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.

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.

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 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.

I’ll start off with audio quality, I’m no audiophile by any means, but I have had some experience with higher end headphones. I’d rate the quality as “good”.  They’re  way above the terrible headphones you get with an iPod. If you have no previous experience with higher end headphones they might be the best you’ve ever heard.

The noise canceling is where these headphones really shine, and that’s what they were designed for. When I first got them I put them on while at home, and it did get rid of the fan noise from my computer, but that’s about all I noticed. Then I took them with me on a trip to Florida. On the car ride to the airport I wore them, and it drowned out most of the noise from the car. More impressive. Once I boarded the plane and it took off, I put these headphones on and was shocked. People talking? Gone. Engine noise? Gone. Babies crying? Gone. All I could hear was my music if the music was turned up to 25% volume on my iPod. That’s amazing. When I turned off the music completely I was able to make out some people talking etc, but not much. I turned them off a few times and was instantly greeted with reality, and it was LOUD.

So in conclusion, I’d definitely pick these up if you fly a lot or ride the bus a lot. Noise canceling is superb and totally worth the money. If you want just high quality sound though, you’re better off looking elsewhere. Personally, I’m never getting on a plane again without my QC15′s. Greatest experience ever on a plane.

You can buy them here: Bose® QuietComfort® 15 Acoustic Noise Cancelling® Headphones

Generally, if I drink 1 2 liter per day it’ll last a month and a half. I make them very carbonated though, about what you’d get from the store. One note is I push the PSI higher than you probably should, 50PSI, I found that if I put it lower it wouldn’t get carbonated quickly enough for my liking. However, this will vary depending on how cold the water is that you’re trying to carbonate.

How To:

1. Fill 2 liter bottle with water, leave some space at the top.

2. Carbonator attachment on bottle has a pin on top, push it down and squeeze the bottle to remove excess air.

3. Attach hose to carbonator by pulling up on the attachment and pushing down.

4. Screw down pin on co2 tank until you feel it pushing down on the tank’s pin.

5. Adjust PSI on regulator until it’s at 30 – 35PSI (Or higher, depending on how cold the water is in the bottle, 50PSI works best but not recommended by most.)

6. Release Co2 via the red lever on the side.

7. Shake bottle for 60 seconds or so.

8. Turn off the co2, unscrew the valve, remove attachment from carbonator.

9. Remove carbonator from bottle and enjoy freshly carbonated water.

Soda requires different steps, I haven’t done it so I don’t know. This process might seem complicated, but it’s really easy after you’ve done it a few times, and it saves a bundle of $ very quickly if you drink a lot of it. Personally, I drink it on and off but when I’m in the mood I drink 1 – 2 bottles in a day.

So there you go.. Quick, easy & cheap carbonated water. Forgive me if I’m using incorrect terms to describe the components Kit can be found at KegConnection.

Informational purposes only, I take no responsibility for personal injury. If you utilize any information provided in this site, you do so at your own risk and you specifically waive any right to make any claim against the author and publisher of this Website and materials as the result of the use of such information.

Anyway, why is it annoying? Stuff keeps popping up all over the place.. While I type a term, crap starts typing itself or whatever, plus the results are moving around trying to give me a seizure. Maybe other people don’t type at 70 – 80wpm like I do, but it’s damn annoying for me.

The other annoying part is the “naughty” keyword block, for instance, if I type “Google Suc-” it’ll stop displaying results, and I’ll have to press enter. Thus, I have to leave the “instant” mode and go back to “normal” anyway.I think this type of stuff would be more useful on a mobile device where you can’t type as fast, but for PC users that can type relatively fast, it’s annoying.

I’m not just bashing Google either, I don’t particularly like Google, but I did give Instant a go for awhile to see how it was and give an honest opinion, and the result was I really didn’t like it.

Bing & Yahoo

The Bing & Yahoo deal is interesting, however Bing isn’t the best alternative to Google I’ve seen. Yandex is. It might have been a good idea to consider something like that, but I’m not sure if Yandex would be down for that sort of thing.

Yandex has very clean results in comparison to even Google. Still not perfect, but very clean. Cleaner than Bing. Go check out their alpha version at Yandex.com, I think you’ll be surprised at how clean the results are.

As far as ad sales with everything going through adcenter, sure, I think both Yahoo & Bing are going to pick up more advertisers, and bing especially will have more advertisers. Will this work out well? Only time can tell really.

A number of things point to e-cigarettes being relatively safe (however there needs to be more research done) and I have used them for months, guess what? My lungs have cleared up, I can finally breathe again. I feel good, generally.

I’ve heard about snus being a pretty healthy alternative to cigarettes as well, and some people combining it with e-cigarettes to finally “lay down” cigarettes completely. One day I had no batteries for my e-cigarette and I was out and about, so instead of buying a pack of cigarettes (which would’ve broke my 3 month long cigarette free streak) I opted to pick up some camel snus. I felt something familiar, a “good feeling” not like when I vape on my ecig to kill withdrawal, that’s a completely different feeling. Then I remembered that there are MAOI’s in tobacco, and that’s what I was probably feeling more than anything. Remember, I didn’t use these MAOI’s for 3 months, however I think they were the problem. I was still holding on to my old cigarettes because I really felt something was missing from my e-cigarette, and it was bothering me.

Later on I decided to try swedish snus, and man is that ever stronger than camel. I had an “MAOI” rush. (I had been puffing on my e-cigarette like normal until the package came, and had just put it down prior to popping in some swedish snus.)

All of a sudden, I feel much better, and feel like I used to when I smoked. This resulted in me throwing away all my cigarettes (finally). I had been holding them because I wanted that MAOI feeling back. I missed it. I was going to ignore it as much as possible and try to get over it, however this makes me feel safer. Now I can say for certain that I don’t have any need to smoke.

Note: You have to realize that smoking is the WORST POSSIBLE WAY to get nicotine, period. I know a lot of people are brainwashed into thinking that smokeless tobacco is WORSE for you than cigarettes. That’s completely FALSE. Unfortunately, cigarettes have the highest rate of all cancers. Oral, lung, pancreatic, etc. Yes there are risks to snus, however those risks are very small in comparison with smoking. (90% – 98% safer)

Conclusion

In my opinion, combining e-cigarettes and snus is going to be the absolute best combination for anyone to quit smoking. Some people don’t care about the MAOI’s much, others do. However, I think e-cigarettes and snus are great choices for anyone willing to stop smoking.

Still, I would like to quit nicotine/tobacco completely, but I’m a pretty big addict. The least I can do is try to be healthier with my habit, and it’s so nice that the “powers that be” shield all harm reduction is secrecy.

While doing all this, EyeFinity was not the priority. The priority was more screen space to work with. However, since I had the whole setup basically, why not mess with EyeFinity?

I had to set all of them at 1680X1050 since that’s the lowest resolution out of the bunch. That gives me 5040X1050 – which looks horrible out of games. I was pretty much expecting everything to be horrible since like I said, all 3 are different monitors, and the LG screen has these horridly big bezels. So, by far not the best setup for something like EyeFinity.

After getting in game however, everything looks good. I’m shocked. The bezels don’t bother me -  I’m shocked. I was able to get the other 2 to line up with my 24″  – I’m shocked. My games are more immersive and I’m enjoying myself a lot – yet again pure shock.

So what does all this tell me? You don’t have to have the perfect setup to get EyeFinity enjoyable or working right. I’ve looked and I’ve looked – but I have yet to find anyone running EyeFinity with different monitors and resolutions like me. I am thinking about switching the 22″ and 24″ screen out for 2 more 23″ IPS Dell panels, but that is far into the future. At that point, I’ll have something to compare against and see if it’s really that much better than my current setup.

Lots and lots of people think EyeFinity is just a gimmick – well I really have to disagree there. After going EyeFinity – I don’t want to go back. I don’t think you can say anything until you’ve experienced it first hand for more than a few days. As you can see, I was very skeptical of the technology and thought it would completely suck. I was wrong.

Sure, it’s a somewhat costly setup, but if you need the monitors for productivity anyway, you can’t go wrong. Let me tell you, 2 monitors is 100x better than 1 and 3 seems like the sweet spot for me.  Sure, spaces are cool, but if you need to see a bunch of things at once you can’t do that with spaces. (also remember that one panel must be DisplayPort or you need an active display port adapter for the 3rd monitor)

Conclusion

After having this setup for awhile – I can safely say that EyeFinity is awesome. Game play is just so much more immersive – and fun. It’s really really hard to form an opinion without experiencing it first hand which is going to be a drawback for this technology to spread. Also, yes I know that Matrox has had this technology for quite awhile – but you have to buy a $300 device on top of the $300 video card which makes it even less accessible to the mainstream audience. So ATI has done something magical – introducing videocards capable of driving 3 displays (FINALLY) and combining 3 monitors into 1 display – all wrapped into a highly powerful graphics card. I won’t be switching to nVidia unless they implement similar technology.

Picture taken before all monitors were lined up correctly..

]]> http://technologyinsanity.com/technology-reviews-guides/ati-eyefinity-review-different-monitors-sizes-and-resolutions/feed/ 0 http://technologyinsanity.com/general-tech/ssd-solid-state-drive-vs-hdd-hard-disc-drive/ http://technologyinsanity.com/general-tech/ssd-solid-state-drive-vs-hdd-hard-disc-drive/#comments Thu, 13 May 2010 18:00:29 +0000 admin http://technologyinsanity.com/?p=1097 I picked up some cheap Kingston V Series 64GB SSD from NewEgg the other day because they seem to be all the rage lately. Not just that, but I am performing system wide upgrades, started with the chair, but my final setup is coming close now.

Anyway, I’m not going to show you a bunch of benchmarks because I’m sure you already know SSDs are fast, depending on which one you get they may be blazing fast. What you may not know is how they change the feel of the overall system. Boot time is cut in half, roughly, but I didn’t really care about that because I don’t even turn off my PC all that often.

What does surprise me is that applications overall feel more responsive!  Any application you put on the SSD for general use pops open faster and feels better in the interface. Not sure why they feel better while already opened, but I have separate windows + apps on the HDD and SSD and I compared how they functioned, the SSD wins hands down. Probably because the program still accesses the hard drive on and off while in use.

Storage: if this is an issue for you (like it is for me) install windows + apps on a 64GB drive and move everything else to a 2TB 72K drive or something. I have about 2.2TB of usable storage other than the 64GB SSD and it works out great.

One thing though.. If you’re sort of a power user and have lots of applications 32GB is definitely not going to cut it. 64GB+ will work. In fact, I cannot install all my games on the 64GB drive, so I’ll have to install/uninstall if I want the loading speed of the SSD. So in my case, I think I’d be better suited to a 128GB+ drive if I wanted to fit everything that needed speed on it.

With the storage issue, not being able to fit all games etc, is it still a worthy upgrade? You bet. Hard drive are obviously the bottleneck in most newer PC configurations, and with an SSD they really pop alive as far as general use