TechnologyInsanity.com

I’m a former smoker that switched to Swedish Snus, just so you’re not getting any ideas about me “promoting” tobacco use. It’s a very annoying habit and I will always say so, but once you’re addicted and can’t stop it’s always a good idea to go into harm reduction rather than continue to smoke.

Now with that out of the way.. I didn’t have much experience with other forms of smokeless tobacco like dip, chew, etc. I always wondered why people used it when there was Swedish Snus. I ran out of my “usual” Thunder Frosted Extra Stark. So guess what? The local tobacco store sells nothing other than that camel and Marlboro garbage. I couldn’t feel that unless I put the entire can in my mouth. It’s designed to keep people smoking.. Anyway I headed over to the dip section because I figured that would take care of my craving. Picked up some Grizzly Long Cut.

First thing I notice when I put it in my mouth, the entire inside of my mouth is covered with brown saliva. Nasty. (swedish snus barely makes any spit and I just swallow any it does create because it’s barely anything and doesn’t bother me at all.) It burns like crazy, and seemed to tear my mouth up A LOT more than swedish snus. I went through only 2 1/2 cans of the stuff, and my bottom lip feels like i’ve been putting swedish snus there for like 6 months or a year. I can’t imagine how it would be if I continued to use this stuff.

The only real advantage I found in dip is that it creates more taste and if you want to have a more “active” experience with a spittoon, it’s not a bad experience. Other than that, it pretty much sucks.

The other problem I have with it is that it’s weaker than my usual Thunder Frosted. I didn’t have direct comparison until today, but I would have to use 1/12+ of the can to get the same amount of nicotine out of Grizzly as I got from Thunder Frosted ES.

Next problem with dip is that it is fire cured. This creates way more cancer causing agents in comparison with swedish snus.

Conclusion on Dip: Only used as a last resort. Not as bad for you as smoking, but not a real pleasant form of tobacco.

Swedish Snus Overview

spitless
not linked to oral cancer
small pouches you just throw in your upper lip.
after using for so long it feels like putting in a mint.
your mouth barely gets torn up at all.
wide variety of flavors.
no mess.
barely stains teeth.
tons of different strengths available.
tons of different types available, such as white portion.
no “looks” from other people because you’re spitting.
looks like you’re using mints.
pancreatic cancer is the only form linked to its use.
98% less dangerous directly compared to smoking. (check out Dr. Rodu, Tobacco Harm Reduction Sites, and some news articles on Swedish Snus.)

Conclusion

If you’re going to use tobacco, you ought to be using Swedish Snus. There’s no doubt in my mind this is the “ultimate” version of tobacco. Smoking is terrible, it destroys your body more than even chew or dip, by a lot. Dip is also annoying and a pain. No one likes seeing people spit all over the place.  Destroys your mouth. Chew rots your teeth. Cigars cause lots of oral cancer. Pipes cause lots of oral cancer.

Which will you chose? The choice seems obvious: Swedish Snus.

There’s a lot of rambling online about the Nano 6G and how it sucks. Most of the complaints are about it not having all the features the previous version had. I think their strategy was just to make it small. It is called a “Nano” after all. The only thing important, in my mind, on a nano would be that it has an ability to navigate to music tracks. That’s what separates it from the shuffle.

I currently own a Nano 1G, but it’s a pain for working out because it bounces around, and I’ve dropped it all over the place several times. I’m surprised it’s not totally broken yet.

So, this is what I think the Nano was designed for – extremely portable, wearable, music player. Nothing else. Why people nowadays expect an MP3 player to do more is beyond me. I remember back when black and white iPods were awesome. So maybe I’m too old to understand, but I didn’t think 20 was really that old.

I do however own a Droid Incredible, everything people are upset about missing from the Nano.

I’ve started to wonder if having comments is even worth it. Most people don’t comment, the ones that do don’t have much useful information to share most of the time. Sometimes they do, but really I tend to think discussions are better off on forums.

Comment sections always have spammers even if you have all the protections in place, you’re still going to get them. Yes, even if you’re using recaptcha or similar. People from India are paid to solve these captchas. When Web 2.0 started, it really helped out spammers, because now they had tons of places to spam.

On a lower traffic site like mine, 99% of comments are spam. I do get real visitors, but they don’t really comment, as expected. So in my situation, it’s easier just to turn them off if a post is older than 7 days. If the site starts getting thousands and thousands of unique visitors per day I might enable them again. That’s not real likely with my current writing patterns and keywords, but who knows. I just write what I feel like on here and I’m not targeting anything.

I was using the default browser for quite some time, but decided to try out Dolphin HD since it seemed rather popular. Currently, I have to say with out a doubt, dolphin runs better than any other browser I’ve tried on my HTC Droid Incredible. I’ve tried Opera Mini (doesn’t work right in some situations), xScope and SkyFire. I will say that if you just want speed and don’t care about having full featured web pages that function correctly, you’re better off with Opera Mini.

I updated mobile flash and was able to watch flash videos without them lagging too badly. There’s still some lag, but the videos are watchable so long as you’re not moving too much while the video is playing. I tried out some local news sites in their desktop form and almost had no issues at all loading up the full featured version.

Another thing I noticed, when I was connected to 1X (which goes to only about 100kbit or less) instead of 3G, the default browser would just hang on the page and not load anything. Dolphin continued to load the page even while connected via 1X.

Another thing I like about Dolphin is the tab feature. You can actually pull off a few tabs on the Incredible. The gesture feature is kinda nice, but I don’t usually use it. Maybe I will in the future if I get used to it, but it’s an interesting toy for now.

In short, it seems like the best browser out right now, way better than default.

Mobile browsers & internet still have a ways to go, but I’m pretty impressed with how things are going. Seems like everything is getting developed out pretty rapidly. Soon it’ll be on par with having a laptop in the palm of your hand.

I remember when I was a kid, I wanted a laptop.. Well back then they cost $2k+ and had at most an 800MHz processor. With Moore’s law we’ll be rocking a 2 or even 3 GHz phone in no time. Add in 4G to the mix and bam. Get ready for awesomeness.