Author: Matt Walsh

I didn’t want to bring out my just repaired camera in the rain at my high school’s football game since there was on and off rain. After I left the house it ended up being dry for the entire night. Oh well.

I went to the game anyways because it was #4 vs. my high school at #25. I expected a better game than what I saw. Since I had my phone with me and no camera, I decided to micro-blog the entire game with my commentary and score updates. I also went for the “total experience” and blogged the band and fan reaction. You can find all of that under the “Twitter” link at the left. Whether or not anyone was paying attention to it is another question, but I’m sure someone got some use out of it.

It was a little tricky. Trying to keep to keep track of the next play while typing up the last one on a tiny keyboard. You’ll notice some spelling and grammar errors that I blame mostly on this. I thik I got it figured out by then end I was even to get some player names in, picking them up from the field announcer.

A few weeks ago I finally parted with my Motorola E815 and moved up to a smartphone, a Motorola Q9c. I really didn’t want to get rid of the old phone. I had it hacked to my liking, getting back all the stuff that Verizon locks out, but battery and charging issues were starting to get to me.

Part of the reason I got the phone and data plan was because of the amount of traveling I do for work. Almost immediately I found out just how handy it is. Last week I was able to keep track of the baseball games from factory floors in Dallas and Milwaukee, and from the St. Louis airport. For this, I found Sportsline to work best.

I also use Google reader a lot to keep tabs on news, Digg and a handful of other RSS feeds that I follow. The integration between the full browser app and the mobile one is great. I can flip through my feeds at lunch, read the ones that I want to keep up on and star the remaining ones to look at later that day.

Google Maps has also been great. In addition to the directions it’s integrated to your contacts so you can get directions to any contact with an address in your phone book. Also, when looking up a business, the phone number is clickable and puts you right into a call. Finally, the traffic has also helped out, especially when I was in a Dallas and needed to know if I’d be able to make it to my flight.

For instant messenger, I found the free Slick to work best. It does it’s best to keep you connected, even after a call. The only gripe that I have is that I would like it to look at the phone’s profile (Loud, vibrate…) and adjust its alerts based on that.

I also picked up a Twitter client and I’m going to start using that. You can see my updates from that here. I’m currently looking into two different clients, and I don’t have a favorite yet.

I’ve made my web site mobile friendly. I didn’t do anything special for the blog, just added a Word Press plugin that puts a nice mobile theme in place when viewed from a mobile device. The photos section of the site, however, required a bit of work. I designed my own theme for Gallery2, and put together a few different ideas that I picked up from the support forum to get it to detect mobile devices and change the theme accordingly.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an open source image editor that is comparable to Photoshop. By no means is it a drop in replacement. But a lot of the core functionality is there, including layers, filters, plugins, paths and channels. There is a bit of a learning curve, especially because the majority of tutorials on image editing are based on Photoshop. But with a lilttle legwork you can find the comparable features and create the same effects in GIMP without the price tag of Photoshop.

Media Coder is an open source video transcoding utility. It supports a large number of formats, and plenty of advanced options for tweaking all of the encoder settings. Fortunately, an extension that is included in the typical install makes it all very easy to use with various presets for small and large video outputs for various formats. It also has presets for various media players such as an Ipod.

I’ve have yet to find a format that it can’t work with, and have had great success creating videos for use on my 5th generation Ipod and my Motorola E815m.