Slashzerø » Reviews

Kindle for the iPhone

admin — Sat, 09 May 2009 13:09:48 +0000

First things first, in the last five or six years I haven’t really been reading many books. Most of my reading has been related to work or blogs. I had downloaded the Stanza app for my iPhone, but only found a few free books that interested me. Out of curiosity I grabbed the kindle app when it became available. I would never have bought the real kindle, and the kindle app is really meant as a companion app to the real thing, but I figured what the heck. As an application it is inferior to stanza, in fact I beleive amazon has since bought stanza. However, the kindle app has one good thing going for it in my opinion, it is east to go to amazon, find a book, send a sample to the iPhone and start reading. At the end of the sample there is a link to complete the purchase.
I have read about 10 books in a month and thouroghly enjoy reading on the phone.
I look forward to better and more features, and I applaud amazon for continuing to come up with more ways to get my money.

TEST

VMWare ESXi: First Thoughts

abx21 — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 15:15:41 +0000

Having just left a position working on a massive VMWare ESX rollout, I have had a lot of experience with ESX and the whole VI ecosystem. I am also acutely aware of the large amounts of money involved with VMWare. For that reason I have been a big fan of KVM and VirtualBox. But at my new job I see lots of opportunities where having a full blown VI setup would help, but am hesitant to introduce this.

Naturally when ESXi was released for free ;I decided to look into it. The installation was straight forward and withing 30 minutes I had things up and running. VMware offers a Remote CLI appliance which I quickly downloaded and installed, with thei RCLI you can do most of the basic things you could do with Virtual Center, as in cloning and svmotion, albeit obviously by using perl scripts instead of a GUI. Other than the DR and SRS features this can work as a low cost visualization platform. ESXi also has support for HBA, nfs and iScsi storage. Using the VMware converter I was able to clone my windows laptop, albeit it took a few tries. Once I was the cause of problems, here is a hint, don’t change your password on the ESX console while you are doing a P2V. I’ll update this with new experiences, but so far, yeah, its fun to be playing with VMware again.

IPhone WordPress App

abx21 — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:37:17 +0000

This is my first entry using the new WordPress app for the iphone. It is a free app, with a pretty standard interface. In addition to creating new blog entries you can view old entries and keep local drafts on your phone. I had a minor issue at first, XML over rpc was not enabled on my wordpress install, but the app recognized this and told me how to resolve it. Now if only I were more proficient with the iPhone keyboard… Things sure have come a long way since the days we used to run phpnuke on this site.

Contour Surface Sound Compact Car Kit Review

admin — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:01:34 +0000

My birthday was a few months ago, and my lovely wife, knowing I am a bit of an Apple fanboy, decided to get me the Apple Bluetooth Earpiece for the shiny firstgen IPhone she had gotten for me last Christmas. I was grateful, but am not a big fan of bluetooth earpieces and after reading the negative reviews decided that I would return it to the Apple Store and exchange it. Nice Husband huh.

I wasn’t quite sure what to get, so I went to the online apple store and look for things that cost about the same as the bluetooth headset, and I came accoss the Contour SSC Car Kit; and decided I would get it.

In all its glory

On paper it seemed interesting. Lets just say I was pleasantly suprised.

What this is is basically a flat panel speakerphone. It fits neatly on my visor, took 5 seconds to pair to my Iphone and just works. The sound quality is great, people sound clear and even when driving around with my window down no one has problems hearing me. I have had this thing since mid-May, and granted I don’t speak on the phone a lot (maybe a few minutes every day) I have yet to have to recharge it, I just take for granted that when I flip down the mic boom its just going to work.

Its simple to use, you flip down the mic boom and the device will connect to the paired phone. There are 2 buttons, a toggle switch for the volume and a pick-up/hang-up button. The device uses beeps and a female voice to let you know things such as “Handset Connected” and the like. In fact the device pairs so quickly I leave it in power off mode and when I get a call I turn it on and it picks up right away.

So yeah, not a real technical review, but in you were looking to spend about $100 or if your state now mandates hands-free devices for phones in vehicles this thing gets my vote.

UPDATE:

It is now November 17, and I still yet to have to charge this thing. I really must say it was a good investment!!!