review
PeakDesign's Everyday Messenger Bag

Reviewing the PeakDesign Messenger Bag

As someone who works in I.T., but is also into photography, I rely on bags for everything. Most cheap bags (hasn’t everyone had an APC bag in I.T.?) are great for storing laptops but aren’t so great at photography gear. Camera bags too are often not meant for computer gear. Well, thanks to some good fortune, I came across PeakDesign and their EveryDay Messenger bag. Frankly, it was a challenge to tell if this was going to be great at what I needed until I bought the thing, so hopefully, if this is on your mind, I can help. Here are my thoughts on this bag.

review
Apex Stand Open

Reviewing the Apex Computer Stand From Sano Creative

Dubbed “The World’s Best Laptop Stand”, the Apex Stand arrived as a Kickstarter project. The stand was wildly successful, gaining $417,515 in pledges. I liked the idea immediately. Laptops are quite literally a pain in our necks, and this stand appeared to offer a way to make using them more ergonomic. So, in September of 2014, I backed the project. With its arrival on Feb 29th, the project was realized in a speedy 181 days.

review
Web WhiteBoard Logo

First Look: Web Whiteboard

Every day I’m amazed by the kinds of tools people create. Sometimes they’re small free projects, and other times, they’re just tools that solved a specific problem. Thankfully, like me, developers love giving them away for everyone to use. Today I stumbled across a cool whiteboard tool that lets you collaborate with others for free[1].

blog review
Flickr logo Rectangle

6 Massive Flickr Usability Pains [in the Ass]

Using Flickr for photo management appears to be a great value proposition. Store all your photos, and in turn, they offer a full terabyte (that’s 1000 gigabytes!) of drive space. For all the different options for storing and managing photos online, Flickr can’t be beaten. Right? As good as that is, Flickr also has to be the most annoying and convoluted systems to use for managing and sharing photos. Today, I thought I’d look at Flickr’s worst offences.

review
Server Logo Square

Evaluating Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 2

Windows Technical Preview 2 was released on Microsoft’s website and made available for download. Usually, this process is a challenge because we don’t always have the best and newest hardware available to test with; but I tend to find what I can in the lab to test as many features as possible. I took a bare-metal Dell PowerEdge server (with a RAID 5 drive setup), and installed off of a burned DVD.

review
Office16 Preview Website

First Look: Microsoft’s Office 2016 Preview

Today, I noticed the public preview for Office 2016 is available on Microsoft’s site. The downloaded file is very small and goes out to download the rest of the application by way of “streaming” [1]. On a 25mbs Internet connection, I had the application installed in about 10 to 15 minutes. Given that a new version of Microsoft Office is a major milestone (and something everyone will a computer will eventually need to use), I thought I’d take a look at what’s new.