Saturday, December 20, 2008

The Hunt For The Watch

Casio watch box.This year it was decided that I was going to get a certain Casio watch for New Year as a present from Alena. Since she claims she doesn’t really understand much about watches the choice was left to me. After days and days of research and deliberations I set my mind on one particular model.

We soon discovered that the model is nowhere to be found online except for one store. Alena placed an order, but to our disappointment got an email within an hour saying that there was a mistake on the site and they didn’t not have the watch in stock. I should mention that the list price for this item is $400, but a lot of online places have it for $299, when they do have it in stock that is. Read more…

In: Gadgets   Tags: , , , ,
Time: 22:09   Comments: 7 Comments   Post a Comment  

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

Leave a comment

O.o teeth mrgreen neutral -) roll twisted evil crycry cry oops razz mad lol cool -? shock eek sad smile grin

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Tinted Windows

Tinted windows on our 300C.It took us a bit over a month to do the first car mode. Last Friday, right before our drive to Pennsylvania, we got the windows of our car tinted1. It’s not nearly as dark as the previous car — 35% on the doors and 20% in the back. It does make it more comfortable inside though.


  1. Used a shop in Brooklyn. Total cost was $250. They did a very good job. []

In: Gadgets   Tags: , , ,
Time: 11:45   Comments: No Comments   Post a Comment  

Leave a comment

O.o teeth mrgreen neutral -) roll twisted evil crycry cry oops razz mad lol cool -? shock eek sad smile grin

Sunday, October 19, 2008

300C Interior

Dashboard of our car with California walnut inserts.Roomy rear seats with rear air conditioning and seat warmers.More then a week ago Alena and I took a couple of shots of interior of our car during the night with all the lights glowing. One of them is HDR, but the colors are slightly off on it from the true ones. The other one doesn’t show as much detail, but the colors are realistic.

I didn’t want to post them before I had a chance to take a couple of shots during the day time. And we did that today.

Mouse over the images for a detailed description.

300C dashboard with no zoom and no flash. The touchscreen of navigation and musical system with no glare.
Dashboard close-up. This is an HDR shot. Good details, but the glow color is slightly off.
Interior shot at dusk. True color of the dashboard lights.

In: Gadgets   Tags: , , ,
Time: 21:45   Comments: No Comments   Post a Comment  

Leave a comment

O.o teeth mrgreen neutral -) roll twisted evil crycry cry oops razz mad lol cool -? shock eek sad smile grin

Friday, October 17, 2008

First Oil Change

0 to 60 timer on 300C.It hasn’t even been a month yet, but there is already over 2,000 miles on the odometer of our car. Chrysler recommends to have the first oil change done at 6,000, but it sounded just way too long to me. I figured it’s a good idea to get all the break-in particles out of the engine sooner. I used the opportunity to switch to a fully synthetic oil. The car took in 7 quarts of Mobil 1 oil and so far seems to be happy about it.

And yesterday I tested out the built in 0 to 60 timer. For whatever it’s worth it came out to 5.7 seconds, and I guess it’s not a bad result for a car that weights over 2 tons. Also I’m sure it can be improved if done on the track and not on the entrance ramp of I-95.

In: Gadgets   Tags: , , , ,
Time: 20:33   Comments: 3 Comments   Post a Comment  

1
2
3

Leave a comment

O.o teeth mrgreen neutral -) roll twisted evil crycry cry oops razz mad lol cool -? shock eek sad smile grin

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Oakley LIVESTRONG Flak Jacket

Oakley LIVESTRONG Flak Jacket XLJ glasses.Alena got me a pair of new sunglasses for my birthday. And not just any pair, but a pair of Oakley sunglasses — LIVESTRONG Flak Jacket XLJ. And it doesn’t end there. It’s not a regular pair, but a serialized limited edition version.

Box from serialized Oakley glasses.I wanted to get a new pair of Oakleys1 for quite some time already. My Prada glasses are nice, but only for the city. If you try to do any kind of activity in them, they just slide off. Oakley however makes the best sports activity glasses in business.

Oakley Flak Jacket glasses in the case.We went to a local store and tried several pairs. I was interested in Flak Jacket or Straight Jacket version. Flak Jacket with normal lenses looked OK, Straight Jacket looked better, but Flak Jacket XLJ2 looked the best.

LIVESTRONG Oakley Flak Jacket glasses box.Next step was to pick out the color combination. Oakley lets you customize many aspects of them. They also have a huge collection of lenses for different purposes. The best part is that Flak Jacket frame lets you easily exchange lenses, depending on the weather conditions or the activity.

Serial number imprinted onto the frame.Either way, I ended up liking the LIVESTRONG version the most, but it was sold out of serialized version everywhere. Zappos.com of all places, had a pair available though, and we ordered it.

I took them to our Pennsylvania trip. They are very comfortable, light and cover fully the field of view. They also have a pretty good grip. I went swimming with them and was diving. The lenses have special coat that makes the water just slide off. I’m very happy with my new Oakley glasses.


  1. Previous pair was lost to the circumstances back in 2000. []
  2. XLJ has the same frame, but differently shaped lenses. []

In: Gadgets   Tags: , ,
Time: 19:31   Comments: No Comments   Post a Comment  

Leave a comment

O.o teeth mrgreen neutral -) roll twisted evil crycry cry oops razz mad lol cool -? shock eek sad smile grin

Monday, August 11, 2008

Vending Frankenstein

Crazy vending machine running Linux.We have the weirdest vending machine in our office. That’s what I call a good idea and a horrible execution.

It runs on nothing else than Linux. It’s able to read your finger print and based on that know how much money you have on your account and if it can dispense drinks for you or if it needs to recharge your credit card. And if something gets stuck while dispensing it generally can sense it and give you an option to select something else or try to drop the item again. Read more…

In: Gadgets   Tags: , ,
Time: 17:54   Comments: 1 Comment   Post a Comment  

1

Leave a comment

O.o teeth mrgreen neutral -) roll twisted evil crycry cry oops razz mad lol cool -? shock eek sad smile grin

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Mice Infestation

Apple Mighty Mouse and Logitech MX RevolutionYesterday we went to our local Best Buy and bought1 a whole bunch of mice. I wanted something for my Mac, since some development tasks with a touch pad are much harder to perform than they should be. A natural choice was Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse — Apple design and bluetooth technology in one package. So far I like it.

Another one was for Alena’s office. Apparently they still use non-laser, non-optical mice at her company, and since she spends all day holding that thing in hand it makes sense to get something nice, comfortable and wireless. We went with Logitech MX™ Revolution. It feels good in hand, has additional buttons to speed up certain tasks and comes with a charger — she doesn’t need to worry about replacing batteries.


  1. Apple’s mouse was $69.99, Logitech’s was $99.99. []

In: Gadgets   Tags: , , ,
Time: 16:53   Comments: 1 Comment   Post a Comment  

1

Leave a comment

O.o teeth mrgreen neutral -) roll twisted evil crycry cry oops razz mad lol cool -? shock eek sad smile grin

Sunday, July 27, 2008

New Dell for Parents

New Dell Inspiron 530 for my parents.A week ago we were thinking of what to get my mom for her birthday and she said that a new computer would be a good idea. Indeed, their old Dell felt like an ancient animal at this point and was extremely sluggish. The total size of HD space on the poor thing was 27 GB!

We decided that we’re going to put in some money for the new machine and that my dad was going to give the rest. I went to Dell and put together a decently specced computer — Read more…

In: Gadgets   Tags: , ,
Time: 12:53   Comments: 3 Comments   Post a Comment  

1
2
3

Leave a comment

O.o teeth mrgreen neutral -) roll twisted evil crycry cry oops razz mad lol cool -? shock eek sad smile grin

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Griffin Wave for iPhone 3G

Green case on black iPhone 3G.I’ve never had a case for a phone before. But then again I never had a phone that seems so fragile to a drop. Don’t get me wrong, the build of iPhone seems sturdy and solid, but because of the huge glass display it seems it won’t live through a fall.

After reading a number of reviews on different sites I decided to trust iLounge and their opinion. Out of several B+ graded1 cases they had Griffin Wave seemed the most visually appealing, yet slim, to me.

Griffin Wave cases sold as a pair.We ended up picking up a pair of these at BestBuy yesterday. They didn’t have any color choices and they were sold as a pair — one was black and white and another one was green. Both of these are translucent to some degree.

Griffin Wave case in black iPhone 3G.After putting the case on one thing becomes apparent — it feels amazingly good in hand compared to the naked plastic of iPhone. It stops being slippery and it won’t collect grease the way iPhone does.

The cases came with a screen protector, but I decided not to install it. It’s very unlikely that glass is going to get scratched, and I don’t want to sacrifice even a small portion of touch screen sensitivity.

Griffin Wave case on black iPhone 3G. Back side.The fit of the case is also very nice, except for one corner where there is no locking mechanism of any kind is present. There is a 1/3 of a milliliter gap between the top and bottom parts there which annoys me slightly. Otherwise I think it’s a very good buy.


  1. B+ was the highest rating for iPhone 3G cases on iLounge. []

In: Gadgets   Tags: , ,
Time: 12:23   Comments: No Comments   Post a Comment  

Leave a comment

O.o teeth mrgreen neutral -) roll twisted evil crycry cry oops razz mad lol cool -? shock eek sad smile grin

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

iPhone’s First Day

iPhone 3GI’ll start with the pleasant part. On July 11th we bought a pair of iPhones 3G. Mine is a 16GB white model and Alena’s is an 8GB black model. They both look great.

iPhone 3G box before opening.Here’s the box of my iPhone 3G right after we got home.

Opening iPhone 3G box.In the box we find what? Yes, iPhone, how did you guess?

Flip side of my iPhone 3G.And here’s its flip side. White one. It doesn’t collect finger prints as the black ones do. The screen however is another story.

iPhone 3G on top of the boxes.Here are the boxes from 2 iPhones with a white phone on top. As you can guess the box color corresponds to the color of iPhone’s back side.

iPhone 3G hooked up to my Mac. Waiting and waiting for iTunes to work.And here I have the phone hooked up to my Mac, trying to activate it through iTunes. This actually took quite a while to get done which brings me to the first part of the whole story. The actual process of buying the phones. And that part was not so much fun.

AT&T store line goes around the corner.We arrived to the local AT&T store 15 minutes to 8. Yes, in the morning. When we got there were greeted by a rather long line. On the other hand this is probably considered a very short line when compared to some that were formed around Apple stores in Manhattan.

At 8am they let in several people and that’s pretty much when the fun part ends. After that it was 4 hours of waiting under a brutal sun. The line was not moving because AT&T couldn’t process any orders. We were told that iTunes and AT&T internal system went down. At some point they just started selling the phones without activation. Then the system came back, but was moving extremely slowly. They were letting 1 person at time into the store and it was taking hours upon hours. Then we were told that they are running out of 16GB models and we weren’t even sure if we’ll be able to get any.

Before entering the store after waiting for hours.By the time we got to the door I was pissed and wasn’t even sure if I’ll get what I want. We let Maruk go in first, since it seemed he would get a heart attack if he ended up without one. But once we were inside all went well. I actually ended up with the very last white iPhone they had. Some poor bastard after me had to go with a black one.

Here we are with our phones. Sorry about the crappy picture.The whole buying process went very smoothly. We got our numbers transferred, accounts set up and so on. I even managed to apply 18% service fee discount, but we won’t know if it will work before we get our first bill.

iPhone 3G. So pretty! :)After having the phone for a couple of days I must say that it lived up to the hype and my huge expectations. It’s as great as everyone said it was. The hardware is great and the software is just awesome. I’m glad we did this the first day and waited until the end so we didn’t have to go searching for it somewhere else the day after. That’s all.

In: Gadgets   Tags: , , ,
Time: 18:01   Comments: 2 Comments   Post a Comment  

1
2

Leave a comment