4 Hour Body Daily Report #7

Breakfast: 2 eggs, 1 pieces of turkey sausage, tomatoes

Snack:  Unsalted Macadamia Nuts

Lunch: Bowl of chili, green beans

Dinner: Ribs (some sauce)

Dessert: Carb friendly ice cream

Workout: 1/2 P90X Bicep and Back

Overall: C. Last day of the ice cream.  It’s holding me back.  Did a weigh in this morning before basketball, 225.  That’s a 2 lbs gain from last week and I’ve been pretty good besides the ice cream.  After basketball I was 220 so some of that is water.  Need a great Thursday and Friday to beat last week.

Read More

Mobile Phone – Gaming

The Latest Mobile Phone Features that Promotes a More Enhanced Gaming Experience

Every year, mobile phones are getting better and better because newer features and specs are installed. This is what makes the market more productive and competitive. Apart from the meeting the objective of excellent messaging and call quality, hardware and software upgrades also promote brilliant gaming and other sorts of mobile entertainment. From analog phones to cutting-edge smartphones, mobile phones are truly making life more convenient and satisfying. At this point, let us now look into the current aspects of mobile phones as linked with gaming.

Main Processor
The main processor is considered the brain of any computer or mobile phone device. If you are using your mobile phone for gaming, chances are, you will need to have other applications open in your phone in order for everything to run simultaneously. As of today, the latest smartphones in the market are equipped with a Quad Core hardware that is responsible in making the user able to achieve multitasking. For users and gamers alike, the processing speed must be 2 gig and up.

Graphics Processing Unit
Latest phone models today are embedded with an excellent graphics processing unit or GPU. This feature is great for video watching and gaming because you will not encounter any delays on the screen. The GPU allows videos to run smoothly, at the same time, accuracy and clarity of graphics are obtained. The ability to see every detail of the video on screen is a great advantage in gaming. Games such as mobile slots are full of graphics and as long as the GPU is upgraded, then gaming becomes more pleasant and convenient.

Random Access Memory
Today’s newest mobile phones are equipped with a larger RAM or random access memory to ensure that all files, apps and games, no matter how huge they may be, can be stored on your mobile phone. The RAM is responsible for providing fast loading of any application. Hence, this feature is vital in all types of games because faster loading results to continuous gaming. You can therefore perform all application in your phone at one time. For instance, playing mobile slots and replying to an SMS can be done simultaneously.

Responsive Touchscreen


In this era, where mobile phones follow only touchscreen platform, competition lies on how efficient this feature is among mobile phone companies. As mobile phones continue to thrive, the responsiveness of the touchscreen is what users and gamers are looking after. Fortunately, mobile phones today have achieved this quality. Fast touchscreen response is ideal not only for messaging and navigation but for gaming as well.

Gaming is one of the reasons why most mobile phones users long for a high-end full-spec smartphone. This is because they want to fulfill the best gaming experience and at the same achieve their goal of successfully winning the game. As we live in this electronic age, it is expected that the creation of innovative mobile phone will further increase and users as well as gamers will be happier and satisfied.

Read More

Intel Ultrabook Final Review

This is my last look at the Ultrabook Intel sent me.  It’s been a very pleasant experience from start to end and I’m very happy to say I will continue to use the Ultrabook in both a development world but also as a go to laptop for surfing the web & general computer usage.

Kids

One pleasant surprise in using the Ultrabook on a daily basis is watching the kids interact with the Ultrabook touchscreen.  It’s very apparent they are much more engaged with a touch screen laptop then the old mom & pop keyboard only. 

Daily Usage

I have to say the biggest enjoyment of using the Ultrabook on a daily basis has been it’s responsiveness.  The thing is able to handle all my computer needs, including developing a recent PhoneGap application I’ve been doing.  I’m consistently running eclipse & debugging with my android.  The system performance has been outstanding. 

PhoneGap + Windows 8  + Sensors

One really neat application of this laptop is being able to play with my Phonegap application right on the laptop with Windows 8 and using the built in sensors in the laptop.  Although I didn’t target the windows platform my Phonegap application seems to work well on the laptop & I can get a quick debug environment setup.  The accelerometer & touch part of the application works flawlessly with Windows 8 and the laptop.

Read More

Intel Ultrabook–Looking Closer

Intel Ultrabook – Looking Closer

I’ve been running with the Intel Ultrabook for a couple of month now. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the power this thing punches for being so light. Boot time has been incredible. It literally boots in less than 10 seconds. That’s reason enough alone to take a closer look. 

Daily Use

I’ve been using the Ultrabook daily. No problem running multiple instances of Visual Studio 2012, SQL Management Studio, Outlook & Google Chrome. The Solid State Drive is a real difference maker. I’ve even had Hyper-V running without issues.The Ivy bridge processor is the real deal.

Ultrabook & Windows 8

So there are a lot of concerns with system admins & programmers when it comes to Windows 8. Classic case of who moved my cheese. Once you get over differences, it’s very apparent a Touch enable laptop is essential moving forward in this environment. There are so many times I’ve caught myself using the touch screen, at this point the on board mouse vs touch is almost 50% split. Honestly, when I use my Dell E6420 on my lap I find myself touching the screen now. All laptop’s moving forward are all going to be touch enabled, err, as soon as Apple catches up.

Games

The Ultrabook Intel sent me has an GPS, Accelerometer, Gyro, & Magnetmeter, Web Camera, & Touch – all the stuff in your iPad that lets you play interactive games. You get this same experience with the Ultrabook. The hardware technology is basically like having a Kinect or Nintendo Wii in your laptop. From Fruit Ninja, to Ball Strike, to Google Maps you now just need developers writing the apps. Here you can learn more about Microsoft Sensor API.

clip_image002

clip_image003

Read More

Ivy Bridge Ultrabook Review

I was fortunate enough to have the Intel people sent me a 3rd generation Intel Ivy Bridge Ultrabook. It’s not a pre-production model or a model that will ever make its way to production. It’s meant only for reference for the hardware vendors when they produce their Ultrabooks in the future, kind of like a developers preview of Windows that Microsoft releases. They asked me to review it and how I thought it measured up in a developer’s environment.

Hardware

The model they sent me included:

– High Definition Web Cam

– Intel Core i7 CPU @ 2.0 Ghz

– 180 GB Solid State Hard Drive

– Mini HDMI port

– 2 USB 3.0 ports

– 4gb RAM

– Touch Screen / Acceleromter / Gryro

Right off the bat you can tell the CPU is very fast, and able to handle what I do. Typically I have 2 instances of Visual Studio 2010 opened, SQL Management Studio, Chrome (with 10+ tabs opened) and I saw absolutely no lag running in Windows 8. I’ve only been using it for a week now but my first impressions are the CPU is a major upgrade from what I’m running now. Windows 8 boot time is under 5 seconds and of course the SSD rocks. The only bad sign is the RAM amount. Now, remind yourself that this isn’t production level hardware and I’m 100% positive when this hits the street you’ll be able to get it with 8+ gigs of RAM, but 4gb of RAM didn’t cut it 3 years ago and it doesn’t cut it today.

Size

I’ve been rocking a DELL E6410 for the past year+. It’s an absolute work horse, the best laptop I’ve ever used bar none. Of course, it’s not thin by any stretch. The Ultrabook Intel sent me is incredibly thin & light weight. I took it on vacation with me & it was great to just put it under by arm on my trek to the coffee shop in the mornings, no need to tout a bag, it’s ipad weightish. clip_image002

Touch Screen

Touch screen on a laptop that doesn’t pivot, WTF? Those were my initial thoughts. I was very surprised by the 3rd day I was using the touch screen more & more for tedious task like closing windows, dragging items, etc… We’ll see how the touch screen plays out but for now I’m actually liking it. It doesn’t replace the mouse or keyboard but when it’s on your lap, it’s sometimes just faster just to click the screen.clip_image004

Read More

Goals 2013

It’s that time of year again. Goals for 2013. Short and sweet so hopefully I can knock them out this time around.

One issue I need to resolve is the tangle of wires and cable. I’m looking into getting a good cable management product to help this get resolved. Other goals are:

Professional

  • Complete Microsoft certification
  • Build Android App
  • Attend 4 local user group

Personnel

  • Drink 8 glasses of water a day
  • 1 hour of exercise per day
  • Read 1 book a month

Read More

Latest Must Have Software

Going to a 64 bit OS this afternoon so here is the latest list for you and me 🙂

Firefox

Chrome

iTunes – export your podcast list

Office 2007

Visio 2007

CCleaner

Fences (new)

mRemote

FireWorks

FileZilla – export site list

Navicat – export site list

BitNami

SQL Server 2008

Picasa 3

RocketDock

Notepad++

Pidgin

Surround SCM

TestTrack Pro

QA Wizard Pro

TweetDeck

VisualSVN

Free Monitor for Google

SSMS tool pack

SketchPatch

MemCached

Display Fusion

Balsamiq Mockups

Putty

Resharper

Read More

Daily Find #118

Charles – Http watcher similar to Fiddler

AMY Editor – online source code editor based off of textmate, very cool

Mozilla Bespin – Online code editor

Microsoft offers $250K for Conficker virus creator – Was it you?  Email me if so 🙂

Read More

2008 Goals in Review

Thought I would jot down my 2008 tech goals in reviews.  I’ll be putting my 2009 list shortly.image

Learn MVCAccomplished.  I started down the asp.net mvc route but after a short bit realized I didn’t want to learn beta technology that would be a moving target on top of learning mvc.  I then went down the ruby on rails route but again I was learning 2 things at once and ended up settling on CodeIgniter MVC framework for PHP. I really enjoyed learning CI and mvc and made doing PHP much more bearable and actually enjoyable again!  I can’t imagine writing PHP without a mvc framework and hopefully it will make learning asp.net mvc or ruby on rails that much easier since I now understand the mvc concept pretty well.

Get Microsoft CertifiedAccomplished.  Passed the MCTS 70-536 exam test. Learned/memorized some new things but frankly I think I’ve already forgotten alot of it.  It was worth it though.

Actively Post to this BlogAccomplished.  I’m going to say “mission accomplished”.  The daily find never was daily and really was never meant to be.  It’s just a name and besides I do have real work to do besides finding the best web stuff for my readers, the 2 of you 😉

Learn LINQAccomplished.  Big fan of linq and grudge when I’m working on an older application that uses plain sql strings.

Learn RubyFail.  Really epic fail.  Just never got to it.  This is one of my top goals for 2009.

Learn SilverlightFail.  This I don’t feel that bad about.  I’ve never been keen on Flash development and silverlight falls under this category for me.  I’m not a great designer so my UI will never be sweet and I don’t see myself using this professionally so, eh… off my list.

Zero Inbox –  Fail. Instead I now depend on search, either in Gmail or outlook 2007 (which is actually not bad).  It’s been working good for me.  Off my list.

Discover New ToolsAccomplished.  This is the the techtoolblog after all :).  Biggest win tool for the year = BitNami/mRemote.

 

5 out of 8 is one heck of a batting average in baseball and I’ll take it.

Read More

Happy Third Anniversary

I normally keep things techie & geekie on the blog, but today is my 3rd year anniversary with my wife, Amanda.  Believe it or not, we were high school sweet hearts – started dating in our senior year of high school.  When I tell people our story most people are amazed that kind of thing still happens today, but it does, and we’ve been together since.  It’s been an amazing ride together and no doubt the best time of my life.image

You hear how opposites attract?  Amanda and I are complete opposites.  I’m a tech geek, she is in the medical field.  I talk ideas & politics, she talks people & events.  I like vanilla, she likes chocolate.  History Channel vs The Hills.  It keeps it interesting when you don’t agree on much.  The good side to all of this is we compliment each other so well.  My weaknesses are her strengths and vice versa.  Over the years her strengths have rubbed off some & I’m a much better person because of it.

Here is to us, happy anniversary Amanda!

Read More