I’ve had or tried a bunch of different messenger-style bags in my time, but I may have come across the Perfect Bag™. The Timbuk2 Command has all sorts of neat features and extras that make it suit me absolutely perfectly. Here are a few highlights: Read the rest of this post…
A while back, I got a Wakemate and was pretty gung-ho about it being a great device for monitoring your sleep and helping you feel a bit more refreshed when you wake up. I recently picked up a Fitbit as well, so as a bit of fun, I thought I’d compare the 2 devices for sleep monitoring and write up a bit of a review. Here we go.
Since I’m mostly using them on an iPhone and a MacBook Pro, I have 2 extra requirements on my earphones (in addition to sound quality etc).
Recently, my Klipsch earbuds suffered the wrath of the TSA when they were munched in the rollers of an x-ray machine. Time for new headphones. I ended up ordering a set of ZAGG Smartbuds. At literally half the price of my Klipsch, I didn’t know what to expect, but have been so far pleasantly surprised: Read the rest of this post…
The age of the quantified self is coming, whether you like it not. I’ve recently started experimenting with a few aspects of this idea, with sleep being one of the first that I was interested to look at, since I’ve had a quite a lot of trouble with getting good sleep over the years.
My theory has always been that after I had glandular fever about 12 years ago, sleep has never left me feeling rested or fully revived. That’s been very difficult to quantify or keep track of though, other than saying “I feel crappy in the morning.”
Earlier this year, my brother got me a pair of Vibram FiveFinger KSO‘s for my birthday. They’re pretty freaky. Here are some random notes on my adventures with these shoes.
Picture by yoavf
After having to send back the Nokia E71 that I was trialing, WOMWorld was kind enough to also send me an E66 to try out. I’ve been using this handset for about a week now, and I feel like I’ve used it enough to start offering some opinions and details.
Here we go.
I used to use OmniGraffle Pro for all of my diagramming needs, including for wireframes. When I needed to do some wireframing for a client, I decided it was about time I found some better stencils (pre-built shapes) for OmniGraffle so that I could get these things done more easily and consistently. That turned into a wild goose chase, which ended with OmniGraffle no longer loading properly and an approaching deadline to have my diagrams done. But then I found Balsamiq Mockups, and all was well. Read the rest of this post…
Now that I’ve been using the Nokia E71 NAM for a few weeks, I wanted to post a follow-up review covering some of the more “day-to-day reality” aspects of the phone. I’m going to bullet-point my observations/comments for brevity’s sake, and as with my initial review, any comparisons made here are as compared to my Nokia E61:
Read the rest of this post…
A few weeks ago, I got an email that I almost discarded as spam, asking me if I would like to try out a Nokia phone for a few weeks. As it turns out, the email was completely legitimate, and the offer was genuine. The good folks over at WOMWorld Nokia wanted to send me a Nokia E71 NAM (the NAM is for North AMerica, since there’s a slightly different European version) so that I could try it out and see if I liked it. Either way, I was welcome (encouraged) to write about it, talk about it, and generally let people know what I thought of it. This is the first of 2 posts that I will be making about the phone and the experience I had with it. I wanted to do one as a “first impressions” post, and then one at the end of the test period (unfortunately, I have to send it back 
) with more detail on my experiences.
Am I the only one that has that feeling of loss or loneliness when I finish a good book? (or in this case, four good books?)
I’ve been reading the “Otherland” series, by Tad Williams for about 3 years now (4?), progressively acquiring each of the books in the series, then re-reading the ones before it so that I get the whole story. In doing this, I have obviously “spent a lot of time” with Renie, !Xabbu, Sellars, Sorensen, Ramsey, Orlando, Fredericks and all the other characters in the books. Now that I’ve finished them all – it’s over. I feel like I’ve lost a whole group of friends.
It’s strange how you can develop such an attachment to characters of a book which are completely ficticious. Personally,
I think this comes partially from my history on the Internet. I have spent so much time online that the characters in a
book are often more realistic, more “detailled” in their background, descriptions and actions than other people who I have spent hours discussing things with, worked on entire projects and laughed over common jokes.
With the detailed writing of professionals like Tad Williams, I often actually know more about the personality, physical appearance and mental processes of the characters in the books that I read, than I do about the people I meet on the ‘net.
The only up-side of finishing the Otherland series is that now I can finally read “Google Hacks”, the book that I wrote a small section of. I’ve had my complimentary copy of the book (from O’Reilly) for a few months now, but haven’t had a chance to read it because I was too busy trapped in Otherland and the Grail Network (read the book if you have no idea what I’m talking about here 
.
I will strongly recommend Otherland (yes, all 4,000-ish pages of it) to anyone who likes science fiction, and especially if you can deal with the idea of fully-immersive virtual reality – it really is a treat.
This website is lovingly hand-crafted using TextMate on a MacBook Pro, is powered by WordPress, jQuery and awesomeness and is copyright 1981 - 2012 Beau Lebens.
