Archives for June 2015

Should you buy a 13″ Retina MacBook Pro or a Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 14? It depends on your needs.

Get the 13″ Retina Macbook Pro if:

– Looks are important to you.

– You’ll be crunching large spreadsheets involving thousands of rows (I can almost hear the office people cheering!)

– You’ll be compiling code and other processor-intensive tasks.

– Long battery life is important to you.

– You like to edit images (Photoshop).

– You like to run Mac OS

Get the Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga if:

– You want to use a touchscreen.

– You want to maximize Windows 8 features.

– You want to some light to moderate gaming (dedicated graphics)

– You’re okay with a 6-hour battery life.

– You’ll be using mostly MS Office, surfing the web, and watching videos (and you want to save money)

– You do *NOT* need a digital pen.

Some people get both for their household, so that they can easily shift from one to the other depending on their particular needs.

[ First posted on 12/21/2014 by Manuel Viloria ]

http://www.viloria.com/secondthoughts/archives/00001979.html

The start of the year was a cold and rainy Thursday here in the Philippines, and I experienced some cable signal issues with our Samsung monitor, a SyncMaster SA300. Before I drove off to visit relatives and greet them a Happy New Year, I chose the Shutdown button from the Windows 7 logon screen (even if I hadn’t fully logged out of my account).

Then I swiped my finger across the front, lower right corner of the Samsung LED monitor to switch it off. Around 5 hours later, when I booted my PC, the monitor showed: “Check cable signal.”

I removed then reconnected both ends of the monitor cable, but the error message persisted. I even rebooted and still got the same error message. I then connected the Samsung monitor to the VGA out port of a laptop, and the monitor just showed a black/blank screen (even if I set the laptop up for clone screen).

So I attached the monitor cable again to the desktop, saw the “Check cable signal” message, and switched the monitor off and then on. The error message persisted.

While looking for some other switch, I swiped my finger under the front of the monitor. The blue on/off light of the monitor went off. When I swiped my finger over the front lower right corner of the monitor, the blue on/off light went on, and I saw the Windows log-on screen again.

Is there something about the bottom part of the Samsung SyncMaster SA300? Anyway, I’ll let you know if something like this happens again in the future. In the meantime, Happy New Year! :-)

[ First posted on 01/01/2015 by Manuel Viloria ]

http://www.viloria.com/secondthoughts/archives/00001980.html

I tried to connect to my email via Outlook Web App (OWA) using Android and iOS, so here I am sharing with you my story.

Using the Email app in a Samsung Galaxy S5 can be quite intimidating. After entering the username and domain, the app warns me that I need to first give it permission to delete the contents of my smartphone, if ever the Exchange Server tells it to.

Yikes! So I just canceled the configuration of the Email app. I then tried OWA (Android).

Unfortunately, we were unable to connect to the email server. In short, we weren’t able to configure the app properly.

On the iPhone (iOS), it was easy to set-up the Mail app. We just chose Exchange, and entered the needed information.

I wonder why working with an Exchange email address is so much easier in iOS than in Android. Perhaps we need to research more.

[ First posted on 02/18/2015 by Manuel Viloria ]

http://www.viloria.com/secondthoughts/archives/00001981.html