We recently purchased a new house and with a new house comes new challenges.  One of my goals was to centralize all our video/audio sources in the basement and use an HDMI Matrix to allow any tv in the house to view any of the available video sources.  I'll discuss the challenges and setup of this in another article, but wanted to touch upon a recent success with locating the Xbox 360 in the basement first. By locating the Xbox in the basement the controller response was flaky on the main floor of our house and completely unresponsive on the second floor.  Some research pointed to others extending the wireless range of the controllers through modifications to the controller itself, but with children around I didn't want to tamper with the controllers...

Just saw this come across from a source: The first iPhone 3G to be jailbroken has been shown at the iPhone Dev Blog.  While it's not officially a release announcement, there is a video of the new 3G phone running custom software and a screencap of the Pwnage tool that did it.  Can't wait!

Link: http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/42344032/not-sat-on-our-hands 

As I write this, I have a new 3G iPhone…but yet I don’t. I arrived at 9am this morning at Eaton Center in Calgary (the mall opens at 9:30) to see that the T Booth store was open and there was a line. I quickly lined up and the staff there was friendly, telling me that they had 10 new iPhones and that my timing was impeccable as I was the 10th to arrive. Great! So far, so good. For the next one hundred and eighty minutes however, the line did not move…at all.

The staff at T Booth was not to blame for this, they had one phone on each ear and the computer in front of them trying to get the iPhone activated. What they weren’t expecting however was the massive, country-wide outages for their ‘Sales Center’ web application or the understaffing of Rogers/Fido call center reps. For the entire day (and as I write this, it is approximately 4:30) the staff has been non-stop trying to get activations through (Rogers mandated that you can’t take the phone home and activate later, you must do it in the store). I can only imagine that the situation at thousands of locations across the country is the same, and honestly it screams of poor planning on Roger’s behalf.

It was months ago that AT&T had activation issues when releasing the iPhone in the USA – Did nobody at Rogers think to envision a similar situation here and put extra staff and servers in place? Or perhaps they didn’t really believe their own hype and figured the launch would flop in face of their world-criticized data pricing. Regardless, here I sit without an iPhone in front of me, despite hours of waiting in the store. It’s at the store, with my name on it, but I can’t have it because of Rogers. Fail.

Update: As of 5:20pm the systems were responsive enough to process activations, and as a result I received my iPhone at 6:02pm.

Everything today demands our time - Increasing work schedules, traffic, kids, cleaning the house and other daily commitments drive our stress levels to the breaking point. Below are the top ten ways that technology can help you take back some time for yourself and enjoy life just a little bit more.

1. Automate where possible – The last few years have provided quite a few options for automating daily tasks, including automatic litterboxes, robotic vacuums and mopping bots, lawnmowers that cut the grass then return to the base to charge, automatic indoor plant watering and more. These devices seem like a bargain when you factor in the hours per week they save, adding that time back into your life for things you want to do.