Monthly Archives: January 2015

Netgear R7500

My home wifi was in a need of an upgrade. My old Netgear N300 was great at the time it was new, but other has surpassed it in performance and functionality and it seemed somehow misbehave in my network. I had the feeling that if large amount of data was send via wifi it would end up get constipation, which certainly is annoying for routers as well as people.

So my network has been upgraded with a new cousin, the 7500.
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The 7500 does not disappoint on the speed side. It’s certainly a great improvement.
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Google Calendar Birthdays

I use Gmail for my mail needs and they do a very good job at making things useful, but two things they are pretty bad at (actually 3).

1. Google’s address book is pretty bad compared to most other things they have. It’s at least a decade behind in smart and finesse, but since I dot need add and remove people here daily I live with it.

2. The Calender is a part of Google mail and works ok, but they have this annoying bug. They have decided that they know better which birthdays I want on my calender than I do. I somehow can’t get it – I like the idea of smart-you-name-it but mostly it needs training. Maybe I don’t like birthdays because I’m born the 29th of February (you never know). There got to be an option for “that”.

The third thing Google is pretty bad at is G+ – nothing wrong with G+ on it’s own accounts – but in the early days they polluted address book completely with G+ people I follow. It took me hours to clean up. They are btw still there (which annoys me) but they seems to stay out of the way for the most cases. The same for the birthdays above – the G+ people are really my problem. I don’t have a connection with these people to the level that my calender need to be infected with them. Now if I could delete them (mark then as ignored) I would invest the time in doing so – Gmail and Google Calender is free after all.

So while I’m no G+ hater like Brenden Mulligan who find a way out and wrote about how to remove birthdays from Google Calender I do see the evil side of Google shining through.

Google cast for audio

Back in September 2013 I was in the US for work and got myself a Chromecast dongle. You know this neat little thing that sits behind the TV and let you watch internet content on the TV. Way better than the “smart” TV features and I really appreciate using it to watch thing on the big screen.

chromecast

Today Google announced Google Cast for Audio and I’m really happy that Google is not abandoning like they have done with Google TV and Nexus Q. On the other hand the Chromecast concept is a typical Google product – two years down the road it’s still not a full complete product. It’s slow in starting up. It’s often loosing the network and I regularly need to give it first aid by rebooting it or the computer I use for casting from. Sometimes it work like charm and other times it’s stuttering like an old Ford T.
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