Category: Reviews


Another thought on Ipod

For a company or culture that is always updating, it seems that Apple has forgotten that it needs to redesign the headphones that come with your Iphone or Ipod.

It seems a bit pathetic that Apple which is recognized for good and working designs they haven’t upgraded their Ipod headphones to a working design since the inception of the Ipod. It is ironic that the ear buds are so bad that some statistics show that one in four kids goes deaf. I wonder if all of these users will sue eventually, how much financial damage will Apple take? Anyway this product needs new and better designed ear buds, and for a $30 value they really come short. They are too big and they loose the sound forcing the user to keep the volume loud, therefore damaging their ears over time.

SO APPLE, GET THIS AND CHANGE THAT STUPID DESIGN ON THE EAR BUDS!

In addition I haven’t seen any Android based music player that would snatch away the market from APPLE. There all this companies that compete on the phone market and the tablet, but no one thought to make a music player like the iPod. Perhaps there is no point to it, because the android phone covers the music player, yet Apple still sells its Ipod. Some of these companies should come with their Music player. Microsoft is lagging behind with their crappy Zune. Perhaps the design is not that great on Zune. There is still market share left out there but no one is tapping into it. Google can come up with their own music player since they have that huge network full of services, they might actually succeed with a music player which will have an universal dock configuration which other manufacturers could use for their own dock-able music players.

I’m not sure what exactly is the difference on the Iphone camera and the Ipod camera, but on their website it does not say on the Ipod that the camera is 8 MP. So that’s not good if there is a difference between the two cameras.

COD MW3 Call of Duty Series

I recently acquired MW3 and I started playing online, I am not interested in story mode. But the maps that I have played so far don’t really offer anything close to the previous editions of COD MW.

I don’t have too many readers so if you stumble on this post I will have you know that I completely skipped the Black Ops iteration of Modern Warfare. But MW3 has fallen short on Map supply for the online gameplay. I’m thinking on going back to MW2 and the original COD4  MW.

This iteration of MW is becoming a boring yearly recurrence like Madden or what-have you. They switch around a few things here and there, put out some garbage maps and there you have it the 2011 iteration of MW.

On MW2 they made a billion dollars but the maps were fantastic. They perhaps made a  map-pack for MW2 which I wasn’t interested to buy, it should have been free. In addition it seems that now the map packs are a new way of increasing revenue. Perhaps this is the new strategy, produce something bad but quickly and then improve it with service packs, sounds Microsoftly familiar? The one good thing they added since Black Ops was the ability to play online split screen. However you can’t have two profiles signed in, just you + guest, or maybe that bug’s on PSN only.

The guns, there is some improvement there but definitely the attachments not a great improvement. They just switched around the perks a bit and voila, the New MW3.

They should have an online play section where you have the ability to choose all the attachments possible on your favorite weapon and three perks or more. They should name that version of online play, Loaded guns, No limit Death-Match, Weapons Reloaded, Loaded Weapon and the list could go on. Moreover the designers could take this to a new level and create a completely free character where you could completely customize it. And you can call it “Totally BadAss”.

In addition Activision should create a Map-Making Contest where everyone in the know can create the map of their dream and submit it. But this time they should go trough with it not like Infinity Ward on COD4 where they announced it and they never went trough with it. Moreover people should have the ability to create their own maps and play them online, however the process should be done on a computer with exactly the same tools the manufacturers used.

MW3, it could have been better, I’ll play it for now but totally disappointing! It’s definitely not worth 60 dollars!

I love the previous maps in COD MW, so whoever is responsible they should port them to the new MW3. All the maps from MW1, 2 and black ops.

It is good that now you can move your claymores and all the other deploy-able explosives, but it sucks that you can’t reload your (explosives, grenades, claymores, noob tube and what have you) with the scavenger perk. That makes the entire perk useless, why would I use scavenger if I only get bullets. I guess you win some, and you lose some.

I hope Valve will come up soon with something better for consoles because this series is going down the drain, and it’s not even rewarding the creative players. Valve had a map contest for HL2, where they appointed winners and everything.

Valve we need you BACK!!! Please step up to this plate, and take it further.

Make sure you switch off all the turbo settings first because my was delivered with all the turbo buttons switched on. And for a second I thought that was an issue with the device. I could not PROPERLY switch weapons because of the turbo being switched on.

I just got me one of these for my PS3 to play MW3. The mouse translation is awesome with version 3.0 firmware. I did not even try to calibrate the product, I just mapped the buttons and tested the mouse movements. The translation is perfect. I used the XFPS Sniper Edition for XBOX and it does not compare with the Eagle eye.

Now the XFPS is like $120 or more but the eagle eye is only $50 and the translation is awesome in MW3. I do not have a a crazy mouse, I have a generic Lenovo optic mouse and it works awesome. In addition this device is firmware up-gradable and it can only get better and should work with future games. I haven’t try it with other games, but it should work pretty good.

A few extra things would be nice, to be able to map multiple keyboard keys for the same PS3 controller button.

And to be able to enable a turbo key on the fly, and to be able to press an extra key on the mouse to enable turbo for the trigger, instead of switching it on and off from the device itself.

The turbo feature should not be a problem since they are creating new versions of firmware.

The Turbo settings seem to be faster than the XFPS, and if you want to cheat a bit then you can switch the turbo on.

refile.net review

So I created a Windows PE ISO with Malwarebytes to clean a computer which has been brought down to a crawl because of adware and what not. So having the image ready I wanted to put it online for people to use it. It was some form of adding more value to The Computer Manual and getting people acquainted with it.

Anyway, in my search for a site that host files online and allows free downloads, I stumbled on the Refile.net website.

And they advertised that they pay $5 for 1000 downloads. At first I said to myself that anyway my MalwareBytes ISO will not make it to 1000 downloads. So I ignored the idea, but the I got greedy and I said that a few cents here and there will help me pay for my hosting and domains and whatever. So I moved all my downloadable content to their site.

Then I started checking the file view counters and the file download counters but it seems that these counters are not very accurate. Because I compared the stats from statcounter with the stats from refile.net and there are big margins of error.

So in essence I have made some cents here and there but not as much as I should have. I already contacted them to see what’s the problem with their counters, and to find out how is it possible to get paid as people are downloading your content. I am suspecting some BS answers from them because I feel that is all bogus.

I haven’t got paid yet so I can’t really tell if this is for real or not, but my main suspicion is that they deliberately made those counters malfunction. I might be off on the speculations but the fact is that the counters don’t work well enough!

Anyway, there was no review online about the technicalities of this service and as I could not find any info on the site I had to put out there my findings so far about refile.net. The reviews I found mention some referral program which I haven’t seen to be available so far. I will update this post later as I find more information.

Their FAQs cover only the obvious questions but not the technical questions (like why aren’t the counters registering accurately the file downloads?).

[UPDATE] And I already got the answer  directly from their tech support:

A file download is counted as a download AFTER captcha is entered of anyfile per unique IP over a 24 hour period. Own downloads (your downloads of your own files) are not counted.

[Update Jan 03 2012]

The file manager is very buggy, I have tried to upload files and they would not be linked with my account, after I contacted tech support all my files appeared and then I had to start deleting my files, and of course the file manager deleted more than I requested it to delete. Moreover the downloads you have earned get deleted as well too, when your files are deleted. Super annoying the file manager, I can’t deal with this thing. Every time I try anything things go from bad to worse.


The plus side so far is the tech support, very responsive, they were able to recover some of my files, the rest I had to upload again. So don’t delete anything because it will delete some of your data you want to keep.

The only way is to create folders, and move the stuff that you want deleted in the folders, then delete the folders. Never  tried it but it might be the best way NOT to delete the wrong files. Make sure you refresh after each move.

 

[Update Feb 10 2012]

Well after sometime of monitoring this refile.net I have had people come to my files and download them but refile.net does not register all as downloads. From all the file views on one particular file, only about 9% have been registered as downloads. So something is definitely not right with the way they count.I know that file is in demand and for a year before it was hosted on my site and I would get lots more downloads than 80- 90 per month. In addition you will get paid once you accumulate $5 or more. Perhaps they will introduce new terms where one can select the amount at which he or she would want to be paid.

Super Angel the 1k juicer

I have had the Super Angel Juicer for a year now, and since it is so expensive I have really used it. The fruits I’ve used are apples, pineapple, and carrots. A few times I used leafy greens and beets.
I have purchased this juicer because I wanted something that will give me the most amount of juice. Before I made up my mind I have watched some videos online to see the comparison between this juicer and others and the juice amount.
When I have purchased this juicer I was only interested in the juice quantity, but overtime I grew tired of spending my time making juice.

Juicing apples

Apples juice fine with the skin on.
I like the Granny Smith apples and they produce the most amount of juice. After juicing Granny Smith apples, the pulp is incredibly dry. It is almost like the cinnamon challenge. OK not exactly :) , but if you are trying to eat the juice depleted fibers is going to take quite some time to ingest them because they are super dry.
I have tried other kinds of apples but after juicing, the pulp came out moister than the Granny Smith apples. Those apples have a different texture, the pulp is more flowery and you get a bit less juice, but that is not the juicer’s fault. In addition the juice is a bit thicker from these flowery apples.

Juicing Pineapple

This one is a tough challenge. It also becomes messy if you don’t have the patience.
The fibers in the pineapple are tough; especially the core and they clog the juicer making the process much more difficult. The functioning principle of the juicer is to somewhat clogging the two filter pipes with fruit giving the juicer the ability to squeeze out the last drop of juice before expelling out the dry pulp. The two spinning rods are encased into two narrowing pipes and the fruit pulp gets crammed at this end and only inserting more fruit trough the chute will actually help expel the pulp at the end.  In addition the pineapple juice is much foamier than apple juice, and a lot of foam gets built up in the chute, and you have to stop to leave time to the juicer to push out the pulp. Otherwise the foam buildup will spill out when you try to add more fruit in the chute. In addition you have to cut the pineapple in manageable chunks that fit in the chute, well that is true for all fruits you might use.
I have used entire pineapples without taking the skin off, the separation is perfect, there no skin residue in the juice, just juice. In addition, a good practice is to alternate between on piece of skinned pineapple in conjunction with one skinless core piece, this tends to extend the workflow to an entire pineapple without cleaning the system. I have tried juicing two pineapples without cleaning the system but the second pineapple adds 50% more work because there is residue pulp on the channels already.
I think there is a need to have a second screen housing, with a larger chute and a larger expelling section, which will enhance the work-flow. I mean for a thousand dollar juicer that’s not a lot to ask. For pineapples you have to make small pauses to wait for the foam to diminish as the pulp gets expelled out of the screen housing.

Juicing Kiwi

Ok this one cannot be juiced with the skin on because those mini needles on the skin slip into the juice. In addition you get more like mash kiwi in the juice collector, and thicker mashed kiwi in the pulp collector. Perhaps for kiwi one would need a Norwalk. But I think we can do without kiwi.

Juicing Pomegranate

It takes an extra step of straining it – plus you have to take the fruits out of the skin which is time consuming.
You need to have a strainer which would separate the juice from the masticated seeds. The seeds get grounded into a fine powder like flour, and it slips into the juice. Therefore you have to collect the juice and strain it trough a cloth, or maybe coffee paper filter.

Juicing Carrots

This process could not be easier, and the collected pulp can be used for carrot cake, I think. Juicing fruits is the closest I got to cooking.
Juicing mango is like kiwi; you get mashed juice and thicker mashed mango.

Juicing leafy greens

This is the easiest part, I tried juicing spinach and lettuce and for the most part the process is self feeding. You don’t have to even use the wooden pushers.

The overall process of juicing

First of all it’s not worth it to juice 3-4 apples, because the cleaning process will take longer than the juicing process, therefore will render the entire idea obsolete. So I usually get two bags of Granny Smith apples and juice them, that gives me somewhat more than a half gallon of juice. This will take probably an hour to do. You have to chop the apples to fit trough the chute, put them in a big pot, and then juice them. There might be a need of slowing down at some points to give the juicer time to catch up with you. Then you must clean the entire equipment, otherwise you will have a tough time scraping of the dried off fruit. Then you have to clean the sink and you definitely have to have a strainer to block off the fruit residue from going down the drain. So this entire process (juicing and cleaning) will take like an hour +.
If you can’t stand half hour to an hour of noise, then this juicer is definitely a good pickup. People that hate noise will find value in this product.

If it would be up to me:

Now, I would definitely sacrifice 10% juice for a 20 or more percent improve in work-flow, with a second and third filter housing where the dried pulp gets expelled faster and perhaps a larger filter holes and larger chute, and  where one can use an entire apple at once. However the larger chute for an entire apple might demand a new design or a great mind to manufacture like a side attachment, somehow. Anyway with three horsepower motor the juicer has enough power to chop trough wood, if it has to, and any side attachment would have enough power to chop trough entire fruits. I used the juicer intensely and I never managed to clog it up. It has a reverse button to get it unclogged if that happens.

Cleaning

One not too cool thing about this juicer is the attachment design. The braces that lock in the housing filter are not completely detachable and this area becomes a bit difficult to clean. The entire machine housing, rods, filer is made from stainless steel, which makes cleaning easy. However the cleaning should not just be a simple rinsing, try to put a bit of work into it so later on you don’t have to remove fruit stains from the rods or the filter.
You can find more information by searching online about other features the juicer has. But I felt I had to review the most important ones.

Possible Tweaks

I think the juicer should be on a special stand to allow for the bottom fan to circulate the hot air away from the juicer thus keeping it cool. In addition in the manual they inform you that you should take a 10 minute break after a 45 minute use. So this would give the time window to rinse the juicing system when you’re dealing with tougher fruits. The juicer gets hot after long usage so give it a break every half hour or 45 minutes.
Another tweak, I used is to put the rubber gasket in the water and just stick in on the main machine attachment area, instead of wrapping it on it, because on tough fruits like pineapple the pressure applied tends to allow some juice and foam to slip out where the rods and filter housing attach to the main machine. Using the gasket like that seals off better the attachment area.

Overall the juicer is a versatile machine and apparently the juice quality is better than most others. You see, I don’t have a lab to test and compare the amount of juice oxidation with the Super Angel 5500 and other juicers, so I am reiterating whatever other people said. But these days you can’t trust the FDA anymore; therefore one might need to get his own lab facility to retest whatever other people claim.
Lots of juice and a wide variety of fruits can be used with the Super Angel 5500.

Interface Design

Since I am using Real Player for a lot of media tasks, I decided to design a more appealing interface. I designed an interface that reduces the clutter and has better looking icons, because the icons real player came with are monotone, quite boring actually.

If you look at the picture below you can see a the top interface which only has the icons changed and then the bottom where the icons the interface layout and buttons are changed. I gave it a lighter color and I removed the tabs at the top and replaced the real player logo button with regular buttons, like “File Edit and View”

Regarding the tabs at the top of the interface, they need to be removed and added as functionality on the left ribbon and right clicks. The featured tab, is such a nuisance, I don’t even know why would it be there. Is pointless. I am not sure about the reasoning and the income that featured tab provides, but is not satisfactory since one has to wait for it to load stuff of the internet.

In my design I tried to add most of the common tasks into the display panel, and I added the volume boost / normalizer slider in the bottom right. This boost / normalizer, would be used to boost the volume on poor sounding media or normalize it if is too loud. I needed such a function a few times on a media player and I thought it would be useful.

I will perhaps add and modify this as I would get more ideas.

Adobe Reader Install

I was trying to install adobe reader X on a computer and it worked like a charm. The only problem is that if you want to install it on a second machine you have to go trough the same online process again. Imagine if you have to do multiple machines, terrible.

Moreover you can’t even see the adobe reader installation kit anymore because there is a weird download butler that has to install too before you can install adobe reader. I’m not sure how is this supposed to be easier than just download the damn file and install it, but adobe has done it again. In addition you have like 4 services wanting to start up after the adobe reader installation. I don’ t even know why businesses choose adobe, but from now on I will use anything else but adobe.

So in the following two locations you will find the installation kit:

windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\NOS\Adobe_Downloads 

Windows 7: C:\users\all users\nos\adobe_downloads

While the download butler is downloading the applications you can browse to find the files being downloaded, after they have finished downloading, the icons are going to change, so just copy them in different locations, because they will be erased after a restart.

Adobe reader has become a garbage application, no wonder PCs crash and burn constantly, it is because garbage apps like acrobat reader that have dimwits designers behind them.

Adobe reader services, adobe reader start up, adobe reader update

Adobe Reader – terrible application, I hope someone else is going to come with a better standard, because their acrobat reader is such an ass backwards design. Now in 2010 you have 4 services that are installed and are running at log on. I am speculating by 2020, they will have perhaps 10.

Xbox Live Sucks

So I wanted to cancel my XBOX Live automatic renewal. And obviously I couldn’t. There is no way to do it on your own, online. Or if it is, is so hidden that will drive you mad looking for it. And I know that is all part of the forced renewal marketing strategy that all companies use. Credit cards, banks, literally almost any subscription service will just get you signed in in perhaps 2 seconds, but it will take you at least an hour to unsubscribe. Why? Is all simple. They use all possible tactics to deter you from canceling.

I called to cancel my automatic renewal. And I really don’t understand why you have a stupid robot that is asking questions because the technician answering the call will ask you the same questions again? If you prompt her about the questions you already answered, she will give you a lame excuse that somehow somewhere your answers got lost. You have to waste your time again answering those redundant questions again to the technician.

It is totally unacceptable when you spend 10 minutes to answer all the possible questions with one technician and then you get transferred.  But the top of the frustration is reached when you are asked the same questions again by the new person.Why was the first tech asking the questions if they did not transfer the answers with the effin’ phone call? It will always remain a frustrating deterring tactic from canceling your subscriptions. Can someone design this better?

I wasted 20 minutes on the phone to cancel a subscription. That is unacceptable, and they did not wanted to change my gamer tag to redeem themselves. All I can do now is start my own console and my own perfect network and following. Anyone care to invest?

About MacBook Air

These devils from Apple have an uncanny way of taking my money :) . I saw the new macbook air and it is very hard to resist this new temptation.
I like everything about it except that the battery life is only 7 hours, and no back-lit keyboard. I was wondering how many ounces would have been necessary to add to this unit to bring the battery life to 16 hours? I would’ve gladly picked up a heavier machine for such a battery trade-off.
I wanted an air ever since they came out first, but I guess I am supposed to wait for the one with 16 hours battery, back-lit keys, washer, drier, cook and feet massager. :)
Maybe powered by light.

I was doing some research into some advanced photo-voltaic cells and there is potential for apple to take it into that direction. They are the only ones that have the drive and taste to do that. The back of the screen seems like a lot of real estate space to go to waste, why wouldn’t be covered with a special photo-voltaic material? But it has to be something that looks good too. Because otherwise is not going to catch on. If there is anyone that would want to do it, it would be them.

SeekTrough Video, Seek Trough Timeline

As I was playing around with Real Player I realized that this thing is very versatile. I spoke on real player before (patronizing tone), just joking. And I found many cool features on it.

But since I needed to use those features I started using it for other things and I found out that if you play videos and you just want to seek trough you can. I mean If you grab the seeker and move it around without releasing the mouse click. The video frames update.I don’t even know what the term is for the process but perhaps I can coin it now. So from now on it is going to be called Video SeekTrough. OR maybe Seek trough time-line, a bit long.

That is a very AWESOME thing. Ok don’t make fun of my excitement but it is. I tried VLC and it updates somehow but it is skipping. Real player stops the sound and it smoothly updates the frames with the mouse movement. I needed this feature many many times to seektrough videos but windows media player didn’t have it, VLC didn’t and finally someone thought to put it in Real Player. Kudos to the Real Player team.

I do video editing and that feature is really useful in video editing but no one thought to add it to a media player, but Real Networks.

Well Done guys.

As I was thinking about this I found Real Player very Useful, and I contemplated on the matter. Why isn’t Real Player the de-facto media Player? Well this answer is for you Real Media, so read carefully here. The User interface is too complicated. Too many buttons, it seems a bit cluttered. The functionality is awesome, but the visuals need a major overhaul.

Therefore if you guys ever think of updating the interface, give me a call to exchange some ideas with the design team. Real player is a great tool but not visually friendly, especially for novice users.

And for god sakes get rid of those commercials and the browsing ability. Real player should never open to a browser. Have you ever thought how annoying that can be? Below you can find a previous post on other real player abilities, and great ones too that come in handy overall. It is a very complete tool but not user friendly.

Other Real Player Features

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