Gadgets Club

I just got a new little gadget for review. It is called Pop-up MicroLite and it is a practical small, portable lighting device.

This small gadget is designed to offer you a light when you need one. It is small and rally easy to use.

Useful to illuminate toolboxes, breaker panels, remote controls, cars/trucks/boats, camping gear, emergency kits, purses,drawers & cabinets, computer ports, briefcases, tackle boxes, backpacks and more.

Pop-up MicroLite features:

• 2 Lumens super bright LED
• hands free
• 30h life time lithium batteries
• water resistant
• sticks to anything

Pop-up MicroLite review

Testing the Pop-up MicroLite was very simple. All you have to do is to turn this little device on and off.

After the device is turned on all the user have to do is to point it where it is needed. Because it come with a 3M sticker it is easy to placed in the area that needs to be illuminated.

A useful gadget because of it’s compact design. It is easy to take it with you and the light in powerful enough to find things in complete darkness.

Until now I have used the device to illuminate my keyboard and to read in bed without turning on the lights and waking my wife.

Pricing and availability

The Pop-up MicroLite is not an expensive gadget. You can get one for less then $7. You can find it on MicroliteTech website.

In the last few days I was testing the A4Tech HoleLess wireless mouse. This is a smart mouse which has a lot of useful features like screen capture, tutor pen and multimedia, internet and office functions.

If you want a good wireless mouse all you have to do is to insert the wireless multi-link receiver into an USB port and put a battery into the mouse and you are done. If you want to use all the features of this mouse you will have to install the software (you can download it from www.a4tech.com/g9) and read the manual.

A4Tech HoleLess wireless mouse has an innovative hidden sensor which keeps away the dust and liquids. By doing this the mouse is very precise even when it run on bed, sofa or carpet.

A4Tech HoleLess wireless mouse review

I had to work a little to make this review because this mouse has a lot of useful functions. It allows customization so the possibilities are almost endless from opening documents to launching your default browser in just one muse click.

You have a lot of options with this mouse. Below you will find a list with the features which are the most useful for me.

Screen capture tool

This is by far the most useful feature for a blogger. There are many times when you want an image to publish on your blog and the save option is not working. I am not talking about breaking the copyright laws. The images I use on my blog are images of products which come from the manufacturers but in many cases it takes time to find the original image so I save a duplicate published on a different website.  

This is where the screen capture tool of the HoleLess mouse is handy. From one mouse click I get the image I want. It is really simple.

The captured images can be edited from the mouse software which is also really simple to use.

Tutor pen

When I am developing a new website with my partner I want to point out different things so the tutor pen function is really useful.

By using this feature I can draw arrows and all sorts of things to highlight the most important elements from an image.

Gesture 16-in-1

This is a feature which allows the user to get maximum from this mouse. You can customize the gestures and after that it is easy to zoom in or out on a page, scroll up and down, open, save a file just to name a few.

One click mouse sensitivity adjustment

You can choose the mouse sensitivity by pressing one button. I don’t like my mouse cursor to move very fast on my screen so I have opt for the 800DPI sensitivity.

Internet, Office and Multimedia

The HoleLess mouse can be personalized to quickly execute Internet / multimedia commands, such as: Backward, Forward, Stop, Refresh, Search, My Favorite, Web Browser, E-mail, Media Player (Open), Previous, Next, Stop, Play/Pause, Mute, Volume+, Volume and so on.

There are a lot of useful functions here and the best part is that you can customize them to fit your needs.

This post will be a little more technical and it was made for the website owners or managers who want to test and improve their sites.

I will be talking about Jmeter technologies and how we can use the stress tests for a website.

Site performance technologies

Using site performance technologies we can see how our website is responding when a large number of visitors enter simultaneously on a specific page. We all want good search engines positions for our sites and we want to offer the user a good web experience. We all know that Google and visitors appreciate speed. If your site loads slow the user will get bored and leave your site, on the other hand if you have a slow website Google will probably penalize it with poor rankings.

To improve our site speed we need data. First we need to know where we start and we need tests to see if the changes we made are working.

About JMeter

There are open source tools such as JMeter which allows us to stress our website by simulating hundreds of visitors who access the website in the same time. JMeter is a popular open source tool for load testing, with many useful modeling features such as thread group, timer, and HTTP sampler elements.

This tool can be used to analyze a site performances. This tool is for advances users. The ones who don’t have great technical skills prefer to utilize more user friendly tools like BlazeMeter.

BlazeMeter is a tool which runs better, faster JMeter load tests. Also the interface is user friendly and the reports are easy to interpret. This is the tool I want to use to improve my website. For now I use the free option but I am thinking of getting on demand plan so I will pay just for what I use.

Why to use a dedicated service

Using JMeter or a tool based on it  will allow you to get the relevant data regarding your website performances.

These king of tools are used to localize errors and to fix them. For example my site has a few CSS problems and some caching problems with some images. By installing a plugin like WP super cache all the images will be load from cache memory and my site will load faster.

You should focus on reducing site latency (time until first response) and lowering the site’s response time. In my opinion these two are the most important factors to have a fast loading website.

Valentine’s Day is a day for celebrating love, friendship and relationships. Like most of our modern holidays, commercialism has infiltrated and taken over the occasion, but the giving and receiving of gifts does not have to be without feeling. All this emotion can make shopping for the perfect gift for your significant other a difficult one. For men, chocolates, roses, teddy bears and the standard women’s gifts may be easy to find and purchase, but just not the right fit for their girlfriend or wife. As for the women out there, finding a gift for the men in your life can truly feel like a challenging labour of love.

Take heart, all lovers, wherever you are! There is hope and a solution to this February quandary: gadgets. Though gadgets both electronic and non-electronic may seem cold and impersonal as Valentine’s Day gifts, choosing the right gadget and adding your own personal touch to celebrate your romance will result in the perfect gift for the man or woman in your life.

Choosing Your Gadget Gift

The first step is choosing the right gadget to give to your loved one. A large part of this selection process will be guided by your personal knowledge of the other person, but here are some general gift ideas.

Everyone enjoys music so an MP3 player, such as one of the many Apple iPods, makes a wonderful gift for the man or woman in your life. They are available in a wide variety of sizes, colours and styles, so choosing a model that suits is a breeze. To personalise the gift, select music to add to the unit that is special to you as a couple; this could be the first song you danced to or the songs that remind you of each other.

A great gift for men and for women is a personal gaming system. A Sony PlayStation Portable, for example, makes an ideal gift and is useful not only for its video game capabilities. This flexible and sophisticated unit also allows you to download and listen to music, watch movies and television, download and view pictures, and even surf the web.

It is also important to keep in mind the tastes and preferences of the person you are getting the gift for. If he or she likes to read, a Kindle and some e-books would make a wonderful gift. If your significant other likes to cook, a unique kitchen gadget would be fun to use.

For the more traditional shopper who wants to try a gadget, high-tech jewellery may be the best choice. Lockets or watches that double as USB storage devices, colour-changing necklaces and Bluetooth bracelets are some innovative options.

When it comes to getting the best deals on your sweetheart’s new gadget, it is always best to look online. Shopping websites, such as Amazon.com and Overstock.com, provide thousands of ideas to choose from, while a search of store sites will yield a wide variety of options in a range of prices. Many sites also have sales, specials or discount codes to use when purchasing your Valentine’s Day gadget that will save you extra money.

Technology is moving so quickly it’s hard to keep pace. Every few months, new gadgets are launched onto the market aimed at making life faster and easier. However, it is usually in the first few months of the year we see the biggest ‘reveals’. Technology companies want to be the first of the year to launch their newest and best products and one of the biggest international tech events of the year is CES. This year it’s run from 10-13 January in Las Vegas. All kinds of products will be launched this year at CES and other tech fairs, and here are some of our recent favourites.

Cool cable storage

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, cleaner and low maintenance, but sometimes it can have the opposite effect. Technology requires power and power is obtained from your home’s electricity system and transported along cable wire. Dozens of cable wires lying around looks unsightly and rather low-tech if we’re honest. However, you can whip all these cable wires into submission with the use of cable ties, boxes, clips and wrapping. RS Components has a range of cable wire storage solutions such as spiral wrapping which allows you to keep all you cables together.

Multi-view compact cameras

Samsung has been leading the way on compact cameras in recent years and its new addition is definitely going to be paving the way for others to follow. The MV800 multi-view compact camera boasts a flip-up screen which can be angled up to 180° so you can capture images from awkward angles. Additionally it has 16.1 megapixels, 5x optical zoom and a 26mm wide-angle lens complete with ‘stitching’ technology allowing you to ‘stitch’ together several images to create one panoramic shot.

Network media players

So you want to hook up your TV with the internet but can’t afford to splash out on a new internet-connected Smart TV. Well, now you have an alternative. Sony’s SMP-N200 network media player does just that. You can watch streamed content from the internet from places such as BBC iPlayer and movies from Lovefilm for instance, but still use your TV as a TV as well.

Ultra thin OLED TVs

LG has really laid down the gauntlet in terms of ultra thin televisions. Its new 55” TV is just 4mm thick thanks to the use of new OLED technology that requires less space to operate and offers far better picture quality. Be prepared for other TV manufactures to follows suit.

Want to find out about even more new technology launches in 2012? Check out the 2012 International CES website for more info.