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The DSE901 Electronic Cigarette Reviewed

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

I saw a post somewhere on the internet about these devices and was intrigued. I am a pack a day smoker, and I have tried to quit, but failed miserably on each attempt. When I saw that you could “smoke” healthier, I was very skeptical. Since I’m an electronic geek however, I thought it would be fun to try anyway.

There are three main components of an electronic cigarette. There is the cartridge, which contains a solution of mostly nicotine and water. Then there is the atomizer, which creates the vapor you inhale. The last component is the battery, which also contains the LED at the end.

When I first heard about these I asked a few questions. Why don’t more people use them if they work so well? The answer I found: Not many people know about them, there is very little advertising. Cigarette manufacturers certainly don’t want you to know about them, you’ll stop buying their product. There also may be something with the government, they want to continue to receive tax dollars from all the cigarette purchases. (Not sure about this one, just something I have read)

I am very pleased to tell you that smoking from an electronic cigarette almost perfectly simulates real smoking. I am simply amazed. The only real difference you will notice with this particular model, is that it takes quite a bit more inhaling to get a good “hit” compared to a regular cigarette. This could probably be remedied by trying out different models, I’m sure some produce tons of vapor, and almost perfectly emulate a cigarette.

The amount of time a cartridge lasts is kind of disappointing, I popped one in at 4PM and by 8:30PM it was done. However, I have purchased  60mL e-liquid that should get here fairly quick. I may have to rely on analogs for a little while till it gets here. Battery life seems decent enough, it’s still going strong after 4 and a half hours of use. I will update with a more full review of this particular e-cig once I’ve used it longer. Expect me to be trying out a few other models and listing the reviews here as well.

Do I think this will become a big hit in the near future with smokers everywhere? Yes I do. How can you go wrong with something that feels and tastes just like a cigarette? One exception! There is no other chemicals to harm you. No more tar, no more staining your teeth, the walls, no more smelling up the entire room when you smoke, and no more mess with ashes. How can you go wrong? My mind is made up, I’m going for the switch.

Remember, most do not advise that you use electronic cigarettes to try and quit. They are too similar to real cigarettes. I know it might sound like I am marketing or something, but I’m not. This is the truth.

Anyway, if you’re a smoker, and feel the need to switch to something healthier, I would say electronic cigarettes are going to be your best bet.

If you’re thinking of switching, you might also want to check out http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/forum/ They seem to have the largest e-cigarette community :)

You can buy the DSE-901  here.

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Switching to permalinks

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

If you haven’t already, you should really switch to permalinks. /?p= is an unfriendly, unSEO link. Go to your settings –> Permalink and set custom like this /%category%/%postname%/

Okay, so at first glance that seems easy enough right? Well yeah.. Not so much. First of all, I had to enable mod_rewrite in apache. (Remember I’m on a VPS) That wasn’t difficult, you just use the command a2enmod on Ubuntu/Debian systems. Now with that done, I could use the .htaccess file generated by WordPress to serve up the new fancy URLs. Wait.. My old /?p= are not being forwarded to the new fancy urls. Well, a simple plugin called Permalink Redirect solves that issue.

Now comes the real fun. Everytime I go to try and access my stats, I get a 404. The stats folder is clearly there, but I cannot access it. So, I remove the .htaccess on that folder. I can now access it, but it’s no longer password protected :D I really wasn’t sure if this was caused by ISPConfig or the .htaccess.

So I searched around for quite some time. The solution is simple, when you go to a password protected area it looks for the 401 and 403 error files first, before giving you a login prompt. With the new rewrite in place, all the errors are now on the WordPress theme. It doesn’t have these errors, so the resulting error is 404 not found.

Anyway, how do you fix this issue? Simple, add the following lines to your .htaccess file in the root directory.

ErrorDocument 401 /[path_to_file]/myerror.html

ErrorDocument 403 /[path_to_file]/myerror.html

That’s it! Problem solved. I can now access my stats directory with the password, and permalinks are working.

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Analytics vs Webalizer

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

Analytics

Analytics states that I’m getting approximately 117 – 150 unique per day, since I started dropping less with Entrecard.

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Now, switching over to just search engine traffic with analytics we see that approximately 50% of my traffic per day recorded by Analytics is search engine based. It’s growing slowly.

analyticsearchengines

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Analytics seems fairly consistent with my ProjectWonderful stats, which means that various blocking plugins for FireFox are not only blocking ProjectWonderful, but Analytics as well.

Webalizer

Now let’s have a look at what webalizer has to say about my traffic.

webalizer

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Seems as if Webalizer is painting an entirely different picture. It shows that my traffic really didn’t drop off when I started to drop less on Entrecard. I believe this can be explained by my search engine traffic growing, which lead to my drop off of EC not showing up. It’s actually quite apparent to me I’m part of the search engines. Why? Well, I get a lot of spam comments even with BadBehavior running. Without BadBehavior, I once received 50 spam comments in one day.

Conclusion

If you’re using Analytics, I would consider switching to something that is blocked less by the various plugins out there. Clicky analytics was recommended by nukeit.org, and I have to agree. Anything that is being blocked by NoScript/Adblock Plus and the other assortment of things out there, is not going to give you reliable stats. The best stats come from log analyzers such as Webalizer.

Comodo Internet Security Review

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

1176739790comodo13c2970cd3Well, I’m a long time ZoneAlarm user. I just recently pulled a switch to the comodo security suite. Instantly, I’m greeted with dialogs just like I would expect from ZoneAlarm. However, Comodo takes it a step further. It seems to monitor every little thing a program does, from modifying any little registry value in windows, to internet access attempts. Why didn’t I try out Comodo sooner? Well, I was under the impression that ZoneAlarm was awesome, and there couldn’t be something better. Well, I was wrong, dead wrong in fact. I see that comodo does virus scans, updates automatically, secures internet, and monitors programs very closely. Many say that Comodo is less resource heavy as well.

Here’s the real kicker, Comodo is free! ZoneAlarm Pro is not. The regular ZoneAlarm doesn’t come with nearly as many features as the free version of Comodo does. I think I have just found my new favorite software firewall and antivirus. Anyone not running something like ZoneAlarm or Comodo needs to go get one of the two now. No matter how savvy you think you are, there are a lot of strange things on the internet that could trick you, and Comodo or ZoneAlarm will block such things.

In conclusion, Comodo gets my vote now, ZoneAlarm is good, but I don’t think it’s as good as Comodo even in the “pro” version.