PMS Buddy Awaits SNL Parody. It’s That Life Touching

PMS Buddy Awaits SNL Parody. It’s That Life Touching After reading some of the testimonials at PMSbuddy.com I had not idea that PMS was such a turmoil bringer. The PMS tracking website is currently monitoring close to 23,000 cycles with about 800 periods starting today and the PMS pressure gauge hasn’t even broken halfway yet! Talk about a flood warning!!

New to the app store, the PMSBuddy for your iPhone or iPod Touch is your “know her flow on the go” solution for all you out there fighting through the trenches of PMS laced tyranny. Boasting the slogan “saving relationships one month at a time” PMS Buddy begs me to ask the question of how many actual relationships really crumble under the weighted shackles of PMS? I think that if PMS is that detrimental to your relationship then PMS is probably not the problem.

Anyway, the reviews I have read have been very positive and it has helped many people so far. The iPhone app is pretty much a streamlined version of the online service with a couple of differences and is extremely easy to use. You can track up to 10 women’s cycles and the time at which their period will occur. However, if you have tons of problems dealing with PMS it may be unlikely that you even know 10 women. Beyond that, you input the name of the female and the last known date of cycle and the average length. PMS Buddy recommends the average 28 day cycle. That’s it. PMS Buddy automatically gives the exact date of the women’s next period so you can know when to pick up your chain mail from the blacksmith.

Rock Legend for iPhone / iPod Touch (video)

What’s the opposite of legend? Whatever you deem an appropriate antonym, that’s exactly what Rock Legend is. In an attempt to make a streamlined air guitar app, Rock Legend falls face first atop a pile of broken guitars. Simply put, this app just doesn’t work that well. I had a uniquely bad experience each time I fired up this app to give it a try.

We all know the basic motions when it comes to air guitar so I don’t have to explain that. Each of the included 4 songs has a pre programmed chord progression that you “motion” into effect. Sometimes it worked, most times it didn’t. In the video below I actually get it to work! It took me 4 video tries to get there though! Trying to get this app to work sort of requires you to be familiar with the songs and their chord progressions in order to get the timing down. If you don’t it doesn’t really matter anyway.

With that said, the thing that doesn’t work the most is the timing of the riffs. The AC/DC riff “Highway to Hell” is one of the most instantly recognizable classic metal riffs. Not here. Even if you strum in time with how the riff should go, it’s late and it plays the same chords too many times before switching to the next chord. There’d be times where a crowd applause noise would appear out of nowhere and the two “stop pads” were completely unresponsive. Ideally the stop pads are there to help you stop the chord from ringing out so you can air strum the next one, but from my experience they did not work whatsoever.

Nokia 6208c announced in China

Nokia was keeping us interested in its premieres all-round the year 2008 and the very last presentation of Nokia's smartphone was held on the 31st of December, right before the New Year. At the ceremony in Nanjing, China, Nokia unveiled the 6208c mobile phone. The place for the presentation was not chosen accidentally of course. Many of those who follow major events in the world of gadgets might have become desperate to see any recent novelty before it appears in China, but Nokia 6208c is not likely to go round world markets – China will be the first and one of the few 6208c's markets. This point is founded in the concept of the smartphone, in its Asian design, or may be in the fact that 6208c is a testing platform of new touchscreen capabilities.

So, what does Asian design actually mean to Nokia 6208c? The first thing to mansion is that Nokia's corporate design didn't go far away, so Nokia is easily recognized in the 6208c model. When I saw it for the fist time, 6300 communicator has come to my mind, but obviously, 6208c takes the 6708's way, which is also a classic form factor touchscreen released in 2006. Secondly, 6208c is all about little creative differences in design. For instance, I can not bypass its stylus. This is the most interesting stylus by design ever I believe. However, I don't like calling it weird or strange because Nokia would not place a poorly though out product under world's consideration, and who knows, may be it turns out to be so comfortable to use, that you wouldn't like to change it. Anyway the idea was to make it look like bamboo slips. Not an ordinary design of course, hence questionable, so let's move to unquestionable pluses. One of those is Chinese hieroglyph recognition, write it down on the notepad and the phone will find the most appropriate hieroglyph in its library. Very good, but Nokia is not the first to have this sort of thing, iPhone also has this feature.

Turbo NAS TS-809U-RP - 16 TB from QNAP Systems

NAS systems seem to never be ideally perfect, reliable, widely compatible or easy to use. Even though there are pretty big names in the business like LaCie, Addonics, Western Digital, etc. we still were able to find a thing or two to mend in their products. This is really annoying because NAS systems are what seatbelt is to a car driver – not the most exiting thing in a car but truly life-saving. There we are then, with a new NAS gadget from QNAP Systems – model TS-809U-RP Turbo NAS.

The presentation of TS-809U-RP Turbo NAS was held today in Taipei, so there is not much to say about different tweaks and upgrades - only very basic numbers which are impressive. Numbers in turn show not only performance of the Turbo NAS, but also grater stability and enhanced feature list. The stats are: 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2 GB DDR II memory. Storage space as giant as 16 TB of 8 SATA hard drives with hot-swapping and Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (S. M. A. R. T.). Network redundancy is provided by two Giga LAN ports. The rest of the long list of NAS' features is probably less interesting, so here are best bits of it: automatic policy-based IP blocking, RAID 0/ 1/ 5/ 6/ 5+spare/ 6+spare, Online RAID Capacity Expansion and Level Migration. One of my favorite features is the "Surveillance Station" - Turbo NAS can playback live image from up to four IP-based cams. No problems with OS' ether - Windows, Mac, UNIX, Linux. Well done, QNAP!

eSlick - Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader rival, but cheaper

More news in e-Reader industry has recently been caught in attention on the Web. The most popular e-Readers today are, of course, Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader. Both of electronic gadgets have different and already well known advantages and drawbacks, but now it is clear that pretty soon they will meet up with a new competitor they both wouldn't like to have. The competitor we are speaking about is eSlick from Foxit Software. We will talk about eSlick's strong and weak sides later, but now let's say that Foxit eSlick doesn't start shipping this December which means it doesn't steal any of Amazon Kindle's and Sony Reader's sales in the hot New Year period.

So, why are we so sure about Foxit Software's eSlick to threaten the other two big moguls? First of all it is its MSRP that matters. Mind you that Amazon Kindle costs about 360 USD and Sony Reader – full 400 USD. eSlick will cost you only about 260 USD, which will save you at least 100 USD if you was going to buy a e-Reader. eSlick has quite an average pack of features, though they claim to be enough. End user might only face a problem in case he needs to wirelessly download content, which is impossible to do with Foxit's gadget and Foxit doesn't provide its clients with any library (Amazon and Sony do). In rest, everything seems to be fine with eSlick. It has 800 x 600 Mpx display, 128 MB of internal memory. Memory is expandable, and in stock, eSlick comes with 2 GB SD card. Synchronization is done via USB 2.0 hub, so you can upload text, PDF and MP3 files on eSlick. It runs Linux operating system by the way and is able to convert more files to PDF format. eSlick is up to live 8000 pages until a full charge goes off and three colors are available: white, grey and black. Once again sales start in January '09 but pre-order is already available.