My favorite fashion blogger Hillary is doing a giveaway on her blog, byhillary.com, for a fancy pants Hana Flat Iron courtesy of Missiko.

It may not seem like a gadget to most, but a good flat iron is something every curly haired gal needs in her tech arsenal.  They are pretty awesome these days–adjustable temperature, ceramic plates, and other cool features that help you get your hair as straight as possible.

I hope that fate intervenes and picks me as the winner, since my hair confounds many lesser flat irons!    If you’re interested, head on over to Hillary’s blog and find out the ways you can win!  The entries close soon, so hurry!

http://www.byhillary.com/2010/02/you-are-gonna-want-to-read-this-hint-it.html

I’ve been waxing poetic on my Twitterstream about my Apple TV’s new lease on life, thanks to the Boxee Beta and a few related hacks.  A few friends have asked what exactly I did, so I thought I’d put the process together here.

I’m a Boxee beta tester, but you too should be able to get the Beta as it is released to the public.  There’s just one problem–there is no Beta release for the Apple TV.  But, never fear…the community is on top of things.  I honestly think that the Boxee Beta install is even easier than the Alpha ever was.

Ready to install?  The details are after the jump! …..Click here to read more

About a month ago I posted about having trouble with Boxee after I upgraded to the latest rolled out version.  I was unable to play files that it had played before with ease–it kept crashing the software and rebooting my Apple TV.

I received a great comment to my Boxee post from a guy named Tom, who worked with Boxee (pretty obvious from the @boxee.tv email address!), but I didn’t realize right away that Tom was the co-founder!  Bad software fan.  I was very pleasantly surprised to receive the comment, which offered to help me figure out the problem.  Not only was it just a nice gesture, but he was really committed to helping me figure out the problem.  Tom was incredibly helpful and responsive during the entire troubleshooting process…we emailed back and forth and I followed some instructions given to me, and through the sending of logs and following Tom’s tweaks, I got everything working perfectly.

You’ve made a big Boxee fan an even bigger devotee with your dedicated customer service, Tom!  Thanks so much.

I use an old-school tape adapter in my car when I want to listen to my iPhone while I drive.  I live and drive in a heavily populated area, and the FM band is crammed full of stations, so the FM transmitters do not usually work very well for me.  Barring removing my antenna like my husband has done on his car, the only real solution is a tape adapter, since my 2003 model stereo does not feature a direct line-in.

It has always worked great, even back when I was rocking a Discman and oodles of mp3 CDs.  When I moved to the iPod, it continued to work perfectly.  However, since I started using my iPhone as both my phone and main source of music, I have run into a problem.

Every time something is plugged into the headphone jack, my iPod music starts to play.  It doesn’t matter if anything else might be supplying audio to the stereo, such as Pandora or last.fm.  It happens only with things that are non-Apple–I don’t experience it with the stock Apple earbuds at all.

Sometimes it helps if I start the other application (like Pandora), get the music playing, THEN plug in the tape adapter.  Other times nothing seems to help and I give up in frustration.  All I really want is to be able to listen to my awesome Pandora stations on my 30+ minute commute, is that so wrong?

Research I’ve done on the Internet has netted me plenty of gripes from other people with the same problem, but no actual solution.  According to what I’ve read, even Apple doesn’t really have a fix for it.  I don’t know if I should take my iPhone in and complain, or if I will have the same problem with another iPhone.  I suppose I should do it before the end of August, when my 1-year warranty runs out.

Is anyone else having the same problem?  Have you been able to fix it?  Inquiring tech divas want to know.

This weekend, I’m attending my second Dallas WordCamp, a local event that showcases not just the amazing WordPress blogging system, but things you can do to make you a better blogger, designer, and community builder.

I attended my first WordCamp last year and I had an absolute blast.  I felt very at home in an auditorium full of mostly techy geeks–many of them even geekier than me in some ways!  I sat in a sea of mostly MacBooks and MacBook Pros.  I on the other hand was rocking my portable yet underpowered Eee PC, tethered to a precious spot on the power strip.  Though I didn’t want to admit it at the time, the Eee PC was more of a conversation piece than a true mobile workhorse.  I was working with a less that satisfactory Windows Mobile phone that was far outstripped by the iPhones I could see other people using.  Hell, the thing didn’t even want to make calls properly, let alone do anything fancy.  I felt almost lost–I was usually the most “techy” person in a group, but I had clearly met my matches at WordCamp.

WordCamp is a place that showcases technology, not just for what it can do for blogging, but what it can do for attendees.  That was my first chance to see mobile technology in widespread action, not just how I applied it to my day to day or specialized needs.

This year I am rocking much better technology with my Dell Mini 9 Hackintosh and my iPhone 3G.  Unlike last year, I don’t have to stay tethered to a power strip to stay connected (although I did, mostly because it was there).  I have better processing power, better battery power–and that translates into better communication power in a setting like WordCamp.

Because I have mobile technology that actually works as advertised in a mobile setting, I am able to connect that much more with the presenters and my fellow attendees.  I’m able to see a running conversation about the event, and contribute to that conversation as it happens.  I have choices in how the information being given out gets to me, and I have avenues to even more information as it is shared in the group.  Would I be able to do that with my Eee PC and my sadly dumb smartphone?  Yes, I would–but would I be able to do it as easily, or as elegantly?  Probably not.

I think there is something very important in having a setup that works for you; having the perfect gear is not necessarily about having the newest and fastest laptop, or an HD camera in your bag at all times.  It’s about having the kind of equipment that can get you through the day at a place like WordCamp, that can allow you to communicate and create and evolve on the go.

I find it fascinating to watch technology become a part of our lives and the way we work, play, learn and communicate with each other.  WordCamp is an excellent study in that, not just from a macro level but from a microscopic level, watching each individual participate in their own way with their own gear.  I love watching mobile technology in action, used the way it was intended to be used.

I really hope a fix comes out for this soon…I just updated my Apple TV to the new 2.4 update and reinstalled Boxee.  Boxee’s brand new alpha, build 0.9.12.6566, really doesn’t want to play anything from my four seasons of Farscape.  I’ve renamed the offending files, deleted my profile and reinstalled it, and still no love.

I was able to watch an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, I was able to stream an episode of Nurse Jackie, but I absolutely cannot get Farscape to play.  Hulu also does not work as intended, though Hulu on Boxee is always up and down so that doesn’t really surprise me.  Instead of playing the actual video it just goes to the video’s web page.

Please roll out a fix for this soon, Boxee devs!  I am otherwise REALLY happy with the new interface.  It is about a million times snappier, things update from the network source a LOT faster, and I like what you’ve done with the new layout.

So, since Boxee seems to approve of True Blood, I’m going to go watch it.

I have been looking forward to push notifications on the iPhone ever since they were first announced.  I knew that programs like instant messaging on the iPhone would be truly usable then, because you wouldn’t have to “sign out” to do something like check an email or make a call.  It was a long wait, but the app I have been waiting to get push notifications FINALLY got the App Store Update tonight!

IM+ 3.1 is live and it is awesome! IM+ is my instant messenger app of choice on the iPhone, at least so far.  Beejive IM is very buggy and unstable (I get TONS of crashes on it) and I use multiple chat protocols, so AIM is out simply on the basis that it only connects to one service.  IM+ has been the best app for me since it was released.  I had been using the free version, but when the price dropped in anticipation of the 3.1 update, I purchased the full version.

Push notification works FLAWLESSLY with IM+.  I have been signed in all night, and the IM push messages are pretty much instantaneous.  There is no lag at all in chat notifications.  I noticed that there is a slight delay between when I receive a Twitter DM to my email and when I get the notification through IM+, but I have myself signed in to Twitter through IM+ anyway.  I mean, how awesome is it to get @ replies and DMs pushed to your phone without wasting text messages?  I’ve been waiting for that.

Finally, a chat program gets a coveted spot on my front app page.  I am very picky about what goes on that page–it’s where most of the stock iPhone apps go (YouTube, Calculator, Maps, Clock, Settings, Camera, Photos, Messages) and my top used apps (The Weather Channel, Stanza, Tweetie, and Byline).  Before, chatting was sort of inelegant and I rarely used it unless  I was stuck somewhere and totally bored, or at home and away from the laptop.  Now IM+ lives next to Byline so that I can access my chats at the touch of a fingertip.

Thanks for building a great product, Shape Services!  I look forward to enjoying push messaging at last.

After almost two full days with the new iPhone 3.0 software, there are a handful of  things that stand out for me as clearly AWESOME…things I wish had been a part of the iPhone OS since the beginning (or at least the introduction of the iPhone 3G).

1) Copying multiple photos from the Camera Roll to email. This is so freaking handy, especially when I use my iPhone to take snaps of something I am reviewing, or a series of photos of a single subject. It is super easy to just throw them into an email now!

2) Shake to shuffle the iPod. This is just intuitive and should have been part of the OS all along, given the accelerometer.

3) Spotlight search. It is so handy to be able to search instead of flip through pages of apps or cycle through tons of contacts.

4) Snappier performance in the Camera. One thing I hated about the camera was the extreme lag I often experienced when opening it, or trying to go from the Camera to the Camera Roll. The increased performance makes it a lot more usable.

5) Push notifications. Not a lot of apps have this enabled yet, but I can’t wait. IM+ is probably my most anticipated push notification app…it will be awesome to be logged in to IM whenever, wherever.

One of the main reasons I wanted to jailbreak my iPhone was to be able to scrobble the tracks I played on my iPod to my last.fm account.  I really love last.fm, both for the radio features and just to have a history of what I’ve been listening to.  I like to track my habits, “love” certain songs in last.fm to remember them, and discover new music by playing artist stations (in a similar manner to how I use Pandora).  I hate having to remember to sync my iPhone just to scrobble things, so when I found out you could auto-scrobble directly to last.fm AS you used your iPod, well…let’s just say it didn’t take me long to break my iPhone out of the slammer.

Now, with iPhone 3.0, there is an application called iScrobbler that allows you to scrobble directly from your phone.  You add your music (as much or as little as you want) and listen to it from inside the app.  As long as the app is open, your played tracks will be scrobbled.  Not as elegant as a small application running in the background…but it’s a start. According to a post in the last.fm forums about the app, you can also start playing tracks on your iPod, and as long as you start the app before the first song ends, it will scrobble that track and all tracks played until the app is closed.

I have downloaded it, but not used it yet.  My biggest complaints so far are that I really hate the color scheme–it is an inelegant mix of orange and yellow that quite frankly hurts my eyes–and the track information (artist, album, title) is in a very small font.  But, like I said, it’s a start.  I look forward to seeing this app grow and possibly seeing something cooked up that will allow background scrobbling in iPhone 3.0.

If you’ve been getting a sync error (Incorrect URL is what I was experiencing!) when Pocket Informant for iPhone tries to sync up with your Google Calendar, there is a quick and easy fix for it.

Simply go into Settings > Sync > Google Calendar and do a Reset Sync. I chose Erase Local Data since I had nothing that wasn’t already on the GCal side and it synced up like a charm! No more errors.

A side note–I am loving the shake to sync feature! It’s a cute and quick way to update the calendar. Because it is so handy I turned off Sync at startup on both GCal and Toodledo…that way I can get to my calendars that much faster. Every second counts, after all!