Adventures in Tech

Many years ago I bought a pedometer to help me count the number of steps that I take on a daily basis. The idea was to walk at least ten thousand steps every day to balance the modern sedentary lifestyle, caused by sitting on a chair almost all day long, both at work and at home. The pedometer was great for a while, showing how far I was from the ideal number of steps, and making me compete with myself every day to increase the number of steps I take. Because it was bulky and inconvenient to carry in my pocket, when I finally hit the goal of ten thousand steps I stopped carrying it along. And of course the number of steps declined back to where it was before the pedometer, and I did not think anything of it. This year the flu season has not been kind to me. Between a hectic work schedule and a kid at daycare, I have been hit by some cold or flu variant every couple of weeks. My wife attributed the low immunity to a lack of physical activity, and she started looking for a way to help...

Over the weekend I watched "Fat, sick, and nearly dead", a documentary on Netflix about how a sick and overweight Australian regained his health by following a strict juice diet for about 6 months augmented by moderate exercise. The documentary tracks his progress over the 6 months period, as he travels throughout the US from coast to coast, talking to people about the health benefits of the juice diet, and showing them how it affected his health. The documentary also shows how toward the end of his diet, he started evangelizing it, and helping other people reverse their heavily medicated health problems by following a similar diet and moderate exercise. The documentary was very well made, and the author is quite likable. It was also very educational about the types of foods people consume, and the nutrients they get out of them: micro-nutrients--those that come from plant sources, and macro-nutrients--those that come from animal sources. The documentary's thesis is th...

Over the holiday season I was looking for a speaker with a decent sound quality, and good support for playing music wirelessly. With a bit of research I settled on the Sonos Play:5 speaker. Most of the online reviews were favorable, and it supported streaming online music from Spotify, Pandora, and a dozen other services. The speakers were also on display at Target stores for a live test, and despite the background noise in the store, they sounded great. Sonos was running a promotion at the time, where you got a free bridge with the purchase of any of their speakers, which is a decent discount. Setup was extremely easy. I plugged the bridge into my wifi router, plugged the speaker into a power outlet, and installed the Sonos application on my computer. The application guided me through the intuitive setup, which involved pressing a button on the bridge, and another on the speaker to connect the whole system together.  After that it was time to play music. The Sonos application...

One of the great things about getting a haircut besides the feeling of freshness, is the enjoyable conversations that I have with my barber. The conversations usually span multiple topics, and are mostly random, but sometimes we chat about technology, and it is always great to get the perspective of someone not embedded in the field. Last time we talked about how the younger generations are using technology to communicate. My barber made astute observations about the topic, gleaned from his observations on how his kids, nephews and their friends communicate. It was interesting to learn that despite having cell phones, the younger generation has forgone all types of voice communication on the mobile device, and instead has opted for text messages and instant messaging. My barber was complaining that his kids rake in thousands of text messages a month, and if he did not select the right cell phone plan he would have gone broke by now. Despite not using voice communication on the mob...

About a year ago I switched from the iPhone to the Samsung S3, and was initially pleased with the switch. What's not to like about a bigger screen, better technical specs, and easy expandability and connectivity. As I gained more experience with the phone, I started getting annoyed by the quality of the software, the inconsistencies between applications, and all the wonderful carrier add ons that I could not remove from the phone, unless I rooted it. And not to mention the dropped calls and the garbage collections that rendered the phone unusable at times. The poorly written software and the carrier add ons drained my stock battery so quickly even with minimal use, that I had to replace the stock battery with one that has 4x the capacity to get a usable phone. The replacement came with its own inconveniences that a bulky phone brings. It made me think about how a superior hardware spec and a bigger screen do not necessarily make a good phone, and that the unified experience ...

Recommendation systems are in wide use today, and Amazon's website is a prime example of that use.  In addition to the recommendations on the site, whenever I buy a new Kindle book, I receive emails with recommendations for other items I would be interested in. The recommendations are usually spot-on, and I end up buying more Kindle books, and the cycle continues. Recently I noticed that whenever I finish a Kindle book, Amazon sends me an email with related books that I might be interested in, which is pretty cool if you ignore the fact that an algorithm is watching when you finish a book, and triggers a recommendation email to entice you to read more. The feature might have been in place for some time, and I might not have noticed it, were it not for a very long book that I was reading on and off over the last year. After I was done, I received an email recommendation for other books by the same author, equally as long. Even though the recommendations are good, I am sure I am...

There is something to be said about using computers before going to sleep, and the effects they have on how well we sleep at night.  The authors of the free software  F.lux  believe that one of the reasons for the sleep disruption after using a computer is the color temperature of the screen. They postulate that computer screens are designed to feel like sunlight during the hours of the day, which is great, but they don't change how they look at night, which is not so great. They designed and implemented the F.lux software to warm up the screen as the sun goes down. And to make things easier, the software can automatically read the location of the computer, and adjust the warming schedule accordingly. The software is free, and works on Windows, Mac, and the jailbroken iPads/iPhones. I have only tried it on the Mac, and while I cannot attest to any changes in my sleep patterns, I admit that the screen looks a lot more pleasing at night: warm and soft, unlike how it lo...