While it went on sale back in May, A List Apart‘s first publication, HTML5 for Web Designers, only just began shipping. I have been eagerly awaiting my copy and it just arrived. I’m not normally compelled to write reviews of technical books I read, mainly because I don’t read them all at once and they usually just lie around my apartment as an every-so-often technical resource (when Google turns up nothing). This book is different. It reads like much less of a verbose white paper — or HTML5 specification rather — and more like a refreshing one-sitter.

HTML5 for Web Designers - A Book Apart
At only 85 pages, this book is rather slim and handy for taking — and reading in its entirety — on my morning Caltrain commute to Notifo HQ.

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Turning 24

June 30, 2010

For the last few years I have written a blog post on my birthday. This birthday is no exception but while working late at Notifo tonight I decided to have some fun with it. Chad and I whipped up this simple page where you can send a birthday message directly to my phone. Notifo uses push — a lightning fast notification technology made possible by the flux capacitor powered by 1.21 jiggawatts — so I will get your message on my iPhone usually in under 3 seconds. We decided to make it the first of a bunch of examples/projects that will go on a future Notifo “Labs” site. You can view the PHP source here to see how it’s done and begin tinkering on your own.

For the next 24 hours, on my 24th birthday you can send me a message to my phone using Notifo. Cheers!

Notifo Labs - Send a birthday message to Stammy

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Have you ever wanted to get more out of your home network, like adding a NAS, without ponying up for expensive hard drives with Ethernet built-in, Time Capsules, Drobos or the like? While some newer routers come with a USB port allowing users to add a hard drive or printer on the network, they are costly and rather limited in their functionality. It was this dilemma that had me pondering a custom solution when I wrote my series about building a cheap and small mini-ITX-based computer with the sole purpose of being a NAS and download box. That setup cost over $200 and required much hardware and software tinkering. For those looking for a cheaper and hassle-free solution, I would suggest the $99 TonidoPlug linux home server, NAS, cloud-in-a-plug… et cetera.

TonidoPlug and cables unboxed
TonidoPlug unboxed.

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Just over 5 weeks ago I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to seek new opportunities. I had no idea what I wanted to shift my full-time focus to and began connecting with people, researching and interviewing with a handful of companies — ranging from huge web presences all the way down to tiny startups. I considered companies in different spaces from finance all the way to video. I met with dozens of folks to see what they were up to and what their company was about. That led to me being wired on caffeine for a few weeks when I had 3-4 coffee meetings scheduled each day, but I digress. I am elated to announce, likely to the surprise of many, that last week I jumped onboard [Continue Reading…]

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Hot on the heels of my quick review of the Sprint HTC EVO 4G, I’d like to take a minute to share my thoughts on the latest iPhone announced at WWDC today here in San Francisco. There seems to be two camps when it comes to the iPhone 4 — those that love it and those that hate it. Actually, it is more like three; love, hate and those that aren’t exactly sold on it but will buy it anyway. I have been onboard with the last 3 iPhones and waited in long lines on launch day to get most of them. However, I won’t be getting the iPhone 4 this time around.

Apple iPhone 4 profile
The latest Apple pocket toy is 24% thinner and features a beautiful 960 x 640 IPS display.. so why don’t I care for it?

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For the last week I have been toting around two mobile phones: my usual iPhone 3GS workhorse with extended battery a la Mophie and the just-launched-today Sprint HTC EVO 4G on loan from Gregory Miller. This is my first time touching an Android device for more than just a few minutes. As such I think I’m interestingly posed to show a different perspective on the EVO from MG Siegler’s thoughts in his recent post entitled “An iPhone Lover’s Take On The HTC EVO 4G.” Similarly, the EVO 4G has received tremendous press as of late — mainly as it has geared itself as being the “it” phone of the month as well as the first 4G WiMAX phone ever.

Sprint HTC EVO 4G phone on
The lovely HTC Sense UI upgrade adds lots of polish to the Android OS.. perhaps too much?

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Media Temple has listened to the masses and finally made a VPS offering aimed at developers and advanced users. While their (dv) Dedicated-Virtual VPS offerings allowed users to have root access and the ability to modify much of the installed software, it was still a fairly turnkey solution: create a new account, transfer files/databases over and everything is ready to go. It also ran Parallels Plesk control panel which sys admins and developers unanimously seem to despise for a mixture of Plesk being a resource hog as well as only working well for out-of-the-box configurations and becoming a burden with custom setups — say, a Rails app. There is a large market for tech-savvy folks that prefer to handle all aspects of server setup and administration themselves. Enter the (ve) Virtual Environment.

Media Temple (ve) Virtual Environment Server

A new product series has been created, ProDev, which caters to the side of our customer base that wishes to take hosting a step further. These users want more controls and low-level options. Therefore, we’re working on new ProDev products, such as an API, CDN and Advanced DNS, that compliment (ve) Server.
— (mt)

You know who these people are — they typically congregate around Linode, Amazon EC2 and Slicehost services. They know exactly what OS and solution stack they want to use, their favorite kernel version and so on. [Continue Reading…]

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Early last month I detailed my plans for moving to California for friends, a change of scenery and of course the acclaimed high-tech hub in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many have contacted me asking to share my experiences on what it is like to move cross-country — in particular to San Francisco — as they were looking to do the same pretty soon. I will attempt to chronicle my journey and adaptation to San Francisco in this and possibly future blog posts.

Looking in the mirror - Driving to San Francisco

Apartment Hunting

I first scheduled a weeklong trip to San Francisco to get more oriented with the city and find out what neighborhoods I liked. I told myself I would not depart until I had signed a lease and received the keys to my new apartment. I had planned [Continue Reading…]

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In preparation for my move to San Francisco I have started selling many of my electronics and sundry possessions. Unfortunately, this included my absolute favorite technology purchase in recent years — the KRK Rokit RP5G2 studio monitors I discussed at length in my How To: Upgrade to Studio Monitor Speakers post. After selling the Rokits I began considering headphones as a replacement for my audio consuming needs. Investing in high quality headphones started to make sense for a few reasons:

  • 1) I will likely have roommates at some point during my life in San Francisco and I can’t blast music all day and night
  • 2) My roommates might blast music all day and night so I will need some good noise canceling headphones to concentrate while I work
  • 3) Headphones will easily fit in my Timbuk2 Commute 2.0 bag along with my trusty 17-inch MacBook Pro for various Caltrain trips to South Bay

After I decided to look into high quality headphones I became reacquainted with the Beats. While I had [Continue Reading…]

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Exploring Silicon Valley

April 7, 2010

Next month I will be moving to San Francisco — roughly 6 years after I moved to Atlanta, enrolled in Computer Engineering as a Georgia Tech freshman. I soon realized my interests involved the Internet, web applications and new media. I changed my major a year into my college stay to nurture these interests. While I enjoyed tinkering with electronics — having designed and printed circuit boards, soldered and built small servo-powered robots for science fairs from a young age — I did not see how one person could make a huge difference on their own in the hardware field. The typical route was for recent EE/CmpE graduates to work for a large, established hardware company the likes of Intel. It was and remains to be exceedingly difficult for innovative hardware startups to get off the ground without significant capital and a strong team. I need not explain how a few people with computers, vim and an Internet connection can build interesting products and services. [Continue Reading…]

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SXSW Interactive 2010 in Pictures

March 28, 2010

Last year I wrote about my experience at the 2009 South By Southwest Interactive Festival as a first-timer. I gave it 10 out of 10 Stammys and had a fantastic time. I just got back from SXSWi 2010 last week and my thoughts have not changed one bit — in my opinion SXSW remains the [...]

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Review: 23andMe DNA Testing for Health, Disease & Ancestry

March 5, 2010

Okay I know what you’re thinking — why is some genetics testing service being reviewed on Stammy‘s tech blog? Well for one, because 23andMe is at the forefront of technology that is slowly but surely enabling the general public to get access to their genome data that would have cost thousands of dollars just a [...]

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Live Blogging: Startup Riot 2010

February 17, 2010

Startup Riot, the biggest and most interesting tech event (in my mind) hits Atlanta for its third year. You might remember the first two Startup Riots which I blogged about: I presented at the Startup Riot 2008 and covered Startup Riot 2009. I’ll backtrack a bit first. Startup Riot 2010 is a startup pitch event [...]

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Review: Rev iPhone app and PLX Devices Kiwi Wireless OBDII Module (Part 1)

February 15, 2010

There are two things I do not usually talk about on this blog — cars (okay maybe there are one, two, three, four, five or more exceptions) and iPhone applications. The former because I am not quite sure everyone here would be interested in reading about anything except the technology behind the car and the [...]

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How To: Apple MacBook Pro RAID 0 Array with 2 Intel X25-M SSDs

January 26, 2010

In late 2008 I wrote about my experience using the first generation 80GB Intel X25-M SSD — my first SSD. I had to pay the early adopter tax for that SSD, so it cost me around $700. The speed boost alone justified the price to me. Fast-forward about a year and that SSD stopped working. [...]

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How To/Review: Surf Securely with VyprVPN

January 14, 2010

Knowing how to keep your web traffic data safe while browsing the web on unknown networks is a vital skill that not enough savvy Internet surfers take part in. I have previously discussed a few ways of solving this issue through the use of SSH tunnels (manually-created and application managed). I have also discussed things [...]

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Review: Blippy (“What are your friends buying?”)

January 4, 2010

Blippy is my pick for startup to watch this year (with Square being close by). Blippy enables people to automatically share their purchases done through a variety of services, such as Amazon, iTunes, Netflix and better yet their credit/debit cards, with their followers. At first glance many will be shocked and wonder why they would [...]

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Review: Kodak Zi8 HD Pocket Video Camera

December 28, 2009

I was recently in the market for an affordable, HD-capable pocket video camera. I knew Pure Digital’s Flip line of pocket camcorders like the Mino HD and Ultra HD were very popular in this space and as such I was just about ready to buy one. However, I decided to look around first and that’s [...]

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Skribit Exits Beta, Gets TechCrunched

December 17, 2009

I always found it a bit ironic that I had less time to blog here as I started working full-time on a blogging startup. Well, my time spent on Skribit is starting to pay off. Today, Skribit finally goes out of what we’ve internally been considering our public beta — so it’s our official launch [...]

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Review: Sonos ZonePlayer S5 All-In-One Wireless Music System

December 13, 2009

For those of you that have been reading for a while (thanks!), it’s no surprise that I am a music fan. I wouldn’t quite say audiophile as I don’t find the need to spend sizable amounts of money on audio equipment, but I always have some music playing and enjoy a high quality audio setup. [...]

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Review: 2011 Ford Fiesta and the Fiesta Movement [UPDATED]

November 27, 2009

On April 25th, 2009, I picked up a 2011 Ford Fiesta for what would be the next 7 months as 1 of 100 hand-picked Ford Fiesta Movement “Agents.” Okay, well technically it is a European-spec 2009 Ford Fiesta, but it is a close representation of what will be making its way state-side come June 2010. [...]

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Launch Something and Meet People at Atlanta Startup Weekend 3

November 9, 2009

The third year of Atlanta Startup Weekend is less than a week away and begins Friday November 13th and goes through Sunday night. I am definitely biased as I have attended the last two Startup Weekends, but I strongly suggest attending if you are within the Atlanta area. For those unfamiliar with the concept, Startup [...]

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Review: AT&T 3G MicroCell

November 4, 2009

The saga continues as I go to all lengths to find 5 bars of cell phone reception at home. It first started when I moved into my new apartment. I didn’t think to check my cell reception when first touring the property so I was in shock after I moved in and noticed I had [...]

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Recap: NoSQL East Conference 2009

November 2, 2009

Last week I had the pleasure of attending NoSQL East 2009, a new conference based around the non-relational data stores that I briefly covered in this post. In short, it was a rather intimate and highly technical conference on the grand scheme of things. There were roughly 120 people in attendance for the two-day event [...]

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Recap: BlogWorld Expo 2009

October 28, 2009

TechDrawl, an up and coming Atlanta-based blog representing technology, startups and entrepreneurs in the US census South (D.C. to Texas), often helps out local entrepreneurs with things like attending conferences that interest them through holding fundraisers on the site. When I made the rather last minute decision to attend BlogWorld this year (people like Andrew [...]

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How To: Build a Microsoft Windows 7 and Intel Core i7 PC (Part 1)

October 22, 2009

By the time you read this, Microsoft’s latest attempt at making a decent desktop operating system (I kid, I kid), dubbed Windows 7, will have been released worldwide. I took it upon myself (and my debit card) to build a new computer properly suited for Windows 7, as well as some HTPC/gaming goodness, after receiving [...]

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GlideTV Introduces Navigator – first “Couch Mouse”

October 13, 2009

So you’ve built a fancy new HTPC, with a custom case that fits perfectly into your home theater setup, but without fail you’re still using a wireless keyboard and mouse created with desktop use in mind. (Or maybe you’re up on your gadget game and have a gyro mouse or use software like Boxee that [...]

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What is NoSQL? Enter NoSQL East, conference of non-relational data stores

October 5, 2009

There’s a new tech conference coming to Atlanta at the end of the month. Unlike other events I have covered and attended, this one is for those who not only develop websites but also deal with large data sets at high load and have learned the struggles of dealing with relational databases like MySQL at [...]

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Recap: WordCamp Birmingham 2009 + Skribit Updates

September 30, 2009

This past weekend I drove over to Birmingham, Alabama, for WordCamp Birmingham 2009. This was their second WordCamp and brought out some 180 people — three times larger than their first one last year. This was not my first WordCamp; I attended WordCamp San Francisco 2007. In a nutshell, WordCamp is a weekend event where [...]

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Review: Supercool School (Online Learning Startup)

September 22, 2009

Two years ago during a trip to San Francisco I met up with entrepreneur Steli Efti. He had previously contacted me and told me a bit about his story. He bought a one-way ticket from Greece to San Francisco with the intent of creating a startup called Supercool School. Steli wanted to change the way [...]

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First Impressions: 17-inch Apple MacBook Pro 2009 (Unibody, Anti-Glare)

September 17, 2009

It started out like any typical Friday morning. I snoozed the iPhone alarm about 5 times then got a late start to the morning and did a groggy stumble to the desk to check email before doing anything else. Unfortunately, this time my 11 month old 15-inch MacBook Pro (unibody) kernel panicked a lot, on [...]

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Review: Brother HL-2170W Wireless Laser Printer

September 11, 2009

Two years ago I wrote one of my most popular articles, A Realistic Back to School Guide for College Students (and off-campus edition). In it I talked about how great cheap black and white laser printers were for the college student or pretty much anyone that isn’t printing out color photos (I leave that to [...]

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