Jlabs Audio J4 Earbuds Review

I’ve been looking for a decent cheap set of earbuds that don’t sound horrible and will allow me try them to see if I really like the in ear style buds.

A few months ago I purchased a set of Meego brand ear buds that were on sale at Amazon for 15 dollars. Needless to say they were awful sounding. The made every type of music, even country, sound like hardcore deep bass rap. The amount of bass is already ratcheted up on any earbud, but those were all bass and no highs. Needless to say they were quickly returned to amazon.

So I was skeptical when Groupon had a set of JLabs Audio J4 earbuds on sale for $19. I also had a coupon for ten dollars off, so after shipping was added in I figured I can’t go wrong for $12. Continue reading Jlabs Audio J4 Earbuds Review

FitBit and My Newfound Fitness Craze

After much procrastination and finally tired of looking at my jiggling belly I decided I need to get back into shape. I’ve been using the food diary software for the iPhone from Lose It, but felt that I needed more data. You see most of these food diary programs use standard equations to calculate your daily caloric amount. And if you don’t fit into the equation, you don’t lose weight. Now all hope is not lost. Most of these many tools can have more data input into them, input it into the equation, and it will be more accurate.
So here are the tools I’ve acquired for this experiment.

FitBit Ultra Pedometer
FitBit Ultra Pedometer – Courtesy of FitBit

FitBit – www.fitbit.com

I first wanted something to measure how active I am on a daily basis. You wear the tiny little device on your waist and it will track how many steps you have taken, how sedentary you are, even monitor your sleep patterns.
There is also a companion website that automatically tracks all of your data and real time updates it for you. The biggest plus to the FitBit site, is that is links with so many other products such as Microsoft HealthVault, Endomondo, and Lose It!, which are also being used in this trial. Continue reading FitBit and My Newfound Fitness Craze

Mountain Lion Available

After repeatedly clicking the buy button and seeing every Mac AppStore error available the Mountain Lion download has begun. Its saturating my connection completely so no problems there.

All apps have been updated thus far, and a Carbon Copy Clone made of my system disk.

Hopefully this is as uneventful as the Lion upgrade. Now just to remember to copy the installer to a thumb drive so I don’t have to download it a second time from my MacBook Air.

More to come!

UPDATE: After about 45 to 50 minutes, my iMac rebooted (albeit slowly) and everything is good to go. One thing I did notice is that my default brightness on the screen was maxed out and with a 27 inch iMac one could get sunburn. Otherwise so far everything seems to work just fine, and actually feels a tad bit snappier and looks just a bit crisper. Maybe its just me.

One thing I’m not too fond of if the new look of the dock. The less translucent frosted glass doesn’t really bother me, but the almost disappearance of the running application “lights” looks like someone could measure pixels right and cut off the screen.

UPDATE 2: Been a good portion of the afternoon and no noticeable problems thus far. Wasn’t at home for a bit, Mac went to sleep and woke right back up. A bit disappointing that no programs I have are iCloud saving enabled, but that does give me a reason to finally purchase Pages.

UPDATE 3: It seems that Apple has fixed a bug that was driving me nuts. In Lion, a Safari child process, WebProcess, would end up eating up memory. My RSS reader which used a web view also would do the same eating up a gigabyte or more of memory. Now both will increase memory as tabs are opened and reduce it as the close. Well done!

Norfolk Southern’s 30th Anniversary and Heritage Fleet Day

Norfolk Southern's 30th AnniversaryOn July 3rd and 4th Norfolk Southern held a 30th anniversary celebration at the North Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer NC. As part of this celebration they have painted 20 of their newest locomotives in the livery’s of their predecessor railroads grouped into the three “families”; Norfolk and Western, Southern Railroad, and Conrail.

This is a seemingly once in a lifetime occasion where all 20 of the locomotives will be in one place and will be as clean and spotless as they will ever be. I decided to brave the 95+ degree southern summer on the 4th and brought the camera along. Horrible sunburn and eight bottles of water later produced the pictures in the gallery below. Kudos to Norfolk Southern for spending the time and money to pay homage to the lines that pre-date it and also for organizing an event that allowed rail fans and railroad families a chance to see these masterpieces up close.

Continue reading Norfolk Southern’s 30th Anniversary and Heritage Fleet Day