Jim Lynch: Tech Tips, Opinions and Reviews

Please see the updated version of this article to get the 25 Best Free iPhone Apps. This article is now outdated. Thanks. Looking for free apps for your iPhone? You came to the right place! Yup, that’s right…every single one of these apps is free! You won’t have to pay a dime to get these [...]

Curses are tough things to deal with. Sometimes they take a long time to get rid of as the Red Sox know very well. The team was plagued for 86 years by the “Curse of the Bambino” and it wasn’t until 2004 that the Red Sox finally vanquished the curse by beating the lame New [...]

They say it’s not nice to kick a guy when he’s down but how about kicking him when he’s retiring? Seems to me that that’s fair game. In case you haven’t noticed there’s been a lot of media coverage about Bill Gates retiring from Microsoft and quite a lot of it has been more than [...]

In my last column I pointed out why I’ve decided not to buy the new 3G iPhone. But since then new information has come to light that indicates that the 3G iPhone is ever worse than I thought initially. The 3G iPhone shouldn’t be called the second coming of the Jesus phone; it should be [...]

Well another WWDC has come and gone and this one left me somewhat disappointed. Oh sure, I thought the apps coming out for the iPhone were cool and it looks like the 2.0 software update is going to be great. I’m particularly interested in getting some fun games for my iPhone. I can’t wait to [...]

Microsoft has gone from being a feared technology powerhouse to being a mocked has-been and shell of its former self. The glory days of being able to run roughshod over competitors and instill a sense of terror in rivals have come to a screeching halt as competitors such as Google, Sony, and Apple have rolled [...]

The Hollywood morons (a term of loving endearment I like to use for the movie and TV industry) are still out of it when it comes to the realities of online content distribution in 2008. They seem hopelessly trapped in a 1980s perspective that they have control over their content and can decide when it [...]

Edit: I originally wrote this column for ExtremeTech a while back. We ended up not running it but I thought I’d publish it here for anybody who wants to read it. Take it with a grain of salt as I wrote it a bit tongue in cheek and in a slightly over the top manner. [...]

Apple has finally updated its iMac line, but I find the new offering sorely disappointing. At the moment I own a 20-inch aluminum iMac and, while I love it, I’ve been waiting for news about the new iMacs to see if it’s worth upgrading or not.Well it seems the answer is clearly no, this revision [...]

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for about three years. In that time period, I’ve leveled the following characters: Alliance: * 70 Gnome warlock * 70 Night Elf druid * 61 Human mage * 53 Gnome rogue * 28 Human mage (twink) * 34 Dwarf hunter * 32 Dwarf priest Horde: * 62 Undead priest [...]

Microsoft’s recent announcement of a price cut for Windows Vista illustrates the desperate position the company is in. By all reasonable accounts Vista has failed and Microsoft is desperately trying to prop it up and put some lipstick on a very nasty and very flawed pig. Unfortunately, it won’t work. How did Microsoft arrive at [...]

A while back I wrote a column critical of the PlayStation 3 and its legions of annoying fanboys. The fanboys struck back, resulting in an amusing and enlightening forum discussion. One of the things I raked the PS3 over for was the inclusion of a Blu-ray drive that ended up hiking the price of the [...]

Apple TV was one of those products that I always wanted to like but just couldn’t when it was released. Oh sure, it was neat to see my photos on my TV and play music or watch a TV show or two. The interface wasn’t anything to rave about, and I couldn’t get any kind [...]

My boss Lance recently wrote a column about how Macs need security software too. In his column he pointed out that Mac users are no smarter than Windows users. I respect where Lance is coming from, we’re all human and quite capable of making mistakes. However, I think he got it wrong. It’s not necessarily [...]

Steve Jobs, mercurial CEO of Apple Inc., recently gave an interview to the NY Times. In the interview Jobs shared his thoughts on a number of things including Google’s Android and Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader. When talking about the Kindle, Jobs came out and announced that Apple was busy working on a competitor to the [...]

A few months ago I was reviewing some of my monthly bills and I came to the conclusion that it was time to dump cable TV. Why? Well it turns out that I was paying a significant amount of money for programming that I rarely watched. Altogether I was paying about $140 per month for [...]

I’ve used iTunes for quite a while as my main source for music, TV shows, podcasts, and audiobooks. But I never bothered with it too much for movies because I had no interest in buying most movies. I already have a DVD collection of around 200 movies, and I learned through that experience that it’s [...]

Microsoft’s rivalry with Google heated up considerably this past year when rumors surfaced that Google might release its own operating system to compete with Windows. Has Google finally jumped into the fray with its own OS? Unfortunately, no; gOS is not a “Google OS” nor is it affiliated with Google (though Desktop Linux has reported [...]

As you probably already know, Apple recently released the final version of its Mac OS X Leopard operating system. And, judging by its initial sales (more than 2 million copies sold already), Apple seems to have hit a major home run. So what’s the big deal about Leopard and why should you care? In this [...]

I’ve always been a fan of alternative operating systems. I can’t help it. It’s in my blood for some reason. I loved OS2, then Linux, then Mac OS X, and now BSD. Yep, BSD. Yes, I know that Mac OS X is BSD under the hood, but it’s not quite the same as running a [...]