Articles by *cowboy*
At the end of February I met up with a few friends in Lake Tahoe, California, for a few days of skiing in the Sierra Nevadas. It was my visit to California and I was extremely excited to check it out. Unfortunately, this winter was one of the worst on record for snowfall and the mountains were...
As 2011 comes to a close, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at my favorite albums released this year. I listened to a lot of music. With great services like Spotify and iTunes Match recently released, I found myself listening to music constantly. I continued to explore new genres...
Earlier this year Apple announced iTunes Match alongside its iCloud offering. iCloud allows you to access your music from all of your devices and download (or stream) the music you want to listen to. iTunes Match is intended for users who have music in iTunes that was not purchased from the...
With the launch of the new iPhone 4S last week, Apple introduced an intelligent personal assistant named Siri. Apple acquired the company, Siri, in April of last year and has since been integrating their software into iOS. Siri uses advanced natural language processing to assist with making...
I’ve always been a huge fan of action sports films. There’s just something magical about watching some of the best athletes in the world travel to incredible places, ski/bike/ride ridiculous lines, and hit enormous jumps. It’s exciting to me because I can relate to the emotions they must be...
This coming Monday will be exactly 2 years since starting the P90X workout program. I first heard about the workout DVDs from a friend and later discovered that they were quite popular on late night infomercials. I decided to try it out and quickly realized that this was the real deal. This...
If you haven’t noticed, the mobile photo sharing space has been exploding lately. Facebook, Google+, and Twitter are all including photo-sharing as a major feature in their mobile apps. Smaller startups, such as Instagram, Path, and now Pool Party, are starting to get quite a following as well...
Two weeks ago a couple friends and I headed up to Snowshoe Bike Park in WV for a weekend of downhill mountain biking. This was my first trip downhilling, but I generally do 3-4 days of cross-country mountain biking each week. The allure of downhill biking is a combination of lift access, big...
I installed OS X Lion (10.7) this week on both my personal and work Macs. I spent some time over at roaringapps.com checking application compatibility for my frequently used applications. Everything was reported to be working fine in Lion so I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my OS on the...
Spotify announced this week that it’s finally coming to the US. The streaming music service has been hugely popular in Europe since it started in late 2008, but presumably the record label deals have kept it from reaching the US… until now! Spotify offers three plans: Free, Unlimited, and...
This weekend I read a linked post on The Brooks Review which really irritated me. The linked post was about the popular 1Password application. Justin Blanton says:
Not a user of 1Password myself, I was unsurprisingly a bit offended by the “idiot” remark.1 Especially because I consider my...
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Mac App Store lately. The store is essentially the same thing as the iOS App Store that exists for iPhone and iPad devices, except for Mac OS X applications. The App Store makes it extremely easy to download and install free and not-so-free software. The store...
A week ago, my wife Caitlin had her iPhone 4 stolen at a local restaurant here in Raleigh. She was eating with some friends and decided to move outside near the end of the meal. The iPhone presumably slipped out of her pocket as she was getting up. A few minutes later she realized it was missing...
While working on my blog this weekend, I stumbled upon the archives and started to read through some of my old posts. I found a screenshot of my iPhone home screen from August 2008. It’s fascinating to see the apps I was using back then and see how my “top apps” have changed over time. It’s cool...
Over the past few months I have been carefully following the news and reviews about Blackberry’s new tablet, the Playbook. I’m not exactly sure why, but something about Blackberry has sparked my interest lately. (Basically, I think their future is looking disastrous… but that’s a topic for...
