UNREALBANTER Has A New Sidekick On Tumblr

I’ll be using my newly setup Tumblr blog to post those “other” posts everyone does. If I watch a movie and have a quick thought on it, but it’s not worth going into detail about, I’ll use the Tumbr blog instead of cluttering this one up.

Same goes for many other topics, but you get the idea. So follow it, or just stay tuned here on the main blog, because I’ll be posting short link posts to the ones worth reading. I might just do a digest type post once a week or so detailing what’s been going on over there. It won’t even be that much different because I chose a theme (see below) that makes it all familiar!

I’ve added Disqus comments as well, so don’t be frightened. And for those new to Tumblr, the header / title links are NOT permalinks, they’re EXTERNAL links. You must use the permalink icon on the bottom of the post, or click the comment count. Cheers.

Here it is — UNREALBANTER on Tumblr

From UNREAL BANTER: “Your Best Bet When Holiday Shopping For Electronics (gdgt)”

A must-read post about why you should be using GDGT to help you find amazing prices for gadgets and electronics for Black Friday and the whole Holiday-Season! LINK TO THE POST!

Here’s an excerpt from the post:

When it comes towards the holidays, everyone gets crazy—we all know that. But we also get extremely cheap, and we find out later—when all the holiday shopping is done—that there were tons of better deals we could’ve anticipated, but hadn’t found.

This isn’t the “Holiday Shopping Breakdown” post (that’s coming beginning of December)—this is a showcase of the spot you all should be browsing until that holiday shopping craze floods in.

What’s this spot? A fairly new site I may have mentioned before called GDGT. (Obviously stands for Gadget) It has a parent company, Past Future. They’ve done a great thing. From what I can remember, GDGT has only been around for one or maybe 2 holiday seasons.

Continue Reading!

Unreal Banter is my new blog! I’m still available for questions, comments, and conversation here though! Still monitoring this site, and updating accordingly.

Please give it a look, I’ve put a lot of work into starting it up! I will still be showing the important posts on here just like this for you lazy readers ;)

New BLOG ‘Unreal Banter’ — That’s Where I’ll Be.

If you’re looking for some new content, head over to my new blog Unreal Banter. It’s the same ol’ me, just re-organized. I needed a fresh start if I were to start this back up again the right way.

I’ve had this self-named WordPress.com blog since about, 2005. It’s been 7 years. Content ranges from awful, to awful-est. I really needed a blank slate this time, I can’t just keep leaving and coming back if it’s going to be the same ol’ slate.

So check it out!!

ALSO, if you still stumble on something on this site, I’m still allowing emails for new comments and such, so I will still be joining the conversation over here, as long as it lasts. But all the new content will be on Unreal Banter.

And YES, still a WordPress.com website. Why don’t I get a domain? I’m asked that 100 times a month, and say the same thing. I’m broke. Won’t be dropping cash for something I can’t seem to do 24/7. Sure, I moderate, conversate, etc 24/7 but writing every single day all year round isn’t something I can do if I want to move on with life.

You catch my drift. So what are you waiting for? FOLLOW Unreal Banter!

Get subscribed now! I’m getting my initial amount of posts done before I begin laying them out, FYI. So I can stick to a posting schedule. Talk to me on Twitter for updates of when I start posting. By Friday, you will see the first.

iCloud – As Simple As It Could Possibly Get..

Apple has released iCloud for Mac OS X Lion as well as iCloud in iOS5. I’m not exactly going to write an article here. I’m going to lay it out as simply as it can be laid out. Screenshots and lists are all you people want to see anyway, so here we go.

iCloud in iOS5 & OS X Lion

iCloud is fully integrated into anything you do on your iDevice that has to do with your Contacts, Calendars, Mail Accounts, Bookmarks and other information. Apple did this right and gave us all of this functionality for the good price of, FREE.

I Get Personal With Behance’s Action Book / Action Method

Aside from hunting for worthless free WordPress themes, the death of Steve Jobs and the hourly wait for iOS5—I’ve been away for a few days.

First of all, if you’re a creative person without you own laptop.. You’ve come to the right post.

I found the perfect helper for all of this downtime. The elegant, social-creative-professional-portfolio website, Behance.net has a sub-company titled, Creatives Outfitter. They make incredible notebooks, notepads, etc. There’s much more to it.

These aren’t your usually stationary. We’re talking, elegant-creative-productive-professional. That’s what Behance is all about in the first place. I spent around $15. I’d never spend fifteen bones on a pad of paper. Unless, it gave me a template allowing me to get shit done. That’s what this does.

I purchased the Action Book. I’ve spent the last 6 days writing in it. It helps you prepare for anything you’ve decided to call a project. From simply something at home that you’d like to create steps—to be more productive. From business meetings, to planning blog posts, the action book alone has everything you need to be at the top of your game. I used it to detail out this post itself. It was a late night so i wrote a ton, and won’t be sharing everything, but just enough.

Uses

1. Bloggers without laptops – I, personally do not own a laptop. I’m still stuck on my 2007 iMac, and I’ve been wanting to switch to a MacBook Pro since, most likely the day I bought the thing. SO when I’m sitting in my living room watching tv, I don’t have the luxury of hittin up my homies unless I’d like to use the iPhone that i smashed to pieces practically. I went nuts with the Action Book and knocked out huge details on about 4 posts I’d like to use for @zakkforchilli. Some, I’ll probably throw away, but It’ll be good to have the extra ideas floating around for later projects and such.

See more+screenshots after the break! I love this thing!

Spotify: The Best-Worst Startup; Facebook Needs to Run Things [In Depth Review]

Occupying most of the time I spend on my computer / the internet has been Spotify. It has been a huge pleasure using it, and I’m actually proud to say that it mostly, for me, replaces iTunes. Especially, iTunes Ping. Spotify flourishes where iTunes falters.

For those who aren’t familiar, I will quickly touch on what Spotify has been doing lately. Facebook. At f8 this year, (Facebook’s annual dev conference) they announced they would be taking music to a whole new level on Facebook. They’ve incorporated services like iheartradio, MOG, and most profoundly Spotify, directly into Facebook.

Spotify is surely the better pick of the bunch newly associated with Facebook. So I went with it, and surely I was more than satisfied. Going hand-in-hand with a webapp and a desktop application, it did what iTunes couldn’t, and flourished with it.

There are things I love about Spotify’s new move, and some things I’m not a fan of within the apps.

Read tons more + SCREENSHOTS after the break.

Firefox 7 vs. Safari 5.1 in Mac OSX Lion – RAM Usage Stats [VERSUS]

Today, Mashable decided to report on the newly released Firefox 7’s memory usage. They based it on Flash running and Flash not running. They used Hulu HD video streaming for the Flash test and they used a Mac running Lion. Lifehacker reported on Firefox 7’s memory usage vs Opera 11, Internet Explorer 9 and Google Chrome 14. They chose to leave out Safari “since they are using Windows,” which makes no sense since Safari is for sure, still on Windows. So I’m here to fill that gap.

“(all tests were done on Windows, so we’ll be ignoring Safari here)” -Lifehacker

Initial Thoughts

I’ve posted about Safari recently after having a run-in with its ridiculous memory usage. It’s officially, a RAM killer. This following test told me that Safari only folds under immense pressure. I’ll explain later. When you have more than a few windows open, each with a few tabs, you’re going to get a huge overload using Safari. Google Chrome seems to deal with immense pressure pretty well. So far I’ve only had it crash on me two or three times with the same windows open as Safari did. Safari on the other hand, had crash at least three times a day.

So, I figured that even with a couple of windows open using Flash, its performance would be going down the drain. This test proved me completely wrong. It seems that Safari holds up pretty well when you’re not pushing it to its limit.

The test (with SCREENSHOTS) after the break:

Realizing Your Influence On The Social Media Scene, And Using It Correctly

The big names in Social Media such as Mashable and TechCrunch especially, (due to the recent clusterf*** with AOL & Michael Arrington) have great influence over what sites we visit, what apps we use, and mostly what startups and apps we even know about.

If you ask anyone, they’ll tell you that these sites are mostly/partly responsible for at least half of the well-known startups’ success. Startups will tell you that if it wasn’t for TechCrunch, they would be a failed startup. Brands go crazy to get plugged on these sites. Sending flowers to the TechCrunch HQ? Come on; this is making everyone desperate and it’s sometimes sickening. One mention on Mashable or TechCrunch and millions of people are shooting over to your new startup to check it out.

So you’ve got all of this traffic to your startup. Sure, these Social Media giants are giving you millions of page views, but are they really causing these sites success? Most of the time, yes. The only thing these giants can’t do is make up the users mind about signing up. But, those users wouldn’t be there in the first place. So yes, these sites are mostly responsible.

Enough with the introduction. I’m writing this after a small annoyance I came across today. I threw out a couple ranting Tweets about Mashable and how they need to stop dictating influence where and when they don’t need to. That’s a general statement, but you will see what I mean as you read.

Tons! More after the break. The incident, the solution and how we lost: