When I discovered that I was running out of disk space I immediately started to look for “disk space” apps on the App Store. I found Spacie to be what the HD DR ordered. With Spacie I found that I had multiple version of NetBeans each taking close to 1GB. I had multiple versions of the Android SDK each taking close to 1GB. Spotify was caching over 2GB of data. I found that iPhoto and iTunes was taking the bulk of the space. I easily had 20GB in iPhoto and 40GB in iTunes. In iPhoto, I started to export and backup photo sets older than a year or two so that I could reclaim more space. In iTunes, I found that I had a hundreds of podcasts taking over 100MB each. I pushed these photo sets and podcasts to an external hard drive and reclaimed over 40GB of disk space. Spacie helped me to identify what files where taking the most space and I systematically addressed each folder as best I could.

Spacie finds large files in your hard drive and helps reclaim disk space.

Spacie is available on the Apple App Store. It is currently priced at $1.99 and it’s well worth it since it saved me from having to upgrade to a new hard drive.

For two years straight the iPad has been the most coveted piece of technology on most self respecting geek. The iPad is great for geeks no matter their expertise, music, photography, gaming, social media, etc. A geek that travels a lot or enjoys reading on their iPad when at a coffee shop would enjoy the 3G iPad so that they can always be connected no mater where they are. Whether you give the geek in your life an iPad or if they already have one, there are a ton of great accessories, such as a envelope iPad cases from Poketo.

Poketo Envelope iPad Case

Over this last year there has been an explosion of tablets come into the market such as the Amazon Kindle Fire, and Barnes and Noble’s Nook Tablet. The Nook tablet at $249 is a great bargain but so is the Amazon Kindle Fire at $199. The Nook tablet is a bit faster and more powerful than the Kindle Fire, but if you already own a Kindle or have purchase Kindle ebooks then the Kindle Fire would be the obvious choice.

For the financial whiz in the family I would recommend the HP 12c Financial Calculator. The HP 12c Financial Calculator has a retro HP look and over 120 mathematical functions that would be appreciated by any business and finance power user.

Every engineer needs a notebook and there are no better notebooks than Moleskine notebooks. Moleskine has come out with a limited edition Star Wars notebooks perfect for that die hard fan. For the old school video gamer in the family, they also have a limited edition Pac-Man set.

As everyone already knows, the standard geek uniform is jeans and a t-shirt. Any self respecting geek needs to have some ThinkGeek shirts in his wardrobe. ThinkGeek gear is like Armani Exchange for geeks, binary fashionable and geek chic.

If you need more suggestions, take a look at previous years geek gift guides:

The Ultimate Geek Gift Guide 2010, The Ultimate Geek Gift Guide 2009, The Ultimate Geek Gift Guide 2008

My personal pet peeve with Android devices is the craziness with moving apps from the internal device’s memory to the external SD card. Even relatively recent Android devices such as the Google Nexus and Dell Streak 7 have less than 1GB internal memory so if you download a lot of apps you’ll soon need to move apps around to the SD card. But some apps you can’t move to the SD card so that presents a different issue.

Who cares if the phone’s memory can be extended by using higher capacity SD cards if a one year old device can’t even be upgraded to the latest Android version. So the whole thing with extensible SD cards and moving installed apps from the internal memory to the SD card I find completely and frustratingly useless. The whole concept of an Operating Systems is that best manages the resources of the device, the Android OS should best manage installed applications in either the internal memory or SD based on some intelligence. Why am I doing Android’s job?

Another concern I have with Android devices is that they usually come with a lot of pre-installed apps. For example, my Dell Streak 7 came with Kongregate Arcade app which I can’t remove and reclaim the wasted internal memory. Similarly, carriers and vendors add and customize Android so that no two devices have the same user experience.

My last concern with Android’s lack of polish is its dark goth color scheme. Most application’s menu and option screens are as if they were designed by a goth listening to The Cure. The Android UI design is not “Just Like Heaven.”

Software Development

• To checkin or not to checkin a large changelist five minutes before you go home, that is the question?
• A test like a good movie, has three parts: the setup, the car chase, and the test of the results.
• Testing is like a tax, you have to pay 5-10% to have a good running infrastructure or system.
• Testing takes time, make sure you make the time, because it will save you time in the long run.
• All programmers have a black belt in hubris.
• One bytecode to rule them all.

Thought Leadership

• Your miles may vary, but it often depends on your attitude.
• Passion + Perseverance = Possibilities
• Sometimes you can’t afford to lose a client, but there are other times you can’t afford keep your client.
• Just like there should be no hard coded strings there should be no unwritten rules, or assumptions, or specifications.
• The dumbest people I’ve ever encountered are those that think that the rest of the 99.99% of people are a bunch of idiots.
• If you are unique no one can compete with you.
• Team meetings should not feel like an AA meeting, “Hi, I’m bob and I work here.”

Product Placement

• I’ve used the iPhone apps for Google Voice and G+ and I have to say, Google does not know how to make a good iOS app.
• I’m not liking the new Google Reader look. I would not be surprised if the next version of Google design has ribbons.
• Leave no smart phone behind. Google won’t upgrade the Nexus One to Android 4.0.
• Google is set to update its motto to “Do no evil if you ain’t getting paid for such evil.”
• Android is to Google what Internet Explorer was to Microsoft in the Browser Wars. MS gave IE for free just to take out Netscape.
• Siri is to Apple what Kinect is to XBox what Facebook Connect is to Facebook what Circles are to Google Plus…
• Every time I upgrade a MS product an angel loses his wings.
• Is Amazon also adopting social networking features? I just noticed that Amazon has a like button on its product pages.
• Facebook should update its mission “to trick people to over share and make the world more open, connected, and trackable.”
• Google should update its mission “to organize the world’s information about our users and make it accessible and useful to our advertisers.”
• @att has two options in terms of text messages. Pay as you use for $0.20 or unlimited for $20. What about a third option, disable texting altogether?
• Why does it cost half of the price of a stamp to send or receive a text? It’s endemic of an industry that has no competition or innovation.
• The Kindle Fire tablet is a modern day physical shopping cart for Amazon’s virtual online store.
• History is being made every day, yet @historychannel airs reruns of Ancient Alien.

Quotes

• OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW. – Steve Jobs’ Last Words
• I’m so embarrassed. I wish everybody else was dead. – Bender Bending Rodriguez
• Goodbye monobrains – Bender Bending Rodriguez
• There is no recession for great companies… – Jason Calacanis
• Software is like sex: it’s better when it’s free. – Linus Torvalds
• Coming together is the beginning; keeping together is a process; working together is success. – Henry Ford
• When all men think alike, no one thinks very much. – Walter Lippmann

Randumb

• On Monday mornings we are all zombies.
• Why am I listening to old school British punk rock? #GodSpankTheQueen
• The truth is that truth is absolutely relative.
• And then God said, “Let there be bacon,” and there was bacon. God saw that the bacon was delicious.
• You’re so vain, you probably think this tweet is about you.
• Fist pump for peace.
• Anybody that gets lost in a corn maze is an absolute moron.
• I hate Lifetime movies!
• Business is legitimate thievery.
• Some of the most common elements on earth idiotum and dumbtonium.
• meta-disrupt: Disrupt those disrupting disruption.
• I am, therefore I meme.

Thought Equations

• Meaning > money
• problem = opportunity
• means != ends
• Success > Perfection
• Experience != Information
• Thinking > Knowing
• Do > try
• Platform > product
• Creation > criticism
• Passion + Perseverance = Possibilities

Million Dollar Ideas

• Million Dollar Idea: Online Speed Dating Site
• Million dollar idea: a news channel with nothing but news tickers…
• Million Dollar Idea: self cleaning floors.

Have you ever notice that when you buy a $0.99 song on the iTunes music store you may be charged two or three days later? I’ve noticed that when if I purchase a movie on a Friday and a song on a Saturday, I often don’t get charged until the following Sunday or Monday and when I do both items are charged together. How does this save Apple millions? Typically, when you have to process a customer’s credit card to charge for goods or services, the bank or merchant account that processes the credit card will charge around $0.20-0.30 per transaction and an additional percentage of the total cost after a certain amount. This is why some small business don’t accept credit cards for less than some amount, like $5-10 dollars. If you are processing credit cards for your digital goods online store, PayPal charges a transaction fee of $0.30 plus 2.9% of the total price.

I’ve positive that Apple has negotiated the transaction cost to less what a brink and mortar business would have to pay, but as an example let’s say they pay $.10 per transaction. If you buy a $0.99 song on iTunes Apple still has to pay a transaction fee for charging your card, in this case $0.10 or 10% of the total charged. If you buy two songs over a span of two days and Apple bills you for the both of the $0.99 songs together, Apple will still only pay the $0.10 transaction cost to process the credit card, or just 5% of the total price.

This is why when you purchase items from iTunes it maybe be several days before you are charged, because it is better for Apple to charge you for multiple items than to charge you for individual songs separately.

The Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect in this area in the last few years and we need to bring it back. The way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds; not to talk about mips and megahertz; not to talk about why we’re better than Windows…

Our customers want to know who is Apple and what is it that we stand for, where do we fit in this world. What we are about isn’t making boxes to get people to get their jobs done, although we do that well, we do that better than almost anybody in some cases. But Apple is about something more than that. Apple at the core, it’s core value, is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.

Software Development

• More code, more problems.
• Code. Money. Respect.
• Code war is the new cold war.
• The programer-designer is the philosopher-king or our time.
• Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to gold farm and he’ll eat for a lifetime.

Team Leadership

• When the world is flat and information freely available there is a premium on creativity.
• There is no such thing as free lunch, especially if it’s lobster.
• Give a silicon valley startup founder a lemon and he’ll make a social networking site for people that like lemonade.

Product Placement

• I hope Twitter doesn’t become the next MySpace.
• There is no i in Apple.
• Google is buying Motorola for $12.5 Billion. Google is also developing a autonomous car, so in a few years it might buy Ford.
• It’s not Thanksgiving, so why did Google pay so much for a moto turkey?
• AT&T charges for services you use and most importantly for services you don’t, and they sell you out to the feds on top of that.
• I know that many G+ users are still in the early adopter stages of denial, but honestly, Google does not know how to do social right.

Quote

• Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant. – P.T. Barnum
• Wall Street is now a huge mathematical game of chess where individual companies are just pawns. – Mark Cuban
• Search is dead. What people want is an answer. … You don’t need Trip Advisor, you don’t need Yelp. – @Jason, #TWiST 171

Questions

• Got Woot?
• You think Papa Murphy’s is related to Papa John’s?
• Has Flash lost it’s fizzle?
• If G+ was spun out of Google as an independent company it would be valued at $50 billion.
• What company will be around in 25 years, Apple, Zynga, Facebook, Google, eBay, Microsoft, …???
• Now they are making movies in 4D… What is next, 7D?
• If this is your third startup, are you really still a starting up?
• I just want to know, why are those birds so angry?

Randumb

• When life gives you bullshit, make lemonade.
• Untangling headphones in the dark.
• Current Status: somewhere between FML and IDGAFF.
• Zoned out from being on the zone for so long.
• The future is retro.
• Don’t trust your shit to chance.
• MTV has as much expertise to produce MTV’s Music Awards as the History Channel’s has to produce Ancient Aliens.
• It’s ironic how many people misuse the word irony.
• Even though I haven’t gone back to school for a while now, I can’t resist a good Back To School sale!
• I tired of Shark Week. When will they have Turtle Week or Salamander Week?
• If Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were to be created now they would have been known as Angry Turtles.
• Total Retargeting
• Shift+Happens

Google went at great lengths on this deal, it not only paid top dollar for Motorola but it even created a special “Facts about Google’s acquisition of Motorola” SEO-rich webpage which includes choice quotes from Android partners and a message from Larry Page.

Larry, CEO of Google, wrote about the purchase…

Motorola has a history of over 80 years of innovation in communications technology and products, and in the development of intellectual property, which have helped drive the remarkable revolution in mobile computing we are all enjoying today.

The last Motorola phone I thought was ground breaking was the first generation RAZR. Since then I have not been impressed with their phone offering, including their Android versions. In the press release, Larry made several references of the StarTAC, which Motorola originally released in 1996.

To appease other Android partners and licensees, the press release stated that Motorola will e a independent business unit.

This acquisition will not change our commitment to run Android as an open platform. Motorola will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. We will run Motorola as a separate business

For me, the key and most revealing sentence in the whole press release was the following.

Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.

What struck me about the above quote is how hard Google is spinning this. When competitors buy up patents, it’s anti-competitive but when Google itself pays top dollar for a turkey stuffed with patents it will “increase competition.”

It has been reported that Google is paying $40/share, over 50% on top of the price at the time of the announcement. The reason Google is paying this price is clearly for the over 14,000 granted patents and over 6,500 pending patents Motorola has acquired over time. These patents will add to patents Google has added to it’s patent portfolio.

Even though Google’s latest attempt at a Facebook killer, Google Plus, has been well received it has also generated some of the most passionate arguments against any of their policies. Google Plus does not allow users to use pseudonyms, alias, nicknames, or any online handle other than their real names. There has been opposition against this stance from even within Google engineers tasked with implementing such draconian technology. The reasoning behind this rule makes no sense, and goes against a fundamental human right of self identity. I have the right to go and respond by any name I wish to be known as. In fact, many celebrities often use names other than their real names. Vic Gundotra, the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google does not go by his real name that was given at birth so this all seems hypocritical.

The second misstep is their self serving stance on patents as written in a recent corporate blog post When Patents Attack Android. In this post, David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer at Google, practically accuses Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle of conspiring against Android with “bogus patents.” These are the same “bogus patents” that Google itself had tried to purchased from Novell for $3.14 billion. I doubt that any publicly traded company would bid $3.14 billion on “bogus patents” and in fact publicly complaining about having lost those patents demonstrates that they are not entirely bogus. Having lost the auction for said “bogus patents” Google went on to buy over 1000 patents from IBM for an undisclosed amount.