Finding parking in NYC requires loads of patience and savvy particularity because parking signs are notoriously difficult to decipher.  The people at PrimoSpot.com have created a site rich with tools to help you land a spot that meets your location, time, and price needs.  Their map clues the user into street parking signs, meter availability, parking garages, street-side images,  places to avoid, premium spots and more.  You can use their site to strategize your parking plan or utilize their smartphone app in the moment as you approach your destination.

This is an indispensable tool for drivers in the NY Metropolis.  Anyone whose experienced the nightmare of having their car towed, which happens all too fast in this city, knows to be extra extra cautious about parking.  PrimoSpot takes some of the pressure off.

image from primospot.com

The phone frenzy is palpable once again.  Out with the old, in with the new.  Have you upgraded your OS yet, that is if you didn’t get the new phone?  Download it here. You might as well familiarize yourself with all the perks, tricks, and added functionality now available with iOS4.  It’s bound to make your iDevice more fun.

New iOS4 shortcuts, features, and settings you need to know for your iPhone or iPod Touch.

image from apple.com

Read It Later

This bookmarklet enables you to compile articles and other content or pages for, you guessed it,  reading later.  You can use it on your computer or phone.  What’s great is the compilation can be accessed when you are offline, so commuters on planes, trains or subways can get caught up on reading without internet connection.  Get it or discover more of it’s functionality here.

Remember the Milk

For those of you who love lists and organization or those of you who are seeking more order, first of all this web application is fantastic task manager complete with various kinds of notifications and accessibility.  Sign up for it and then add this bookmarklet to your browser – pure expedience.

Google Bookmarks

This is another content management tool.  Bookmarking is easy, managing bookmarks is getting easier – especially with this bookmarklet.  Enjoy the cross-browser syncing functionality of Google Bookmark’s service.  A pop-up window lets you edit the title, add tags, note, etc.  It just makes accessibility a breeze.

images from readitlaterlist.com, rememberthemilk.com, google.com/bookmarks

Dear Rovio,

I really wanted to love you, I did.  Your wifi enabled webcam, your omni-directional steering, your programmable web interface.  You were going to be my little remote sentry to keep an eye on my lair and keep me company on a long winter’s night.  Alas, it just wasn’t meant to be…

(hit “read more” for the rest of the story)

I bought my Rovio back in March when two of my favorite sites, Hackaday and Woot teamed up to show me a little of the awesomeness that you can do with the little robotic Rovio from Wowwee.  There was even a 50% off deal on woot that day for Roborealm, a really powerful realtime video processing software designed to let you quickly set up Rovio to drive and avoid obstacles while moving.  It even has preconfigured controls for the Rovio drive system!

Just check out this list of yummy bullet pointed goodness:

• Easily control Rovio remotely 24/7 from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. Use any web-enabled device: PC or Mac, cell phone, smartphone, PDA or even your video game console.
• Rovio detects your computer settings and guides you through the setup process.
• Its head-mounted moveable camera and wide range of vision enable you to see and hear exactly what Rovio sees and hears, on your screen.
• Set waypoints so that Rovio can navigate itself around your home, without having to control each step yourself!*
• At the click of a button, send Rovio back to the charging dock using its self-docking capabilities – even when you are not at home!*
• Guide Rovio through dimly lit locations with the aid of its built-in LED headlight.
• Rechargeable NiMH battery included
• 1 x Charging dock with built-in TrueTrack Beacon
• 3 x Omni-directional wheels
• 1 x Head-mounted VGA camera
• LED illumination
• 1 x Speaker and 1 x microphone for 2-way audio
• USB connectivity
• Wi-Fi connectivity (802.11b and 802.11g)

The problems start soon after I opened the package, charged the Rovio overnight and started to play.

Using a web browser I drove the Rovio off it’s charging station, looked around my office a little steering left and right, panned the camera up and down and then, nothing.

The Rovio shut down.

Thinking maybe I bumped it off it’s charger before I went to bed I carefully placed it so I was sure the contacts were in the right place, the lights came back on and I left it for another day to charge up fully so I could start to play.

The next day, same thing.

Hey, these things happen.  I’ve received many parts DOA before, no biggie.  I called Wowwee, the manufacturer and get the standard “Our normal phone hours are 9am to 5 pm est, all of our lines are busy.  Leave a message and we’ll get back to you” except I’m calling at 11am and it’s not a holiday.  I leave a message and wait.

Not hearing back, the next day I go to their website and fill out an online ticket, and wait.

And wait.

Over the next week I called (during normal business hours) no less than 20 times and never got a person on the phone nor did I ever get a call back.

I did some online research and found out many, many people were having this problem, especially the other people that bought them from woot.  At least I’m not alone. (yay?)

After several days I finally get someone to return an email and they say they’re going to send me a new battery (great!).  A week later I follow up (again) and they say it’s slated for shipment the following day.

Over a week later I get a package from Wowwee and it’s….a replacement wall adapter, not a new battery.  I try it anyway and of course the Rovio still doesn’t hold a charge so I write back (having long since given up trying to call them).

After another week and a half I get a reply that they’re going to ship out a battery and that it will take four (4?!) weeks to arrive.  Ok, I’ll wait.  I *really* want to play with my no-that-new-anymore toy so I’ll stick it out.

Guess what?  It’s four weeks later, no battery, no response via email and of course no one is answering their phones (still).

I really wanted to love this toy, it has so many features and so much possibility however the company behind it and many other products couldn’t care less about the end user and will do anything they can to make you go away.

In short, if you want to take your chance and buy one just pretend that the company that made it went out of business.  If you’re OK with receiving absolutely no support what-so-ever from the manufacturer then you can try your luck and hope you won’t get a lemon.  As for me Wowwee won’t be seeing a dime from me for a long time.

How great is it to be in New York City, or the surrounding densely populated areas, and use Google Maps on your mobile to determine where you are in relation to a sought-after destination?   If you aren’t using it yet, here’s where to get it.

With that said, there are more unique ways to utilize Google Maps than just searching for locations, directions, and satellite views. Boost your use in these ways:

• Lifehacker’s fantastic tip list in Top 10 Things You Didn’t Know Google Maps Could Do.
• Business exposure – find out how to list your business on Google Maps
• Recession creativity inspired a newfangled kind of  resume listing.

Happy mapping.

image from http://www.google.com/mobile/maps/

If you have grown accustom to downloading free books in PDF format, or if you have other kinds of documents that you would like to read on your iPad or e-book, Calibre is an application that will serve you well. Calibre is a free e-book library management application that converts PDFs to ePub format (among others), the format used by iPad’s iBooks. In fact, Calibre can do a whole lot more for your e-book collection; from library management, to syncing, to conversion and more. Calibre works on Windows, OSX and Linux, download and find out more here.

And, for a detailed how-to on converting PDFs to ePub, complete with screenshots, check out this post by Simple Help.

image from apple.com

So how do I get started backing up my stuff? Here are 3 programs that I recommend.

Bonkey
JaBackup
NasBackup

Of course you need to back up your files somewhere. If you have money to spend I would highly recommend a Drobo. If not you can get by with a cheaper solution, an external enclosure that is either connected to your network or directly to you computer.

Drobo
External Drives

Of course if you are at work you probably have an enterprise solution in place, Ask your administrator if you are worried. And remember to backup!

Congrats!  You joined in the fun of Apple’s latest and greatest.  Most of the iPad’s interface should be intuitive and user friendly, but tips and tricks are always useful for leveraging your use.

These guys have put together a very comprehensive tutorial outside of Apple’s guided tour.  I couldn’t resist sharing it with you.

Enjoy!

Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials

image from apple.com

Security is always a huge concern in the IT community.  We make huge efforts to maintain firewalls, encryption via SSL, VPNs, encrypted wifi signals, program and operating system updates but the biggest security vulnerability time and time again are the passwords that people choose.

There is an article that I recently came across written from the perspective someone trying to break into a secure system.  The top 10 most used passwords list reads like a list of lazy choices from people that just don’t want to think about security:

1. Your partner, child, or pet’s name, possibly followed by a 0 or 1 (because they’re always making you use a number, aren’t they?)
2. The last 4 digits of your social security number.
3. 123 or 1234 or 123456.
4. “password”
5. Your city, or college, football team name.
6. Date of birth – yours, your partner’s or your child’s.
7. “god”
8. “letmein”
9. “money”
10. “love”

Even if this list didn’t cover the password that you use on every site out there, does it come close to some of your passwords?   Someone that’s motivated to gain access to your system won’t just try a handful of passwords on one system and then give up, they will try your email accounts, your facebook login, web forums and anything else they can find.  From the article:

So, how would one use this process to actually breach your personal security? Simple. Follow my logic:

• You probably use the same password for lots of stuff right?
• Some sites you access such as your Bank or work VPN probably have pretty decent security, so I’m not going to attack them.
• However, other sites like the Hallmark e-mail greeting cards site, an online forum you frequent, or an e-commerce site you’ve shopped at might not be as well prepared. So those are the ones I’d work on.
• So, all we have to do now is unleash Brutus, wwwhack, or THC Hydra on their server with instructions to try say 10,000 (or 100,000 – whatever makes you happy) different usernames and passwords as fast as possible.
• Once we’ve got several login+password pairings we can then go back and test them on targeted sites.
• But wait… How do I know which bank you use and what your login ID is for the sites you frequent? All those cookies are simply stored, unencrypted and nicely named, in your Web browser’s cache. (Read this post to remedy that problem.)

So how do you protect yourself and your accounts?

Well, the obvious first answer is use good passwords.  This means your password should not be a word that’s found in any dictionary in any language all in lowercase.  Cyber crooks use software that can try tens of thousands of words per minute to crack your password and their first tool is generally a dictionary attack.  Putting a number, capital letters and special characters (i.e. !@#$%^) in your password make it exponentially more difficult to guess.  If you use an either character password all in lower case and change one letter to a capital and change another to a special character  the time that it would take to crack the password goes from 2.4 days to 2.1 centuries!!  Check out this chart to see the difficulty of cracking your password:

This is all great unless you make a password so complex you can’t remember it. So how do you make a secure yet usable password?

Start with something you can remember (though not someone’s name or a dictionary word).  For this article I’ll start with “ilikecheese”.  Right off the bat this is a long password so it’ll take a while to crack but it’s fairly easy to guess if someone knew my penchant for cheese.  First thing you can do is swap out a letter or two for numbers that look similar.

ilikecheese could become il1kech3es3

Then you can put in a capital letter and a special character:

il1keCh3es3! will take over 18,000,000 computing years to crack!  For all intents that’s uncrackable.

The second thing to remember is don’t use the same password for everything!  The reason for this is that different websites have different security measures in place and if someone can steal your password from an online forum and use it to log into your online banking you’re in trouble. The best practice is to use a different password for every site and use a password manager (not your browser) to store them all. Roboform for PC users and 1password for Mac are both excellent choices.

I admit that I don’t use totally unique passwords for every site I use, there’s just too many of them.  The trick that I use is I have a handful of different passwords with different complexity that I use depending on the site I’m logging into.  If someone steals my digg.com password they’ll be able to get into my slashdot.org account, but not into the online retailers I use.  If someone managed to steal the password for a shopping site I use, they wouldn’t be able to get into my banking or credit card accounts.  For the financial sites I do use different passwords for each, that way if my bank is hacked my credit cards are safe and I can still eat while the damage is fixed.

Don’t trade your password for chocolate

It’s a funny thought that people would give strangers on the street their passwords for a chocolate bar, but over 70% of the people tested by a security firm in 2004 did just that.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3639679.stm

Don’t give your password to anyone.  Not a stranger offering you candy, not your family, not your coworkers, not even your IT person (if we need your password you can type it for us), no one.

At the end of the day computer security is always a balancing act between restricting access and ease of usability, I’ve just seen too many people use the same password everywhere and get into trouble because of it.

[onemansblog.com via lifehacker]

image from kk+ on flickr

If Verizon Wireless is your cell phone provider, you can now get Skype on your Smartphone!

This means you can use Skype on your cell phone to make unlimited Skype to Skype calls anywhere on the planet, IM your contacts, or get low rates on calls to International landlines.  How?  It is super easy; simply go to Verizon Wireless’ site here http://phones.verizonwireless.com/skypemobile/and type in your phone number.  They will send the download right to your phone.  Download and click through the agreements and you are ready to Skype on your mobile.

image from skype.com