A month and a half ago I got an email out of the blue asking whether I'd like to have a free pair of wireless bluetooth headphones in exchange for a review on my blog. Well gee, sure, why not?! It's cheap advertising for them if I like them, but they risk bad PR if I don't.

In the past I'd tried small wireless headphones from Avantree, ECSEM, and Mpow before finding a pair I liked, "BlueAnt Pump". I was happy with those, but figured it wouldn't hurt to give another pair a try.

So, I was sent a pair [...]

The other day I got to witness the most amazing experience of watching a lady in her 70s touch an iPad for the first time, and right before my eyes the delight and sparkle on her face transformed her into a young girl again. It was magical.

Yet this experience at an Apple Store in Ohio was marred by some shockingly un-Apple bumps in the road.

I'm in America visiting my folks, and took the opportunity of being here to help Ann, a family friend in her 70s, buy her first computer. Until now her most technically-advanced electronics were a [...]
View full post »

If you ride a bicycle for long distances, as I have been wont to do lately, you want to feel comfortable on the bike and ride with a posture that doesn't lead to injury. If something is so obviously uncomfortable that you notice it right away then of course you correct it or at least try something else, but it's the subtle poor riding posture that can insidiously lead to long-term injury.

I often get numbness in my fingers after a long ride, and my own brother had to give up cycling after a long ride left him with chronic [...]

I'm surprised that no one seems to make bifocal sunglasses for use in reading a phone or tablet screen. I'd think that this would be a popular product among the technically-savvy over-40 crowd.

I've been trying this pair of bifocal sunglasses for a few weeks, and while they may be great to read a book with, they're literally worse than nothing when it comes to reading my iPhone screen because the reading-glasses part is also shaded. The darkness of the screen makes it less readable than the poorness of my eyesight.

My ideal sunglasses would be clear and unpolarized for [...]
View full post »

I made my second cycling run up Mt. Otowa (音羽山) on Wednesday, the first having been two days prior in the gloomy late afternoon just before a typhoon came through. Wednesday's was the first afternoon after the mild typhoon passed, so I expected the air to be really clear (like this and this), so I lugged my Sigma "Bigma" 50mm~500mm zoom all the way up there, along with the 2×TC to give me a 1,000mm lens.

It was so not worth it... it was the most hazy I'd seen it in ages.

The only things that were sort of clearly [...]