If you are using any social network you would know, people associate 2016 with everything bad that happened. All the celebrities that died, terrorism, brexit and even Trump.
For me, in a lot of ways, 2016 was a great year. A lot has happened, good and bad, but I am happy with where I am.
There are a lot of plans for 2017 and some of them involve this blog. I’ve subscribed to a lot of blogs in 2016, after getting tired of all the “tech news” I’m much more interested in stories and opinions.
I hope to make 2017 even better than 2016. And will see what this year will bring us.
Category - Blog
Probably the biggest change in the iOS 10 for me is lock screen and all that’s changed about the locked phone. Only after updating did I notice, that I had a few habits that are hard to change. One of them is putting my finger on the Sleep/Awake button while getting the phone out of the pocket and pressing the button to see the lock screen as I look at the phone. What happens now, is I get the phone out of the pocket, it automatically turns on, because of the Rise to wake feature and I turn the display off, by pressing the Sleep button, so then I need to wake the phone, by pressing Home or Sleep button. I have mostly changed the habit in less than a week of using the iOS 10, but there are those little things you don’t notice while using the phone.
Also, the big change — sounds. I’ve always been in love with Windows Phone keyboard sounds. When I’ve had Android phone, I was looking for a keyboard, that made sounds similar to WP. Now on iOS it comes pretty close. I love those new sounds. Actually, I’ve had my phones muted for about two years and now more and more I keep turning the sounds on, just to listen to the keyboard sounds.
This year Apple made a very solid update to the operating system. It totally feels like a new phone after installing iOS 10. Love all the changes introduced.
IIHF World Championship is over and I’ve already deleted the official app, but there is one thing that stays and that’s the habit of using Today widgets. It was so easy to look up scores in Notifications center and not by opening an app that it got me thinking – maybe other widgets can be useful too.
Right now I’m trying to better understand which widgets I would like to use, so I add/remove one every couple of days and see which ones stick with me. Excluding IIHF Today there are currently three other widgets – MyFitnessPal to quickly glance at my remaining calories (I’ll post about my diet and logging food later), CoinKeeper – for quickly adding expenses and I’m experimenting with using different Weather app instead of default one, so the last widget is WU Weather.
I couldn’t find much use for widgets for half a year I use iPhone, until I found one use case which was appealing enough for habit to stick. When I’ve used Android I’ve used widgets a lot, but those were on the home screen and it was easier, because they were always there, on iOS, you have to remember to go to Notification Center and then scroll to the side. I still think that widgets as they are implemented on Android make more sense, but iOS widgets are not as useless, as I thought before.
The Daily Show’s Head Writer on How the Muppets Lured Him to New York
I’m still not totally sure New York isn’t just a movie. Even after 15 years of near nonstop New Yorking, it still seems more filmic than real. Nothing I do in New York feels completely believable unless it reminds me of something I’ve seen someone do in New York in a movie. And even something as mundane as walking and talking becomes exciting when you see it in a movie. Especially something mundane like walking and talking.
For a long time, when someone would ask me where did I want to live, New York was my go-to answer, but I was always afraid I wouldn’t like it. This essay illustrates this point perfectly.
Previously, in my days of (possible) piracy of everything, installing all the software after reinstalling Windows was a pain. You had to download the latest version of the program from the website or torrent tracker, you had to install every program by itself, if it was from torrent tracker, you had to apply some kind of crack or jump through the goops in order to make it work. Later, came one of the greatest tools ever – Ninite, you could choose programs you want to install and get this bundle of apps (only those, that were free, of course). You still had to install cracked apps separately, but it was much lesser pain.
Today I don’t have questionable software on my computer and this time I’ve decided to download programs only as I need them. That way I won’t have cluttered laptop right away and it’s pretty easy to download and install something if I need it. So, I wanted to take time and write about all those apps that allow me to do my work, study and helped me not to lose all the data.
Microsoft Office 2013. I’ve mentioned it in previous post about reinstalling Windows. This is a great piece of software. You can start using it even before it installed on your PC, streaming apps is a very cool idea. Also it comes with 1TB of OneDrive storage space, I’ll talk about that a bit later. And for the price I paid It’s almost free – 70€ for 4 years. The greatest deal.
Microsoft OneDrive. Let’s get all the Microsoft products right out of the way. I’ve used Dropbox for a long time and love the product. They have some very interesting features, like saving Screenshots. (Windows 8 also saves screenshots if you press Win+PrintScreen). Also it offers integration with all sorts of services, but since I’ve started using Office 2013, I’ve migrated all my documents to OneDrive, integration with Office makes using it a lot easier.
Dropbox. I’m using it for the photo backup. It would make more sense to use 1TB of OneDrive for that, but Dropbox works with photos so much better, especially automatic photo uploader on Android.
Evernote. This one is interesting. Like Dropbox, I’ve been a user of Evernote for a long time, but I still have trouble managing it. I can’t find the system that works for me. Mostly I’ve tried everything tied to Notebooks, I still have to try managing everything using tags or try to use Google Keep. I dump all the articles I find interesting there, but then rarely read them.
Spotify. After Spotify came to Latvia, it became the only place I listen to the music. I’ve had couple of albums bought in iTunes, but I don’t have iTunes installed on my laptop for a long time. I cache one big playlist to my laptop, so I have something to listen to at all times.
Chrome. I’ve tried to use the newest IE for a couple of weeks and really liked it, but the lack of extensions just kills it. So still using Chrome as my main browsers. Ones in a while, I try every other of big browsers, but nothing matches Chrome, unfortunately.
That’s all the software I’ve installed after installing new OS and this is mostly stuff I do use daily. There are probably other programs I’ll install later, but I use those rarely, comparing to the main ones.
In the previous post I’ve wrote about hardware side of things when your hard drive fails. It’s definitely not the greatest experience in the world, as you realize you’ve lost all of your data. Fortunately, we live in the world full of clouds and the data is mostly safe. All of the photos, work documents and files for school were backed up to some kind of cloud solution. I could instantly remember couple of files I’ve lost, but not anything important.
How do you return everything back to normal? If you didn’t have some kind of hard drive clone (and I didn’t), you start by installing OS. Here Microsoft doesn’t make it easy, at least for me. In Latvia, installing Windows for most of the people is easy, you just download the copy you want with some sort of “activation” and install it, easy enough. I’ve went the legitimate rout. I’ve bought my laptop with Windows 7 and when 8 came out I’ve paid what was small amount then (about 30€) for the update. It seemed like a great deal at the time.
When you try to start from scratch, as I did, you can’t just install Windows 8 from scratch using your key, because your key is not good enough, it supports only updating from previous version of Windows. That means, I had to install Windows 7 first and then update it to Windows 8. Fortunately, I didn’t have to install all the updates for Windows 7 and could just go straight to upgrade. In addition, it’s worth mentioning, thanks to the speed of the SSD, it takes far less time than it used to, to install the OS.
Windows 8 is with us for a long time already and so it got many updates and there are some drivers updates, that means you have to download and install, in my case, 140 updates, before you can upgrade to Windows 8.1. That takes a long time. Nevertheless, tens of minutes and two or three restarts later you are ready to download Windows 8.1 upgrade. I’ve went to Windows Store app, where the big tile was waiting for me, but when I clicked “Download” it just showed an error message, which said something about not being able to download the update right now. Not very useful, considering the true reason of the message was not entering the code for the 2 factor authentication. How someone supposed to just know that is beyond my understanding. I’ve downloaded and installed Windows 8.1 and thought I could start downloading apps I use, but not too fast. There are couple more updates about 200MB in size. Why can’t they include all of the updates in to Windows 8.1 upgrade?
After you have your OS running, everything else is easy enough. Kudos to Microsoft for the new Office, all I had to do is go to the website and click Download button and in about 10-20 minutes I’ve had full Office suit running on my laptop, ready for typing this complaint. Clicking the second button, I’ve deauthorized previous install. Office 2013 is truly an outstanding product.
It started like an ordinary day. I was working on my laptop, connected to the big screen. Everything seemed fine when I turned it off and went for a walk. But then I’ve returned home and pressed the Power button on my laptop. BIOS started checking all the devices there are inside and stopped after it found processor. “That’s unusual” I though at the time and restarted the computer, thinking it was some kind of a bug. But this behavior persisted. The only good thing I could see – it wasn’t frozen, I pressed F2 and got to the BIOS settings screen and there was the answer. There was this word “None” right after “HDD:”. That couldn’t be good. As it turns out, it wasn’t good. That means SSD had died on me. I’ve purchased it more than a year before and it seemed to work just fine. There was just one unusual experience couple of months ago, when it did some kind of reset removing everything. The only difference between that time and yesterday was the price of the new SSD, as in both situations all the data was gone.
The SSD in question was Kingston V300 120GB Solid State Drive. I bought it on recommendation of my friend, who used it in many computers – his, clients and at work and never had a problem. And it was (and still is, as far as I can tell), the cheapest SSD on the market. This time I’ve decided to look at something else, I wasn’t ready to pay a lot more, but about 10 euros premium was fine for me. The other thought I had was upping the capacity to 240GB, but it meant doubling the price, not only the storage. Also, I wasn’t ever hitting the limit on the previous SSD. After looking for what was a very short time, I’ve decided to buy Samsung 840EVO 120GB SSD.
The first thing I’ve noticed was the package. It was much nicer than plastic Kingston one, which you have to battle with scissors. Then I’ve opened the package and got the SSD out, it felt much lighter than the Kingston one. I’ve later checked and it was indeed lighter. SSD by Kingston was 86 grams and Samsung one is 53. It may not seem as a big difference, but I think there is some kind of psychological border. Samsung’s SSD feels like it is a little empty plastic box. Of course, you won’t even notice the difference when you put it inside the laptop, it’s just an unusual feeling getting it out of the box.
There was also CD in the packaging, no idea where to put it as my laptop doesn’t have the drive. I believe everybody should stop putting CDs in the boxes, I know, the cost of including it is almost zero, but it’s pretty much useless.
After I’ve installed the drive, it was time to get the Windows up and running. And that’s whole different story for another post and I’ll leave it for tomorrow, probably.
Today I’ve decided to use prompt from 500 Words Every Day Challenge on Lift.do. I’ve been writing at least 500 words for 17 days already and it’s the longest I’ve managed to do that and the theme of todays prompt Distractions – is very important part of this process.
Just now, as I was writing this post, I’ve reached for my phone and started reading Twitter, so it shows, how hard it is to stay focused while writing, but the problem of distractions arises even before you begin typing your first words. You have to choose time and place to write your post. I’m usually planning to write just after lunch. After working all morning, it’s a good way to clear my thoughts and focus on something different and also, if I didn’t have time all day, I still have evening to write something last minute, just before bed. In terms of place, I usually write at coffee shops or at home. It’s easier to focus at coffee shops, since there are less things asking for your attention, but if I’m referencing something a lot, I prefer writing at home, since there is big monitor, which makes working with multiple windows a lot easier.
The biggest distraction for me are messages, Twitter and Pocket queue. First two are on my phone and the last one is on my laptop. When I’m referencing something, it’s hard not to go to Pocket and read something not related, but also very interesting. And I have to stop myself from grabbing my phone and checking Twitter every couple of minutes (it doesn’t help, that I like to read every single tweet). I also like to answer messages right away, so I’m pretty much given up trying to remove this distraction. As I’ve already mentioned, I couldn’t resist checking Twitter even writing post about how bad the distractions are and regarding articles saved in Pocket, this time I’m not distracted by them, because I don’t use the browser writing this post, so it’s harder for me to slip.
I’ve tried to use couple of distraction free text editors on my laptop, but they didn’t stick. The one good application I did like, was Evernote for Windows 8.1. (Metro version). It’s the Evernote client for the tablet side of Windows, but it works great on a laptop, even without touchscreen. It’s the same old Evernote, but it occupies the whole screen. So that’s a plus. Recently, I’ve been writing all those posts in Word. I have Office 365 subscription, I love this version of an office suite, and it saves all my documents to OneDrive, which I now use instead of Dropbox, because of this great integration.
Sometime distractions, even help, when you write your post, then change your attention to Twitter and then return to your post, read it and have some new thoughts, you just have to be aware and don’t make those distractions too long or often. If you are not a heart surgeon, all those messages and notifications car probably wait a couple of minutes. It doesn’t take too long to write 500 words, so try to enjoy yourself. Just figure out, what works for you.
Last year, I had to make a choice between 4” iPhone 5S and HTC One. This time it was much harder choice – iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus or LG G3. I looked at LG at a store and so I was ready for a bigger phone and watching Apples presentation I was leaning more towards 6 Plus. But considering my use of a previous phone and iPhone 6 Plus prices and the fact that LG G3 was free, I made my choice in favor of the Android device.
iPhone 6/6+ sale date for Latvia wasn’t announced, but here are the prices on the grey market:
First of all, LG G3 is smaller than the iPhone 6 Plus, because there is no Touch ID in the front, so the bezel is smaller, it’s actually not that bigger than my HTC One m7 with 4.7” screen, so it was comfortable in my hand from the start. The only different thing – all the buttons are on the back of the phone, but after about an hour I was very comfortable with that and considering how you hold phone this big it makes a lot of sense. And I use knock to unlock a lot, it’s just easier to knock on the screen two times and the phone comes out of sleep. It is also lighter than the iPhone 6 Plus, but that’s because it is plastic instead of aluminum. It doesn’t feel as premium as some aluminum phones do, but you can use it without case (which is not the case with iPhone, you really should use a case, just to not have this camera sticking out, which Apple photoshops out of every picture).
I’m surprised how many people are comparing 5.5” phones to iPad Mini. Maybe some uses are similar, but the phone this size is much smaller even than the iPad Mini.
Regarding the phone itself. The screen is gorgeous, it’s QuadHD, maybe even too much, I can’t even imagine what the battery life would be with 1080p screen. Similarly to TVs there are two 4K videos loaded on the phone, which look outstanding, but you probably won’t have access to more such high resolution content, so it’s nice to brag about, but maybe not that useful.
I didn’t have time to test the camera, but a couple of shots I’ve made looked good and the focus is instant. It’s laser focusing system and it seems to work very well. As soon as you tap the screen, the phone focuses and takes the picture. Much faster than HTC One m7 and pictures look a lot better. I also think HTC made a mistake sticking to 4 mega-pixel camera with additional camera for focusing later. There is a mode in LG, where you take a photo and after that pick a point to focus and it works great.
Battery life is a great improvement over my HTC One, I had to charge it two-three times a day and then leave it charging all night. This one lasts me all day from 6:30 to midnight with some 20-30% remaining. Also, you can change the battery on the go, I’ll probably buy another battery and won’t have to worry about the charging for a long time.
LG’s software on top of Android isn’t that bad, but I still changed the launcher to Nova, because of all the gestures I can do, otherwise sticking with default launcher is a good choice.
Kudos to LG Electronics Latvia for giving me a gold phone and it’s gold with black, unlike iPhone, which is gold with white front. Gold with black looks so much better.
It has been almost two weeks since Apple announcement and I still have not written about the Apple Watch. After rewatching the Watch part of the presentation, reading a crapload of articles, listening to a lot of podcasts and most importantly thinking about the product, I’m ready to give my opinion on the product. (As if anybody cares).
Before the announcement, I actually was convinced Apple would show a wearable, but not a watch, something else, something different. This time, I think, Apple made Samsung’s product.
The Next Chapter in Apple’s History
It is hard not to notice how excited Tim Cook was presenting this product, he chocked a bit a couple of times and they’ve received standing ovation after the first video introduction. Straps looked great in that video, I didn’t know historic value of some of them, but you can read about that in a great piece by Benjamin Clymer. I was worried about magnetic strap, but it seems it’s pretty solid.
Tim Cook talked about Digital Crown, how you cannot just use touch screen for most things, because your fingers would be in the way of content, so you zoom in and out or scroll through the list using this crown. However, later Kevin Lynch used the Digital Crown only handful of times and actually scrolled a lot on the screen (probably, not even that, but the Demo was scrolling on the screen).
They’ve also showed 11 minute video, which, if you believe Tim Cook was made this morning and Jony Ive narrated it (that part was true, I guess). There were a lot of functions showed and that’s not a good thing, in my opinion. Sending someone a heartbeat, so he feels it on his wrist, why would you do that?! In addition, in the video, Ive said the phrase “using GPS and Wi-fi from your iPhone” – I can see how the watch uses the GPS from the phone to save battery life, but why Wi-fi? There was a moment with hundreds of photos on the screen of the watch, why would you do that? I’m rarely nostalgic enough to want to see photos right away on my watch and if I’m showing someone, I’ll pull out a phone. Another thing is Stocks widget. Maybe I don’t get something, but who needs to look at the stock price on his wrist? Tim Cook after presentation, maybe, but that function is there, just to feel the screen, nothing more.
They have mentioned Siri couple of times, but used it only one’s. Speech recognition is one of the strong sides of Android Wear, so Apple has very good competition in that space. You can also read your Twitter timeline, on a watch. Again, something that’s done best on a smartphone, and would probably be painful on a 1.5” screen.
The one thing I like about that watch is it’s fitness and health capabilities. I would use it as a fitness tracker, the app looks great and it seems like there are many great ideas in that space. Again, there are different devices for that kind of usage.
Two things unanswered:
- How much would the model you will actually want would cost. Starting price at $349 sounds a bit pricey, as it is, but it’s even more interesting how much the best one would cost?
- Battery life. The phrase Tim Cook used was “It’s simple to charge at night”. Everyone seems to think it will last a day, which is okay, compared to Android watches (most of them can last a day), but still, many of us were thinking Apple would do something different.
I’m sure they’ll sell a lot of those, but I can’t see the real use for that watch, especially at such a price. It looks somewhat good, it’s thick, but as often with Apple products, looks good. It doesn’t do much of the interesting stuff, I think Google Now on a watch is more advanced. The only interesting thing I saw was Fitness capabilities. I won’t buy one, because I’ve decided on my next phone, and as you can guess, it won’t be an iPhone. More on that later.