Fitbit One

I have been using a +Fitbit for a while now. In the past few years, using a Fitbit has encouraged me to move more during the day.  I have had two of the original Fitbits, and one Fitbit Ultra.  I just got a Fitbit One and I was looking forward to the wireless syncing.

Sync we have switch to using Chomebooks as our main computers, it has been pain to sync my previous Fitbits.  I would either have to leave a PC or Mac running all of the time, or turn it on often if I wanted my activity data synced.  Uploading my data daily is useful when you are trying to compare your activity against your friends. What I ended up doing was turn on a computer when the Fitbit needed to charge.  This would sync about a weeks worth of data at once.  I was looking forward to the Fitbit One solving this problem, by adding the ability to sync through my cell phone, which I always have with me and is always on.

Unfortunately, wireless syncing doesn't work with my phone, so I still need to turn on a computer at home to sync.

One other downside of the Fitbit One is that they changed the single USB dongle that charged and did the wireless syncing with the Fitbit into two.  Now if I want to sync and charge my Fitbit, I need to use two of my USB ports.

I am still pretty happy with the Fitbit One, and am looking forward to being able to sync through my cell phone.

Switched to Blogger

I moved my blogs to +Blogger from Wordpress.com.  Blogger has essentially the same functionality as WordPress.com but has better integration with +Google+.  Blogger also allows you to use a custom domain for free, while WordPress.com charges for this.

The conversion from WordPress went pretty well.  I was able to use the online conversion tool for one of of my blogs.  But since the tool only supports converting files up to 1MB, I needed to run the tool locally.  I also encountered a few other problems:

1. WordPress.com supports special syntax that gets converted at display time, which creates the html for embedding content.  WordPress makes it easy to embed +YouTube and +Google Drive content, with out having to include the html.  When these posts are imported into Blogger, the inline content isn't shown.
2. Blogger only supports 20 labels per post, while WordPress.com doesn't have a limit for tags.  I needed to remove these extra tags before exporting the blog from WordPress.

This is the 4th migration that I have done with my blogs, so I am sure that some links won't work in previous posts. My blogs were originally run on a self-hosted LifeType blog, then I migrated to a self-hosted to WordPress.org blog, and then I migrated it to a WordPress.com blog.

New Xbox 360 Dashboard

I have played with the updated Xbox 360 dashboard for a few weeks, and really am enjoying several of the new features.  The new additions that I like are better support for using an Xbox Live account on multiple Xboxes and improved support for  new video content sources.

Multi-Xbox support

We have two Xboxes in our house.  The second Xbox is upstairs, and has been used mainly as a Windows Media Extender and as a way to watch Netflix and Hulu content.  We haven't used it to play games because it was too much of a pain to either recover our Gamertags or copy the profile and saved games to a USB thumb stick.

With the new Dashboard update, Microsoft added two features that help with users with multiple Xboxes.

Roaming Profile

Microsoft renamed "recovering" profiles to "downloading" profiles.  With this you can "download" a profile on multiple consoles, with specifying the live.com password.  This allows you to use the same Xbox Live account on multiple consoles (though not at the same time.)  With this functionality, I am able to play a game on the upstairs Xbox while my wife or kids are watching something else on the downstairs TV.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRrJ7pVInqI

Reducing power consumption of electronics

One of our network switches stopped working.  While looking for replacements, I decided to look for a switch that would be more energy-efficient than the existing one.  I was very interested in D-Link's Green line of products. I bought the DSG-1024D 24-port network switch.  I figured that I would be able to replace several switches with a single energy-efficient switch.

The D-Link Green series has several ways that it saves power:

• It powers down port where it detects an idle link status.


• The switch can detect the cable length of Gigabit Ethernet run, and will use less power for shorter runs.

Before I replaced the switch, I measured the combined energy usages of the switches and did the same after replacing the old ones with the new switch.  By just replacing the two older switches, with the single new switch I saw some power savings.  Since I have other switches that are always on, I decided to replace those as well.

Once I replaced these switches, I saw a savings of 8 watts.
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Travel accessories

My wife and I traveled to Chicago this past weekend.  There were two accessories that made the trip easier.

AmazonBasics Universal Travel Case

The AmazonBasics Travel Case allowed us to keep our assorted cables and accessories in a compact form.  For this trip, we used it to store:

• 2 cell phone chargers


• USB cable & power adapter for our kindles


• USB cable for phone


• ethernet cable


• charger for Motorola Xoom


• USB thumb drive


• extra sdcard


• Charger for Samsung Series 5 Chromebook

All of these items fit in a 10" x 6" case.  One good thing about this is that having these items contained in one case made it easy to find each of these items.  Also, my backback wasn't loaded with a rats nest of wires.

I did put this case inside my checked bag, as I was sure that such a densely packed container of wires might have looked suspicious to the TSA agent watching the X-ray images.

ZuniConnect Travel IV

The ZuniConnect is a great travel router.  It lets you connect to a wired or wireless network, and share that with multiple computers.  It will share the network connection either via Ethernet or a 802.11g/n network. One our trip, my wife and I used  the ZuniConnect to share the the hotel wired network connection with our two phones, our laptop, and our tablet.

There are some other nice features of the ZuniConnect:

• Two USB ports to charge portable devices


• The ZuniConnect can be used for a wireless network bridge to connect devices that only have an Ethernet port to connect to a wireless network.

Downgraded Netflix Account

Netflix recently changed their account pricing for their accounts that include streaming and DVDs. Here is a snippet from the email that I received:

Your current $17.99 a month membership for unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs (including Blu-ray access) will be split into 2 distinct plans:

Plan 1: Unlimited Streaming (no DVDs) for $7.99 a month
Plan 2: Unlimited DVDs (including Blu-ray), 2 out at-a-time (no streaming)
for $14.99 a month

Your price for getting both of these plans will be $22.98 a month ($7.99 + $14.99). You don't need to do anything to continue your memberships for both unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs.

This got me thinking about how we have been using the Netflix service.  We love Netflix streaming, especially since we cancelled our cable television service.  Our kids can always find a kids show that they will like, and generally my wife and I can find something that we enjoy.  But we haven't been using the disc part of our service.

We have had the same two Blue-Ray discs sitting in our entertainment center for several months.  Obviously, this is the type of customer that Netflix like, as they don't have to pay for mailing costs, but are still receiving our monthly payment.

Often if we want to watch a recent movie, we will rent a movie through Amazon Video on Demand through our Roku box.  The selection through Amazon is pretty good, especially for newer releases.

With the change in plan, I have taken the opportunity to downgrade our Netflix account to streaming only.  Since we have been using Amazon Video on Demand for recent release, we won't miss the discs.  And in the cases that we want to get a movie on disc, we can always go to our nearest Redbox.

Summify

I have been using my6sense for a while to find content that I am interested in.  my6sense does a very good job ranking content, and it is easily accessible when using the application on my phone or when viewing the Twitter site, with the my6sense extension. One downside is that I need to actively perform steps to view this content.

Summify is a service that will periodically send you an email with a summary of some stories that you are interested in.  When you create an account, you associate your Twitter, Google Reader, and/or your Facebook account.  Summify uses the data from those accounts to determine your interests.

Then periodically Summify sends you an email with articles that you may be interested in.  You have the ability to further refine your interests when you receive the emails.

What is Summify? from Summify on Vimeo.

What is Summify? from Team Summify on Vimeo.