Tag Archive for: review

Peak Design Tech Pouch

One of my biggest pet peeves of traveling is the night I get home, and I have to plug in my phone and watch on my nightstand. The cables are in my suitcase somewhere, and now I have to go hunting for them, and I just want to get to sleep,

That is, until a few months ago.

I finally had enough and purchased all the cables, chargers, and accessories I would need to travel. No more worrying about packing what I need or cannibalizing my nightstand before the trip. It has had an outsized impact on my travel experience, and I regret not doing it sooner.

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Backblaze

If you have a computer, you have a ticking time bomb. Some computers last decades before they have a catastrophic failure, some barely make their way out of the box. Whichever is the case, your computer will eventually fail and you will lose all of the data on that device. This outcome is guaranteed no matter who makes the computer, only the timeline is unknown. This means that you must prepare. 

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Dropbox

A long time ago I downloaded an app for my iPod touch (my phone was an LG Voyager at the time) to help me take attendance for the class I was long term subbing for. The app was cool at the time and is out of development now, but there was an option in the settings for that app to sync data via Dropbox. I had never heard of Dropbox before so I signed up for an account and that was that. Dropbox is now the very first app I install on a new device, I rely on Dropbox to save all of the photos and videos that my family creates, and most of the apps I rely on every day use Dropbox to function.   

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Square Cash

Ever since I was I kid, I have been a fan of heist movies. To this day, I will argue that The Usual Suspects has the best plot twist of any movie of all time. But there are only so many The Usual Suspect caliber movies out there, so to fill the void I had to slum it a bit with lower quality heist movies, enter Swordfish, The Italian Job, and the like.

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Apple Watch- The First Two Days

I have been interested in the Apple Watch since they were announced, but I was not compelled to purchase one until the Series 2 came out. This past weekend I purchased a 42 mm Aluminum Space Grey Series 2 Apple Watch. While that is a mouthful to say, my experience so far as been as smooth as I would expect from an Apple product. With two full days under my belt here are my first observations:

My Apple Watch Face
  • The ability to have multiple watch faces is pretty pointless for me. I made the one watch face I needed and removed the rest from my watch.
  • The bulk of the apps that installed automatically were worthless, but the process of deleting them was helpful for me to learn how to interface with the watch.
  • The watch app is helpful, but splitting control between the phone and the watch to change settings on the watch takes some getting used to. I think of the phone now as the “System Preferences” of my watch and haven’t had to use it much since I set up and customized the watch.
  • This is a device for health and consuming notifications. I have not been very successful with “heavier lifting.” Messages is fine, but Slack crashes more often than not for anything other than reading notifications.
  • I know it was likely due to the shiny new toy effect, but I did have one of my most active days in a while yesterday with the watch on.

This is the first watch I have worn regularly since I had to wear a watch for student teaching. It is comfortable and only pinches some hairs off my wrist when I first put it on in the morning.

So far I have the greatest benefit from the Breathe app, which has been much easier to use (in that I have a lower motivation requirement) than the Calm app I have been paying for since last year.