Joel McLaughlin | Gear Diary

Using Tech for My Bible Study

I never really thought about it much, but I do something that for some who practice my faith, might be alien. Much like my friend Dan, I use either apps or eBooks to do most of my Bible studies. Why It’s Better The app that I use the most when doing my Bible reading on my Android devices is Youversion.com; it’s also available for iOS. I took to using it because I like to read from different translations. Sometimes I will read the same verse in three different versions of the Bible, and I can do this within seconds using a…

Gear Bits, News & Features

Best Google Easter Egg Ever?

I love what Google does to have fun; just look at their April Fools stuff from this year. But now they have what may be the best Easter Egg ever! Just Google the Following and the egg you see above will be revealed. Google this(or just click it): 1.2+(sqrt(1-(sqrt(x^2+y^2))^2) + 1 – x^2-y^2) * (sin (10000 * (x*3+y/5+7))+1/4) from -1.6 to 1.6 I just hope someone spent their 20 percent time on this. Hopefully they start spending some of it on Android, too. Happy Easter!

Gear Bits

I Don’t Like Money-Grubbing Accessories, the Ham Radio Edition

I simply cannot stand money-grubbing accessories. What is more money-grubbing than the weird connector on my handheld radio? The above pic is of the headset connector for my Yaesu VX-7R. This radio is old but they still make it. One unique thing about it is that it is submersible. Yaesu had to use a different connector to keep the radio watertight. They could have used something more standard, but they did not. Only Yaesu makes headsets for this radio. What brought on my rant? I forgot my headset at home this morning.

How to Do It Yourself!

Which Ham Radio Should I Buy?

In my continuing series on the subject of Ham Radio, I’ll now attempt to answer the great unknown question: Which ham radio should I buy?? Well What do you Want to Do? In a lot of ways, this is almost the same as asking which phone one should buy. The first question you should be asking isn’t which radio do you want to buy, but what do you want to do, or what is your goal? Knowing what you want to do is important, because if you buy the wrong radio and try to do something it wasn’t really designed to do, you could get…

How to Do It Yourself!

How to Get a Ham Radio License

After my last ham radio post, one of the first things I wanted to write about is how you can get your Amateur Radio License. Well, it’s not as difficult now as it used to be. When I last tested to get my General Class license, I had to be able to receive Morse Code at 13 words per minute. Not long ago, the FCC and agencies in other countries removed this as a requirement for any class of license, so now all you have to do is pass one to three theory exams depending on what class license you want to…

News & Features

DropcamHD is the Smallest WiFi Camera on the Market

I have been thinking about setting up some sort of wireless camera at my house to help monitor my home’s security. There’s a new one that will let my wife and I check in on our house at any time, right from our phones. DropcamHD promises easy setup and loads of features that makes it a really cool option. DropcamHD has a cloud based DVR and many features that may make it nice not just for security, but for other uses like monitoring your baby’s room. Oh, and they also say that DropcamHD is the smallest camera of its type…

Gear Bits

Amateur Radio Is Both a Hobby and a Service

I am almost embarrassed that I had not mentioned this earlier, but there is a hobby that I have been involved with in some form or another for almost 20 years — Amateur Radio. Amateur Radio which is otherwise known as ‘ham radio’ has been around since before most of us were born. It has roots in the 19th century; experimentation with radio started in 1888 with the likes of Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi. I first learned of this wonderful and rewarding hobby from my grandfather, who originally held the very same call sign I have today, W3RAZ. The whole time I knew my…

Editorials, Gear Bits

Google, This Is Why You FAIL

This morning I got excited, at first. I saw on my phone and my tablet that Temple Run has had an update. The game has been less than stable on all of my devices so I was anxious to get the update to see if it was fixed. So I go to the Google Play Store to download it and get an error 927. Tried multiple times and got both error 927 and 941. Cleared data on the Google Play store, force stopped the app, rebooted and tried multiple things and was still unable to download the game. I am…

News & Features

StarTech’s New USB 3.0 HDD Docking Station

If you build computers or do any maintenance on computers or just want a quick way to offload the data off of an old hard drive, then StarTech.com has a new solution for you. Their new HDD docking station supports 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch SATA or IDE hard disks and connects to your computer with the faster USB 3.0 standard. It’s supported on pretty much every OS out there as well. The dock will allow you to: Connect a SATA and IDE hard drive at the same time or separately, through a single USB 3.0 connection at up to…

Gear Bits

Why Do We Lose Power So Easily?

Ever lose power when the sky is blue? That happened to me this week at both my place of work and my home. While at home the answer was not clear, at work it was totally apparent. There is a pole in front of our building that has not once, not twice but at least 3 times since we moved in the building had at least one of the three wires break. For those who don’t know how power works in your home or business, it typically has 2 or 3 phases. Each phase requires a wire. In the case…

Editorials

Open Letter to Google: Fix Android Now

Dear Google, I love Android. Ever since Judie gave me my G1 I was in love. You had an OS that was pretty good then, even better now and getting better all the time. So I don’t have too many problems with your OS. However, the problems that remain are ones that are bad enough to want me to consider buying an iPhone. Yes they are that bad. First my complaints about the OS. I know it’s not entirely your fault, but the current state of updates on different devices is crazy. Here we are almost 4 months into the new year and…

Reviews

A Linux Geek on Microsoft Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Now I know what your thinking: why would I care about Windows 8? Well, even though I am a Linux guy and use it almost everywhere, I still have to use Windows on a daily basis for my job as well as supporting my wife and family as no matter what I say, I cannot get them to even try Linux. So, to get an early look at Windows 8, I downloaded the Consumer Preview and installed it both in a virtual machine using Virtual Box and on a Netbook that has a touch screen. I installed a few apps…

Gear Bits

Android Developers Can Now Develop on the go with AIDE

In yesterday’s post about Post-PC or Plus-PC, I mentioned that you could generally not write programs on mobile devices. This is not true as of today. As I was reading through my feeds at lunch, I noticed a story on the Register about AIDE. AIDE is short for Android IDE or Integrated Development Environment. An IDE is an editor that is specifically for writing programs. In this case, you write programs for Android. AIDE is not necessarily targeted for developers to use their phone to write programs. It’s targeted at developers using devices like the Asus Transformer and Transformer Prime….

Gear Bits

Is it really the Post-PC Era, or Is the Plus-PC Era Simply Continuing?

Ten years ago I bought one of the first devices I ever had that could be classified as a post-pc device or as I like to call it, a plus pc device. That was a Toshiba e740 Pocket PC. This was the first device I had outside of a laptop that included wi-fi. I remember taking the e740, a flexible USB keyboard, the keyboard adapter and a compact flash modem on a trip with me and chatting with my wife and other family members every night on a SLOW modem. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked. I also remember my…

Gear Bits

Buh-Bye Android Market, Hello Google Play

The Android Market has been around for a while now, but Google has begun using it for more than just Android apps; they have added Music, Movies and Books over the last year. So, in an effort to unify things a bit and get a less ambiguous name that describes the service, Google is re-branding the Android Market as Google Play. The website is active now, and the Android Market app on your devices will be replaced with the Google Play Store app. You can also expect to see updates today for the Books, Music and Movies applications. For more, check out…

Gear Bits

To Tweet or Not to Tweet: Is it Safe for Drivers to Tweet from the Track

A couple of weeks ago during the long and arduous Daytona 500, Brad Keselowski who races in the Sprint Cup racing series for Penske racing caused quite a stir while the cars were parked on the track during a red flag. He tweeted from the track. What did he tweet? Pictures from his vantage point on the track of the aftermath of fellow driver Juan Pablo Montoya’s collision with the jet fuel powered track dryer.

Reviews

Lightweight Portable Security Linux: The DoD’s Linux Distro

Michael posted about the NSA’s version of Android complete with its own app store. Well, the NSA is not the only government agency looking at bringing out their own version of an open source product. The Department of Defense has one too in the form of a über lightweight version of Linux called Lightweight Portable Security or LPS Linux. I created a virtual machine using Virtual Box intending on doing an install, but LPS Linux is a live Linux distribution. That means, you either burn the freely downloadable image to a CD or you make your own bootable USB drive…

News & Features

Digital Innovations Speaker Dock for Android Review

For many years, Android lovers have suffered. Apple’s iPhone and iPod had these wonderful speaker docks that allowed their owners to enjoy music without ear buds; plus many of those docks also included a remote that could be used to control the music from across the room. Finally Android users can breathe a sigh of relief, thanks to Digital Innovation’s new Speaker Dock for Android. I was lucky enough not just to receive one to review, but to also give feedback through its early development stage. Is it as good as some of the better iPhone docks? Let’s find out.

News & Features

Keurig Introduces the New Keurig Vue Brewing System

Most of the Gear Diary team and many of my friends know that I love my Keurig machine. Brewing many different hot drinks from coffee to cocoa, my Keurig is my morning friend, and I’ve even been known to fire it up in the evening? However, there’s one thing that my Keurig can’t do — milky drinks like latte’s and cappuccinos. Well, Keurig has done it again and brought out a new brewing system called the Keurig Vue.

How to Do It Yourself!

Arch Linux: Only the Hardcore Need Apply

In search of a different distro (term of endearment for Linux distributions) to try, I decided to try installing probably one of the harder distros to install, Arch Linux over the weekend. I thought I would gather some thoughts into a post and share what I think of this interesting distro that doesn’t get the press that Ubuntu does. Arch Linux is a bit different than most Linux distributions out there. For example, it doesn’t have a default graphical interface. It boots directly into a Linux command prompt from the CD. You get into the install by typing in: /arch/setup in…

News & Features

Ubuntu’s HUD: A New Way to Use Your Linux Computer

Yesterday Ubuntu’s community manager, Jono Bacon put up a post calling for people to test their brand new idea for the Unity interface they currently use. They call it HUD. HUD will be included in the next relse of Ubuntu, version 12.04, code named “Precise Pangolin”. With HUD, you can do many different things like post to Twitter, Search your web history or find a drop down menu in Firefox or any other app. You can do some of this even if you don’t have that app loaded. Above is a video that shows you just what you can do…

Articles by Joel McLaughlin