Do you find yourself often wondering where a good place to dine or maybe where to get some great souvenirs in a city you may be visiting for work or leisure would be? Is your GPS just not cutting it for you? Too timid to ask a local for suggestions? But wait! You have an iPhone and Google Maps seems to be working for you. Well, kind of. No worries, mate, SvenOnTech just discovered Schmap! While the name makes me think of having a shot of peppermint schnapps, the new city guide made just for the iPhone goes live with its public beta Monday that’ll help you with all your city guide needs.

With Schmap, you’ll be able to find a nice place to dine, attractions, stores, and many other easy to find items from the simple laid out iPhone-like interface. Drilling down to a place that fits your desires, you’ll be able to find the address, phone number, email address, and web site of the place all with a tap of your finger. Tap on one of the items and the corresponding iPhone application opens it. From dialing the number to showing you where the place is on Google Maps, you’ll be quickly on your way to your new found Point of Interest, or POI as us geeks call it. If you’d rather stay in Safari, just turn the iPhone onto its side and Schmap presents a map of the POI right there befor you! It looks just like Google Maps on your desktop computer. Reason being is, well, it’s powered by Google Maps. Nice! You will also be able to do local city searches once the service is fully initialized.

What I really liked about Shmap is how light-weight it is. EDGE connections are not spiffy by any shot and thankfully the folks at Schmap not only gave us a familiar interface but one that loads quickly, too. Anytime you tap on a form element that needs a number only, a keypad comes up, not the regular keyboard. Yes, a basic thing for any iPhone developer, but man, I can’t even begin to tell you how many iPhone “ready” sites are missing this little thing. Schmap didn’t forget us keypad tapping folks.

Overall, the site offers some useful information for the average tourist but I did find some more mainstream names missing such as Starbucks and Peet’s from the Coffee/Tea category. Donald McMillan of Schmap explained this is because, “The current content does tend to focus on more unique/independent locations”. Don’t worry though, you coffee snobs, McMillan said the local search will kick back your well branded caffeine hits once it is up and running. I noted that also omitted from the Shopping category is malls. I was told by McMillan that malls can be found in “Stores & Arcades”. Both Sacramento and San Jose did return a good sized list for the “arcades”.

Schmap is in beta, so this means things can change, be added, removed, or just plain fixed if there are bugs found. Give it a spin on Monday (www.schmap.com) and be sure to let the Schmap team know what it can do to improve the city guide experience. Until then, take a look at the preview page on your big boy Safari (or other browser.)

Now I need to satisfy this peppermint craving….

Today my iPhone did what my Pocket PC/Windows Mobile phone would do three or four times a day: lock up. I was surfing a web site on Safari and it just locked up. (Later on my Mac, I learned that the site is a full Flash site. Mmm, Apple’s handling that lack of Flash well.) The phone would not respond to the home button nor the on/off button. Holding in the off button for a long period of time still rendered my iPhone a brick. Nothing. Fortunately, I had just read how to soft-reset the iPhone a couple of days ago, so I applied the Apple support trick. Sure enough, after a long seven second count (I used 1, 1,000, 2, 2,000 count instead of the Mississippi one), my iPhone went black and there in the middle of the screen was the Apple logo. Woo hoo! It worked.

Now, I don’t expect perfection from any company but I’ll tell you, a week before something triggered my iPhone into brick mode is very impressive when you’ve used Microsoft gear for nearly ten years. I’m sure when that rumored Flash update hits the phone, then even this won’t be an issue.

I always enjoy connecting to a wireless network (WLAN) with my MacBook Pro. It’s a piece of cake and never a difficult and nerving task unlike Windows XP or even Vista. One thing that’s always bugged me, though, about joining WLANs on my Mac is trying to figure out which one has the strongest signal when in a hotspot rich area. Heck, my own home has three wireless APs alone! In true Apple form, however, I don’t need to use iStumbler to find the strongest signal. Nope, I just need to hold my Option key when clicking the AirPort status menu item. When done, the menu displays in order of strongest to weakest all the hotspots in your Macs reach. I love this!

Thanks to TidBITS for the great tip that I just had to pass along. Be sure to hit the jump to learn more about coconutWiFi, my new tool that may just make me never use iStumbler again.

I’m always telling people, “It’s the little things that makes Apple stand far and wide beyond the competition.” From the way it packages its product to the ability to make any of its computers an external hard drive with a press of a key. Man, I wish all the time that I could put Windows-dead PCs into Target Mode instead of having to physically take apart the PC to gain access to the hard drive with my IDE-to-USB connector. Dell, are you reading?

Today I found another sweet “little thing”. Many Apple users know that if they have more than one bootable partition on their hard drive, they can select which on to boot from at power-up. By holding the OPTION (or ALT) key down after the Mac tone plays, a screen will appear with the various boot up options (including bootable CD or DVDs if present in the drives.) Well, what’s one to do when they purchase a non-Apple keyboard that doesn’t respond in time or the Bluetooth keyboard hasn’t yet bonded? Dig out the original keyboard? Nope, find their remote!

If you are unable to select your bootable partition with a keyboard, then simply press and hold the Menu key on your Apple Remote after the boot tone. Within seconds, you’ll see that familiar boot manager and then you’ll be able to use the volume up (+) key to make your selection and then the Play/Pause to accept that choice. Presto! Up starts your Mac in your selected drive.

Knowing that there had to be further goodies with the remote, I searched and found Wikipedia is there to give you all the delicious things you can do with your Apple Remote. Enjoy!

With temperatures dropping and the snow piling up, skiers and snowboarders are making their way to the mountains. When they do, Verizon Wireless, owner and operator of the nation’s most reliable wireless network, urges winter sports enthusiasts to remember they can count on their wireless service if they keep some wireless winter wisdom in mind:

• Charge your phone or PDA frequently. Cold temperatures can run down the phone’s battery charge more quickly.
• Handle your handset with care. The display cover can become brittle when exposed to cold temperatures for long periods of time.
• Keep your phone in a warm place; avoid leaving it in an outside pocket of your parka or backpack, or in the car overnight.
• Prolonged exposure to the cold may affect the phone’s display screen. When on the mountain, carry it in an inside jacket pocket, keeping it close to your body for warmth.
• Check your phone’s signal strength in a non-emergency situation to know where the signal is strong and where it’s not. Ski area and back bowl coverage may vary depending on topography and altitudes.
• If you hold a yard sale, pick up your phone first to keep snow from melting into the keypad.

“Our ongoing investment in Verizon Wireless’ coast-to-coast digital network makes it possible for winter vacationers to use their wireless phones from the Western Rockies and Cascades to the Green and White Mountains of New England,” said Jack Plating, executive vice president and COO for Verizon Wireless. “Skiers can maximize their time at their favorite mountain by using their wireless phone to check in with families, get in touch with friends in a neighboring condo, receive the latest snow report or make reservations at a nearby restaurant whether they’re in the lodge or on a lift.”

Homes and businesses are inundated with calls from telemarketers. It’s become such a problem that even TV sitcoms such as Seinfeld have added the concern into their story lines. While Jerry was able to make us laugh about this pickle, most aren’t hee-hawing when they pick up the phone at home when it happens to them.

My home number has been swamped with calls from someone trying to sell me something for years. Every year, it seems to get worse. The do not call list, known as the Do Not Call Registry, never helped to a noticeably different state and the answering machine still doesn’t prevent the phone from ringing through the day needlessly.

What to do? Get Packet8.

Packet8 offers a business package called Virtual Office. One of the many features of Virtual Office is Auto Attendant. You all know what auto attendant is. When you’ve called Best Buy or some business and it answers immediately and warns us to listen carefully for the menus have changed (talk about a boy cry wolf, I hear this ALL the time!) and then we make our selection by pressing a number on the keypad. Well, you can add this to your home number and then listen to the results. Silence!

See, the trick lies in using the same ammunition as the telemarketers use: computers. When you receive a call from a telemarketer, a computer dialed your number and then transfers the call to an agent when you pick up the call and activate it by saying “hello” or how ever you answer your phone. When their computer reaches the automated attendant, the transfer may or may not occur. If it doesn’t, then the call is dropped. If it does, the agent then hears a menu and figures it’s a business and hangs up. If neither happens, the auto attendant hangs up the line within a specified time frame and then the call is dropped by it.

In the month I have had this on my personal line (I need to answer all business calls and not frighten off potential customers with an auto attendant,) I have not received one telemarketer call. A blissful thing since I would get on the average about five calls a day! Everyday. Friends and family haven’t complained about this, either. In fact, you still need a direct line, so you can add another number and give that out only to a select few.

Once the agents start pressing one to get to our live phone extension, then we’ll have to figure a new trick, but for now, this works great and it will most likely work for you, too!

I love the On-the-Go playlist on my iPod but have added a song or two by accident I didn’t want in my list. Well now thanks to shadownight’s post at macosxhints, I can remove them on-the-spot instead of having to wait when I get back to my Mac and delete it via iTunes.

Select the song in the playlist, and like the way you added that song, simply hold the select button (middle button) and watch it quickly disappear in just but a second! Just like that. Repeat where necessary.

The title is a bit misleading, but this is basically the cleanest install you’ll get of Windows XP on your system without having to format your hard drive. Many need to do a destructive install of XP, destructive because you’re formatting your hard drive and thus losing all that’s on it, due to root-kit type spyware or other problems that prevent ones install from being productive. We do it week in and week out as Microsoft has kept us well employed in the day time. While we back up data files, we can’t backup program installs and some customers dread this. If you’re such a person, then this non-destructive reinstall of Windows XP may be what you’re looking for.

In short, the article shows you how to navigate through Microsoft’s confusing messages during install that helps you basically wipe out the C:\Windows directory and then re-install it. The article does not mention the fact that this means there could still be infected files or spyware living elsewhere on your drive that could re-appear after this procedure has been completed. It does state that your registry file is pretty much kept in tact, which is another security problem, that once again the article neglects to mention. But with that said, if you just want to try this as a last ditch effort, try it.

After you have performed this re-install, download and install anti-spyware such as Ad-aware and Search and Destroy as well as Microsoft’s Windows Defender after you patch your system via Windows Update. If any pests still linger, these helpers may get what’s left.

It’s a well known fact that Verizon is not a friend of the Bluetooth camp. It likes to retard the Dail-up Networking (DUN) feature as well any file transferring (OBEX Exchange). Sometimes you find just simple syncing isn’t the easiest thing in the world, either.

Some find iSync and RAZRs compatibility less than desireable. Even though Apple’s iSync Devices page shows the RAZR line as supported, the footnotes indicate some trouble ahead for you ultra-thin phone users. Calander sync seems to be a biggie as one such problem for the v3c. But thankfully Brian Toth documented how to get the iCal and iSync to get (i)RAZR to get that important to one and another. It’s not a difficult task, but it’s not for the faint at heart, too. There’s some blood involved. You’ll need to do some package opening and file editing, but it’s nothing too major and within a few minutes, you’ll be syncing your days events with your phone! Give it a try and remember who helped make this happen…Brian.