Archive for the ‘Ramblings’ Category
Friday, April 19th, 2013
I recently discovered Swappa. This is great site to sell or buy an Android phone. Why? First off they only sell good condition phones with clear ESNs. You won't find any "only good for parts" deals here. As well, every phone posted for sale is verified by an actual employee at Swappa, so there's no scammers. Further, they have lower fees than ebay.
However, I take the the blawg-o-sphere today because of their amazing customer service. The other day my one year old and I were hanging out by our pool. When he thought I wasn't looking, he jumped in (ok, fell in) the pool, face down. Only thinking of ensuring my son didn't drown, I jumped in and pulled him out. Only afterwords did I remember my Galaxy SIII in my pocket. After a week of letting it bake in the sun and still no speaker or mic working, I deemed it dead.
I went to Swappa, found my replacement phone, and purchased it. It was easy to find the exact phone I wanted, which even came rooted and with CyanogenMod 10.1. The seller told me it would ship out the next morning.
On a whim I powered up my old, left for dead phone. Oh my gosh! It totally worked! I even stuck my SIM card in there and I could make calls with the speaker and mic working no problem.
I embarrassingly asked the seller and Swappa if I could back out of the sale. Both agreed to help me out. The seller refunded my money, keeping $20 at my request. Swappa even refunded my buyers fee, which I had said they could keep. This all took hours and was tended to by the same Swappa employee who had verified the phone for the initial sale. What service!
I could not give them a higher recommendation and plan on purchasing all my phones from them. You should too!
Posted in Ramblings, Reviews, Tips | Comments Off
Thursday, December 1st, 2011
For a long time I've always thought that tablets are not of much use until you reach the 3rd or 4th use case. You know, you have a laptop on which you can have 20 tabs of browsers open, have a full blown IDE to code in or even run a local instance of your dev environment. The second use case is your smart phone for when you're on the go, don't want any bulk or weight but still want to surf and check emails and listen to music. It's not until you've got all those covered that you'll consider spending hundreds of dollars on a 3rd device (or 4th if you have a desktop).
The wife is considering having a bigger screen than her Incredible to watch Netflix and read blog posts, news and library books on. This will likely spill over into reading kids books for our kids Emmett and Violet as well. Below are the tablets we're considering. Each item has a product, review and purchase link in the first row. The second row is the presence or lack of a camera. While researching this piece I found Lisa G's 7" Tablet Smackdown on Mobile Tech and John P. Falcone's Kindle vs. Nook vs. iPad on CNET reviews quite helpful. Also, those that wanna blow past the 7" screen (to 7.7") and $400 price should consider waiting for the Samsung Tab 7.7 ($600-$800 at this writing). Of course that depends on where you fall in regards to my and Moore's law. Finally, if you're looking for cellular connectivity, consider the T-Mobile Springboard .
 Samsung Tab 7+ $399 |
 HTC Flyer $299 |
 IdeaPad A1 $229 |
 Kindle Fire $199 |
 Nook Tablet $249
|
| Product – Review – $ |
Product – Review – $ |
Product – Review – $ |
Product – Review – $ |
Product – Review – $
|
| Front and Back |
Front and Back |
Front |
None |
None
|
| 1024 x 600 |
1024 x 600 |
1024 x 600 |
1024 x 600 |
1024 x 600
|
| 7.5" x 4.7" x 0.45" |
7.7" x 4.8" x 0.52" |
7.68" x 0.46" x 4.90" |
7.5" x 4.7" x 0.45" |
8.1" x 5" x 0.48"
|
| 12.1 oz |
14.82 oz |
14.08 oz |
14.56 oz |
14.08 oz
|
| dual-core 1.2GHz |
1.5GHz |
1.0GHz |
dual-core 1.0GHz |
dual-core 1.0GHz
|
| WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS |
WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS |
WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS |
WiFi |
WiFi
|
| 16GB Int & MicroSD |
16GB Int & MicroSD |
16GB Int & MicroSD |
8GB Internal |
8GB Int & MicroSD
|
| Android 3.2 |
Android 2.3.3 |
Android 2.3 |
Android 2.3 |
Android 2.3
|
Update: I've added lil' thumbnails for each tablet.
Posted in Books, Food, Photos, Ramblings | Comments Off
Monday, May 30th, 2011
As many of you know, I've had an on again, off again, and then on again affair with Meego. I love that lil' guy! You may have expected me to be quite excited about the recent release of Meego 1.2, including a netbook refresh. Since I was running Meego on a netbook, you may have then also expected me to be super excited about the very recent announcement of the ASUS Eee PC X101. This is a 2lb laptop that runs Meego and is expected to cost $200. Sweet!
However, as you may have guessed from the title of this post, I'm not running Meego any more. I'm running OS X on a MacBook Air 11". I had crossed the threshold of tinkering around on a laptop, to wanting to commute with one every day. Indeed, 2lb was my sweet spot for a laptop. I wasn't that stuck on the OS as my apps are all cross platform enough. I seriously considered many different netbooks and then the MacBook Air came out. The 11" was just over 2lb, included a full size keyboard, had a 1366 x 768 screen and a 5 hour battery. It was also insanely small. For a relative paltry $1000, there was simply no laptop, regardless of OS, that had had all of the above features. Period. Though I think the new Eee X101 will be very cool, it lacks the screen resolution of the Air. I briefly considered the Sony Vaio X (no longer available) which met all my requirements, but it was a pretty penny to pay for an Atom processor.
"But if you want something super light, what about a iPad?", you ask? I do agree, an iPad's insanely long battery life coupled with 1.3lb weight has some handy uses: a cross country plane ride, long regular commutes where you want to read the news and browse email or need a super light weight video conference rig. But what about when you want to run an IDE? What if you want to compose a 3 page (7,500 character) long email? What if you want to flip back forth between the 3 browsers you have open to check how your code renders? The answer is clear: you need a laptop.
I've been super happy with my Air and I wish the best of luck to Meego.
Posted in Linux, OS X, Ramblings | 1 Comment »
Monday, March 21st, 2011
Recently, some one got a hold of my card and was making fraudulent charges on it. My card company was Johnny on the spot and called me to verify the charges (side note: I had no way of verifying they were who they said they were, so they did the right thing and told me to call the number on the back of my card. You can't be too vigilant!). When I finally got a rep. on the line, they canceled my card and sent me out a new one. Done deal.
But then they tell you, "cut up your card". Why? If the number was stolen and we're de-activating it so it can't be used again, why cut up the card? In fact, why would you ever cut up the card? I guess if you think that cutting it up an active card will stop you from using it, then you should do a good job and cut it real good. But otherwise, I can't think of a reason. My 5 minutes of googling didn't find an answer either.
Do any of my faithful readers have an answer?
Update: There's some good discussion below, but more notable is my comeuppance! After writing this post, I got not, one, not two, but three copies of my new card. Now I have the need to trash three credit cards that are all not canceled. Oh the horror!
Posted in Ramblings, Tips | 7 Comments »
Saturday, February 12th, 2011
It seems that reCAPTCHA is a victim of its own success. Y'all know I'm a huge, huge fan. However, recently the spammers have started to submit comments, successfully getting past the reCAPTCHA . I suspect this is a mechanical turk or some such tomfoolery. Of course the comments don't get approved, but they're still a bother to have to delete.
Our friend over at hanskellner.com ( guess which friend?) also has the same problem with submitted span. This makes it clear that reCAPTCHA is being targeted (well, not clear, but it's better than n=1!). However, he found a solution to stop the spammers. He added a static math question to his comment form. That is, it's always "what is 5 + 6", never any other question. Funny enough, his spam stopped all together. He still has his reCAPTCHA giong, but now it's a two factor anti-spam.
I posit that the reCAPTCHA code is easy enough to programmatically detect, but some random math question isn't, so it breaks the spam scripts. Let's test this theory, shall we? I've just written a word press plug-in called simple-math. Using a simple to hack, all client side javascript there's now an easy to solve math problem on the comment form. It is random, choosing two numbers between 0 and 9. I haven't tested it too broadly, but you're welcome to a copy.
I'll let it run for a week and see how it goes and report back.
Feb 13th Update: I fought the law, and law won! Spammers got past round one of simple math. I've updated it to now check for the existence of the field on post, but still, no checking for a right answer on the server. As well, the field is created via javascript. Spammers, back to you for round 2.
Posted in PHP, Ramblings, Tips | Comments Off
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