iPhone/Web 2.0

Are you sick of being denied access to US shows because you live outside the USA and want to get around it and have a comfortable viewing experience? Here’s how:

• Download Hotspot Shield – this program while displaying a banner on every website you visit, will let you view restricted content since you live in other countries, but this doesn’t matter since most sites have a full screen button to maximize the video content to your entire screen covering the banner while you view.
• Download Caffeine – if you’re a Mac user, this program will keep your computer from dimming and shutting off your screen. You can even tell it for how long you want it not to sleep, so you don’t forget to let it sleep again.

Some great US-only content:

• Hulu – great variety of TV shows including The Colbert Report
• CBS – watch great CBS shows
• KSOLO – Karoake online, must be signed in to view.

if you want to try a German-based service for Karaoke, try Mikestar.

Anyone have any recommendations for other US-only content?

So, I recently decided that my 16-month old Macbook with 80 GB hard drive (I continually had to free up space) and 1 GB of RAM just isn’t cutting it anymore (because I wanted to run Windows alongside OS X with VMWare Fusion). So, I headed over to the Berlin Gravis Store to pimp my machine. Unfortunately my model Macbook can only handle 3 GB max, so I got a 1 GB (30 EUR) and 2 GB (60 EUR) chip. I wanted to get a 320 GB hard drive (120 EUR), but they were out of stock, so he said I can order it online and only pay 5 EUR for shipping. Not bad since the subway trip and back to the store would’ve put me out 4 EUR.

The RAM installed, no problem. Just unlock the battery bay, unscrew 3 screws, flip 2 levers, pull out 2 memory cards, push in 2 more with quite some force, shut the case and ready to go. The hard drive was a bit more complicated. I downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner and backed up everything to my Time Machine external hard drive. So, again, unlock battery bay, unscrew 3 screws, pull out hard drive tab, stick in new hard drive, screw it back in and ready to go. I booted from my Time Machine drive (only possible after the carbon copy cloning), and everything worked fine.

I only lost my SVN repositories which I had to checkout again, and then restore my working files back in using Time Machine. [If you're looking for a good graphical app for SVN on OS X, I'd recommend the new Versions.] All in all, a relatively headache-free upgrade, and not a bad amount of extra power for only 220 EUR. I’m just a little worried, because my computer seems to get much hotter than it used to, even reaching temperatures of 85 C (185 F)! But it could also be getting hot from an exorbant amount of hard drive use lately as I backup stuff and move large files around. I downloaded smcFanControl and it doesn’t seem to be helping too much. I’m even using a Lapinator.

Update: I discovered the problem was that I didn’t attach the special legs to my Lapinator, thus the air under my laptop didn’t have space to ventilate.

As many of you know, I’m the cohost of GermanPod101, a podcast for learning German geared toward Americans. You’ll notice on our Twitter feed that I summarize the content of each episode, so our followers can quickly get a teaser for the material and really want to listen. If you look at the C|Net Loaded Twitter Feed, you can see how boring your feed can look to the general public and actually one reason why I stopped following @CNetLoaded. This really frustrates me, because I think Loaded is the most interesting podcast on the entire Internet.

So, if you’d like to quickly update your Twitter feed with interesting information about your podcast episodes, I’d recommend using Twhirl which should work on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux with Adobe Air. In Twhirl, you can use the shorten URL feature to automatically make your URL really, really tiny to something like http://is.gd/cJa as you can see on the GermanPod101 feed which gives you more space to summarize the show description. I find that it takes me about 3 minutes each day to take our summary from our blog and make it a bit shorter for Twitter. So, this reminds me, I should write up the summary for today…

Ok, after getting on Twitter, I figure I need to have a professional blog as well. Here I will write about my thoughts of Internet phenomena as well as other weird or interesting tidbits I find on the Interwebs.