November 2011

Mophie and Rocketfish (Best Buy) Issue External Battery Pack Recalls

Two recalls just crossed my inbox; these may be products that you all own, so please check: The first item is the Mophie iPod Touch Rechargeable External Battery Case (shown above); it’s being recalled due to a burn hazard. If you have one of these, check to see if your serial number has the first five alphanumeric characters of TR113 through TR120. Cases that fall in between those numbers are affected by the recall. WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, in cooperation with the firm named below, today announced a voluntary recall of the following consumer product. Consumers should…

Reviews

The Gammatech’s U12C Durabook Review

It takes a certain type of laptop to stand up to certain jobs. Most laptops find comfort on a desk, in a padded bag, or possibly in the local coffee shop around the corner. Gammatech sent me a laptop suited perfectly for all those tasks and a whole lot more. Usually the worst that happens to most laptops is polished keys and touchpad, where your fingers have rubbed the finish off. Possibly it could fall victim of a flight off of your bed or the table after you happen to trip over your power cord. Luckily for those accident prone…

Editorials, Game Diary

Gamer Banned for Using ‘Inappropriate Language’ in Forum Tamer Than What Is in the Actual Game!

Early this year I wrote about two separate incidents of gamers being banned from playing games based on comments made in separately housed gaming forums – the first was about someone banned for upsetting a forum moderator by asking “Have you (Bioware) sold your souls to the EA devil?”. At the time EA claimed it was an ‘error’: “Unfortunately, there was an error in the system that accidentally suspended a user’s entire account,” he told Ars. “Immediately upon learning of the glitch, EA took steps to restore the user’s macro account and apologized for the inconvenience.” My speculation that the…

Reviews, Yum Log

Smoke Like a Pro with the Peg Leg Porker BBQ Kit

I’ve loved pork for a long time – waaay before the hipsters made bacon worship popular. One of my favorite ways to spend a Saturday afternoon is to put a pork butt on the smoker first thing in the morning and watch college football all day while the meat soaks up the hickory goodness. Since you have to add new wood every hour or so, it pretty much guarantees that you have to stay on your couch all day and restoke the fire at halftime of each game. Sorry about those chores, sweetie. Can’t you see I’m working here? While…

Gear Bits

Tiny Homes for People Who Know That Less Can Be More

When I lived in San Angelo, I had a home that was almost 3,000 square feet including the garage apartment. My daughter and I were the only two people living there, and on more than one occasion I remarked that the only rooms we really needed were the kitchen, our bedrooms, and my office – which also served as a den. When I moved to Eldorado, I finally had an opportunity to downsize. It takes a bit of discipline to weed through your belongings and live in a space that is more than half of what you were used to,…

Gear Bits, Music Diary

Music Diary Notes: Elvis Costello Says ‘Don’t Buy My Record’

Given how accustomed we have become to pop music stars going anywhere and doing anything to practically beg us to buy their stuff, this announcement from ElvisCostello.com is certainly surprising. Here is the initial post from Elvis: “Let’s make things sparkling clear” We at www.elviscostello.com find ourselves unable to recommend “The Return Of The Spectacular Spinning Songbook” as the price appears to be either a misprint or a satire.All our attempts to have this number revised have been fruitless so we are taking the following unusual step. If you want… His site followed up with a more elaborate explanation: If…

Reviews

Digital Innovations AllTerrain Wired 3-Button Mouse Review

Mice seem to be ubiquitous. Everyone has one. Not many people even consider buying one that didn’t come with their computer while some are fanatical about the mice they use. I tend to be one of the former. As long as it has a scroll wheel I am usually happy, but now I have a new favorite wired mouse in the Digital Innovations AllTerrain Wired 3-Button Mouse. What makes this mouse All Terrain? Well anyone who has used an optical mouse and tried to use it on a glass surfaces knows that they usually will not work on glass table top…

Events, Gear Bits, Reviews, Travel

Quick Look: Belkin Travel Router

This year Gear Diary’s CES base will be a suite at the MGM Grand. All of us will be bunking together which means we will be able to get even more writing done early in the morning or late at night. Of course that presumes we have the wireless connectivity to go online and post. 🙂 The suite comes with free internet connectivity. That SHOULD mean both wired and wireless connections will work, but we won’t really know until we get there. Add in the fact that during CES there is such a huge demand on wireless systems and… we…

eBooks, News

Amazon Releases First Kindle Fire Firmware Update

It has been two weeks since the Kindle Fire stormed on to the market, with loads of pre-orders fueling an extremely successful Holiday period for the product. I am still finishing up my review, and Dan has already sent his back … and last night Amazon released the first firmware update for the Fire. Here are the details from Amazon: We have a new, free software update available for Kindle Fire. This software upgrade provides improvements to the operation of your Kindle Fire. If you are not sure what software version you’re running, tap the Quick Settings icon, tap “More,”…

News

Twilight Versus Star Wars, Feminist Style

I’ll admit, I saw “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn”. Mainly it was so I could laugh at how campy it was, but I think years of watching “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” have given me a soft spot for vampire tales as a whole. And yes, I’m 99% sure my women’s studies degree dug itself out of the box in my parents’ basement and ran in circles screaming in horror that I paid to watch a movie that revolves around a love triangle between a boy-crazy girl and two controlling, super-strong men. But New York Magazine has written an article that…

Reviews

Twelve South Bass Jump 2 Portable Subwoofer for MacBook Review

The MacBook air isn’t designed to be an entertainment device. The anemic speakers on it make that point quite clearly. Sure, they work well enough, but I would be hard-pressed to call them anything more than functional. The speakers on the iMac are far better but even they still fall a bit short. That’s where Twelve South’s BassJump 2 Portable subwoofer for MacBook comes in. Let’s take a look.

Game Diary, Reviews

The World of Goo for iPad Game Review

> There are times when a simple description does little to convey the joy contained in a great game. For World of Goo, my one-line description ‘solve puzzles by building stuff by stringing together bunches of goo balls’ doesn’t begin to explain why you will be losing sleep playing ‘just one more level’. I am not sure that my description or conclusion will completely describe just how much fun this game is, but hopefully my full description will entire you enough to buy one of the best games available for the iPad. The Hype: Beautiful and surprising, the millions of…

Reviews

Grid Detective for Kindle Review

I am a huge sucker for logic games. When I was a kid, we used to do them all the time in school, and I have very fond memories of drawing my grid, X-ing out the wrong choices, studying the clues, and cracking the puzzle. Last week I was trolling the Kindle bestsellers lists, and stumbled upon Grid Detective; it was free, it was the logic puzzles from my childhood, I had to try it! Gameplay is extremely straightforward. You start with a paragraph explaining the scenario (the puzzle I am on now involves four friends reupholstering furniture) and the…

News

It’s Time – A Celebration of the Natural Cycles of Adult Life

As adults we see so many different good and bad things in our lives; some we would change and others we wouldn’t change even if we could. As we grow we have friends and family who experience joys and tragedies and are reminded that life is just too short and can end in a moment without warning. This Thanksgiving I had my brother in my house – not his family, just him … because after nearly 25 years of marriage he is facing divorce. Which comes on the heels of my sister whose divorce finalized the day before her 20th…

Reviews

Wahoo Fitness Heart Rate Monitor for iOS Review

There are a few schools of thought in fitness when it comes to heart rate monitors. One side says that a heart rate monitor helps you keep your effort in the proper range, while the contrarians think a heart rate monitor is a crutch and you should go with what feels right, not a number on a screen. I’ve never trained with any sort of heart rate monitor, so when Wahoo offered Gear Diary the chance to review it, I jumped at the opportunity. The Wahoo system comes with two parts, a heart rate monitor strap, and an ANT+ receiver….

Gear Bits

Droid 4 Revealed – Like a Moto Razr with a Slide-Out QWERTY Keyboard

When it comes to mobile devices I tend to be fairly platform agnostic, owning Android phones, iPod Touches (well, iPods since the original one in 2001), and both iPads and Android Tablets. But there is one place where I have clear bias (well, aside from gaming performance), and that is my preference for physical keyboards. Listing the smartphones I have used over the last few years, there is the original Droid, Palm Pre, Palm Pixi, HTC Touch Pro 2, HTC 7 Pro, and Droid Pro. What do all of those phones have in common? A physical keyboard. I even stuck…

News

The Latest Cool Steve Jobs Video – NeXT Computer ‘Entrepreneurs’ Feature

For most people, Steve Jobs is the iconic black-turtleneck & jeans wearing icon who led Apple from near bankruptcy to become the most valuable public company in the world before he passed away recently. But there are more and more historical views of him popping up all over the place – and this is one of the coolest I have seen. It is from a PBS series called ‘Entrepreneurs’, with an episode from late 1986 looking at NeXT Computer when it was merely 11 computers and a long road ahead before shipping their first computer. It is great to see…

Gear Bits, Outdoors

Siri Is Awesome but It’s Not the AT&T iPhone 4S’ Best Feature

I love Siri on the iPhone 4S. As I have written previously, it has changed the way I use my iPhone and, in fact, the way I do much of my writing. Thanks to Siri I’m better at consistently setting up reminders for myself. Thanks to Siri I’m able to make new appointments on the fly. And thanks to Siri I am rarely typing on my iPhone any longer. Yes, Siri’s voice recognition is so good that, so long as I speak clearly and slowly and follow the guidelines I have previously shared here on the site, I am now…

Gear Bits

Technology Meets Tradition: Prague, a Bat Mitzvah and an iPhone to the Rescue

Picture from Jewish Journal A few years ago I received a picture from friends in my congregation. They were in Jerusalem for their daughter’s Bat Mitzvah. The the picture their daughter was standing on the Southern Steps of the Temple Mount wearing a tallit (prayer shawl) and holding a BlackBerry. It seems she left her speech in the hotel room in Jerusalem. Luckily, her mom had it on her Blackberry for safe keeping. Yes, a BlackBerry saved the day and her Bat Mitzvah. Fast forward to last week. It seems when it comes to a smartphone saving the day during a Bat Mitzvah…

Reviews

The Motorola Droid RAZR Android Phone Review

The battle for “World’s Thinnest” presses on with the release of Motorola’s latest flagship. Resurrecting the name of a phone that became an icon, the RAZR is back, but aside from the name, it bears little resemblance to the phone-in-skinny-jeans of 2004. The new RAZR, or the XT910 as Motorola define it, is an Android slate measuring a trim 7.1mm at its thinnest point, handily eclipsing the Galaxy S II’s now portly 8.49mm figure. Make no mistake; this is a seriously thin phone. But like a Lamborghini, it may hug the ground when laid flat, but it’s seriously wide. At…

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