Hasta La Gadget!

Oct 13

5 Fun Gadget Hacks to Tackle on a Rainy Day

Posted in: Apple, diy, Hacks, Hacks, Mods and DIY, iPhone, jailbreak, Mac, netbooks, Today's Chili

Avast! There be a mighty tempest rocking the good ship Gadget Lab. OK, it’s just raining really hard in San Francisco and most of the Bay Area. But what better time to check off all those do-it-yourself gadget projects you’ve exiled to the bottom of your to-do list?

Sure, copious sunlight makes it hard to concentrate on backing up your data. But when it’s pouring and there’s nothing better to do than geek out, tasks like beautifying your iTunes library, turning your Mac Mini into the ultimate media center, or hacking your netbook can be a dorktastic blast.

Even if the skies are clear in your city, here’s a list of tech-centric activities you can take on when the weather is being a harsh mistress. Trust us — they’re a lot more fun than playing Monopoly or constructing a magical butterfly garden.

1. Straighten Out Your iTunes Library With TuneUp

Anybody with a sizable iTunes music collection is bound to have a bunch of albums with incorrect or ungrammatical song tracks (e.g., Track 01, Track 02, “here comes the sun,” etc). TuneUp is an awesome plug-in that hooks into an online database and analyzes your incorrect track titles and automatically renames them for you.

The TuneUp plug-in automatically launches with iTunes, and you drag a list of incorrect song tracks into the TuneUp menu to begin automatic renaming. The only drag is that it takes about 5 to 10 seconds per song, so if you have a ton of improperly named tracks, this can take a pretty long time.

Other than renaming songs, TuneUp can also identify any albums in your iTunes library that are missing cover art. Then, it will download that art from its database and automatically tag it onto the respective album.

TuneUp isn’t 100 percent reliable, especially when it comes to dealing with super-indie tracks, but it successfully fixed up about 80 percent of my iTunes library, which contains about 5,000 songs. Not bad. TuneUp costs $20 for a one-year license, or $30 for a lifetime license.

2. Turn Your Mac Mini Into the Ultimate Entertainment Box

Ever dream of a TV set-top box that offered every type of media you can imagine? An ultraversatile media machine doesn’t really exist yet on the market, but if you own a Mac Mini, you’ll like this solution. Sporting a gorgeous UI, Plex Media Center is a Mac app that serves your movies, TV shows, music and even content from websites such as Hulu and Netflix. It supports a large number of file formats, so even digital pirates will be pleased. Just install Plex on a Mac Mini, hook up the Mini to your TV and you’re gold. You can access and control Plex with your Apple remote, so forget about that shoddy keyboard-and-mouse experience.

Similar to TuneUp, Plex uses metadata from the internet to automatically retrieve art to accompany your media. In the screenshot above, Plex provides that slick Seinfeld background. One caveat: It’ll take some time to make Plex look just right. Plex can be pretty particular about just how you organize your files in order for it grab metadata for your media files. That means you’ll have to do lots of renaming of files and folders. Example: To load that Seinfeld menu, Plex required arranging the folders as such: Movies–>Seinfeld–> Season 3. Still, it’s worth the time and effort.

The best part? Plex is free.

3. Hack and Mod Your Netbook

Netbooks are popular not just because they’re so small and convenient to carry around everywhere; they’re surprisingly hackable. There’s a wealth of literature on the web that will teach you how to hack a netbook to run Mac OS X, or install mods such as an HDTV tuner, GPS or Bluetooth.

We know you dig the idea. Wired.com’s How-to Wiki has some tutorials to get you started: Run Mac OS X on a Netbook and Turn a Netbook Into a Net Jukebox.

4. Throw Your Hard Drive in the Cloud

… the digital cloud that is the interwebs, of course. Indeed, cloud storage is the hip way to manage your data (unless you’re a T-Mobile Sidekick customer). By throwing your files into a cloud-based service such as Dropbox or Box.net, you’re automatically backing them up to protect against data loss. Not only that, you can enjoy access to your files from any computer with an internet connection. For example, on my office computer, I can listen to my entire iTunes library, which I copied into Dropbox.

The words “cloud storage” are pretty yawn-inducing, but once you get past that and start experimenting with the tech, it’s pretty fun. After trying out cloud backup services, you might consider throwing your notes into Evernote, an online note-taking service. Evernote has apps not only for the Mac and Windows, but also for several smartphones including the iPhone and RIM BlackBerry. When I find a recipe I like while browsing the web with my computer, I paste it into Evernote, hit Sync, and then on my iPhone I launch the Evernote app — and there’s the recipe. Pretty sweet.

5. Set Your iPhone Free

Apple plays gatekeeper for its iPhone, enforcing stringent control over what types of third-party software appear in its App Store. This, of course, has resulted in some questionable app rejections, most of which blew over after a short duration. But Apple crossed an invisible line when it rejected the Google Voice app, a service that enables users to rely on a single phone number to ring all their phones, while also delivering the gift of free text messages and voicemail service, as well as cheap international calls. Fortunately, there’s a way around Apple’s restrictions: Jailbreaking the iPhone.

Jailbreaking (i.e. hacking) the iPhone gives you access to an unauthorized app store called Cydia, which offers a Google Voice app among other wares Apple would forbid. Want to tether your iPhone? There’s a Cydia app for that. Want to download files larger than 10 megabytes on the 3G network? Yup, there’s an unauthorized app for that, too. Jailbreaking is also the first step you must take if you wish to unlock your iPhone to work on a different carrier, such as T-Mobile.

The drag about jailbreaking is that it just isn’t very convenient. Every time Apple releases a software update, you lose access to Cydia, and your unauthorized apps temporarily disappear. Then you must jailbreak and re-download those apps again. (If you paid for a Cydia app the first time, you don’t have to pay to download it again.) But if you actually have free time, having a jailbroken iPhone can be largely beneficial.

From our experience, the best tutorials on jailbreaking can be found at iClarified, and if you need more visual aids, plenty of YouTube users have posted tutorials as well. What are you waiting for? Jailbreak away!

What are the rainy day activities you enjoy with your gadgets? Post your suggestions in the comments below.

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