I love my iPhone. It’s a great communications device. It’s got texting, Facebook, Twitter, email, and more. The only problem with it is the email doesn’t have push notifications. So if you want to check if you have new messages, you have to go to the Mail app. It doesn’t tell you if you have a new email, like Facebook or texting does.

GMail has a way around this. It’s not the perfect solution, but it works. I would really like to see Apple support push notifications from email right out of the box.

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138740

One problem I have is falling in the lake. Does anyone else have this problem? This problem wouldn’t be that bad, except for I usually have a piece of electronic equipment on me and as you know water and electronics do not get along.

The first time it happened, people were telling me all kinds of ways to save the electronic. The easiest and best way I have found is uncooked rice.

First of all let me say that this does not work 100% of time, and does not save hard drives at all.

The first thing you need to do is if an electronic is wet, is remove the battery. I didn’t remove the battery in my cell phone and it fried it.

Next find a container and some uncooked rice. Fill the container with some rice, put the electronic in, and then cover it with rice.

Then comes the hard part, wait. Put the container in a dry place and let it sit there undisturbed for 48 hours, two days.

After two days have gone by, take your electronic out of the rice. Examine it and see if there is still any water in it, if there is, put it back in the rice for another day or so. If you can’t see any water, put the battery back in (which you should also put in the rice) and try to turn it on.

If it turns on, congratulations! You just saved your electronic from death. If it doesn’t turn on, put it back in the rice for another day. If it still doesn’t turn on, sorry, but your electronic is dead.

Some notes:

If you feel comfortable, tear down the electronic some and then put the parts in the rice. This will have a better chance of drying out completely.

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed, LinkedIn. Chances are you are on at least one of these social networking sites. How can you make the best use of these sites though? I am going to share some hacks to make better use of these sites, make you look professional, and make these sites easier to use.

To start off, I am going to share some general things you can do with all social networking sites to make you look more professional. Now these hacks may not be for everyone, but if your looking to get more followers, look professional, or be more social, I would follow these tips.

1. Profile Picture
First impression is everything right? Well your profile picture plays a big part in what people will think about you. If you have a picture of something that isn’t you, how are people supposed to know it’s you? Sure there’s the name, but chances are there are others out there with the same name. Put a picture of yourself as your profile picture, and one where you are the main subject of the picture.

What if you want to look more professional? Don’t put one of you at a party, one taken of yourself in a mirror, or one with many people in it.

2. Smart Status Updates
What I mean by this, is don’t sound like an idiot with your status updates.

How do you do this. One big way is to spell things right. You look like an idiot if you’re saying things like “i is uploadin sum pics to fb now”. Even capitalization, punctuation, and grammar matter.

3. Be Social!
It’s called social networking for a reason. It’s not called “aggrandize-yourself-and-ignore-everyone-else networking”. The point of social networking is to connect with other people, share information, and to be social.

If you are just posting things and not interacting with other people, chances are people won’t be as social with you.

That’s all the general tips I have for right now. Next I will be going into more specifics with Facebook and Twitter as I know a lot about these social networks. If you have experience with another social networking site, why don’t you write a guest post?

A while back, I helped a friend with some computer issues. At first I tried to help them over Facebook, but when that wasn’t working, I knew I had to actually see the screen and be able to control the machine.

At home, each of my computers has TightVNC. That way I can gain access to a machine without leaving mine. Doing that over the Internet is a little harder.

There are tons of programs out there that do that like, LogMeIn. A recent one I hadn’t heard of was featured on Lifehacker, called CrossLoop. It is essentially a VNC server, but you don’t need to know your IP Address (which most people don’t).

I decided to give it a try. I downloaded it, but after having to go through a ton of pages of them trying to get you to upgrade to the pro version. It was really annoying.

With VNC, you need to know the IP Address of the machine. Over the Internet this can be very difficult. So to fix this problem, it gives you an access code and then you can give that to the person you are sharing your screen with. But just because you have the access code, does not mean you can gain access right away. The sharer has to allow it.

It sounds pretty simple and easy, but how easy is it? From the time I sent my friend the download link to the time I saw her screen was about two minutes. Not bad.

What about chatting with the person to find out what’s going on. Open up Notepad? No. CrossLoop has a built in chat. I think most VNC servers do, but I haven’t messed with that. It was really easy to talk with the person on the other end, one thing about it was I could not chat and see what was happening on the screen at the same time. I had to close that chat to see what was going on and to work on it.

There are a ton of other features in CrossLoop, like file transfers, which work very nicely. And with the pro version, you can customize it for your business.

In conclusion, CrossLoop is a great tool for those of us who family and friends come to to fix their computers. Even if they are computer illiterate, it’s still really easy to work on their computer from long away. There are still some minor issues and annoyances, but overall it is a great tool.