Linking Life

Product Review – Samsung Galaxy Note

Ryan Young — Thu, 03 May 2012 17:28:56 +0000

Recently I had a bit of a romp with Rogers Wireless because they had sent me a “refurbed” phone to replace my original smartphone and it had been running poorly. I was able to convince them (after a little wrangling) to let me do an early hardware upgrade. Excellent!

Excellent… except I hadn’t been thinking about what phone would replace my first-gen Sony Xperia.

OK, that’s not entirely true. I’d been coveting my friend’s Samsung Galaxy SII. But I didn’t want to be too hasty. I rely on my phone for getting things done, so I wanted to make sure I chose wisely… that scene from “Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade” where Indiana is choosing the holy grail comes to mind.

So I did what any good nerd would do and I created a check-list of things that the new phone needed to include (listed in order of importance):

- fast processing speed
- touch screen
- large screen (watch videos, Netflix etc., large keyboard for my giant thumbs)
- good camera (ability to take and do minimal edits to photos)
- lots of RAM
- receive and respond to email
- Google apps (Android)
- Kindle integration to read books
- a quick way to write notes
- view and do quick edits on Microsoft docs

When I got to the end of my list, I came to the realization that I’d been trying to use my phone as a tablet; meaning I’d tried to do the things on it that are best left for tablets, which had always left me frustrated. What I probably needed to do was buy a tablet and just be done with it. The only problem is a tablet is hard to carry around in your pocket and you can’t use it as a phone.

At this point, all I can say is that advertising works on me: Samsung Galaxy Note Commercial. I took the plunge and got a Galaxy note. I’ve used for a few weeks now, and if you are considering a “phablet” (phone / tablet), here are some thoughts that may help you decide if a phone tablet will work for you.

“The Ups”

Screen size
With the “slide-it” keyboard app (swipe) added I’m no longer clumsily misspelling myself to death every time I write a quick text or email. The screen resolution and color is breath-taking. I’m a photographer and I can now take my phone into a meeting a give clients a quick view of my portfolio without bringing my laptop. And the screen is large enough to comfortably watch movies and videos. And although it’s not as large as a full blown tablet, I find reading books on it to be a vast improvement over my phone.

Quick Notes
Putting text memos in via a keyboard is OK, but often in a meeting I’m needing to go back and add quick clarification to previous notes I made so using a phone keyboard often feels cumbersome at best. With SS Memo on the Note, using a stylus I can quickly add notes, small sketches or anything else I might need to remember what I need to do after that meeting. If I meet someone new and might forget their name, I can quickly write their name down or even take their picture and use the stylus to write their name right on the picture. I love the functionality of the stylus for writing notes in my own hand.

Document viewing & edits
Sitting in the doctor’s office and getting an email with an attachment that could be reading while you are waiting, but can’t because your phone can’t open it, stinks. On my Xperia I had a program that would open documents, but because of the size of the screen, editing was challenging.

With the note I can quickly open documents. The app provided with the phone also allows me to do simple edits, save them and send revised documents back for revision. Wicked!

The apps
I’ve never had a Samsung before but I’ve got to say that their apps have impressed me so far. S Planner integrates well with my Google calendar. I’m able to set up reminders from my phone calendar, which my previous phone couldn’t do. The task manager allows me to see what programs are running and kill background programs if I need more RAM, and the photo editor is great for simple edits on photos taken on the phone. Finally, the functionality of Kies Air, let’s me quickly transfer files from my phone to my computer and vice-versa, without plugging it in with USB… it’s all transferred wirelessly.

The camera

The 8mp camera does not disappoint. Obviously you’re not going to get the kind of pictures that you’d get out of a pro-photo setup. But for snapping quick pics of your kids or interesting places, or something you want to remember: fantastic. We don’t have a video camera at our house, so I would say the same for the video.

The “Downs”

I can really only think of one. Size. The Note is big. When I talk on the phone, I feel like I’m holding a briefcase up to my head. It fits decently well in a front pocket, but you have to be careful when you sit down, so I find I’m always taking it out of my pocket when I sit. If you are prone to lose things, or forget them, this may be a significant hurdle for you to get over in terms of thinking about whether a phone tablet is practical for you.

Who is the “Galaxy Note” for?
If talking on the phone is the #1 way you use your phone, a Note probably isn’t the best phone for you, mainly because of it’s size.

But if you say “check” to a few of the following, I think something like the Note may be a good fit for you if you want:

- to quickly have access to documents through apps like Dropbox and have a virtual, portable office
- great apps that play well with Google applications
- ample screen with great color and resolution for watching media & playing games
- decent camera for stills and video
- quick wireless syncing of files
- quick notes and swiping with the stylus that’s included (if you are from the Palm Pilot era, this feature will feel like home to you)
- integrating with Kindle or other ebook distributor to read books on the fly

I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts and comments on the new world of “phablets”!

My Acer Canada Customer Service Nightmare

Nathan Colquhoun — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 18:47:43 +0000

I have been repairing and selling computers to my clients over the last four years. Recently I decided to start selling Acer PC’s because of the seemingly quality and price of their desktops. I have purchased well over twenty desktops in the last year and haven’t had too much of a problem. So this post isn’t about my frustration with their equipment. Electronic equipment breaks, I get that. This is more about my frustration with how a large company such as Acer deals with their customers and makes up for the mistakes that they have made.

I bought my Acer Aspire AM5700 on January 11, 2010. I bought it for a man who helps do the bookkeeping for our church. He had purchased a copy of Windows 7 for it, so we upgraded the system. For the first few days, everything was working like a charm. Exactly how fast I would have expected the system to work. Then he called me to tell me it was shutting down at random times. So I went over and played with it for an hour, and sure enough it was getting all sorts of blue screens and shutting down intermittently. Seeing as this was the first Acer I had any problems with I hadn’t gone through the support process. So I looked it up online, and it only took me a few minutes before I typed out all the information they needed. I shipped them the computer for the first time on Feb 25, 2011. It cost me $25 for shipping costs. Which I realize this is well over a month of time between buying it and purchasing it, so you can tell that it was about a month of me trying to convince the customer that he must have been doing something wrong before I realized it wasn’t him. I tried swapping out the different pieces of ram, reinstalling Windows 7, going back to Windows Vista and was getting the same problems over and over again.

So when they sent me the computer back about two weeks after, you can imagine my surprise when they only replaced the Ram and said it was fixed. Sure enough, I give it back to the customer and he reports back to me with all the same problems only a few days later. So I ship it back to Acer again on April 26, they ship it back to me replacing a few other parts (I forget what they were this time). It costs me $25 more in shipping. By this time, my customer was beyond frustrated, so I just ended up buying him another computer. I went HP that time. So now I am stuck with this dud of a computer. I played around with the computer for a few days when I got it back and it had all the same problems. Just randomly shutting down at different times, nothing really consistent, just not working. So on May 21, 2010, I quickly packaged it back up, and called them this time and asked them if there was anything they could do. Could they just give me a refund? At the very least, could they give me a replacement instead of trying to fix something that they obviously have no idea what is going on?

They escalated me to their level two technicians, were an extremely helpful man reassured me that they were taking it seriously and they even offered to pay for my shipping to have it brought in. So Purloator showed up to pick up the machine, and it didn’t cost me anything. They replaced the hard drive this time and a week later I got the machine back, I played with it for a few days and then resold it to another client. Imagine my disappointment when I get a call back a week later saying they were having the exact same problems as my first customer. Randomly shutting off, USB causing it to freeze, blue screening at random times. So I call Acer back. I have to go through their horrible phone support system where I have to read them my serial number and ssid number, I always have to read it a few different times to the digital lady.

Finally I get through, I get escalated to the second level technician person again and get the same lines. They will receive the shipment and ship it back to me. This time they will not pay for shipping. So now I have paid another $25.00 in shipping and it is July 05, 2010. I have been without a working computer and two customers have gone without and I’ve paid an extra $75 in shipping along with the 3-4 hours I’ve spent on the telephone and shipping things back and forth and calling these customers. This is turning into a hefty ordeal. They refuse to send me a new machine and just want me to play this game of sending the machine back and forth with them. We’ve done this four times now. So what do I do? Obviously I’ll never buy an Acer again, so this is costing them more than just a few phone calls since I buy typically around 30 systems a year. But how do I deal with their customer service to get a refund or a full replacement for my system? Anyone out there have any ideas or does someone from Acer want to respond to this post and deal with my problem directly? My service request number is 1-6NIY9I.

What Would You Do with 100,000 Toothpicks and 3000 Hours?

Nathan Colquhoun — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 21:24:03 +0000

This is absolutely remarkable. I can’t even comprehend having the patience and creativity to come up with something like this. Scott Weaver created this masterpiece that is 9’ tall x 7’ wide x 30” deep and it only took him 34 years.

Fox and the Fiddle

Porn Movies and Disney And What They Have in Common

Nathan Colquhoun — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 21:21:16 +0000

Found a great new blog. Stuff No One Told Me. It’s a blog of comic style drawings of interesting and challenging tidbits from someone named Alex Noriega. My favourite one so far.

Sarnia Police Car Photos After Partying for 60th Anniversary

Nathan Colquhoun — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 17:40:23 +0000

First Photo Taken by Ryan Farr on his Droid

Last Two Photos taken By Dave Walterhouse on his Iphone

3 Reasons Behind My Professional Sports Boycott

Troy Shantz — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 21:00:57 +0000

1. Money

First of all, I think it’s an absolute farce that people are paid money to simply to play a game. It’s purely getting paid for a hobby.
I’m not against hobbies, not at all. I have a few of them, and I enjoy them profusely, but I don’t feel right supporting an industry that represents a group of professional hobbyists. I love to bike – it’s my hobby. I’m pretty quick on my commute to work, so maybe I should get paid? No, I shouldn’t, and neither should anyone else who exists in an industry which is based on pleasure.
It gets better… not that we have all of these professional hobbyists coming together to play baseball/hockey/basketball/etc, but we need an entire sub-industry of business people, marketers, broadcasters, lawyers, medical professionals to form a giant conglomerate which exists solely to maintain revenue and smooth operation of this business of pleasure.
And all of the professionals in this sub-industry need to be paid, right?
And where will we go to watch these athletes? We should go to the billion-dollar stadium with the jumbo-screen which is the size of 4 city blocks.
Don’t get me started on advertisers…

2. Skills

Wayne Gretzky is an amazing hockey player, but even he knows that to be a great hockey player you need to dedicate years and years of practice. Years – sometimes 5, 10 or 20 years to truly refine yourself as a professional-level athlete.
I have no beef with hard-work. Hard work is a very important attribute for any human being, and you find yourself limited in many aspects of life without it.
My issue is when someone dedicates and disciplines themselves in order to perform a sport at a professional level. What the fuck? How do we not have people dedicating so much time and passion into solving housing issues in inner cities? Or people dedicating there time to solving conflicts in war-torn countries?
I’m not pointing fingers at all – simply because people do this doesn’t make them bad people. I largely see it as a failure in society itself which is to blame.
Let me digress: from a young age, we’re all driven towards these icons, and we in turn want to be them. Ask most 10 year olds who Stephen Hawkings is and they will have no clue. Alex Ovechkin though?
So, back to skills, I see the vast collection of people who’s lives are dedicated to professional sports a disgusting waste of human resources, and another reason why I boycott professional sports.

3. False Unity

Guys love to get together to watch a football game. You have a common team which represents your city or your geographic area. All of a sudden, you have unity.
These guys have this bond now, and it revolves around professional sports.
People yell, fight, and kill for their professional team. Soccer riots were common at one time, causing millions of dollars of damage to public and private property, not to mention the assaults and injuries to those involved. People are fighting and killing for their fucking team. I don’t want to get into politics, but so many people fight tooth and nail against wars or foreign policy, yet they will love to smash a beer bottle over someones head in a bar over a fucking football game.

In closing, I know professional sports will always be a part of our society, and that’s probably one of the main factors that will keep our society from truly prospering. We are hardwired to dedicate time, money and emotion into an industry that exists for the pure purpose of pleasuring people.
Until we all boycott professional sports, we’ll always be held back as humans.

The IPhone Needs Android

Nathan Colquhoun — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 05:22:01 +0000

I’m not afraid to say it. Apple for the most part has always done hardware well. Who doesn’t drool whenever they see anything Apple creates, even the boxes their products come in seem to invoke a sense of awe. The design on all their products is flawless. The IPhone continues to push the smartphone market in a good direction by putting out a better product before anyone else does, and then everyone else catches up. Their phones work more smooth than any other phone out there.

Because Apple wants to take this experience inside their phones, they end up ruining what they are really good at. They think that by controlling the entire experience for a user they can give the user a better one. This just isn’t true. Users know what they want and they should be given as much control as they can manage. Apple says know and so we have the never ending game of jailbreaking and hacking every new version of the Iphone that comes out.

I would buy an IPhone if it came with Android. Their phones are obviously best on the market and with the Iphone 4 just being announced, there is no doubt that in terms of hardware, companies are going to be playing catch-up for a long time to try and make a phone as beautiful. Why limit my mobile experience to just hardware? Why doesn’t Apple just sell the phones as they are with the possibility to run android on it (just like I can run windows on a Mac). They would sell more phones and make more people happy.

Photography Mixed with Paint

Nathan Colquhoun — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:11:32 +0000

This is a great example of thinking outside of the box in terms of photography. This picture was taken at a beach here in Sarnia. The sunset was drawn on the models by the Painted Cat and the photograph was taken by Hailey McHarg. The layers and the amount of setup that went into this shot is excellent. Good work folks. Good work! The shot was taken for The Interrobang which is published weekly by the Fanshawe Student Union.

Why Custom Costs More

David Bazan House Show in Toledo (MP3 Downloads and HD Video)

Nathan Colquhoun — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 03:44:07 +0000

I had the pleasure of attending one of Bazan’s house shows this past week. It was pretty cool to sit in a room of forty people and listen to him sing. With his battery powered amp and scratchy vocals he sang a bunch of his classics and let us ask questions with his line “does anyone have any questions at this point in the show?” I brought my camera and recorded one song, in HD on my awesome 5D Mark II, and recorded the entire show on a mic. You can download the song in MP3 Format and watch the video below. Here is one of the pictures I took at the show.

Cover – Vic Chesnutt – Flirted With You

Cover – Bob Dylan – The Man in Me

Tranconinental

Options

In Stitches

Of Minor Prophets And Their Prostitute Wives

Curse Your Branches

How I Remember

Please Baby Please

Cold Beer and Cigarettes

Paramedics

(Download all Songs as one Zip File)

Finally, A Video Encoding and DVD Burning That Works

Nathan Colquhoun — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 01:44:47 +0000

I’ve been working with videos for years. One of the more frustrating experiences I’ve ever had in front of my computer has been trying to encode video. I always had trouble. I had tried every program I could find, hack or legally buy and really none of them made it a seamless and simple experience. There are a few different things that I’m usually trying to do when encoding video.

1. Reduce File Size so it’s easily uploads to online sites like youtube or vimeo.

2. Compile a single dvd with multiple videos formats and kinds

3. Add clips from other formats of videos into one I’m editing or off of a DVD.

Two programs I have found that have made this process almost perfect.

The first one is called DVD Flick. DVD Flick is a program that does DVD authoring. It has saved my life on numerous occasions. I can take any video, of almost any format and drag it into it’s easy to manage interface and then click burn and I now have a fully playable DVD. It’s that simple. Trying to do that in Encore or any other DVD authoring program just never worked, it could never figure out all the different codecs and how to encode the videos properly.

The second is called MPEG Streamclip. I can take my HD video clips from my 5D Mark II and reduce their file size and change the quality or the pixels or the format with only a few clicks. It doesn’t use that much language that an amateur wouldn’t understand and it works seamlessly. It’s the easiest and best working program I’ve used for it.

So thank-you DVD Flick and MPEG Streamclip for making the time I spend in front of my computer not waste my precious moments with video that doesn’t work.