Technology

Device Enthusiast (Verizon Health and Fitness Voices)

by Jessica on May 10, 2013

in Technology, Verizon Voices

Disclosure: I am participating in the Verizon Health and Fitness Voices program and have been provided with the Motorola Razr HD and six months of service in exchange for my honest review and opinions about the product.

Hi guys! So I’m a month into my ambassadorship with Verizon (Parts 1 & 2 of the kick-off event if you’re just joining) and having a blast with the devices they’ve provided me to use abuse. Getting to know he Motorola Razr HD and using the Fitbit One has not only given me the opportunity to explore new tech, but also how I use tech within my lifestyle.

I make it sound polite, but I’ve been pretty tough on these devices. CrossFit isn’t exactly gentle, but so far they’ve not only held up, but been really useful. Here are a few of the phone’s features I’ve found especially helpful so far:

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Google Now: Think of it like voice-activated Google. To activate it, hold the bottom home button, then slide your finger toward the Google logo in the circle when it appears. You can also access it from the lock screen or the Google search at the top of the home screen.

Since your phone knows where you live and work, it can send you traffic updates, or remind you of flight times or changes via alert. I’ve especially found it useful when I travel and am looking for boxes, parks, or places to get in a great workout. I’ve also used it to find workouts or look up my programming for the day.

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Multi-tasking: I have a horrible habit of leaving apps engaged and having multiple open at once. To manage them on the Razr HD, I simply hold down the software button (square) and close them by swiping them to the right.

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SmartActions:  This feature has been the most fun to play with. Simply put, SmartActions (emphasis theirs) are a great way to avoid time spent menu hopping. If you have certain routines or behaviors, you can set SmartActions so that your phone acts a certain way when it’s triggered by an event you define (think cause and effect). For example, when I’m in the gym, I want to completely shut out the rest of the world. I can turn off notifications and have my favorite playlist load when I plug-in my headphones to start rowing.

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Hotspot: As a web developer, much of the work I do requires an internet connection. As a web developer who travels quite a bit, this can prove to be somewhat tricky. I’ve attempted to use 3rd Party apps to turn my Galaxy S III into a hotspot, but have received scary litigation threats from AT&T and pricey options to add the service to my current plan.

With Verizon, the functionality is a simple click-to-enable feature, and the service is complementary with whatever plan you choose. For the past few weeks, I’ve been living the dream of being able to work from anywhere with awesome speeds thanks to 4G LTE. This alone has given us immense pause in considering a re-up with AT&T.

Battery Life: By far the feature I adore the most. I am a heavy user. I usually have to charge my Samsung Galaxy SIII before I work out in the evening so I can use it for music/video recording. It doesn’t make it through the day, even on battery-save settings.

So when Verizon told me the phone had a 2530mAh mAh capable of some pretty unbelievable talk and browsing times, I was definitely skeptical. However, the battery has lived up to its hype. I’ve gone two full days between charges. TWO! None of our smart phones have ever lasted that long. And the phone wasn’t just sitting around. I’ve worked on blog posts while adding photos to Flickr. I even used navigation to go for a run in a new area while listening to my favorite playlist. The battery barely budged. It’s incredible.

Lest you think I love everything about the phone, there are a few things I haven’t enjoyed…

The Camera: While I’ve taken some great photos, I often miss shots because the camera is slow to take the picture. The camera also seems permanently zoomed in, making some shots difficult to get. It also tends to blow out photos and videos even when set to lower exposure. It just lacks a crispness that my Samsung Galaxy SIII has.

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Its weight: It’s smaller than my Samsung, but heavier, which I find interesting. It hasn’t been a huge detriment, but I’d second-guess wearing it on my arm if I were running.

The accessories: Even though the Verizon store staff has been extremely helpful, there just don’t seem to be a lot of accessories (mainly cases for this phone). When I bought my Galaxy SIII, the options were endless.

This post speaks only to the native features of this phone, not any of the apps I’m currently trying out, or the Fitbit I was also given to play with. Those posts are coming up next!

What is one phone feature you’ve found you can’t live without?

Disclosure: I am participating in the Verizon Health and Fitness Voices program and have been provided with the Motorola Razr HD and six months of service in exchange for my honest review and opinions about the product.

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Our home network

by Neil on March 27, 2013

in Featured, Jessica, Neil, Technology, Web Design, Work

You might say we’re technies. A lot of our lives are spent online, definitely not helped by the fact that both Jessica and my professions are in information technology in one way or the other. By day I am a Network Administrator and by night I try my best to be a programmer, however my real passion lies with the hardware side of IT. Jessica is an instructional designer as well as a great graphic designer, having done her undergrad in graphic design and illustration and her masters in Learning Systems Development. She’s also trying on the programming hat for size.

WARNING: NOSTALGIA AHEAD

I have been enthralled by computers since I was 13 and our family got our first home computer. It was an ACER Pentium 1, 75mhz with MMX! It was…. awesome. I immediately got every game I could find for it through garage sales and the library. Our family was fairly poor, so almost every game was nearly free or paid for with allowance money. We also did a lot of pirating. It was too easy to “copy that floppy”. Remember when they tried to combat piracy on 3.5 inch floppy disks by not allowing you to flip the read/write slider on the back? A simple piece of tape and you were golden! Yup, all you had to do was tape over it.

Then I got my own first PC after taking a IT grunt job at 15. It was a home built PC Intel 486 100mhz with 16 (!!) MB of RAM and a great 4 meg graphics card. Awesome. That really started it all. I convinced my parents to get me a second phone line for the internet and I was off. In 1995 the internet was quite young, and if you were diligent enough you could have a field day doing anything you wanted. I hacked, I war dialed, I did everything I could and learned a lot.

LAN party anyone?

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END NOSTALGIA

Anyhow I am kind of getting away from the main point here. What I want to talk about is our home tech setup. Sometimes we get asked what kind of devices we use and why, and I wanted to have a post to point people to without boring or confusing them to death.

I want to preface this by saying that we build our own computers. Why? Because they are above and beyond better than any retail PC or MAC you can buy. People often assume that because of our backgrounds, especially Jessica’s that we are a Mac shop, or that only macs will work for what she does. That is simply not the case. The computers I have built for us are far more powerful and of better quality than any Mac she could buy for the price.

Our PC’s

Jessica’s Setup (almost 3 years old!):

My goal with Jessica’s computer build was to give her a very stable setup. Fast Intel processor that does not need overclocking in addition to plenty of speed with the solid state drive that I believe is a must in any build these days. To complete the build, I selected an IPS monitor for the color accuracy she needs for graphics and multimeda. The graphics are overkill for her profession but we are gamers as well, so game on!

Neil’s Setup (also almost 2 years old):

With my PC setup I went a bit more budget-friendly, but above all I wanted it to be stable, cool running, and quiet. I decided on an AMD build for cost savings, however I went with a very nice case that allowed for really good cable management, and a very nice water cooling system. By water cooling the CPU you really eliminate a lot of the big CPU fan noise. I built this in 2011 and it is still very quick.

To complete my build, I opted for a 120hz monitor because I do game a lot on this PC. The 120hz refresh rate makes things smooth, not only in gaming, but also in windows. The cursor and input movements are just amazingly fluid. If you have never experienced a true 120hz monitor, I highly recommend them… they are worth the extra $$$.

I expect our rigs to last us well over 5 years, and beyond that because they do allow for small upgrades along the way. Typically after 5 years a commercial PC will be excruciatingly slow and require complete replacement. Not so much with the right custom built devices.

Our home network LAN setup:

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Four our home network I decided to get a bit geeky and focus on an enterprise setup. Because by day I am an Network Systems Analyst, I tend to desire a bit more control and network analysis than an average Linksys or Netgear all-in-one consumer product will give me.

During our home electrical update to replace old aluminum wiring with new romex stuff, I had the electricians pull cat6 cabling to a few rooms so that we could house all of our network and server devices down in the basement. Storing everything in the basement not only keeps the equipment nice and cool, but it also eliminates the presence of bunch of devices sitting on shelves with cords running crazy. All of our IT is now centralized on a wall mounted rack where it stays exceptionally well organized.

The dedicated wireless access point allows us to place it in the middle of the house because it does not to be directly connected to the modem or router. Since it’s only function is to provide wireless access it really is a night and day difference when it comes to signal strength and quality. It really blows the all-in-one devices out of the water. The system also allows us if needed to place more than one access point in the house to expand our wireless network while using the same SSID and network security. It is quite slick for the price.

DS213

We recently got our act together and purchased a NAS storage and backup system. Before we had kind of a pieced together storage and backup solution. Considering how much invaluable data we have for both ourselves and our clients the new NAS was long overdue.

Synology offers a great product with a TON of features. The Synology not only functions as a NAS but it can also be a syslog server, web server, PHP server, cloud server, music streaming server, and so much more. You can even develop your own “apps” for it. It has been well worth the money so far.

For our setup I have the system running RAID 1 with a nightly backup to an external USB drive hooked to the back of it. That gives us 1 drive failure redundancy as well as a secondary data backup. I also have our Cisco ASA sending its syslogs to the Synology so that I can analyze if necessary.

asa5505

I decided to get a Cisco ASA 5505 Firewall/Router/DHCP appliance because not only am I working on some Cisco certifications currently, but I use these in my day job almost daily. These appliances can be very powerful and rock stable if you know what you are doing, however they tend to have a fairly big learning curve. They are certainly not your plug and play home router. You should probably know a decent amount of Cisco CLI as well as Cisco ASDM and have a pretty decent knowledge of networking in general in order to have much success with the ASA. Fortunately I do, so this thing is a blast to mess around with and is very secure and stable.

In the end I feel our setup really combines some enterprise level technology and reliability with affordability. We also maximized the performance in our work rigs by building them ourselves and will incur much lower upgrade costs in the years to come since we will be able to upgrade components easily by ourselves.

I felt this post was important to write not only as a reference for what we’re doing, but because so often bloggers focus on software, apps and what computers they are using, but I wonder if they’ve given serious thought to their storage and backup needs. All data, even if its just pictures or old school papers, is worth securing for the long haul.

If you have any questions or comments on anything feel free to give us a shout below!

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A goodbye tribute…

by Jessica on September 7, 2012

in Kitchen, Rant, Technology, Uncategorized

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Neil, the dogs and I would like to take a few moments and remember our fridge, Ms. Superba KitchenAid, circa 1994…

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Oh Superba, you’ve served us well…

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Okay — Who we are kidding. She was a complete pain in the ass. Despite cleaning this fridge from top to bottom countless times since we moved in, the freezer continued to smell like mildew, causing the ice and water from the dispenser to taste like outright shit. We could never use it, and the dives in front of it to prevent our guests from using it could have earned us Olympic qualification in several of the smaller lesser-known countries. And the crisper drawers? No longer temperature controlled, they seemed to freeze or rot food without rhyme or reason. Not to mention the drawers fell off the tracks every time we opened them.

And Superba wasn’t looking so hot anymore; her yellowing doors, handles and permanent stains made the rest of our kitchen (which lets face it, is not winning any awards) worse. We’re saving for our dream remodel, but for the time being, we thought we’d do something we knew would help things a bit.

Having watched consumer reports and holiday sales since Memorial Day, we finally took the plunge and got a sleek, albeit nameless Samsung fridge over Labor Day, with french doors, freezer drawer and some pretty cool features. Neil and I have always had the most basic of refrigerators, so this feels pretty fancy. Still, we kept it pretty basic, opting out the digital displays and water/ice dispensers because it just felt like another thing to clean, service and eventually break on us. I know, we’re shocked we did that too. At least Superba taught us something.

You could say I was thrilled (and apparently huge-armed)…

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Matilda was too, though you’d hardly know it. The staring, she’s such a creep.

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Stop it!

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The space in this thing is incredible. What you see was stuffed into and falling out of Superba. Now, I think we could fit another Thanksgiving meal’s-worth of food. Plus, it really helps the kitchen overall, and I no longer feel like I’m entering 1994 when I walk into the kitchen — though I’m sure Alice in Chains and NIN will still be heard from there fairly often.

Have you ever had a nightmare appliance you were happy to see go?

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Unplugged. Rewired. Upgraded.

August 27, 2012
Thumbnail image for Unplugged. Rewired. Upgraded.

Where have the past five days gone? Sorry for disappearing (I feel like I say this every week) but between a business trip and our first major house project being in progress, we’ve been somewhat unplugged over here. We’ve slowly started having the electrical redone throughout the house. Going into the purchase of an old [...]

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Friday Link-Up

February 24, 2012

I keep wanting to make this a regular feature of our blog. We come across so many awesome things on the web throughout the week that we think it’s a disservice not to share them. For instance: Memes I’ve been laughing at this video (above) all week. “Is that Jason Khalipa?” Hate peeling garlic as [...]

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First House Purchase: Sony Internet TV

June 8, 2011
Thumbnail image for First House Purchase: Sony Internet TV

Almost immediately after deciding to buy a house, we started thinking about what we wanted it to be. Those thoughts grew into several endless Google Doc repositories of longtime dreams, new-found ideas and things that have to be fixed. Sure, many of our ideas for the house still fall into the looks department (paint, furniture [...]

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