Monthly Archives: November 2012

Early Edition 2 news app for the iPad – Review

The Early Edition 2 works OFF-LINE for news reading!!! You don’t need WiFi to use it, just to sync it! So if you have the data plan (or even if you don’t have a data plan), you can sync beforehand and not pay for any data! This pre-caching makes it really fast to use, it’s slow at the beginning when it’s pulling stories and images down, but once it’s down , you don’t have to wait for a thing. Even if it didn’t have this feature, it’s great for news reading of any topics you might be interested in.

And it syncs with Google Reader, I haven’t tried that yet. (I should, I use Google Reader all the time). I think the choices are GoogleReader or stand alone, no integration.

early-edition-2.jpgI love this app, I can’t decide if it’s #1 or #2 of my favorite news readers. But this is the one I use sometimes when I’m in the house, but all the times when I’m out the of the house. As I put my iPad in the sleeve, I run Early Edition 2, so it syncs with my WiFi as I’m heading out, then when I get somewhere, even if they don’t have WiFi, I have pages and pages of things I’m interested to read on my retina iPad. If you want to do this, be sure to set the settings for “Preload Images” to “ON”, or else you won’t have any images there and under “General” I set “Autofetch Options” to run “Every Launch”. (I set my “image frequency” to “Most”). There are separate settings for 3G (I assume that include LTE, 4G and HSPA+) so that it doesn’t automatically fetch and cache images.

It’s got settings for “Unread” news, “Today” or “All” news. I use “Unread” and in the settings I have it set to ‘if I see the headline, it counts as read’. So if I see something interesting, I have to read it then (or star it for later).

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It’s got great sharing options: Twitter, Instapaper, Readability, Facebook, Pinboard, Delicious, RedItLater and Evernote. I’m not on-line, I just mail a link to myself (I always forget if I star something off-line if it remembers it for later).

My biggest complaint: When reading an article I click it to go full screen (you have to or you don’t see enough) and I can swipe for the next article (if I want it). BUT to close an article I have to move my finger to the very tippy-top of the screen and click “done”, it needs something different (double-tap on the white space or anywhere that isn’t clickable) to close an article.

Downside on the setup: It’s a little awkward to manage your sections. Once you learn it, it’s okay, but it takes a little bit. It’s worth it though!

$4.99 is a little pricey though. I think it’s worth it. It goes on sale occasionally (but not often and not for long)

Electronic Arts games HUGE Thanksgiving sale! Scrabble, Monopoly, Boggle and more for the iPhone and iPad for only 99 cents

Many Electronic Arts games are way on sale today. Their annual Thanksgiving sale seems to be the best year round, it may last throughout the weekend; no promises for how long it will last, so get them before it runs out. scrabble-badge-notification.png
I listed some of the most popular ones that are $0.99, these games go on sale occasionally but never cheaper than this. Scrabble for iPad is often between $4.99 and $9.99, so 99 cents is a great deal.

Personally, my favorite is Scrabble, which will connect to Facebook play against the computer or you can play multi-player and use other iPads, iPhones or iPod touches as tile racks, local network play and it supports GameCenter (but I’m not sure how that part works). I occasionally pull out Boggle too, which is way easier to play than in real life since it knows if the odd words are actually words. The classic game SimCity (the Sim before all others!) is pretty great too!

I see Scrabble for Kindle is 99 cents, they might be on sale for your Android devices too, so check out your on-line store.

I own many of them but the only ones that have gotten a real bit of play is: Scrabble, Boggle, Lemonade Tycoon and SimCity.

What Electronic Arts games do you play?

Amanda Palmer – This might be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen at a concert

I notice when they start this song Amanda Palmer heads to the side of the stage and I can see her putting on a dress. This dress has and extremely super long train. She then gets the security guys to pass her over to the crowd. As they carry her out above the crowd she gets passed around and the crowd supports her and the extremely long train of the dress. The lights are very cool as they play upon the dress.

Direct link to the Amanda Palmer video.

I’m really glad I went to this concert, it was excellent!!! I only know her stuff a bit, I think I recognize more from when she was with The Dresden Dolls. I see her pop up on Pandora a lot with songs that I like. She’s also married to Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite authors, that’s not why I like her music but it helps with the name recognition.

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So when I saw she was coming to Saint Andrews Hall in Detroit, which is a nice semi-small venue that I like and it’s probably less than 15 minutes from my house so I decided it was a perfect opportunity to see her. I’m really glad that I went!!

Doctor Who Regeneration – The Musical

Here’s an interesting musical. The Doctor regenerates and needs a new companion. A “must see” if you are a Doctor Who fan.

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Here’s a direct link to the video.

This is starring Travis Slavin as Doctor Who and Elizabeth Oldak as his companion. I don’t know who they are but they deserve to be mentioned by name!