Jawbone Up Review

So I purchased the Jawbone UP back in July and I think I've had it long enough to have an informed opinion about the band and that would be, it's not quite ready for prime time. If I had the opportunity to do it all over again I wouldn't purchase the UP instead I'd be talking hard look at the Fitbit Force.

While the UP does a good job of tracking physical activity and sleep it has a number of deficiencies that keep me from recommending it. First there is no wireless sync option. Originally, I didn't think that it would bother me but it has become cumbersome to sync the band by plugging the band into my phone's headphone jack but it's become a PITA. Second, there is no external display where you can check your daily activity progress or see what time it is. Third, there is no website for you to track your progress everything has to be done via the phone interface.

Finally, charging is problematic. In order to charge the band you need to connect it's head phone jack connector to a special cable that connects to a USB port. Also, the battery sometimes will not take a charge, I'm on my second band since July and a friend of mine is in the same boat.

All in all, I love the idea of life tracking I just don't think this is the product for me.

My WD MyBook Live Crashed

Well, we had a bit of a power hiccup last week and when I got home my WD MyBook Live could no longer be recognized on my home network. Nothing I could do would get the drive working again so I had to assume the power outage fried the ethernet chip on the board of the enclosure. Googling around the internet showed other folks encountered the same problem that I have.

This is the second time a WD enclosure has failed on me. Why, oh why, do I do this to myself. I guess it is because I'm cheap and the WD products offer a good price/functionality ratio. However, what they do not offer is reliability. This is a good lesson for us all not to skimp on quality when you have an important piece of your home setup.

I guess I should explain that I use the MyBook Live to host my iTunes library. As a result it is just packed with shows for my daughter and I really need to get this fixed before she wants to watch Beverly Hills Chihuahua again. As well this drive is setup to be the receptacle of the Time Machine backup on the Mac. I get antsy if my backup isn't running daily even though I also run Carbonite to backup to the cloud.

Anyway, the drive in the enclosure is just fine. I pulled it out and popped it into SATA to USB which works great except for the fact the drive is formatted as XFS. It's a typical Linux file system which predictably isn't recognized by Mac OS or Windows. Luckily there is a great free program called Linux Reader from Disk Internals that you can run on Windows which will allow you read only access to the partitions. I've got it setup on an old Windows laptop now and it is busily copying away.

Twitter Enabled Coffee Pot

Learn how to make your own over at the Instructables.

Coffee Lover Umbrella

Foolish Gadgets strikes again with this interesting umbrella for coffee lovers. Not sure if I'd drop the money for this gadget though. Growing up in Cape Breton has given me an aversion to umbrellas as they are pretty much useless with the winds we get.