Category Archives: Product & Service Reviews

Reviews of various products and services

Made O’Meter A Free App to See Where Products Are Manufactured

Made O’Meter is a free app that brings product transparency into your hands!

When you are out shopping, how often have you wondered where a product was made or who really owns the brand behind it? Now there is an easy way to get that information right from your phone.

Made O’Meter is a free mobile app that lets you take a picture of any product while you are browsing in store or online, and instantly shows you:

Where the product was manufactured, and
Which company owns the brand, including the parent company.

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Experts Exchange: A Community Worth Taking Notice Of

Over the years, many of you have probably seen me share my thoughts, reviews, and experiences across various online forums. Like most things in the digital world, communities evolve, and so do our impressions of them. That is why today I want to take a moment to highlight a platform that has really stood out for me: Experts Exchange.

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Hold Off Adopting Thunderbird For Android Devices!

I recently was thrilled to see that Mozilla had finally released an Android version of their e-mail client Thunderbird.

I’ve been using it for a several weeks and don’t get me wrong, it has 1 or 2 issues, but in a general sense was good and I was planning on dumping my other e-mail clients.

However, during this same time frame, I started experiencing e-mail issues it which my e-mail provider was bouncing a number of my e-mails. I’ve been on their case about this for the past few weeks. I was informed they were using a mail analysis company, MailChannels, and it was them blocking my e-mails.

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OpenDBDiff – Dangers Lurking Around The Corner

I’ve been doing some work which involves comparing a couple databases to identify differences so I could get them all in sync.

I decided to test out a program I found a while back OpenDBDiff

GitHub - OpenDBDiff/OpenDBDiff: A database comparison tool for Microsoft SQL Server 2005+ that reports schema differences and creates a synchronization script.

A database comparison tool for Microsoft SQL Server 2005+ that reports schema differences and creates a synchronization script. - OpenDBDiff/OpenDBDiff

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WEme USB C 3.0 to SATA External Hard Drive Dock Docking Station

I recently purchased a

WEme USB C 3.0 to SATA External Hard Drive Dock Docking Station, SSD HDD Disk Duplicator Cloner for Dual Bay 2.5 3.5 Inch SATA I II III, Support UASP and Auto Sleep and 2X 12TB, Black

WEme USB C 3.0 to SATA External Hard Drive Dock Docking Station, SSD HDD Disk Duplicator Cloner for Dual Bay 2.5 3.5 Inch SATA I II III, Support UASP and Auto Sleep and 2X 12TB, Black : Amazon.ca: Electronics

on Amazon, model WM-3024B to be precise, and thought I’d post my thoughts here since Amazon won’t allow me to post a proper review.

I was eagerly awaiting this unit for work purposes and was happy when it showed up at my front door less than 24 hours after placing the order. Talk about service!

I quickly unpacked the unit, okay took it out of the box. Then attached the 2 cables that came with the unit: (i) Power, (ii) data cable. Plugged every thing in, inserted 2 different drives and powered the unit on. Then I waited, … and waited, … and waited. Nothing! I checked Disk Management, nothing there either!

I then started digging, checking the little leaflet that came with the unit, searching online, but came up empty handed.

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Bye Bye UserVoice!

I reported it for several years now that UserVoice was a complete waste of time!!!

Let me be more specific, the general idea was a great one, but rather it was the implementation, administration and follow through with the core principle of such a site that made the it a complete waste.

You can check out my findings by looking over:

Microsoft’s UserVoice Announcement

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Access – New Find and Replace for Developers!

Most developers, at some point in time, need to make a change throughout a database, say change a field name. Now it can be a serious PITA to remember every object, every piece of code in which it was used, thus the need for a tool to help. Now I have previous written a post regarding this very subject, Great Access Tools – Find and Replace, but last week Philipp Stiefel of AccessDevTools was kind enough to invite me to try out a new add-in his company had developed. Below are my thoughts.

A Quick Overview of the Find and Replace for MS-Access

So let me introduce to you the AccessDevTools’ ‘Find and Replace for MS-Access’ add-in.

After downloading and installing the add-in you will have an extra tab in your Access Ribbon.

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Huawei P30 Review

On was on the market to replace my 6-7+ year old Moto G cell phone and was looking for a phone for 2 primary uses:

Call quality (something that was very poor with my Moto G)
Good for taking pictures and videos with (I like photography)

So, like most people, I started researching online only to be submerged with too many options!

Like you, I’ve seen the stunning ads put forth by Apple, Huawei, Samsung, …

Now, from a technical standpoint, nothing comes close to the Huawei P30! So I was already leaning that way. When I went to my local vendor for my cell company (presently Koodo) and was up front and asked for advice and was told the same, the Huawei was the way to go and that there was no difference (besides screen size) between the P30 and P30 Pro. So I purchase a P30. Below are my thoughts on the unit after a couple solid months of use.

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My First Venture Into Using Flow

For months, if not years, MS and certain fellow MVPs have been promoting the virtues of Microsoft Flow. Until recently, I simply never had a reason to even look at it as I had no need for any of its supposed capabilities. That said, working on a new project for one of my clients and a new request by my client made me look into one particular aspect of Flow, the MySQL Connector.

My Goal

In the scenario we are talking about in this posting, I had a pretty simple MySQL database in which we wanted to create a table to save information relating to incoming and outgoing e-mails. Now since their e-mails are all through Office 365 and Flow now offers a PREMIUM (you pay extra for) MySQL connector, I had all the ingredients to make a go of things.

My Actual Experience

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Surface Laptop – Microsoft Misses The Mark Again!

In a recent discussion, it was brought to our attention that Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop scored a 0 out of 10 for repairability. You can read Fstoppers full article by using the following link

Microsoft’s New Surface Laptop Scores 0 out of 10 for Repairability

Now I’m not even going to argue points like Apple’s, et al., have been doing this for years. This is true. And if everyone jumps off the bridge, you’re going to do that too! So let’s move on.

This was Microsoft’s opportunity to shine and set themselves apart from there competitors, to be bigger and better, to show confidence in their product, to show respect to their users, and they didn’t. They chose to simply do as everyone else does, how disappointing.

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