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A review of The Hike, by Drew Magary

I have been on a solid kick this last year, looking for my favorite reads. So far, Ready Player One takes the prize for one of the best books I have ever read. Also in my list, you’ll find books like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (of course) and other fun sci-fi/fantasy books. I have a very strong

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(Review) Cookie Dough flavored Oreo Cookies

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Ok, so Nabisco has been on a crazy kick this year releasing custom flavored Oreo cookies and here they go again. This time with a cookie dough creme on the inside.

This review will be short and to the point. In fact, here is the conclusion: YUM! You need to snag some of these! Done!

Now I have to figure out how I left the house to get some fruit for healthy eatin…and instead left with this…..

Buying a DJI Phantom 2 Vision+ Drone

DJI-Phantom-2-Vision-Plus

I am purchasing a Phantom 2 Vision+ Drone and will be hanging with the guys at Poc Network Tech Blog who will be doing a full review on it which I will share below once it happens.

This bad boy is ready to fly right out of the box and I look forward to sharing what it can do. Int he meantime, I’ll explain exactly what I am getting now so you get a head start at 1) knowing exactly what’s involved and 2) tagging along if you have the itch to get one yourself! The Phantom comes ready to fly and record (as long as you get a MicroSD card), with and extra battery (if you get the below one) and live video feed (iPhone or Android devices). Wait for the review or grab one now, the following four items is what I will be getting:

 

That’s it! I’ll share the review when it happens. I think they are waiting on additional intel from DJI before they make their move.

UPDATE:

The review has been published by them and can be found here! Looks like it got an 8/10. They also covered my costs due to some “crashing” that took place during their tests lol.

Top Ten Anime Series of 2013

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The end of 2013 has come and like everywhere else, I think it is time to look back on the year to see what the top something of something is and today felt like a top ten anime series kind of day! I couldn’t just base this on my own opinion since…well…I’ve been a little behind in watching so there are a LOT of new series I need to set my eyes on. So I took my own opinions and then went around and collected data from many different polls and discussions around the web to bring you a valid top ten list based on not just my own opinion but the opinions of the many!

10 – Arpeggio of Blue Steel
(Aoki Hagane no Arupejio)

Arpeggio of Blue Steel

Kind of like an animated take of Battlestar

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Vizio 80-inch 3D Smart LED TV Equals Awesome

This year Vizio launched an affordable 80 inch TV which it would be disrespectful to refer to as anything less than amazing. EIGHTY INCHES of screen packed with all of the features everyone is looking for. 3D support, 240Hz, smart apps and internet….EIGHTY INCHES!!

Now, this would mean nothing if the image quality was meh, but it’s not. The quality is superb and I hope to own one myself as soon as possible. Brightness is very customizable, image is sharp and clear (ESPECIALLY if you are watching a blu-ray), motion is smooth with zero drag and Avengers is worth watching over and over on it because it feels like it’s filmed live on the news or you are right there.

Best of all is that you can buy the TV for less than $4k. With how big it is and all the features it supports, you would think that it wouldn’t come anywhere near that price but they did…oh they did.

Move on over projectors as Vizio has just taken away your business! …unless of course you want an even bigger screen………then you may want a projector

I just thought this was worth bragging about as the TV is super big and super cool and I am sure they are selling off the shelves, especially now that Christmas is here.

It’s fracking HUGE!

You can find additional info, specs and what not here!

If you are nice, you could buy me one 🙂

Hoorah!

 

Newsgroups Provider Newshosting Upgrades Their Retention to 1750 Days (and growing)

newsgroups6451561156I am always writing my many reviews for various services around the internet, and this one never gets old. I have mentioned them (Newshosting) many times in the past (including one of the most popular posts on this website: “How to use Newsgroups for Downloading Anime (for Beginners)“) as being one of the very BEST newsgroup services to use (without a doubt). They are the fastest, they are the most reliable, most affordable (especially for what you get) and of course they have one of the highest retention windows in the market (now towering in at 1750 days and growing!).

That means it retains post records for 1750+ days compared to the competition which still on average offers about a year…maybe two. So if you run across a post that you just really have to read or download, and it was posted over 4 years ago…it can still be yours. No more of having to set a year limit in your newsgroup reader for searching for posts. Newshosting has offered far more retention for a number of years now and it just keeps growing. Who knows what it will be by next year. Newhosting’s resources are massive and they don’t shed a single tear at sharing it with you.

So if you enjoy newsgroups, and enjoy not having a limitation to what you can find…and say…you want all the anime your heart could ever desire (or pictures, news, art, open source applications and whatever other media exists out there)…choose Newshosting. I myself have been using them for years and you won’t find me with anyone else! A big thanks to them! Keep it up!

…I got a little hyper in my thoughts there out of excitement but well worth it as I already have a post for the day 😀

NH *Specials 300×250 A

Hisense Sero 7 Lite and Pro – Better Than The Google Nexus 7 Tablet

So I have been keeping my eyes open for both friends, family and myself…to find the great options for tablets. Some looking for power, some look for cost and like me, some look for both. Last year’s Google Nexus tablet was pretty nice outside of the fact that it was missing certain features…certain *important* features that in my eyes makes or breaks a tablet.

The biggest of these features was an SD card slot. How could they make such a great tablet but not include an SD card slot?? So naturally I never bought one.  It’s missing some other features like a rear-facing camera and decent speakers, but an SD card slot is a deal breaker for me. I *almost* bought one for my house last year until I read that.

Now! Enter the “Hisense Sero 7 LT ($99!!!) and the Hisense Sero 7 Pro ($149)! These capture everything the Nexus has but also has a camera on both sides (Update: the Pro has both cams, but not the Lite/LT) so you can both take pictures and do video conversations, it has HDMI out so you can connect it to a TV, AND…it has an SD card slot…AND….it costs less.

Sadly it doesn’t have much space on-board as I would like but it definitely makes up for it with the addition of the SD card slot so you can expand your space.

So for those on a budget yet still looking for a killer tablet…you’d be nuts not to give this a try. At the price, you might as well snag one even if you have another tablet already floating around the house.

Now let’s hope when Google launches a new Nexus tablet that they make the right move this time.

 

Here are the links again for the two tablets:

$99 – Hisense Sero 7 LT (Dual Core, base features)

$149 – Hisense Sero 7 Pro (Quad Core, base features +NFC, Bluetooth, larger battery, more space, higher res screen, cams on both sides)

Obviously the Pro is the way to go but if you just need something simple and don’t need the extra options…and want it to be dirt cheap, then the Lite/LT is for you!

As always, every time I see something amazing, I try to share the intel and I will never (hopefully) lead your wrong! I try never to review something I don’t feel *strongly* about! 😀

 

 

Awesome Blu-Ray Player That Plays MKV Files (Cheap too!)

mkvI have been reading up looking for a Blu-Ray player that could play MKV (Matroska) files for some time now. Most reviews say its hard to find one that plays them…but really it seems its simply hard to find one that “prints” the fact that it will play them in the specs. I have this Toshiba (cheap…usually $60-$100) only because for the price it was a steal and I needed an extra blu-ray player in the house. I didn’t find out until now that it played MKVs (randomly tried to see what would happen if I stuck a disc in). HD quality…yep, digital sound…yep! Two thumbs up from me!

So all of your MKV formatted anime and whatever else…..here’s your solution to bring it to your TVs and home theaters without having to hook a PC up to them!!

Toshiba Blu-Ray Player — Amazon

(free shipping too ^_^)

UPDATE 09-25-2013

I figured it was a good time to update some of these posts. Here are a few more options for good MKV playback via Blu-ray player. Some of these options are pricey and some more than affordable. It all depends on the general over-quality of features you are looking for:

Greatest Home Audio Receiver Yet! The Yamaha RX-A3010!

This baby speaks for itself. Reading through the specs makes it very hard not to appreciate what Yamaha brings to your living room with their receivers. Overcoming the specs of the recently popular Pioneer Elite receivers, this receiver competes with the high performance lines and bring you the wattage to power some of the big boy speakers (such as the high performance lines of Klipsch, Synergy, Marin Logan and B&W for a few examples). Best of all, this amazing piece of techdebuted this month with a low price of only

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Newshosting.com Review for Newsgroup Access

Under Review: Newshosting

We have used multiple providers in the past, testing both connection and stability and Newshosting has to be one of the best we have seen thus far.

From what we have seen, Newshosting (so far) has had a 0% downtime. Now when I say we put that to the test…I mean we REALLY put that to the test. Since most newsgroup applications record and save their queue information, this really isn’t much of a deal, but for some…it is. It also says a lot about a company’s reputation and pro-activeness to thwart network problems.

One of the biggest selling points of Newshosting, is that they have a retention period that is more than 1000 days!!! That’s not months..that’s YEARS until posts vanish from their servers. Just imagine how much information if just waiting for you. We have used companies in the past that had 60-150 day retentions. You get bored of those companies because you find that you miss out on a lot of stuff. Newshosting eliminates that problem completely.

Next we tested connections. They claim to allow 30-60 connections all at once from your PC. That’s a lot of connections, but is it true? Well, we wound up locking up 3 different machines because we opened all connections at once, and the connection was so strong…it flooded our network/ports and put the PC’s into a total panic. We even had to restart the router because for some reason…it got confused from it and Wifi was totally knocked down. Awesome!

Speed….now there’s an important factor! Tons of retention and enough connections to choke your computer to death…but does it happen quickly? The answer…yes. We tested from 2 different networks. One pulled an average of about 30mbits/s (3.5+MBytes/s), the other a whopping 50mbits/s (6.2MBytes/s). We wanted to go even higher than that but we didn’t have access to a faster ISP connection. This is more than enough to show a result though since I’ve had hard drives transfer information from one to another at a speed slower than that. Got a faster connection to test it with? Sign up with their trial and give it a try. Let us know what your results are and we will post them!

Other benefits? For the most part, pretty much all of their accounts offer unlimited downloads. They have an account where the monthly download is limited to a large number of gigabytes, but to switch up to the unlimited one is such a small difference in price that you might as well go all the way. They also offer encrypted connections which is cool and all of their accounts come with a free trial.

The conclusion: I’m impressed, we’re all impressed and you will be too! Especially if you LOVE to access everything your mind can absorb (and or your hard drives…whichever gives in first). Newshosting has to be the best Newsgroup provider we have ever experienced, and we back it 100% 🙂