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About Me
I'm Michael Koby, and I love technology. I'm also a programmer, currently doing Ruby on Rails development for a small Houston startup. Here I talk about technology, programming, politics, movies, music, and anything else I feel I need to talk about. If you would like to know more, you can check out the About page.Popular Series
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Author Archives: Michael Koby
Secure Yourself in 2012
It’s a new year, and with a new year comes those things called “resolutions.” You know, the promises you make to yourself that you eventually don’t do, or just for get about entirely. But some are slightly easier to do than others. And while I don’t want you to resolve to be more secure online in 2012, I do want you to be more secure online in 2012. Continue reading
Year 2011 in Review
The year 2011 brought about a few great accomplishments, some disappointments, and finally some big changes for me. Lets review some of these. Continue reading
Cutting Cable
In mid-September my wife and I made the decision to cut cable television and go the route of OTA and streaming. It was a tough call, and it required me to do some math and research to figure out if we’d be able to get most of what we got with cable via other means. Good news was that aside from HBO and Showtime shows like True Blood or Weeds, we were going to be able to get most of what we watched on cable via digital downloads. This post will go over how we get our television shows now that we’ve cut the cord. Please note, that while we did cut cable television, we did not cut cable internet. We still get cable internet through Xfinity. Continue reading
Posted in Television
Tagged cable tv, streaming television, streaming video, tv
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Stop Thinking the Fire is an iPad-Killer
Last week, Amazon officially unleashed the Kindle Fire on the public. After a month of speculation, people finally got to be hands on with the device and the reviews came flowing in. Most reviews of the device mistakenly took the point of view that the Kindle Fire was an iPad killer, expecting $500 performance from a $200 device. Again, this was a mistake, and proof that several gadget sites do not understand the product. I would seem that commenters on related threads also have the same problem.
Stop it! Continue reading
Posted in Commentary, Technology
1 Comment
Intro to iPhone Development at Houston Open Dev User Group
Last night at the Houston Open Development User Group, I presented an introduction to iPhone development. Through the course of 2 hours I covered the very basics of iPhone development, from Objective-C to actually creating and wiring up a user interface for an iPhone application. For the demo application, I built a simple Twitter search application that allows a user to type in a search query and see the first 15 results returned from the Twitter search api. Continue reading
Posted in programming
Tagged houston open development user group, iphone, objective-c
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Michael Koby 
How Smartphones are Changing Travel
This was my first out of state road trip in a probably a decade. And it was interesting to me to see how much smartphones have changed how road trips are done. And I don’t mean in the “keep your kids entertained” kind of way. What follows are just a few observations as to how having a smartphone has changed road trips. Continue reading →