Amazon MP3, Cloud Player, Cloud Drive – New Features Coming Soon

Posted on July 5, 2011

This article will be admittedly vague, as Amazon has released little to no information on new features that are coming to their MP3, Cloud Player, and Cloud Drive services. However, I just got off a call with someone from Amazon’s Cloud Drive technical support team, and asked when and what might be coming regarding new features for the services.

amazon mp3 Amazon MP3, Cloud Player, Cloud Drive New Features Coming Soon amazon cloud drive Amazon MP3, Cloud Player, Cloud Drive New Features Coming Soon amazon cloud player Amazon MP3, Cloud Player, Cloud Drive New Features Coming Soon

The candid response I received noted that the techs had been told that new features were coming “within the next couple of weeks.” However, apparently Amazon is being hush-hush as to what the new features will entail, as the tech claimed to know absolutely nothing about them. In fact, the tech was openly irritated by the fact that he was not being told what was coming, and had had no training on the new features.

I will say that I was impressed with the support I received; the fact that Amazon actually has a phone number to call is surprising, and the fact that the person I talked to was obviously US-based (no accent whatsoever) was even more impressive. On top of that, I waited less than a few minutes to receive support. That’s a big win as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, we have reason to be excited, as Amazon is sharing internally that new features will be coming to their Amazon MP3, Amazon Cloud Player and/or Amazon Cloud Drive services “within the next couple of weeks.” How excited, though, we’ll just have to wait and see…

Posted in Amazon Cloud Drive, Amazon Cloud Player, Amazon MP3, Technology | Leave a comment

5 Crucial Tips for Being Lazy and Productive at the Same Time

Posted on March 18, 2011

lazy 5 Crucial Tips for Being Lazy and Productive at the Same TimeOne thing’s for sure: I hate work. But we all have to be productive from time to time (or we’ll end up living in our parents’ basements till we’re 45). These are a few tricks I’ve learned over the years that constantly save me ample amounts of time, and I think it’s hilarious when I see other people wasting their time using the traditional approach.

Posted in Culture, Technology | Leave a comment

jQuery Tools Scrollable – Stop Scrolling Past the End

Posted on January 31, 2011

jQuery Tools is an amazing library, and the Scrollable control is extremely useful. However, it doesn’t work well by default for situations where you want to display more than one item in your list at a time, and scroll through them one by one (instead of five at a time such as in this example). It took a bit of time for me to figure this out, so I thought I’d share it with everyone. Credit goes to neogisme and soon7 from this post for getting me half-way there.

Posted in Javascript, jQuery, jQuery Tools, Technology | 20 Comments

How to Get Unlimited Space Out of Your Dropbox Pro Account

Posted on August 24, 2010

If you’ve never heard of or used Dropbox, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot. And if you’re not backing up your important files on a regular basis, you’re really begging for trouble.

dropbox How to Get Unlimited Space Out of Your Dropbox Pro AccountEveryone is in need of a good backup, and Dropbox fits the bill very well for most users. In addition, it provides excellent syncing functionality to keep your data up to date between all of the computers that you use. It’s free for the first 2 GB, and above that you can pay for either 50 or 100 GB of space. We’ll be addressing Dropbox Pro accounts (50 or 100 GB accounts) in this article.

In my experience, Dropbox is the most easy to use, mature, and trustworthy service available for online backup and syncing. It does have one caveat, however: the most space you can use is 100 GB (at least for the moment). You can’t even pay for more in a single account. Granted, 100 GB is a lot of space (especially to back up online), but if you’re like me, you have more than 100 GB of precious home movies of your little ones.

So what do you do? Find out after the break…

Posted in Dropbox, Technology | 11 Comments

UpSync Version 0.7 Released

Posted on October 5, 2009

The new version is here! As always, it is recommended to upgrade as soon as possible. Here are the major changes:

  • Administrator permissions are no longer required to run the application from the Program Files folder; application settings and logs are now stored in the Windows program data folders.
  • The application has been tested with and should now work fine with UAC under Windows Vista and Windows 7.
  • Summary logs have been added to the end of the logging to report count totals for the various operations.
  • Fixed a bug in the new syncing empty folders functionality that caused a neverending loop when the root of either folder was empty.
  • Added a “File Filter” property to mapped folders to allow the use of wildcards (*.txt) to restrict which files to sync (as requested by Jason Saul).

Simply run the setup to upgrade to the latest version.

Download UpSync 0.7 Setup
Download UpSync 0.7 Source Code (Visual Studio 2008 required)

Remember to share your thoughts and suggestions!

Posted in C#, Software, Technology, UpSync, Visual Studio 2008 | 15 Comments

UpSync Version 0.6 Released

Posted on September 1, 2009

I have a new version of UpSync to put out today! If you are regularly using the application, it is strongly recommended that you upgrade because the stability of the sync process has been greatly improved. Here’s a brief list of some of the more interesting changes:

  • Significantly improved error handling
  • Delete prompts are now all displayed at once (instead of throughout the process)
  • A new “stop prompting and do this for x remaining files” feature has been added
  • Code is now StyleCop-compliant (as well as code analysis-compliant)
  • Empty folders are now synced properly based on their creation date

You may simply run the new setup and it will automatically upgrade over whatever old version you have installed.

Download UpSync 0.6 Setup
Download UpSync 0.6 Source Code (Visual Studio 2008 required)

Please remember to comment and share your thoughts on the application! :)

Posted in C#, Software, Technology, UpSync, Visual Studio 2008 | 2 Comments

5 Often Overlooked Caveats of Managing a Digital Music Collection

Posted on August 14, 2009

If you’re like me, you slave over your music collection on a regular basis making sure every song is properly tagged, free of any audible flaws, and overall as perfect as possible. Okay, well, you’re probably not like me. But still, having your music skip because you used a crappy ripping application or hiccup between songs because of a non-gapless codec is exceedingly annoying. Here we’ll go through five commonly-made mistakes by music enthusiasts when managing their music collection.

Posted in DRM, Management, Music, Technology | 7 Comments

Centering a Message Box on the Active Window in C#

Posted on August 7, 2009

One of the annoying caveats of using the built in .NET message box is that it provides no functionality to center a message box on the currently active window. Oddly, even when you specify the parent window using the proper overloaded version of the Show() method, the window still insists on centering itself on the desktop, instead of on the active window. This is annoying and confusing to the end user because it breaks the ability to set aside particular “screen real estate” for an application. Fortunately, there is a way to fix this, although it does involve the Win32 API.

Posted in C#, Technology, Visual Studio 2008 | 19 Comments

From My BlackBerry

Posted on July 24, 2009

My wife, baby boy, regretfully the dog, and I are on our way to Michigan for a wedding as I’m typing this post. I managed to download the latest beta version of WordPress for BlackBerry, and like I’ve been with everything else WordPress-related, I’m extremely pleased with the ease of use and functionality (and that it’s even possible to update the blog from my handheld without having to deal with trying to do it in a crappy browser).

WordPress for BlackBerry is currently at version 0.9.0.134 in beta, but it sure does seem to be working well enough for me. Of course, it only has a subset of the full WordPress admin features, but it has pretty much everything you need for what you’d want to do on the road (full page, post, and comment viewing, adding, editing, and deleting).

It seems there’s no end to what I can do on my BlackBerry these days. It sure beats my days with Windows Mobile…

Posted in BlackBerry, Family, Technology, WordPress | Leave a comment

6 Anal-Retentive Ways To Improve Your C# Code

Posted on July 17, 2009

Nothing irks me more than to have to dig through garbage code.  Working at a software consulting company, I’ve seen a whole slew of it.  And I’ve hurled on my computer monitor enough as a result to give it a pretty, brownish-green tint.  Bad code destroys hardware.  And souls.

The single biggest clue that a developer either has no idea what they are doing or simply doesn’t care about their code is inconsistency.  We all have different preferences and coding styles, but when a developer can’t pick a particular approach to take they come off as incredibly amateur, and for good reason.  Inconsistent code is difficult to read, and is thus difficult to modify in the future.

The majority (or even the entirety) of the list below revolves around writing consistently styled and consistently performing C# code.  Much of this list is admittedly anal retentive, but all of it is guaranteed to improve the quality and readability of your code.

Posted in C#, Technology, Visual Studio 2008 | 4 Comments