.

Parallels allows you to run windows apps because it allows you to runs windows.  But unless you install windows inside of parallels you will not be able to run windows applications.

I have had people want to install the Microsoft Office programs for windows on their new Mac so they did not have to buy a new copy that was Mac compatible.  Yes you can do that but you must first install windows under Parallels or VMWare Fusion.

Both Parallels and VMWare Fusion create a virtual machine that runs inside of the Mac operating system.  They have a few other things in common:

• You can share files between the Mac and Windows
• Transfer files with drag and drop simplicity
• Multiple Virtual machines can be created and more than one can be running at one time
• Support for multiple operating systems (Windows XP and Windows Vista, Linux, etc.)
• VM Snapshots
• Support for DirectX

Each product has their own way of doing things.  Parallels for Mac has been out longer and has a few new features.  The beta version of VMWare Fusion is available now for download.

Now Parallels for Mac has been around longer than VMWare Fusion however, VMWare has been around a lot longer than Parallels.  VMWare has had VM products for many years that run on Windows and Linux servers.

I have both of these products and have tried them both and I keep gravitating back to VMWare fusion.

According to the Parallels web site they outperform VMWare fusion but from what I have personally seen, VMWare runs circles around Parallels.  Also, VMWare fusion does not crash on me.  Parallels had some stability issues.

Both companies offer a free trial download so you can try them yourself.  If you want to run your windows apps on the Mac, try them both.  I can personally recomend VMWare fusion.  That is the product I have selected as my choice.

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Raise your hand if you have the new Microsoft Office 2007….  Raise your hand if you hate the new tab based interface in Word and Excel….  Wow, same number of hands!

I am not sure what Microsoft was thinking with this new interface.  I have not found one person that likes this new interface.  In fact, most people really hate it.  It is so much slower to use, not shortcut key friendly and just not the same.

It is harder to find things than before, the menus are gone, it is just frustrating to use.  And the other frustrating thing is you do not have a choice.  There is no option to go back to the way it was before.  I applaud trying to improve on an interface but if you are going to make such a drastic change at least give the option to go back to the old way.  I mean this is not just a simple interface change like a new menu or maybe moving a couple of things around and re-organizing, this is a whole shift away from the way we have been using every program since the beginning of windows.

It is so frustrating that I now use other tools more and then paste in the text and tweak it after I get it in.  The same changes were made in Excel and Word.  I have had this update now for a few months and I still cannot find some of the features that were there before.  I am sure they are there somewhere but I sure cannot find them and I refuse to have to use help to learn how to use Microsoft Word.  After all, I have been using it for at least more than 14 years.  I should not have to use help.

Now, I have been ranting on how bad the new Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel are in Office 2007.  I must say I really like the new Outlook in Office 2007.  There have been some nice additions in there and they did not mess with the user interface and menus like they did in Word and Excel.

Microsoft…  Either go back to the old user interface or at least give the option to use the old interface.  Oh, and fire the person who designed the new interface!

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I recently did a review on Adobe’s acrobat.com site that allows document storage, document editing, collaboration and screen sharing, file sharing and more.

The part of the acrobat.com site that allows for document editing is called Buzzword.  Buzzword is a pretty powerful web based application that allows you to edit documents online in a word processor that somewhat resembles the big guys like Microsoft Word.

Buzzword is not as feature packed as Microsoft Word but for most tasks it will probably do just fine.  There is no charge for acrobat.com or Buzzword so it is hard to complain that they are not full featured .

This is the initial release of Buzzword, so I suspect that sometime in the near future new features will be added.

One cool thing about Buzzword and acrobat.com is they allow collaboration between multiple users.  You can share files, share documents, etc.  It also appears that more than one person can be editing the same file at the same time without losing work.

If you compare it to the other free word processors out there, buzzword is better than any that I have seen.  Also, you can access your document from anywhere on the Internet.  But yes, you need to be connected to the internet to get to it.  So you cannot just take your laptop out to lake where you have no internet and work on your document.

There is also an Adobe AIR based version of the acrobat.com suite of programs.  I am not sure if it can run without the internet or not, that is something I will have to research and update everyone on.  The little bit of research I did on the AIR version did not turn out happy comments.  Most comments were that it was hard to use.

Check back soon for an update on the AIR version of acrobat.

Bottom line, Buzzword is great for most regular word processing, it is free and has nice collaboration capabilities.  But if you need the advanced features that are available in Microsoft Word, then Buzzword is not there yet.  But by all means, check it out.

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Not sure if you have heard but there is a new search engine in town.  It is called cool but is spelled cuil.  Visit cuil.com and you will see a very simple interface.  Nothing cluttered like yahoo or msn.  Simple is the new beautiful .  Cuil claims to have 121,617,892,992 site indexed at the time of this writing.  That is at least 10 times more than Google.

The other cool (pun intended) thing is cuil presents it’s results in column format, just like a magazine or newspaper.  You can select if you want the results in 2 or 3 columns.

In my playing over the past couple of days I have found it to be very fast in finding results.  Now, remember this is a new search engine so as more people start using cuil it may get slower.  Hopefully the folks at cuil will keep an eye on performance and do upgrades as needed.

Unlike most other search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) Cuil does not keep any information on you, what you search for, etc.  They focus more on the sites and the site content.

Cuil was created by some former Google engineers who recreated the search algorithms from scratch to better index sites by content.

Cuil presents the search results in a very easy to use format and even categorizes with a tool bar for larger categories that it finds.

I am not sure of the business model for cuil but at least for now there is no advertising that I have seen.  I guess it remains to be seen if that continues or if they have a different business model than other search engines.  Up to this point though I am not sure how they are going to make money.

Give it a try.   www.cuil.com.  It might just become your new favorite search engine.

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Ok, just about everyone has heard of Acrobat.  No, not the bendy twisty guys and gals that fly around on poles, parallel bars, etc.  Think more geeky than that.  How about Adobe Acrobat?

Well, Adobe has a new site out now called acrobat.com that is aiming to replace some of your desktop applications.  acrobat.com has built in a feature rich word processor called BuzzWord.  It is not as full featured as Microsoft Word but hey it is free and it has one other very cool feature which I will describe in a little bit.

Acrobat.com is aiming at the collaboration market.  That is where it really shines.  In addition to BuzzWord the site has ConnectNow which is Adobe’s competitive entry into the market for screen sharing and web presentations.  Kind of like Webex.  I personally like the user interface for ConnectNow better, but that is just me.

The site also lets you share documents and create PDF files.  Remember that cool feature about buzzword I mentioned before?  Buzzword allows 2 people to edit the same document simultaneously.  Talk about collaboration…..

I will do a more in depth review of BuzzWord soon so I will skip all of the cool details in this review.

Go checkout acrobat.com.  There is no cost to sign up and use it.  You can login from anywhere on the internet to access your files, your documents, etc.

I am still trying to get more info on the roadmap for acrobat.com but the initial offering that is out there now is a good strong start.  I would think a good spreadsheet application is also required for the site to become highly successful.

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Oh, the great debate about Mac vs. PC. My view on the subject may not be a popular one

We have all seen the Apple commercials where Mac looks like the cool kid on the block and PC a whiny, geeky hypochondriac with severe allergies that was denied fun by his parents. Ok, so I read a lot into the commercials.

The debate between PC’s and Macs has gone on since the Lisa was first introduced in 1983. Back then it was the GUI interface vs the command line interface.

Ok, so let’s get down to the nitty gritty dirty stuff, but first let me just say I am not prejudiced towards either one. I love all computers. I have both PC’s and Macs in my house as well as linux machines. And I not only have all of these but use them all regularly.

I am a network / security engineer by trade and let me just say that for that type of stuff, the PC has many more tools available. Linux falls a close 2nd right behind Windows. It seems Windows has a big jumpstart on the tools I need to my job. All of those years prior to the Mac OSX operating systems put the Mac way behind because it lacked a good networking system.

Now that OSX is based on a unix kernel, the development of such networking tools would be much easier. There are tons of unix tools already out there and it would not take much to port them over to the Mac, at least in a command line form. And, now the Mac can run X-windows. But so far, there have not been many ports yet.

So, from a perspective of doing my network jobs, a PC is a requirement. I mean you cannot get tools like Solarwinds, the checkpoint dashboard, etc. on a Mac. At least not in native OSX. I do not want to delve into Parallels or VMWare Fusion. They may solve what I am talking about.

From the perspective of the office tools, I use both, it all depends on what else I am doing. For example, if I am using my Laptop doing some regular work I will use the PC. My main email is on an Exchange server. I do like Outlook better than Entourage. Although I will use Entourage if I am on the Mac.

For development tasks, I use the PC more than the Mac except if I am working on web pages. I use both for developing web sites. You can code in php, java, flash, etc just as easy on either platform. I use Dreamweaver which is available on both platforms. I think I am a bit more familiar with Dreamweaver on the PC but Dreamweaver on the Mac is easy too.

Now, I do a lot of photo work and video editing, I do all of that work on the Mac. There is in my opinion no better editor than Final Cut. I have used lots of them and Final Cut is a step above the rest. The Mac really shines in the graphics and video world and has for a long time. In fact that was a stigma that the

So, I know I sound like a politician, not taking sides. Why would I take sides, I like them both. As I mentioned before I also use a lot of unix (mainly linux). That is probably my favorite operating system. However, I do not use much XWindows. For the nice gui interfaces I stick with the Mac or the PC.

So which one is better? You could use the numbers that are published by Microsoft and Apple to determine that, but according to them, they each think they are better and winning. I do think there is a platform shift going on right now. I think the Mac is gaining ground.

A couple of years ago I got my mom to purchase a computer and get on the Internet. She is not computer savvy at all. She has Windows XP and I keep it updated for her. If I had to do it again I would probably have her get a Mac. I do think they are much more intuitive than a Windows system.

So that being said, what is the right one for you? There are a lot of factors that need to be looked at. First of all, what are you going to be using it for? If it is going to be just a home machine for the family to use, a Mac is a great choice. It is easy for kids to use, it is intuitive for the new computer users.

Macs are also come in some nice packaging forms now. The iMac is self contained. All you have is a monitor, keyboard and mouse with one power plug. The Mac is a complete system that includes matched hardware and software. Unlike a Windows machine where the hardware is made by Dell but the operating system is provided by Microsoft. If you have a problem you have one place to call for the Mac.

Now, I just talked up the Mac, now lets talk up the Windows platform a little bit, afterall, I like it too. First let me say, I am not a huge fan of Vista. I like XP better. I agree that Vista looks prettier, but like your prom date, it is what is on the inside that counts.

I have much better luck with Windows XP than Vista. Just my 2 cents…. Ok, so if you have specialized needs that require Windows or you are already used to Windows, there is no reason to switch. Unless you are getting tired of blue screen of death (BSOD) crashes.

Windows is not too hard to figure out. Windows does support a much larger selection of hardware and has a ton more software available for it than a Mac OSX does. More games, more productivity software, etc.

Ok, now you are convinced a Windows machine is the way to go right? Afterall it has all of this software, lots more than the Mac does. Well….. What if you could run all of the Mac software AND all of the Windows software on one machine? Are you saying to stop teasing you, oh stop confusing you…..

Well, with Parallels for Mac or VMWare Fusion the Mac can run Windows programs too. In fact, you install Windows inside of your Mac. Now, this is only a good option if you have a new Intel based Mac. the older Mac that used powerPC chips had to run a program called VirtualPC which runs very very slow. Not something I would recommend.

On my 8 core Mac Pro I run VMWare fusion and have Vista and Windows XP running and they run better than if they were on their own dedicated hardware. You ask why VMWare Fusion over Parallels? Well, I have another review of the 2 products coming out soon, in there I describe the 2 products. Let me just say you can have drag and drop between the operating systems as well as file sharing. It is awesome.

Ok, so now you are confused. Sorry…. Deciding on the right computer for you can be confusing. The first thing to look at is your budget. If you have the money, I can recommend a Mac with VMWare Fusion running Windows. You will have all bases covered and you will love the solution. The Mac has easy to use video editing and other tools that blow windows away. If you decide on a Mac, check out a .mac account, there are some really cool features you get with a .mac account.

What about Windows for a new machine for the family? Well sure, it will work just fine and you will save a few bucks over a Mac. Shop around, there are some great deals out there for Windows PC’s. I like IBM hardware, I am not a big fan of Dell Laptops but they make good desktops.

Now that I have probably completely confused you, the bottom line is I think both platforms are great platforms and each has their advantage over the other, but I think the Mac has more advantages over Windows when it comes to hardware and software integration . But you will not be making a horrible choice with Windows.

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