The iPhone works fantastic, but the 3G, Bluetooth, GPS, Push, … features (in short, the most interesting ones) eat up the battery fast. No problem if you’re nearby a power supply, but ‘out in the field’ the standard battery doesn’t last for days (which is a heavy understatement ). A simple way to cary around extra power is a set of 3G Juice batteries. These are high capacity (1770 mAh, compared to the 1100 mAh or so of the iPhone), compact, batteries which fit easily under the Phone. They’re charged via a small USB port, which is dead simple, plug it in a powered USB source (HUB, PC, Apple adapter, …) and charge them. When you want to use them, slide one under the iPhone and put it on. The 3G Juice come with a cap over the iPhone adapter, so it’s protected when you carry them around.

Another great way to use this is to revive my good old trusty, almost 4 year old iPod 60GB. This has been used intensively for almost 4 years (daily usage for several hours a day). In the end, the battery life was about an hour, but the 3G Juice fits the iPod as well, so again usable for a whole day.

One small thing which can be handy is a indicator if the battery is full or not. If you have a few lying around, it’s hard to keep track which was the one what half empty again? It can be as simple as a sign on the clip which shows the clip if full attached one way, empty the other way around. (This is the way Canon does it with its clips as well.)

Anyway, love the product; easy, no-nonsense, high capacity and POWERful.

There are plenty of Get Things Done (GTD) applications available these days. The native Apple OS X Calendar, and the TODO-list in Apple Mail are already providing good (but basic) functionality. An application which does GTD the OS X way is Things from Cultured Code. Things has a fantastic user interface and has a great [...]

I’ve been using Amazon S3 for a long period now. (I think not long after it’s launch). Mostly it was being used for an extra backup of the databases, subversion repositories, configuration files, etc, … Mostly smaller files (below 1MB (g)zipped). It was fast and easy to use. Only recently I’ve been using it as [...]

p>Nooooo! The 2.0.1 update ‘killed’ the iPhone. I tried everything. Removing and reinstalling iTunes, the Mobile Services, different USB cables (of course directly plugged in and all) on 3 Macs and one Windows machine. I also tried to start the update in XCode (which takes very long but gives detailed feedback) and ends with ‘Error [...]

Adobe Camera Raw 4.5 (ACR45) and Lightroom 2 (L2) (these get mentioned side to side all the time, since the underlying ‘engine’ they use is the same) have a great new feature: the support for Camera Profiles. Lots of people don’t like shooting RAW files for just this fact: the colors on the RAW image, [...]

It seems that Nullriver’s NetShare got some free advertising today. Apple removed this application from the store and this caused quite a buzz. Now the application is back available, it will be bought by many, myself included. This utility can be incredible handy on the road, although you have to check your bandwidth usage very [...]

MobileMe has caused a severe headache on a lot of Mac users since it’s launch on July 9. Once I could access it on July 12, I haven’t experienced any real problems. The email client is not very ‘web 2 rich’ but it works. The Address Book, Calendar and Mail are the applications I use [...]

Since a few months we’ve been using an AVCHD camcorder (Canon HF-100) intensively. One of the main reasons it gets used this often is the great picture quality. (The compact size of the camera is handy, but since it always tags along in the ’still camera bag’ and it’s used on a tri-pod 95% of [...]

We produce lots (and I do mean lots!) of files these days. Still pictures mostly probably, but also the video and audio files. (I call these the digital memories.) All these have to be managed in one way or the other. Here is a list of the essential tools I use:

exiftool which is simply and [...]

OS X’ Time Machine does a fantastic job for backing up your machine (I use it all the time for my main hard drive), but sometimes it can be handy to manage the backup of some drives and/or directories yourself. (When you want to create extra backups of those digital memories: photo’s, videos, … which is [...]