Posted in Reviews on 12 December 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Over Thanksgiving, I broke the tail boom on my new MCP X heli, so I hardly got to fly it. I never got to take it to an open space, a requirement due to my novice skill level. It’s all fixed up now and we took i to the park yesterday (Sunday).
At first, it was pretty difficult. Not sure why, but at one point I found that the vertical swashplate guide was out of its groove. Perhaps it had been that way all day.
Anyway, I really got the hang of it and totally love it.
Posted in Reviews on 17 November 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Bought the wife a Kindle Fire (pre-order) the day they went up for sale, 8 September 2011. It arrived yesterday.
I played with it a bit at night after work.
First big complaint: The Kindle Fire doesn’t get loud enough. I was watching Ip Man via Amazon Prime on it and I couldn’t get the volume high enough. Same was true watching a couple YouTube videos about RC helicopters, which are plenty loud enough on my MacBook Air and iPad 2. This is a big problem. I didn’t point it out to my wife.
Also, I really miss having a physical home button.
I also miss having physical volume buttons. How the hell do you change the volume while playing Angry Birds? (My wife was playing, I don’t find Angry Birds very interesting to play for more than about a minute a month.) This volume thing sucks.
Web browsing is okay. Even my wife remarked that page loads are disappointingly slow. I’d seen a video comparing iPad to Fire page loading yesterday and the Kindle loaded pages in 14 seconds that the iPad 2 loaded in 4, so I was prepared for slow page loads. Hopefully this is just a DNS thing and I’ll be able to change the Fire over to using Google DNS without screwing with any of the Silk browser’s cloud-based web browsing acceleration magic. We’ll see.
The list of huge (pretty) icons of the last-used apps and such is annoying in that you can’t delete items from first position — you have to push them down in the deck by running other apps. I opened the pre-installed Pulse app to see what it was. I don’t remember what it was now, the morning after, but I do remember that I wanted that stupid thing out of my face.
Address Book: What does this sync to? I want to sync my address book to my wife’s Google Contacts so they in sync with her Blackberry. How do I do this? Is this possible at all with the Kindle Fire?
The price. $200 makes up for a lot of disappointment.
The Kindle Fire’s size is nice for one-handed holding. Nice for watching a movie while holding our five week old daughter. I like that. Though I couldn’t hear the videos I wanted to watch, which was a shame.
28 November 2011 update: Fire still sucks. But wife wants to keep it, even though she agrees that it’s pretty bad.
Posted in Reviews on 17 November 2011 | Leave a Comment »
The short version: If little helicopters interest you, buy one. They’re $20, come on.
My daughter, who is six years old, has crashlanded it in the pool, where it sunk to the bottom (and survived after I blew the water out with my compressor and let it dry overnight), stuck it on the roof where it sat for about ten hours and dropped it to the dirt from 25 feet in the air numerous times. Parts bill so far: $0.00. This thing is a tank, a submarine and a bit of a rocket. It’s not actually fast, but it hovers stably and is a joy to use.
Posted in Photography, Reviews on 4 October 2011 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve had this Nikkor 50mm lens for over a week now. I’m very happy with it. I wish it were wider, but that’s the shakes with a DX body.
Photo-wise, I don’t miss my 85mm f/1.4. I do miss its sexy body, but I’ll get over it.
Posted in Reviews on 13 September 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Google Talk on my wife’s Virgin Mobile BlackBerry has been frequently telling her and her contacts that she’s online and quietly not delivering message to or from her. Restarting Google Talk app fixes this, until it recurs hours later. Could be that our Sprint network coverage at the house is spotty. Some research on my part has uncovered complaints about RIM’s Google Talk chat client fro BlackBerry.
My wife (and I didn’t twist her arm) tried a Motorola Triumph this weekend. Surprisingly, Google’s Google Chat Android client was logging her out. Not as bad as false reporting her as logged in, but still non-optimum. So I set her up with BeeJive IM and put her on the wifi at the house. I don’t remember why I changed clients, actually, but whatever.
But she can’t stand the Android keypad. And the Android 2.2 autocorrection is, in a word, completely freaking awful. I confirmed. 2.3’s autocorrection (checked on someone’s 2.3-based Nexus S) seems fine.
So she decided she’s going back to her BlackBerry.
Posted in Reviews on 29 August 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Ivan invited us to a roller derby last night. The wife couldn’t make it, but I went with our daughter.
I was wondering if it’d be like roller derbies I see in movies, such as the recent one with Ellen Paige, Whip It. (Had to look up that title.) Well, for better or worse, it was like roller derbies portrayed in cinema.
My daughter had a hot dog, played a lot of skee-ball and got to go to bed a little late. She had a good time.
Posted in Photography, Reviews on 29 August 2011 | Leave a Comment »
My Canon S95 camera is still the bee’s knees. I Love it. I bring it everywhere in my small Timbuk2 messenger bag, protected by its little Olympus neoprene case.
Its color rendition is phenomenal and it takes excellent video. It’s still not for taking photographs of moving targets, such as my daughter. I have my Nikon D90 for that.
Posted in Macintosh/OS X, Reviews on 15 August 2011 | Leave a Comment »
This Saturday, 13 August 2011, I picked up a MacBook Air 13.3” 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo 256GB SSD 2GB via Craigslist. Bought it from a good guy. It’s super clean and still has six months of warranty. I plan to add AppleCare to it to extend it two and a half years. My biggest concern would be an SSD failure.
This thing is fast. Last week, my cousin showed me his new/used MacBook Air (same specs but 4GB of RAM in his) and I was instantly in love. I’d seen them at the Apple Store and loved the 13.3” models while hating the 11.6” models. But seeing it next to my Mac, running apps and seeing how fast it is really sold me on it. So I started looking for one on Craigslist right away. I’d given up hope of finding one at a price that made it worth it to me to not just upgrade to a new i5 model to get that hyperthreading goodness.
I offered him $875 (asking $1100) and he accepted. I think it was a fair price all around. My cousin got his for $960 a few weeks ago (right before the new i5/i7 models were announced), so my price was on par with that.
Boy, this thing is fast.
I ran the OS X Snow Leopard Migration Assistant on this Mac and my old MacBook Pro 15.4” 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo 500GB HDD 3GB and — voila! — two days later, it was done, at about 8:05am this morning.
Things are working really well on it so far.
I consider this to be actually a very conservative purchase. My old MacBook Pro (three-plus years old now) was getting very slow (probably in need of an OS wipe after upgrading it from Tiger -> Leopard -> Snow Leopard). Putting an SSD in there troubled me because if it failed, it’d take a bunch of work to pull it out. And every time I’d take it apart (to install or remove), I’d risk breaking the computer each time. Plus the hassle. Plus if I had to send a broken SSD back to the manufacturer, I’d want to leave the MacBook Pro in pieces for weeks waiting for the repaired SSd and I don’t really have a safe place for that (kid-proof) in my home.
So I consider this upgrade a measured decision that I’m really happy with.
Update: It’s Tuesday, 4 October 2011. I’ve been using my MacBook Air regularly since I got it. It has completely replaced my MacBook Pro. I’m very happy.
Posted in Photography, Reviews on 10 May 2011 | Leave a Comment »
I picked up one of these the other day. I was tricked by its claim to include an “autofocus chip” into believing it would autofocus (via screw, most likely, since it doesn’t look wide enough to have an internal autofocus motor). Well, it is indeed non-AF. That chip just makes my D90’s autofocus viewfinder light turn on when the subject is in focus.
I’m still considering keeping this thing. I like the bokeh so far (just a few tests since late last night) and I really like the build quality. Specifically, it feels solid (heavy) and the focus ring is nice and smooth.
24 August 2011 update: I miss this lens. But I couldn’t stand having to manually focus it, especially since my favorite target is a five year old girl who is always on the move.
Posted in Reviews on 28 March 2011 | Leave a Comment »
I recently moved my wife and her mother from T-Mobile cellular plans to Virgin Mobile USA. Everybody’s needs are different, but Virgin Mobile’s plans and phones suited them very well. Nice phones at reasonable prices, no contracts, incredible service rates.
Virgin Mobile is now owned by Sprint and uses the Sprint network. Certainly check coverage maps to be sure the phones will be suitable for you.
The plans for Virgin Mobile’s smartphones are
$25/month: Unlimited texting, unlimited internet, 300 voice minutes
$40/month: Unlimited texting, unlimited internet, 1200 voice minutes
$60/month: Unlimited texting, unlimited internet, unlimited voice minutes
My wife bought a BlackBerry Curve 8530 (after returning the buggy Samsung Intercept smartphone to Best Buy). No touch screen on her BlackBerry. The BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) costs an extra $10/month over the fees above, but it’s still worth it for her. I was told BIS is mandatory on Virgin if I want data on the BlackBerry. My wife is a big BlackBerry fan. My wife’s BlackBerry: http://www.virginmobileusa.com/cell-phones/blackberry-curve-8530-phone.jsp
Her mom got the LG Optimus V for $150 from Radio Shack. It’s a small Android phone. I used it for a while, testing it for her. I’m happy with it. Unlike the loser Samsung Intercept my wife had for a few weeks, the LG Optimus is a good little Android phone. No hard keys, just on-screen keyboard. http://www.virginmobileusa.com/cell-phones/lg-optimus-v-phone.jsp
They have other phones at the first link above you might like better, but I like to stick to mainstream operating system phones (Android, BlackBerry, iPhone OS). But your needs may vary.
If you want a non-smartphone, Virgin also has those in spades: http://www.virginmobileusa.com/cell-phone-plans/paylo-plans.jsp
And here are their non-smartphone plans: http://www.virginmobileusa.com/cell-phone-plans/paylo-plans.jsp
I have different cell phone needs from them so I have a T-Mobile prepaid plan. For $30/month, I get a combination of 1500 voice minutes or text messages (any combination) and 30MB of cellular internet. I bought this phone and it was pretty nice, albeit tiny: http://www.amazon.com/T-Mobile-Comet-Prepaid-Android-Phone/dp/B00466HQC4
Don’t buy it from Amazon.com, I got a better deal from T-Mobile, but I didn’t find a direct T-Mobile link. I used it a little bit and found it to be fast and non-buggy. But it’s small. I use my iPhone and keep this phone as a backup or for, say, trips to the beach where I don’t want to damage my iPhone.
I don’t need a lot of internet or minutes, but I wanted to keep my GSM iPhone, so I like the T-Mobile plan. My wife and her mom, however, love their Virgin Mobile phones and service. If the combination of minutes/texting/internet suit you, their prices can’t be beat. You be the judge about whether the cellular coverage is good. For my wife and her mom, it’s been fine.
You can port your phone numbers from Verizon to Virgin Mobile or T-Mobile phones. It’s easy, we all did it. (Well, since I was going from T-Mobile (postpaid, monthly, with contract) to T-Mobile (prepaid, monthly, no contracts) it was a bit of a nightmare until I reached someone who knew how to do this in a way that actually worked.)
You can buy the phones at Best Buy and you have 30 days to return them if you don’t like the phones or the service, no questions asked. If you decide to do this, do check with Verizon to see if they’ll take you back. =)
Oh! Previously, my wife and I had a shared unlimited minutes two-line family plan that cost us $165/month. Now we pay $65/month. Any month she’s going to want more minutes, she just switches online to the $40/mont (+$10 BlackBerry) plan for that month and she gets 1200 minutes for that month. It’s not hard to do.
There are no hidden taxes.
