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Watch College Football On Your Mac

by Dan

As anticipation for a potential iTV continues to build as we await Apple’s official announcement on September 1st, we wanted to take a closer look at what upcoming television and interests are already available to Mac owners. There are few things on american television that are watched more than College Football. Saturday’s are filled with interested fans watching football match-ups from schools across the country. And like most television, College Football has found its way to the internet and the Mac.

Watch College Football on ESPN3

ESPN 3, ESPN’s newly branded website that was formerly known as ESPN360.com, will broadcast 20 NCAA Division 1 college football games this year. Mac owners will be able to few these games by navigating their Safari or other web browser to ESPN3.com and clicking through to the game in progress. A complete schedule of games that will be broadcasted on ESPN3.com this year is already available online.

Virginia Tech fans will be finding themselves glued to their computers more than other college fans, as the Hokies will be broadcast 3 times on the ESPN online network. If VA Tech can win throughout the season and keep their high ranking, ESPN3.com will receive a considerable amount of use as more and more fans will be interested in the games being broadcasted on the network.

Most of the games scheduled this year will feature larger schools from BCS conferences playing smaller schools. It will be interesting to see if the trend to online broadcasts continue over the next few years. If so, we can expect to see more and more important games brought to our Mac screens.

Connect Your Mac To your TV

If you’re wondering how to watch these online games with friends and family on your new HD big screen television, then you’re in luck. Apple computers easily connect to most HDTVs through either VGA or HDMI adapters that connect to the video out ports on your Macbook or latest iMacs. Mac Mini’s even include a built in HDMI port to allow you to easily use your HDTV as a monitor and broadcast the games streamed to you over ESPN3.com and the internet.

If you don’t have a Mac MIni, you’ll want to be sure to have an HDMI adapter for your Mac so you can easily connect it to your HDTV. After connecting the adapter to your Mac, you’ll be able to use an HDMI cable to connect your computer to your HD television. Then, open up ESPN3.com, select your game and enjoy the event on your television.

Overall, we’re excited about watching college football on our Macs. I’m crossing my fingers that Apple’s September 1st announcement makes this process even easier.

What are you looking forward to watching on your Mac this fall?

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Netflix – Movies, TV Shows, And More On Your iPhone

by Dan

It didn’t take Netflix long to bring the solid app that has become so popular on the iPad to Apple’s other mobile devices. Today, Netflix announced their iPhone and iPod Touch app as it was made available on Apple’s App Store.

Like the iPad app, iPhone & iPod owners will be able to stream movies and tv shows from the Netflix Streaming library to their mobile devices. The app itself is free, but you’ll have to have a Netflix subscription to be able to watch the videos. It wasn’t that long ago that Netflix first became available on the Mac, and now its available on Apple’s popular mobile devices.

This recent Netflix push and popularity on Apple’s device makes many believe that Netflix maybe a partner or part of the media announcement coming from Apple HQ on September 1st. An update to the AppleTV that included capabilities from Netflix streaming library would be a valuable addition. Personally, I hope any TV related announcement include Netflix streaming functionality.

We’ve discussed in the past how Apple’s miss on AppleTV was a big gain for Xbox 360 owners. A major part of this had to do with the fact that the Xbox 360 also included the ability to stream video from Netflix. I can’t see Apple successfully entering the living room without Netflix.

The current version of Netflix already has over 1,700 reviews with a 3 and a half our of 4 star rating. It seems that the App itself is as useful as the version that is extremely popular on the iPad. Netflix is also offering a Free trial of their services for iPhone users. Download the app, install and configure, and sign-up for a Netflix account to see how useful the app is.

Netflix, which originally started as just an over the mail rental service has quickly been at the front of the digital distribution of video efforts. They’ve done an excellent job, and I expect them to continue to push forward.

If you haven’t already checked out the Netflix App for your iPhone, iPod, or IPad, now is the time.

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Retrieving Missing Voicemail Messages on Your iPhone

by Shaun

How many times has someone ever told you “Hey, did you get my message?”  And you respond “What message?”  And they say “The message I sent you 2 days ago.”  If you are like me, I never got the message.  Whether this is AT&T’s fault or Apple’s fault, I really don’t care.  I just hate when I don’t get a voicemail and people think I didn’t respond to them and that I am ignoring them.  Well, this post is all about getting those voice mails back onto your iPhone.

How To Restore Messages to Visual Voicemail on your iPhone

To retrieve visual voicemail message on your phone you’ll need to follow these steps:

  1. First, hit the “Settings” icon, and then the “general” tab on your iPhone

  2. Next, scroll all the way down to the bottom and hit the “reset” key

  3. After this you will see a menu of things that you can reset.  You are going to want to click on the “Reset Network Settings”.  You will then be asked if this is really what you want to do and you hit it again to reset your network and allow it to retrieve missing voicemail messages.

    4. The steps listed above will now restart your iPhone and from here you should now see all of your visual voicemails, including those that you did not original receive.  If for some reason this does not work, repeat all the steps, but instead of hitting “Reset Network Settings”, choose “Reset All Settings.”  This should get it to work.  

    If for some reason the extra step listed above also doesn’t work, then you may want to go ahead and either call AT&T or Apple to see if there is something wrong with your iPhone. There could be a problem with the phone or the software that could be interfering with the way that the device receives notices of voicemails. However, hopefully with the steps described above you’ll be able to retrieve the messages left for you and you won’t be “accidentally” blowing off your friends, family members, and co-workers.

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Google Voice comes to Gmail

by Shaun

As you may have noticed Google has really been stepping up their game the past couple of months or so and came out with another cool feature today.  Google Voice for those of you that don’t know has been around for a little while.  For me personally, there was no real advantage to Google Voice as all it did was give me another phone number and a place to check my voicemails online.  What I really wanted from it was for it to be somewhat similar to Skype, but with Google’s magic, be better than Skype.  Well, today, Google may have taken a step in that direction.

This morning Google introduced Google Voice integrated into Gmail.  Basically, to make this very easy to explain, it is basically Skype in a web browser.  The advantage to this is that you can take advantage of Google Voice from any browser and you are not limited to an app that you have to download to your computer like Skype.

When you look at the left hand column in your Gmail you will see your Chat box and you will see a “Call Phone” button.  When you press this button you will see the dialer that you see above.  From here you can press the phone number of the person you want to call or start typing in their name and if you have added this person’s phone number to your Gmail contacts then their phone number will show up as well.  If you don’t have your Address Book contacts synced with your Gmail Contacts, hre is a post to get your Address Book contacts to sync with your Google contacts.

Overall the call quality was pretty decent for VOIP.  For right now calls to and from anyone in the United States is free and there is a small fee for other countries.  This is great news for people here in the US as now I can call other people in the US for free and not use my cell phone minutes.  This is what really separates Google Voice and Skype.

With Skype you are limited to only calling other Skype users for free.  Google says they are doing this for at least the rest of the year.  Here is to hoping and praying that it stays this way.  I would gladly see ads in my Google Voice if they are willing to let us call anyone in the US for free.  In fact if Google were to keep this the way it is, I would suspect it would definitely put a dent in home phone sales.  Google has a lot of potential in this area and I hope they are able to stick with it and offer a great product.

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Disable iAds on your iOS 4 Device

by Shaun

When Apple introduced the new iOS 4 one of the big things that was introduced was iAds.  These were going to be sweet looking ads from within apps.  The ads were not going to take you out of the app, but run inside of the app.  It was the future of advertising for app developers.  When the new OS came out, you didn’t see many iAds, but now they are starting to crop up more and more.

Personally, I really don’t mind the ads.  Some of them are done well, some of them could use some work.  But, for me, if it means that a developer puts iAd’s into their app so they can make their app free, I am all for it.  At the same time, I do know there are people who don’t like ads period and don’t want them.  Well, this quick tip is all about disabling iAds, to a degree.

What you have to do is grab your iOS 4 device like an iPhone, iPod Touch, and soon an iPad and go to the following address http://oo.apple.com.  Again, this will only work on an iOS 4 device, so if you try this on your computer, it will not work.  Another thing to keep in mind is that when you are taken to this site, it will automatically opt you out.  So if you don’t want to be opted out, then don’t go to the address.  When you do go to the address, you should see something like the picture below.

Now, you have to be careful here and read the fine print on the site.  Apple says that you have opted out, but you have not necessarily opted out of iAds all together.  Apple wouldn’t be that dumb.  You will just now see less ads that are relevant to your interests.  If you want to do this for all your iOS devices, you have to do it individually on each device.

So why do this?  Well, a couple of reasons.  One, if you don’t like ads, then this will lessen them.  Two, Apple collects information off your device to help tailor the ads according to your interests.  If you don’t want Apple snooping around too much then this would be a good thing to do.

What do you think?  Are you planning on opting out?

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