Need a new site, want to post more, but who has the time?

23 Sep

It all started with good intention. As a guy never short of an opinion or point of view it only made logical sense to churn out a blog. I’d offer insights, post some designs I’ve been working on, code samples for tinker projects and just put myself out there in the community. I mean it sounded logical right?

Well judging by my lack luster posts and calendar that looks like a bad game of jenga I’d say its about time I start thinking about retiring this blog and shoot for a more “at a glance” homepage that I can update on a fairly regular basis.

See moreĀ about me , link in with me, and definitely follow me on twitter @petesena

Thanks for viewing

How do Colors Affect Purchases an Infographic

20 Sep

Steven Johnson on where good ideas come from

24 May

Great, Fast, Cheap Pick one

14 Apr

a Facebook obsessed world gets an infographic

25 Feb

The World Is Obsessed With Facebook from Alex Trimpe on Vimeo.

Oh so thats why you should sleep more!

29 Dec

My new years resolution is def gonna be to get more sleep!

Awesome Projection Mapping on IAC hq

23 Dec

How to drastically improve the HTC Incredible’s Battery Usage

23 Nov

So I couldn’t wait any longer to join the touch screen revolution. I was getting tired of my blackberry and made the jump. I quickly unpacked the new HTC Incredible with high hopes. The speed and UI was awesome but I pretty much couldn’t do anything without plugging it in every few hours. It was literally just completely dying.

I googled, read forums and all I got was mixed reviews and feedback.

So I started tinkering with the settings and I’ve found a technique which literally improved my battery life by at least a half day.

With normal usage I can literally make it a day and a half without recharging.

Naturally if you are obsessively using foursquare or other apps that tap into the GPS you are going to want to purchase an extended battery.

To really maximize the battery life there are a few key tweaks you can make which will make a world of difference.

  1. Get an App Killer. While most Verizon or other Cell phone stores will tell you to grab the little green guy (Advanced Task Killer) I have found that Task Panel X is a great deal more effective for killing apps. The only application I’ve needed to put in the ignore list is “clock” in fear of not having my phone wake me up in the morning. I’ve set it so when I lock my phone it auto-kills applications.
  2. Change your Screen timeout. Goto Settings > Display > Screen Timeout and change the setting to 15 or 30 seconds. The less bright your screen is the less it will suck from your battery. When you don’t need the brightness at 100% don’t leave it there. I use theĀ  “power control” widget which lets me quickly toggle Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, Sync and brightness depending on my situation. If my phone is sitting in my pocket not hooked up to anything its pointless to leave sync services, wifi or bluetooth running so simply toggle them off.
  3. Now comes BY far the biggest tweak which made an instant noticeable difference. Change your Sync Settings. If you are using Microsoft Exchange or even Gmail your phone is consistently looking for new emails. Why does your phone need to look for new emails when its locked and sitting in your pocket? The second you pull your phone out and go to check your emails your phone will in seconds pull in the latest emails. Even someone like me who is processing 200+ emails a day only needs to have the setting running every 15 or 30 minutes. To get here goto Settings > Accounts & Sync. If there are things like Stocks or Twitter for HTC sense that you are not using make sure you disable them too so the green icon is not highlighted.
  4. Train your App Killer. Goto your phone and literally open and app, then hit home and open another app. Open up Task Panel X and look at all those applications running! hold down each of them and be sure to “Add to Auto Kill list”. There are some applications that will run as a service such as Qik, Hootsuite or Kik Messenger to name a few of mine. Services you will have to manually terminate but to be quite honest you don’t really need to do this. For those of you that wish to do this goto Settings > Applications > Running Services > from here you can see all the services and click on them to manually kill them. Do not kill the Google Services Framework, Transaction Service or any other applications that mention the Android operating system.

So there you have the short list of things you actually should pay attention to for increasing your battery life.

If you have tested this and found success please share this post with your friends and comment so when I stumble on random stuff like this I’ll keep posting it.

Chax, the iChat preference pane you wish you had.

23 Nov

Whether you are an old Apple fanboy or a recent convert instant messaging is something no computer geek is complete without. After all the irc chats, forum flame wars and blog lurking everybody taps into some type of instant messaging program for their one to one conversations. For me it was first Aol (yes i’m getting old I know) and then aim. Recently I’ve settled for iChat or Adium for my mac instant messaging program. File sending is easy, and the bare-bones UI does basically what I need it to.

Despite the basic essentials of video chat, file sending and messaging there are a few little gems that I miss from some instant message clients like Trillian, or Adium.

I Stumbled upon this awesome little gem for ichat today and figured i’d share. Chax is a handy little installer (DMG) that adds the following “missing” features into iChat.

  • Growl Notifications – Adium Style
  • Built-in, searchable log viewer. Along with Text Export. No more .ichat files
  • Change preferences right from within ichat.
  • Unified Contact List

Download Chax here

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Bounce Rate, an Infographic

18 Nov