Eating at Yamakase LA
Never Summer For Mammoth
Adding Bluetooth to Audi Music Interface
Eating at Beverly Soon Tofu LA
Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean
Eating at Pine & Crane LA
Eating at Peter Luger NYC
Eating at EMC Seafood LA
Eating at Meet In Paris LA
Eating at Chikalicious NYC
Over the last few days, I’ve been playing around with my new Wren V5PF speaker. I had been cross shopping the last month or two for a speaker that fit my needs (e.g. wifi support, controlling via iphone/PC, and above all else great sound). I looked at various wifi solutions including the Bose sound system and Sonos. But ultimately I went with Wren because of their Play Fi support.
When it comes to mechanical keyboards, you have a few brands out there to choose from. Popularized by gaming sponsors and Twitch streamers, people generally prefer Corsair, Razer, Steelseries, etc as their choices. These companies make all kinds of gaming peripherals that cover a wide range of usages. I personally have a Steelseries Sensei mouse which I would not hesitate to purchase again, so I’m not exclusive to any particular brand. Not many talk about DAS in gaming reviews, but I think they should. It’s the epitome of a simplistic yet refined premium mechanical keyboard.
I’m sure those of you on Time Warner Cable have received the above notice. At first it was just $3.99 last October, which was a slight minor inconvenience. Now the price has been bumped 50%. It’s about time to look at buying a cable modem instead of leasing. After all, at the end of 12 months, you will have almost paid off your cable modem.
One of the mediocre inventions made by Audi was in the fact the Audi Music Interface. I personally own the 2012 Audi A3, and this system sits in my glove box with an iPod/iPhone attachment. If I plug in my i-gadget into this, I have to use Audi’s clumsy dash interface to control songs. If I were to ever want to stream any content such as Pandora, it’d be impossible because I would have to reach into my glove box to control while I’m driving.
At first there was a somewhat complicated solution to this. It involves modifying the 3.5mm AMI cable to also have a micro/mini USB cable come out of it as well in order to power a 3rd party bluetooth adapter such as the BlackBerry Music Gateway. The problem with this was that not many were technically inclined, and it just seemed troublesome to find someone who was to get them to make you a cable. This thread is found on the A5OC forums.
Based on early reports, the ViseeO Tune2Air WMA1000 allows you to accomplish the above without the modified cable and without the bluetooth adapter. I haven’t yet tried this, but it is on my wish list at a hefty $99 + S&H/tax from Amazon. It can probably work for other devices such as i-connectable dockable speakers.
So I guess if you have an iPod connector and no aux in your car and want bluetooth streaming, this could be a nice solution.
I’ll report back with my findings if I end up purchasing this.
Edit: I actually purchased the Tune2Air. It works flawlessly in my Audi A3 with nav. After connecting to the device via Bluetooth, my nav screen saw that an iPod was connected. I was able to browse my music collection via my iPhone directly without using the nav controls. I’m a very happy camper now.
I first started using Mozilla Firefox in 2003 when it was still beta pre 1.0. It was fast, lightweight, and not clumped with ghost processes that eats up memory and cycles. Fast forward to November 2012.
Gone is the incremental versioning of Firefox. They’ve decided to use whole numbers. Firefox 5 was released June 21st, 2011. Firefox 17 was released November 20, 2012. So basically it went through 12 complete versions in nearly 18 months. Based on the change logs, there were a lot changes including performance and new features, although most of these did not warrant a complete version up.
If you’re a PC user and you’ve used iTunes, you probably know how much it sucks donkey balls when it comes to working with a medium size+ library that’s located on a NAS. Itunes in general was poorly designed for PC desktops to begin with, but it also is a terrible performer when it comes to operating with its libraries located on a network attached storage. When I open the iTunes application, it takes a while for it to actually load my library. I also have iTunes match, so I have to cross my fingers and hope it will update my iTunes matches without crashing (which it never does well).
Here is my solution to transition everything to my NAS but still have a responsive user interface for my media.
Lately, I’ve been trying to cycle on weekends to start burning those winter calories I built up from hibernating. And now I notice this layer of fat is not going away. Being how I don’t own a pair of running shoes because they were stolen with my car a few months ago, I’ve been shopping around for some new training shoes. I came across Nike’s Lunar TR1+ which seems pretty interesting to me.
It utilizes the Nike+ technology where it tracks your movements, so hypothetically it should be able to figure out how hard you are working out and where your feet are applying pressure to each shoe. In addition, they are releasing an iPhone app that syncs up to your shoe and creates a training regiment for you similar to the current Nike iPhone app. Every time you work out to their training app, it analyzes your performance. You can choose to post your stats online and compare with your friends.
It retails a hefty $250 and is expecting to be released June 29th. It might entice me enough to actually go outside and run after work.
As a long time user of Instagram and a dormant user of Facebook, I was just about as shock as everyone on the interwebs when it was announced that Facebook bought Instagram. I hate Facebook with a passion. I could care less about when people brush their teeth. In fact, I used it more for like a twitter i.e. for following TV shows, artists, and other culture companies and brands. I used Instagram because I enjoy looking at pictures without words and people didn’t post too much garbage.
So what does this mean for all parties – Facebook, Instagram, and us?
Since the SOPA and PIPA fiasco, the latest victim of this whole anti-piracy scheme of things has involved the popular site Megaupload.com. The feds recently arrested the New Zealand owners accusing them of paying users to upload illegal intellectual property items to their site. The website also charged other users a monthly fee to access these which of course was robbing Hollywood of their money.
Ok all that sounds like the whole Napster thing happening again in a way, but what was interesting about this was the hacker group Anonymous launched a full fledged DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on some major websites particularly of the Hollywood and MPAA types. These include the Department of Justice, the FBI, Universal Music, RIAA, and MPAA sites.
SOPA, also known as “Stop Online Piracy Act“, was introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives on October 26, 2011, by technically illiterate politicians. The main goal was to allow copyright holders and the Department of Justice to seek court orders against infringers for copyrighted material. Its goal is to protect intellectual property. Supporters for this include the RIAA (surprise!!!) and broadcast and TV companies such as NBC and ABC.
How this act aims to work is let’s say you have a Youtube video with some copyrighted material. You are allowed a finite number of views before it’s deemed by agencies that you have infringed on copyrighted material. When that happens, you could potentially be responsible for taking away thousands of dollars from the rightful owner and would be subjected to some major bills. Major sites such as Youtube would also be responsible for hosting copyrighted material and may be taken offline. This would also include Facebook (for letting people post copyrighted material), Google (for providing links to copyrighted material in the search results), Ebay (for providing sales to copyrighted material), and a slew of other tech companies that have some direct or indirect involvement.
So exactly what benefits does SOPA provide for America’s growth?