Snacking with Adel

It’s nice to write posts for two blogs at the same time, here and on Technoodling. I consciously write some of my blog posts to work for TN too, and have taken to reposting most of my TN reviews on this blog for volume’s sake, so that I have some posts on this as well, and not have to depend on my paltry output for content.

I’ve back-posted all my reviews already, what little there is so far, and even repurposed some tech commentary for inclusion in TN, even some that are a bit old. You’ll know what these are if you read closely. Most of my own new stuff I’ve reviewed and put on TN, but I’ve since run out of gear.

I’ve taken to this commentary schtick just to have stuff to put in. I’m kinda disappointed in the stuff they do give me to review, mostly inconsequential stuff like computer pouches and camera bags, and I’m loathe to review some of them. I still have a couple of these items to take care of, and I guess I’ll get to them this afternoon. Thank God Jason texted to ask to meet me tomorrow and give me some earphones Howard asked me to review. Anything but bags.

But then again, I’m sort of shorting out on reviewing earphones too. Where are the new phones and laptops and cameras? The game consoles and desktop computers and tablets? Where are the substantial accessories like big speakers and newfangled gadgets and stuff like that? Sigh. Or maybe the manufacturers aren’t sending TN new stuff, and the guys have to rely on their own purchases to have something new, like I do.

Oh, well. Guess I’ll just have to wait until they throw me something nice. Or if I buy something new. Sigh.

Computer bags come in all sorts of sizes and designs these days. There are fluffy, gay bags that explode in all colors of the rainbow, and there are staid, utilitarian, tough bags that are almost military spec’d. Some are simple, plain bags that provide minimal protection, and there are those that are so complicated and feature-laden, with pockets and divisions for putting in practically everything you own, including the kitchen sink. The choices are bound to drive you crazy, and it’s hard to sort out through all of them.

Leave it to Sumdex to create the no-nonsense bag with just the right combination of specs, and have no other extraneous features except the very thing Sumdex is famous for – their wonderful shock- and impact-resistant material that the entire bag is made of.

The ungainly-named Sumdex NeoMetro Super Light Flap Brief bags come in different sizes and colors to accommodate different sized laptops. I tried out the one for the 13″ MacBook Pro or Air or any 12.1″-sized PC laptop, and the one for the 14″ MacBooks or any of the 15.1″ PC laptops. Aside from the sumptuous, lush Sumdex material that comprises the whole of the bag, they come with a nice strap that has a nice, comfortable shoulder pad made of the same material. This padding is great protection for your laptop, and is worth the cost alone.

There is a front pocket for your everyday little gadgets and knick-knacks with their nice, non-obtrusive logo attached to one side, a large secondary pocket with three inner pouches for your chargers and other things, and a big rear pocket for magazines and other paper thingies. The NeoMetro Super Light Flap Brief’s main laptop division is unique in that it has two corner catches that hold your laptop in place and keeps it secure when you’re moving around. The zippers are sturdy and durable, yet smooth and luxurious in operation. It was a pleasure carrying something so stylish, plush and light, but doesn’t scrimp on protectiveness.

On the whole, the Sumdex NeoMetro bags are great, no-nonsense computer bags that exude style and class. Now if only Sumdex could get their long, odd product-naming conventions in check, everything should be all right.

Price: P2,950

Availability: All Sumdex outlets, Digital Hub/Digital Walker

Like
Great Sumdex material provides excellent protection

Dislike
Compartments might be too simple for some folk

 It’s maddening. Now it works, and seems to work fine. Dammit.

Finding out there isn’t much to do today (save for the usual important but everyday stuff), I head on to the mall to catch a movie (‘Haywire’ starring Gina Carano), and find out I’m a bit too early. So I head on to my usual place, with my trusty iPad 2 and my not so trusty broken bluetooth keyboard, to wait out the film. I bring out my iPad 2 (after I order my usual (a tall brewed coffee in a mug, with two Spendas) and bring out the keyboard, and wouldn’t you know it? It works now. After conking out on my the past few days, usually when I’m about to use it outdoors, it works.

What am I going to do now? I complained to customer service at Logitech yesterday and am waiting for an answer. Then again, it’s just as well. Something is indeed the matter with this keyboard, after conking out on me several times in the past few days, I should get it replaced or something. Meantime it’s doing just fine, working as it usually does, taking in my text with aplomb and switching apps and stuff. Who knows, it’s probably going to go dead any minute now (although it hasn’t really gone down as I was using it, save for that first time when it went out in the middle of typing a sentence)?

I can’t tell what’s bringing it down – a loose connection somewhere inside, something I tried to trigger by flexing the case this way and that; or a faulty charging system, a wonky battery. I charge it overnight, which is really unnecessary, but just on the off chance that that could be it. Yet it wakes up and works the minute I plug the micro USB, which is the mystery.

I’d better take advantage while it’s working and do that bag review for Technoodling (why I don’t do it on my other Mac is beyond me). So excuse me while I do it.

Ok, I’m on my last legs. I had to try and see if this keyboard is really giving up the ghost before I even attempt to have it serviced, or better yet, replaced by Logitech.

I let it charge a long time, overnight in fact, and brought it over this morning to the Philippine Heart Center, where I was scheduled to try and get my brother’s medical records today. While waiting there in the corridor by the Records section, I turned on the keyboard. Dead as a doornail. So I was relegated to just surfing on the iPad as I normally do, sans keyboard.

Later that afternoon, at my favorite coffee shop, I tried again, to no avail. So when I got home, I dug up the original packaging it came in, and looked for the email support page of Logitech. I had to go create an account first, though, before I could complain, but it was smooth sailing from there. I logged in, punched in the model, serial and part numbers, and told my story. They promised a reply within 48 hours. We’ll see. If they reply favorably, I’ll get a new keyboard, and if not, I’m out $99.

It’s sad, really. I had high hopes for this setup (which is working now; I’m using it to type this post after plugging it in and having that blue charging light go on for a few minutes). I was really hoping to have a viable laptop replacement in my iPad 2, but these recent technical problems have foiled that. It always conks out, and at the most inconvenient times (mostly when I’m out). When I’m testing it at home, though, it seems to revert to working condition, like now.

Real bummer.

More updates on my current favorite topic.

I met up for a lunch and movie date with my daughter today, and I brought along my iPad setup as I normally do these days. I got to our meeting place early, so I thought I’d get started on a Technoodling post. Everything went well; the keyboard functioned as well as it normally did, which is what I expected, having tested it out thoroughly yesterday. Upon waking up today, I checked it and it turned out fine, and I thought everything’s as it should be. Back to normal.

I wrote most of my post while waiting for Ea, and the keyboard was working just great.

Ea finally arrived and I put my setup aside, and we went about lunch and dessert and a movie and everything we normally did on a Sunday like today. Then the day ended, and we went our separate ways, hers to church with her friend Liel, and me home. Upon reaching home, I tried out the keyboard and …nothing. It was dead again. Damn it.

So I hooked it up to the micro USB cable, and the blue charging light came on again. It winked out after a while, and I tried the keyboard again – it was fine and working dandily. It’s still working now, as I write this post on it, a couple of hours later. Looks like it’ll work through the night and into the morning again.

But damn, I don’t know what’s wrong. It stops working at some inopportune time for some reason, only to revive and work again as soon as I plug it back in. I don’t know what to do.

That Macbook Air thing looks mighty fine lately. In fact, I entertained thoughts of purchasing one of the previously-used ones on the net, and I had given an outrageously low offer to a guy selling one low-end unit. After an exchange of texts, the guy finally, amazingly, agreed; we were texting back and forth while Matt Damon tried to figure out why he had bought a house that came with a zoo. I gave some excuse that I couldn’t get the money together until Tuesday (tomorrow is a holiday, Chinese New Year or something like that), and he renegged on the agreement. (Secretly, I was relieved, because I wasn’t sure if I really wanted an 11″ Air with only 2 gig RAM and 64 gig flash memory.)

Thing is, I had actually considered getting a real laptop, instead of settling for this jury-rigged contraption of mine that got it into its head for the keyboard to conk out every now and then. Heck, I don’t know. Came real close to getting the Air today, though.

Sheesh. Will continue testing. And the saga goes on.

I admire Apple‘s efforts at improving education. God knows its about time to dispense with the old textbook paradigm and lugging the heavy, increasingly obsolete books around in a backpack from class to class. Apple’s recent launch of iBooks 2 and iBooks Author is a great step towards this, but despite the drive to bring down costs, there is a small, but significant hidden penalty to all this, I think.

The books are damn big!

They’re large and take up a lot of iPad/iPhone space. DK’s Dinosaurs & Prehistoric Life tome is already almost half a gig large. But that’s nothing. The Pearson Biology textbook is a whopping 2.7 gig in size! I know they’re relatively inexpensive, and we’re all thankful that they all top out at $14.99. But imagine loading up four or five of these “big” textbooks on your iPad – that would be, what, already 10-12GB or more?

Considering that the vast majority of cash-strapped students only have 16GB iPads, that would mean giving up a lot of the apps they currently have to make room for the textbooks. I know, we all have priorities, but this problem is certainly a big thorn in their side.

To give up what makes the iPad unique and enjoyable in favor of what’s “needed” sort of defeats the purpose of the device. Sure, most apps are only a few megabytes in size, but how about the larger, more complicated ones, like GarageBand?

I’m not knocking Apple and it’s efforts to bring education into the 21st century. Far from it. Just wanted foks to stop and take a good look at what’s really here in front of us now, and think about it. There’s a fair distance to go, really, before we can safely say that we’ve done all we can to improve the education situation. We can bring the sizes of the textbooks down to more manageable levels, or, failing that, maybe bring down the costs of iPads and other technologies so students can afford to get the higher capacities. Something like that.

But it’s good to have these new, revolutionary breakthroughs in the field. Where would we be without these little feats? We just have to take care that we don’t get carried away by our successes and pat ourselves on the back.

Reprinted from Technoodling.net

There’s some developments to this story – and not all good.

Since there wasn’t much happening today, I decided to go out for lunch and then go to Starbucks and kill a few hours writing those reviews. I came with my iPad-keyboard setup, which was nice because I came from fully charging the keyboard (or so I thought) last night and was prepared to type the afternoon away.

I spent the first hour just surfing, with the keyboard out and open but as yet unused. When I got bored surfing, I hit a key, expecting the keyboard to wake up and connect like it usually did. But – it didn’t.

Hmm. I hit a few more keys, but no response. I picked the iPad off and checked the power switch of the keyboard, and the thing was on. I turned it on and off, tried reconnecting, but the keyboard was dead and not responding. Damn.

So something WAS wrong with it. I tried to figure out what could be the matter, and wondered if I should take the case to the manufacturer and hope they’d give me a replacement. But that was a tricky proposition since I bought it online from a guy, and so didn’t have a proper receipt. So I just spent the next couple of hours just surfing without the bluetooth keyboard, and hoping that I could revive it when I got home, recharge it (again) or something.

When I got home I hooked it up to the mini-USB cable connected to my iMac again, and the blue charging light came on for a few minutes, then went off. I disconnected it and reconnected it via bluetooth to my iPad again, and wonder of wonders, this time it worked. I’m typing on it now, disconnected from the charger, and so far it works fine. I don’t know for how long, though, although I’m hoping it should work properly from here on in. I’ll test it out some more and put it through its paces and see how long the power will last. So far so good.

I don’t know what I would do if this thing turns out to be wonky. There goes my alternative laptop experiment down the drain. I was really hoping I’d hit on a solution, but it looks like that’s in jeopardy at the moment. Sure, its working fine now, but for how long? Suddenly that MacBook Air being sold on PhilMug seems appealing.

Will continue to test this setup first before I come to any drastic conclusions.

UPDATE: Ok, it’s been hours, and the keyboard is still working. Hoping that this was all it was, a glitch in the matrix. Still testing, opening it and reconnecting every hour or two, and so far it’s looking good, that bluetooth icon lights up every time. Will continue testing until tomorrow before I declare myself out of the woods.

I got into a big scare this afternoon.

My iPad 2‘s bluetooth keyboard just plumb gave out on me as I was writing a Technoodling review this afternoon, settled in my usual little place.

I thought the thing was toast. My Logitech/Zagg Bluetooth Keyboard Case was supposed to run for weeks without needing a recharge, and just like that, in the middle of typing a sentence, it died on me. I thought, it can’t be, it hasn’t been that long that it needed already needed a recharge. It must be broken. I tried turning it on and off, tried reconnecting the bluetooth, tried everything I could think of to get it to work. Maybe it was just a glitch, a momentary thing and it would work again if I just reset it. But nothing worked, and I had to resign myself to finding out when I got home later if the keyboard was hosed or not. In the meantime the thought of continuing writing the review via the iPad’s onboard keyboard was too much hassle.

In retrospect, I think it HAS been weeks since I recharged it. I don’t rightly remember. I don’t think I even recharged it properly; just the one time, I think, when I plugged it in just to top it off, and before that, I don’t think I even actually recharged the keyboard since I first got it. I think I got spoiled by the battery longevity of my Kindle, which is rated at two months at 30 minutes use a day, and I figured this keyboard was the same. Thing is, I didn’t notice it giving any sort of warning notice. Then again, I couldn’t see if there was, the indicator light is hidden by the iPad, if there was some indicator of fading battery life. This was a glitch in the manufacture of the keyboard, and maybe I should tell Logitech/Zagg about it.

When I got home I immediately plugged the keyboard into the micro-USB jack, and lo and behold the blue charging light came on. The keyboard was fine, it really just ran out of power. After an hour or so the light went out, and I guess it was charged up again. I tested the thing, and everything worked as normal. We’re back in business. There is just the matter of finding out when exactly the power would run out again, and if there was some indication of low power I was missing.

I vaguely remember reading in the manual that there was some indicator of low power, some blinking light or something, but it also said the thing would continue working for a couple of days or so before finally winking out. (Couple of days? Wow.) Besides, there’s the matter of the hidden indicator light which means I can’t see it anyway, Ah, hell, I guess I just need to get into a routine where I plug it in every three or four weeks just to make sure. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about running out of juice.

I turned on my Playstation Vita this afternoon and headed on to the Hong Kong PS Store, and was pleasantly surprised to find a couple of new things on it to download.

First is a new app, for free. Flickr has been around the block, and I remember encountering it for the first time years and years ago, and encouraging my friends to sign up for this newfangled app. A photo library of sorts, Flickr takes all the pictures you want to put in it and organize them into albums, and it’s grown from a few users to becoming an internet staple that everyone uses. Now it’s finally reached the Vita, and it’s now available to download for free.

The other is another Vita game demo – Little Deviants, an 880MB download. Unlike some of the other demos, this one is in English, so it’s all good. I don’t know if switching over to the US PS Store will affect this download and the other apps and demos when it goes on line later next month; I certainly hope not, but I think I’d better get ready to start over from scratch (crap, even progress on my copy of Uncharted: Golden Abyss will be wiped out). But that’s the breaks. At least I hope there’ll be a lot of new stuff to download on US launch day, which will be Feb. 22 (23 here). Unlike the Asian launch, which is mostly in Japanese and is spotty in coming. Let’s hope.

(And on an added note: there’s also a new demo on the Nintendo 3DS, out today via the Nintendo eShop – Resident Evil: Revelations. Big sucker.)

There was a guy just in here in Starbucks who was an incorrigible, loud, irritating blowhard.

I’d seen him before, and he was not as big a jerk the last time, but today he was really something.

He was with this other guy, some token sidekick-personal assistant-sycophant type. When he sat down, it was incessant tooting of his horn. In a loud voice for all of the shop to hear, he talked endlessly of his exploits: his joining a “marathon” back in the day where he became “champion” and beat out everyone in the 5K run, it was in all the newspapers; his being unbeatable in tennis, where he won a ‘humongous” trophy that he had to leave in the States because it was too big to bring home; and that sort of junk. He waxed rhapsodic about his various other adventures that turned me into an unwilling yet captive listener.

I didn’t want to listen, and tried to tune him out and work, but his overriding, grating voice couldn’t be denied. You just had to listen, he was so loud, and I could tell that the other patrons were also being bothered and irritated. And still the guy went on and on.

When he first arrived this morning, he made small talk with the guard. Apparently they were old “friends”. Maybe the guard worked for him at one point in the past, and the false bonhomie he cultivated back then he brought back to life now, and his false cheeriness was stupefying. His sycophant assistant didn’t help, and he encouraged the blowhard to tell more of his wonderful exploits.

After a while (a long while), his parents came and met up with them, and old lady and an old man with a cane and a limp, old rich and old money. He immediately turned into a dutiful son, kissing the mom and giving the dad a mano po in respect, shifting into obedient yet still arrogant superiority. Apparently they all had a lunch date next door, and they all left noisily.

Thank God.

I thought they’d never leave.

Just ranting. Back to work.