Zephyrus of the Anemoi

I’ve been getting quite a few visitors from my interview over at InkKC the last couple days, so I just wanted to put a note up here for those of you that are visiting from there.

First off, thanks for stopping by my little place on the Interwebs. Have a nice stay, but please don’t break anything.

If you’re looking for iPhone app reviews and news, you can find all of them by clicking on the iPhone category to the right. Feel free to browse, leave a few comments, or even shoot me a message if there’s an app you’d like to hear about but don’t see on here yet. I’ll be glad to give you my opinion, or maybe even write up a post all about it if I feel I can be informative enough.

That said, come back soon.

My gorgeous and talented friend Alex posted this video on her Facebook profile recently and I was lucky enough to stumble across it last week. It stars TJ Thyne, whom you may recognize from the TV show Bones (or if you’re really hardcore, from season 5 of Angel) as a parking attendant that just wants to see you smile. It’s a brilliant film and very entertaining. If you want to see it larger without going fullscreen, click the direct link below.

Direct link here.

I haven’t mentioned these guys yet, because I’ve been kind of waiting for them to get into a private beta of their service before I gave them a shoutout. However, they’ve been doing an awful lot of updating over at their site since they went to SXSWi this past week, and I felt it was necessary to give them some press.

I can’t reveal any details yet about what Swindlr is working on, but they have announced the name of their new service: Zappn.com. When they’re ready to reveal what Zappn does, you’ll be able to find out at the site, or at the team’s blog.

Several weeks ago, my friend Chase, of Swindlr & Zappn fame, gave my name to a reporter for InkKC that was doing an article on iPhone apps. Well, yesterday the article was published and can be picked up at any InkKC kiosk in the Kansas City area or viewed online here (article no longer online).

The nicest thing about the article was that my blog got a mention, so any of you that are coming here from that article, you can check out my iPhone articles here, or in the future by clicking on the iPhone link in the Categories section on the right.

No, really. Google Voice is awesome. At least, if you like the concept of GrandCentral, which I did and is why I signed up for it. But even better is that Google finally made some changes to it and they rock.

Let me start from the beginning. GrandCentral is a website that lets you choose a phone number to give to friends, family, coworkers, evil overlords, what-have-you. When those people call said number, it rings all the phones you own: your house phone, work phone, cell phone, even the pay phone outside your house if you so choose. If you answer from any of the phones you’ve listed, the call is routed to that specific phone. But, it goes one step further. If you don’t WANT to be bothered, you can listen in on voicemails to try and cut down on your telemarketing pain, block specific phone numbers and even schedule all UNKNOWN numbers to be blocked straight up. Then, voice messages are stored on the server for you to peruse at your convenience and even call back by clicking the call button and selecting which of your phones you’d like the call to be directed to, effectively masking your actual number inside of the GrandCentral number.

Enter Google, whom upon seeing this awesome service said, “WANT!” and snatched it up. They sat on it for a while, not making any changes until just recently when they announced Google Voice. The basic tenets of the service remain unchanged, however there are some spiffy new features. First and foremost is the option to have your voice messages transcribed and then e-mailed to you so you never have to log into the website to check your messages. This feature alone made me drool over the service. But I was made even happier when I discovered that I can log into the site (from my desktop or my iPhone) and send and receive SMS messages from my Google Voice number. And they are all archived online.

Needless to say, I’d love to see an iPhone app that combines all of these features into one place to use wherever I am. And if background notification ever comes to the iPhone, I can effectively rid myself of paid text messages. Thank you, Google. Now merge with Apple so that all of these features can become native to the iPhone. I’ll die happy.

I’ve got a variety of things to share with you today, so try to keep up. No, seriously, I intend to move along quickly.

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This past summer, the gang at Penny Arcade and PvP got a chance to play the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons before it went to print. Being the incredibly intelligent guys that they are, they recorded the entire session and broke it up into chunks for the official D&D podcast. I bring this up because they just recorded another session, only this time they added an additional member to their party: Wil Wheaton.

Yes that Wil Wheaton.

Anyway, I’ve gathered the links here for your perusal. Check them out:

Series 1: Episode 1 / Episode 2 / Episode 3 / Episode 4 / Episode 5 / Episode 6 / Episode 7 / Episode 8

Series 2: Episode 1 / Episode 2 / Episode 3 / Episode 4 / Episode 5 / Episode 6

Subscribe to the podcast.

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This is one of the more entertaining music videos I’ve ever seen. It’s called Hardrock Hallelujah by Lordi. If you enjoy metal, you’ll probably have a good time with this.

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Jonathan Coulton released his greatest hits for free in very high-quality MP3s. He even went one step further and released each audio track, as well. So anyone dying to remix a JoCo song, start here.

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Finally, if you use Mac OS X Leopard and are interested in some new stationery themes for Mail, then I suggest NovCon.net’s stationery archives. While not as extensive as some stationery packs, they are free and some of them are pretty nice.

There’s something very calming about driving to karate classes with my son and a warm breeze rippling through the car’s open windows while “Topeka” by Ludo blasts over the car speakers.

DropBox is this crazy-awesome service that lets you synchronize your files between several different computers. Even cooler, it also stores any files that you sync on the server even after you delete them from your computer (or move them out of the DropBox folder). This means that you can go back and pull it down when you realize you still need it. Plus, it saves revisions to your files, so if you share your folder with your friends so you can collaborate on a project, and one of those friends either sabotages you or just plain sucks at whatever you’re doing, you can revert to a previous version that they didn’t frak up.

I’ve been a fan of this service for a while, but today I want you to check them out just a little bit more than usual. You see, if you don’t already have an account with this incredible service, you can get some bonus space just by signing up through my referral link. I’ve used lots of services that give perks for referrals, but rarely do those perks extend to the referred. So check it out and see the future of file-syncing!

Amazon’s Kindle 2 has arrived. It looks great, and if you want a device for just eBook reading, you probably won’t find better in the current generation. It seems Amazon is serious about this market. And, it seems there may be a possibility that Amazon will make KindleBooks available to iPhone owners in the future.

While the Kindle itself sold less than Microsoft’s Zune by a 2-1 margin, that doesn’t seem to make it a failure in Amazon’s eyes. To be fair, eBook readers are still an emerging market. Either that, or there’s no market at all and no one has told Amazon, Sony, or a handful of other companies yet, either. Personally, I still love to read, and a dedicated eBook reader would go a long way toward making reading fiction something I do daily again.

However, since I still can’t justify spending this kind of money on a device just for reading eBooks and then pay the hardcover price for a DRM’ed digital copy, I’ll stick with Stanza on the iPhone for now. Or, if I’m looking for a good price on a large selection of classics with a gorgeous interface, I’ll go with Classics, instead. What are your thoughts on the matter?

Thanks to Felicia Day, I learned about Cornify.com and Ninjafy.com, two of the goofiest websites I’ve ever seen. As a result, I’ve added a Ninjafy button to the column on the left-most column on the right so you can check it out. Enjoy!