Open the Settings app and select iCloud. From there go down to the “Storage & Backup” button. Once you tap that you’ll see where you can enable the iCloud backup and start a manual backup.

Once you enable it and create a backup to start, you can tap on “Manage Storage” which will show you any and all device backups on your iCloud. Taping on any of those will bring you a menu where you can select individual apps that get backed up, or not.

On my iPad, I dont want to backup my pictures because I’m going to let Photo Stream do that. I also dont want to backup my comic books or my Wired magazines. I unchecked those three apps and the backup size went from 4.8GB to 873MB. That’s more like it!

Disabling images on my iPhone (for the same reasons) allowed me to go from 1.7GB to 233MB on the iPhone.

I now have two devices backing up to my iCloud and they only take around 1GB of my 5GB of storage.

I expect Apple to allow you to purchase more storage once the service actually goes live but I feel like this is the better solution either way. There are just things you dont need in the event of getting a replacement for a iCloud enabled device.

Yeah, thats the Quick Bar right now. A huge drain of Twitter’s cool.

I tend to agree with Steve Jobs on ease of use, and a one-click subscription is really convenient… But… 30%… for credit card processing? That’s ridiculous.

I mean, they host apps. They do approvals and things like that, but they do nothing for Netflix. They do nothing for Hulu. They’re going to strong-arm 30% of their monthly subscriptions, or pull the apps out of the app store?

How is that good for the consumer?

On the bright side… Deadline is June 30th. I guess we know when iOS 5 will be coming out.

Is it? MySpace was huge, Newscorp bought it because of that reason. Nobody knows who Tom is anymore. Friendster? AOL? ICQ? All of these services are still around but are but a skeleton of what they used to be. There’s a big difference between online and relevant. Either way, Diaspora is not here to destroy Facebook it’s here to give users choice. There is really no alternative to Facebook if you want a clean online profile this will change soon. Will it get to 500M users? Probably not, but the part people forget is that…

Nobody is going to host their own seeds.

Hosting your own seed is too complicated, people would have to actually care about what theyre doing and keep up with updates to the base code and I’m sure most people would not want to and actually nobody has to, you pick where your seed lives. Diaspora mainly describes a connection method, there is no need for a central site to store all the information. The way I see it this is something that companies like last.fm would love to enable for their users. A whole lot of music centric seeds. You’d store your profile there, and it’d talk to everyone else, the site where you joined from does not matter because all sites can talk to each other. If you want to think of the possibilities of this, think of it this way, what if Facebook itself gained Diaspora capabilities? If Facebook could read/write to Diaspora seeds, you’d have the universal network, and people could still use Facebook if they wanted.

What am I talking about?

Facebook has its own IM network right? Well that IM network is based on Jabber. Completely open. I connect to Facebook IM through iChat on my mac. It’s in Facebook’s interest for people to keep using Facebook. There are people who refuse to join Facebook on principle, those people could be swayed by something like Diaspora because they’d get to talk to their friends, and share things about themselves without having to give others this information. Is this a best-case scenario? yes. I’m just thinking of what the possibilities are.

Also, remember Diaspora never said anything about them wanting to be the next Facebook, they want to give you choice. You’ve just been given choice.

A social network is nothing more than a way to communicate with others. There is no reason for anyone to have to go out of their way to do this by signing into a specific site, or using specific software. It should be ubiquitous in any and all sites/applications. This is that first step.

Open Source software is here, it has been here, and it is the future.

The problem with Open Source software is that openness gives you too many options, everyone can contribute code and modify it to do the task at hand. You then have open source projects that need a governing body to handle releases and they limit the scope of that project.

For example you have Firefox, if you are feeling adventurous you can download he nightly snapshots or branch your own version. Mozilla will never support your branch but you’re welcome to do it. If you take Drupal, this is a project that the White House has taken and they’ve even contributed code back. The release of Drupal 7 is just a group of selected features and not the whole collective knowledge and improvements that the community has made to it.

The underlying tech for OS X and iPhone OS is Darwin. Darwin is an open source distribution of Linux (Now called PureDarwin), much like Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu. (Apple’s OS X 10.6 open source projects)

Apple’s systems are closed, yes, but they’re easily opened.

As far as I know Apple has yet to go after any jailbreakers. Last year they claimed that it violated their copyright, but that was about it. I actually believe this to be proof that part of their contract with the music and movie studios requires them to take measures to secure their content and not that Apple is trying to stop it. I mean, any google search can give you a handful of ways to jailbreak the phone no takedown notices to be found.

Do I agree with the App Store approval process? Absolutely not.

My problem is not that there is a process however, my problem is with the secrecy. My problem is with apps that have played by the rules and have not been approved because Apple does not feel like it. Am I upset that all the boob and swimsuit apps are gone? Not really. Am I upset Google Voice isn’t there? You bet.

At the end of the day I am left at a decision I have to make.

If Apple and Google go their separate ways, which one will I follow? At this point, Google

Google has Android, and no matter how much I complain about how complicated I find it to use, its just because I have not given it all the attention I could have. If i had to use it on an everyday basis I’m sure I’d be more than happy with it. Having a choice in manufacturers also gives you the ability to pick a phone that you really feel is right for you (physical keyboard or not). Oh and Android is also built on Linux.

I feel like I can give my iPad to my mom and she will be able to just enjoy it and not have to deal with settings and confusing dialogues. Things that I am okay dealing with, I do not feel “trapped”, I do not feel “limited” and at the same time I do not feel entitled.

One of Cory Doctorow’s big hang-ups with the iPhone and the iPad are that they should have a “hidden setting” that enables me to jailbreak the OS and install any application I want and that way it would be sanctioned by Apple. While this would be nice I think its just cynical to believe that they do not do it because they want to hurt innovation. They do not put that setting there because then they’d have to support it. They’d have all sorts of people coming into the Apple Store complaining about how their phones got messed up and the reason for the mess-up was an app that was not on the App  Store.

When I mess up my phone because I messed with it, I know I cant expect help from Apple, they warned me this would happen. Just like back in the day when I installed LiteStep on my Windows machine and it took over Explorer.exe and I couldn’t figure out a way to get either of them to show up, it wasn’t an option on Windows “install LiteStep” or I would have been tempted to call Microsoft for support.

I have the best of both worlds on my phone, I have a very controlled App Store experience that has given developers like EA and Capcom the confidence on a platform to release excellent games on it (Go try out Street Fighter IV on the iPhone), and I also have a completely open environment where I can change anything I want on the phone through the Jailbroken app stores.

I’ve had to do a complete recovery restore from my iPhone since I’ve been jailbreaking. I’ve also had to format my Windows machine when I was messing with it. These are things I am okay doing and everyone that is interested in how technology works should do.

You know who shouldn’t do it? My mom.

On monday Meebo released their client for iPhone. They had announced this well over a year ago during the iPhone OS 3.0 preview event saying how they needed Push Notifications to do what they really wanted to do. The first time they presented the app for aproval was last week.

After using it for a few days I am willing to replace my copy of AIM with it. The colors are very light and it feels inviting to type. The client can save and read your history online, this is what I thought even Trillian was missing (on the mac at least, never tried to play with the iPhone version).

My biggest problem with it so far is that it still doesn’t have metacontacts. Hopefully that’s coming sooner, rather than later.

While I’ve been waiting for this App for a while, it has outdone my expectations. The other mobile IM applications have been put on notice… specially the $10+ dollar ones.

Pingdom notified me of this and I kind of ignored it at first. The site was down twice that night. The first time for 1h 40m, the second for about 30 minutes. I personally stopped the server the second time as I configured a tighter memory allocation for Apache.

It’s been my first day with the monitoring turned on and it’s already helped me identify a problem and alerted me to the first time that said problem has manifested itself.

I’m going to set this up with a twist for the properties at work, I’m that impressed.

Plans are $9.99/month for 5 sites or $39.99 for 30. Those two plans come with a seven day free trial. They also offer a single site solution for free, which is the one I am using.

Sorry for the downtime, you can thank Pingdom for alerting me. If you want to check them out theyre over at Pingdom.com

Apple told everyone that they had to wait until 3.1 for Augmented Reality apps to be approved on the iPhone 3GS. Yelp, did it anyways in the form of an easter egg.

I am so happy about this and at the same time I am having a very severe case of iPhone 3GS envy… I have convinced myself that I do not need the new phone because my 3G is good enough but it is just so cool to see these applications start to leak out.

When Apple announces 3.1 (My bet is during the iPod event that’s been rumored on 9.9.9) all of these little apps are going to take over. I mean remember three years ago when all of the talk was on Jeff Han’s multitouch TED presentation? Then we got the iPhone and it became reality. Then the dream was to have applications to do everything from banking to gaming inside of your little-wonder device. That is now also true. Augmented Reality is just as big of a jump and we are getting right against it now.

Source: Mashable