Reviews Posts

I was recently looking for a decently priced VPS where I could host a couple of small to medium sized websites. I actually signed up for a few random ones that I found on Google and tried them for a few days, but they didn’t strike me as working very well. One of them actually crashed after about an hour, and it took about eight hours for support to finally restart it for me. Eventually I started looking around the internet a bit more, and ran into a relatively new company called Digital Ocean. I realize that not all web companies have nice looking web pages, but whenever I encounter one that does it immediately makes me feel more comfortable about trying it out. One of the claims on the front page really stood out to me: Deploy a SSD Cloud Server in 55 seconds. I had to test it […]

Despite the amount of cool technology I own (iPads, iPhones, etc.), I actually don’t really spend much money on anything else in my life, other than plane tickets when I travel. While I appreciate new clothes, my brain rarely comes up with the idea that I actually go buy some new ones. The one exception to that is socks – whenever I see a nice pair I generally always buy them. Which is why I probably own about 100 pairs (and even then it’s hard to find a matching pair from time to time). That said, one personal item I have been shopping for recently is a new wallet. I can’t say that I’ve ever owned anything special in that department; usually I just head down to the mall and buy whatever I can find, often some faux-leather item for about $20. But recently an Australian company called Bellroy has […]

I used to wear a watch all the time, probably since I was around 18 years old. My first watch was some tacky gold-plate Seiko that I took a fancy too around that age, but over the years I slowly upgraded to more stylish options. That changed around the time I purchased my first iPhone though, when I suddenly stopped wearing one. I guess at the time I figured wearing a watch was a bit redundant since my phone could show the time with just a single click of a button. But last year I started noticing other guys wearing watches again, and I thought it looked sort of cool. I looked around my apartment for the last watch I had, thinking I would wear it again, but it turned out I managed to misplace it somehow during my travels. But since it was a Citizen Eco-Drive titanium watch, I […]

I’m currently in Europe travelling around with my girlfriend, and our plan is to be here until December. Since she was adamant that she didn’t want to bring a full computer with her on this trip, we decided we could make due by sharing my Macbook Air for various tasks. That meant that whoever wasn’t on the Macbook Air would have to make due with one of our two iPad Minis. I don’t mind using my iPad Mini at all, but typing on it gets a bit tiring, especially when you’re trying to work on a document (such as an eBook), or put together a presentation. I thought in this case that it might be a good idea to grab at least one bluetooth keyboard to bring along on our trip, that way whoever was stuck using an iPad would at least be able to easily type on it. I […]

After three years of travelling solo and about ten or so of travelling with various businesses, I’ve become pretty used to booking accommodation online. Hotwire Hotels, Hotels.com, Priceline, HostelWorld – I’ve done them all. While each of those services listed above has advantages and disadvantages, one service I always go back to faithfully is Hotwire Hotels. If you’ve never used Hotwire, their business model will probably come as a surprise to you. Essentially they offer you extremely discounted hotel rooms in most major cities in the world, which is a great way to save some money if you are comfortable booking online. But there’s a catch – you don’t know exactly what hotel you are staying at until after you have already paid for it. That’s a scary proposition for most people, but is ultimately how they are able to keep their prices so low. You can mitigate this risk […]

I first heard about the Drobo Storage Array from my friend Tony a few years ago. A Drobo Data Array is basically a self-contained RAID-5 data storage array in a box. For anyone that doesn’t know what that means, it’s basically a fault-tolerant form of storage where you can lose any one drive completely and still recover all of your data. Unlike most RAID-5 software or hardware systems though, the Drobo unit is intelligent in that it will work with different sized drives, and expand accordingly in the future if you pop a new drive in. My business partner picked up a Drobo about six months ago, and he’s been really happy with it. So a few months ago I went to NCIX here in Langley and decided to grab one. The unit I purchased is a 4-bay unit that supports Firewire 800, but you can get units now that […]

Probably the best book I read last year was Steve Job’s biography by Walter Isaacson. I thought it was a fascinating book that showed just what a polarizing figure Steve Jobs actually was. Recently I found myself looking for a new book, and Amazon recommended Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein, Einstein: His Life And Universe. I recently finished reading it and I wanted to share my review of it here. As someone with a physics background, I was impressed with how Isaacson dealt with some of the technical achievements of Einstein, such as the photoelectric effect (which Einstein won the Nobel Prize for) and of course relativity. I assumed beforehand that these would be glossed over, and was happy that most of them were not. Presenting these topics to the average layperson without dumbing them down too far is a big achievement, and Isaacson did it surprisingly well. I […]

Whenever I look to book a hostel nowadays, I almost always gravitate towards one of the online booking services such as HostelWorld. Not only can you see a huge inventory of available hostels in the area, but you can also see reviews from recent visitors. Sometimes a hostel with a good rating will have a bunch of poor reviews recently due to something like construction noise nearby, so it is always a good idea to read the reviews in detail. For our trip to Cuzco, Peru, we decided to stay three nights in Cuzco upon arriving to eat some of the local cuisine and to help get our bodies acclimatized to the 11,000 feet altitude. I’m glad we made this decision, because I pretty much had a headache the entire time in Cuzco due to my body adapting to the thinner air. July is one of the prime months to […]

I recently returned from Brazil, and decided to stock up on some new electronics. While down at the Apple store I managed to grab a new bluetooth keyboard for my iPad Mini, as well as a few other gadgets. That’s when my eye caught some of the Fitbit devices on display in the Apple store, and I decided to get one. What Is The FitBit Zip? The Fitbit Zip is basically a pedometer, a device that measures and records each step you take. If you wear it around during the day you can log how many steps you take, and in term how many calories you burned during the process. The advertised features of the Fitbit Zip are: Tracks steps, distance and calories burned Syncs automatically to your computer or select Bluetooth 4.0/Bluetooth Smart Ready devices (iPhone 4S or later, and the iPad (3rd generation) Set goals, view progress, and […]

Last year I sold my Nikon DSLR and replaced it with an Olympus OM-D M5 micro four-thirds camera. While I’ve had a few of the micro four-thirds cameras, the Olympus OM-D camera was the first one where the image quality seemed on par with my DSLR, not just for outdoor photos with tons of light, but also for low-light photography as well. As a former wedding and concert photographer, it was a bit challenging to go from my Nikon and Canon gear (where most of my lenses were f/2.8 or faster) to my micro four-thirds lenses, where most zooms are f/3.5 or slower. The lack of a built-in flash on the OM-D complicates this further, since the camera doesn’t have the ability to increase the ambient light without purchasing a flash unit. For the most part I had been using my Panasonic Lumix 20mm f/1.7 lens on all my micro […]