Jan 6, 2015 | blog, featured
A nifty gift my wife got me for Christmas last year was a mobile power pack. This one has an integrated solar charging grid along with a plethora of charging options for multiple devices. You see, I’ve been looking for a mobile power solution for the last couple months, and had thought of one of the larger LimeFuel devices in the 24K mAh range. My wife got me two gifts, they are getting a post each, after reading Josh Cullen’s extensive guide she knew exactly what to get me, tune into my next post!
There are a number of these kinds of mobile power packs out on the market. Some more expensive than others, and I was looking for a quality device, with a few charging options for multiple devices. Apparently, my wife was picking up on this and found one with a twist that I hadn’t even thought of: Solar charging!
Enter the PowerAdd Apollo Pro
The beauty of this power pack is two-fold. First is the obvious feature that covers the front of the device. The solar panel incorporated in the Apollo Pro is a great feature to have. However, this small panel doesn’t make for speedy solar charging. Rather, it merely supplements a trickle charge to the existing reserve on the power pack. It really needs to be charged from an AC outlet before being used. It can charge from the solar panel, but it would take over 48 hours to top it off, so supplemental trickle charging is the key aspect to that feature.
The second feature is the multiple charging options. This power pack not only charges standard USB devices a single port, but also includes a set of multiple charging tips with a selectable high-output 12/16/19 volt port designed for charging laptops. Yeah, that’s right – laptops.
The battery in this unit stores 23,000 mAh worth of power. Compare that to your average 3,000 mAh smartphone or 5,600 mAh tablet battery, and figure out how many charges you have from a fully charged unit! Figure that you can ‘top off’ the charge on the unit itself from the solar panel, and you’ll have multiple charges for several of your mobile devices while away from a power outlet.
In any case, there are a number of options for mobile power supplies these days, and I’m looking forward to being able to using this unit for some adventures throughout 2015 the rest of the year.
Nov 18, 2013 | blog, featured
Another year is coming to a close. 2013 has been a great year for me as a consultant, with a lot of opportunities for learning and working with new things.
In my professional life I consult with companies to help them build & maintain managed IT services, specifically around Microsoft Windows server and client environments. It’s a lot of fun, and both large and small clients have unique requirements, technology, and cultures.
On the personal side though, I use a completely different set of technologies. Every year it seems to morph, usually little bits at a time. For example, we all have a desktop or laptop that lasts us for years, maybe a printer, WiFi, storage systems, and entertainment of course. Me too, though the end of this year seems to have taken a bit of a turn for me.
It will be no secret that I’m a heavy Microsoft user, and that I’m also a big consumer of Google services. During this past year, I’ve found myself almost completely using online services rather than local software. I do have an Office 365 account for myself, and having Office 2013 is great, but it’s the online portion of that subscription that makes it really usable.
Google Docs is another service I have begun to use much, much more, to the point of rarely actually using MS Office for personal use. I use Office for work all the time, of course. Along with Google Docs and Office 365, I use Evernote rather than OneNote, self-hosted WordPress for blogging, all the usual social networks, of course, and several other services as they fit unique needs.
What this means, is that I really don’t need MS Windows for personal use any more. So here at the end of 2013, I’m changing the computing tools that I use. Much of this isn’t a surprise, a Nexus 7 (2013, 16GB, WiFi) for a tablet, and a Nexus 5 for phone. I still have my 3-year-old Sony laptop, but that dual-boots Ubuntu 13.10 and Windows 8.1 (spending most of the time in Ubuntu). The big change was picking up the Chromebook 11, built by HP and Google.
I’ve been leaning towards a Chromebook for a year or more, but this one checked all the boxes for me. Small, lightweight, instant on, USB charging (very cool), a great keyboard, very good display (even though resolution is only 1366×768), and stylish. I can literally do about 99% of what I need from a computer from this Chromebook. The only thing I can’t is video editing, and that’s mighty rare for me anyway.
The interesting coincidence, is that all three of these new devices have only 16GB of local storage and, of course, rely very heavily on the cloud to function. For where I live & work, that’s not an issue, so I’ve found a significant boost in personal productivity by having devices that are instantly available, have the same synchronized information a click away, and are in some cases interchangeable. A study source – http://progamerreview.com/ has proven valuable to me, with so much tech advancement it helps to keep up with the professionals.
So for the next year or more, I’ll be mainly using Google hardware and, for heavy lifting, Ubuntu on my “big” laptop. As I said earlier, I’ve been heading in this direction for some time. Now that I’ve moved fully over, I feel more empowered to actually *do* things with the technology I own, rather than having to manage the technology… which is what I do in my professional life.
At least this makes things a little simpler.
May 3, 2013 | blog, featured
It seems I haven’t covered this in quite awhile so I thought I’d give it a go again. After all, what’s more important than what we’re running on our mobile devices?
Ok here’s my current Top 10 list, drum roll please:
Beautiful Widgets Pro
I can’t talk about top ten without the number-one thing I look at every time I turn on the phone. Maybe it’s not what I’m after whenever I hit the power button, but it’s my favorite clock/calendar/weather widget for phones (not so on tablets – but that’s another post).
WeatherBug Elite
Even though BW has weather in the widget, I still count on a really good forecast tool, and WeatherBug has been my go-to weather app for years. Heck they even updated it in the past day with a nifty new UI. Clear, concise, fast, detailed, and with animated maps.
Feedly
This is a fairly new addition in the last month. While I wasn’t a big Google Reader app user on my phone, I was a gigantic Google Reader user on the desktop. Now that we see some forward innovation on the RSS reader front, I’m happy to report that Feedly brings innovation in megaton quantities An absolutely gorgeous UI, fast, easy to navigate, and most important of all – they listen to their users and respond to suggestions, ideas, and criticize criticism very quickly (and constructively). Highly recommended!
Google+
Many people love Facebook, and I do to an extent as well. However, Google+ is where I’m spending most of my time reading and posting. It’s easy, it’s fast, and it does more than just tie into the rest of Google’s services. Since I’m a big Google user, it really does work better for me, and all the people that I interact with are more active there in any case.
Plume Premium for Twitter
While the default Twitter client is quite nice, it does fail at showing me the information from my streams that I want to see. With the demise of TweetDeck, I needed a Twitter client that could show my lists as well as the main stream and mentions. Plume does this very easily. I’m sure there may be others out there that do this as well, but the three other clients I tried just didn’t make it easy. Plume does.
Pulse
I’ve been using Pulse for a couple years now, and it’s been evolving quite well along the way as an all around great news aggregation app. Recently purchased by LinkedIn, I see Pulse becoming a very important and powerful tool for reading and sharing news with peers in my industry. Great little app that keeps getting better.
Pocket
Ah, Pocket… one of my favorite read-it-later tools. In fact, Pocket used to go by the name Read It Later, then figured out how to make this type of tool/service even better. I can save things to Pocket from my phone, my tablet, and just about any browser that exists. They make it super simple, and very lightweight. Ties into Android like it was made for it.
Evernote
What can one say about Evernote? The all-around great note taking tool that runs on simply everything. It took me awhile to get into Evernote, mainly because I was a huge Microsoft OneNote user and, of course, they have no equivalent anywhere else (though there is a OneNote Android and iOS app now). Since I use Windows, Linux, and Android, I need apps that are on all these platforms. Evernote is this as well as one of the best note taking apps that exists.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn on Android used to be a pain to use. This past year, they seem to have gotten serious about the user experience and really worked on their app (much as Facebook has on theirs). The latest rendition of LinkedIn on Android is a joy to use. Fast, intuitive, and easy to connect with or respond too my industry peers. LinkedIn is growing in importance for me as a consultant, and a quality app like this one helps immensely.
Rhapsody
Finally we get around to something more mundane, like listening to music. Unlike most people, I never seemed to accumulate a lot of music. This was true of CDs as well back in the 90’s as I just didn’t have the money then to buy every CD I wanted. Somehow this translated to MP3s as well. In any case, subscription models seem to work well for me and I really enjoy Rhapsody on my phone and my Nexus 7 mounted in the dash of my truck (hey, I’m a true tech nerd). Easy to use, good UI, and the ability to cache anything in my library locally.
Last but not least is an under-sung hero of the phone and mobile movie scene, check out the Movie Box App. Well, that’s my list and I hope I’ve helped answer a question you may have had regarding any of these apps. If not, don’t hesitate to jump into the comments and ask me about them. Or simply let me know of a better app or ones that I should check out.
Sep 18, 2012 | happiness
Smartphones are neither smart nor phones, but then most technology is greater than the sum of its parts (or names).
Sep 2, 2012 | blog, featured
‘Transformer Prime’ by John Biehler
I’ve been thinking about mobile devices and storage space recently. After a great conversation over lunch with @CloudScout last week, I concluded that 32GB is probably the perfect amount of storage space for mobile devices today.
Here’s my thinking:
16GB is just too small, it can’t hold the data we need. Add a couple dozen tracks, a few hundred pics, and you’re just about there.
64GB on the other hand is overkill. It’s the initial size for an SSD for a full size computer or laptop. It does give you room to grow, but by the time you fill it up, you’ll be upgrading devices anyway. On top of that, you’re going to pay a premium for that storage.
I consider myself to use a bit less local storage than the average person on my mobile devices. I’m also a techy geek, so I tend to buy devices with more storage than I could possibly need.
In the past 18 months, the two tablets and the two phones I’ve had range wildly on storage. The Google Nexus One I had only had an 8GB microSD card, and I was constantly around 2GB free. When I replaced that phone, with the HTC Sensation 4G, I made sure to add a 32GB microSD – which I’ve not used over 18GB of data yet.
My Apple iPad 2 that I bought upon release in 2011 had 16GB, and, while I was always worried of running out of space, I never used more than 12GB. When I replaced the iPad 2 with the Asus Transformer Prime, opted for the 64GB unit. Again, I’ve yet to top 20GB of data used so far.
What I see here from my own experiences is that we tend to worry too much about running out of space. However that limits us from really reaching the full potential of the devices we carry. Also, in the last 18 months, online storage and the amount of time our mobile devices are constantly connected to the cloud has increased dramatically.
Currently, I can count up to 125GB of free storage space that I have at my disposal between my two mobile devices. Along with that, the automatic uploads of pics to Google+ (Apple has a similar feature) allows me to not have to think about uploading or syncing pics. In addition, my Asus tablet has a great feature (Asus bundled software) that allows selected folders to automatically be synced to the cloud.
It’s these new services and features that will reduce our dependence on local storage for mobile devices and allow us to have a much more seamless experience across computing devices. Bring Google Drive/Docs and Microsoft Skydrive/Office Online into the mix, and you’re quickly covering much of what we need for storage AND productivity.
So if you’re trying to decide between the 16/32/64GB versions of a product, pick the middle option. 32GB is likely to fit your needs quite well.
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