Monday, November 23, 2009

Passive Solar Heaters

Just a funny story to pass on to my friends. Those of you that know me better than my bio info know that I dabble in solar and wind power projects. Most of these projects are for personal use such as the passive solar heaters I devised. Made of card board, and shaped as a wide "U" shape open on top and bottom, painted black on one side. The heater was stretched across a window that receives most of the day's sun(black side toward sun). These heater were the ugliest things ever, but they worked. They worked too well in fact. I succeeded in heating our bedroom to around 85 F with an outdoor temp of approximately 34 F and furnace set to 68 F. Not bad free energy, but it is hard to breath in a room that hot....hee hee! Wife hated them so much she tore them down. Well now its the beginning of winter here and she wants me to put them back together again and re-install them...Hmmmmmm. I guess the story isn't that funny, but it was to me. Guess you had to be there and hear all the guff I took for their appearance and the fact that too much heat could be generated and now she's cold again and suddenly its a good idea again. Oh hell what are ya gonna do? Catch ya later...

Storm still has some problems

Well after installing and using OS 5.0 on my Storm, it seems that the phone is indicating a memory leakage problem. However there doesn't appear to be any performance hits that I am aware of. When I go to the options and select the memory settings app the application memory will decrease constantly until it reaches zero. I've tried everything I can think of including deleting all third party apps...still indicates some sorta memory leak...also completely restored device to factory settings and OS 4.7, then reloading 5.0. I still had same issue, but the phone never slowed down or hang like it used to on OS 4.7. So if the phone works great and very speedy since upgrading to OS 5.0, then I guess I can't complain too much. There is one weird problem that has been reported on most of the BlackBerry blogs/forums. This problem has to do with disappearing App World icon. I'm still working on that one so look for my findings in the near future. Thanks for checking us out and please add your thoughts and experiences....

Monday, November 9, 2009

Just setup mobile posting on blackberry...we will see how this goes...;)

Monday, November 2, 2009

BlackBerry Storm OS 5.0.328 Review

I have mixed emotions about this new OS. First I'm peeved that The Storm could have been this good in the beginning. Once again I paid good money to beta test their phone. Second I'm grateful that RIM and Verizon could work together to service the customer's complaints. Now I'm happy to report that this is the phone I wanted and the phone I'm going to stay with until I'm eligible for an upgrade( Probably Storm 2. ).
My most vocal complaint about the Storm is the memory management on the device and lack of memory. This OS version has solved most of this issue in aces...very little lag now. That is to say that now apps open and close quickly...very snappy. Also so gone is the "hanging condition", where the tiny clock symbol appears and the rest of the device is frozen. The "hanging condition" could only be cured by doing a battery pull...thus causing a reboot and sucking up valuable battery time. Battery pulls still occur but rarely...before 3-4 times a day...now 3-4 times a week.
The next improvement I noticed was improved performance on all apps...opening and closing especially the internet. Let me tell ya the internet was almost unusable before...now...very snappy! Pages load slow on all phone of this type...even...you guessed it the iphone too. Now the web browser rocks with a major speed boost. So I can look things up on the device without tethering to the laptop every time...Yeah!!!
Other items of lesser importance to me are faster response time from camera when taking pictures, more camera settings to play with, SMS text threaded messages, word search and select slider whenever you are typing on the device. These are all very cool items I'll call the icing on the cake.
Improvements so good I will stick with this phone for a while. As a matter of fact, the only improvement left is for me to buy a 16GB media card and install it. Really....no kidding.