Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Vincent's Awesome Blog is now recruiting writers!
If you would like to write on this blog and have a blogger account then leave a message in the comments section of this post and I will give you posting permissions. You can write about anything as long as it's awesome.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Total Doctor: A totally awesome anime concept
So I was sitting in math class today when I came up with an awesome anime concept. The title of my little idea is called Total Doctor and I will be briefly summarizing its plot below...
Saturday, April 9, 2011
I've always wondered how many calories are in my telephone.
They have an app for everything these days, don't they?
So I was reading Redmond Pie yesterday and came across an interesting article about an iOS app. The app, dubbed "Meal Snap," is able to estimate your calorie intake from pictures you take of the food you eat. DailyBurn, the company behind Meal Snap didn't give out much information in regards to how this app actually works other then the four steps listed below.
How Meal Snap Works:
1. Snap a photo of your meal.
2. Add a descriptive caption, if you are so inclined.
3. Let the system auto-magically detect the nutritional breakdown.
4. Keep track of your meals & progress over time.
This seemed to be a nifty little tool to have so I went ahead and got it to test it out. The app has a very nice looking, easy to use interface. There is a scrolling bar on the left side of the screen that allows you to scroll through previous days/months to see what you ate in the past and how many estimated calories you consumed on a day to day basis. When snapping your picture, you have the options of providing a brief description of your meal, as well as providing the location to which the meal was consumed at (via. the iDevice's location service).
Now one question you may have is "how accurate is this app?"
Well, based on the initial two pictures that I snapped, I'd say it is actually pretty accurate. The app guessed the number calories in a cup of hot chocolate as between 103 and 155 and the number of calories in 4 butter cookies as between 115 and 173. When I compared these results to the official nutrition facts listing, I saw that the number of calories for both of the two items I consumed fell in between the range of calories that the Meal Snap app estimated.
One thing that I don't like about this app is that you must be connected to the internet in order for it to work. This isn't much of a problem for iPhone owners who have a data plan, but I actually have an iPod touch, so for the majority of the foods I eat, I won't be able to know the amount calories they contain until I find a place with a WiFi connection.
So me, being the clever little genius that I am, decided to snap photos of a bunch of random objects to see how many calories the app would estimate that they would have. Apparently, my telephone has between 131 and 197 calories. That information will definitely come in handy for when I have run out of food and have only my telephone left to eat.
(edit: after further testing of the app, I found that if you do not add your own description of what the object is and let the device try to identify it itself, it will label it as "Not Food." I actually retook a picture of my telephone without adding the description myself and this time it was labeled as "Not Food" and said it had 0 calories. I assume that if you choose to not label the food yourself then the picture of the food is actually sent to a human who gives the food its label.)
A user on the official app store page for the Meal Snap app wrote the following:
I doubt this information is true though seeing as how each of the pictures I snapped received a calorie intake estimate within 30 seconds of me taking the picture. If it is true, however, then that is definitely not a good thing for me, seeing as how I actually snapped a picture of my shit in the toilet bowl to see how many calories it was (Sorry if you saw that picture; it was pretty disgusting).
All in all, I'd say this is a pretty awesome app to have. It would sure come in handy in a situation where the nutritional facts for the food you are about to eat isn't readily available (i.e. in a restaurant setting). Is it worth $2.99 though? Hmm... that's for you to decide.
So I was reading Redmond Pie yesterday and came across an interesting article about an iOS app. The app, dubbed "Meal Snap," is able to estimate your calorie intake from pictures you take of the food you eat. DailyBurn, the company behind Meal Snap didn't give out much information in regards to how this app actually works other then the four steps listed below.
How Meal Snap Works:
1. Snap a photo of your meal.
2. Add a descriptive caption, if you are so inclined.
3. Let the system auto-magically detect the nutritional breakdown.
4. Keep track of your meals & progress over time.
This seemed to be a nifty little tool to have so I went ahead and got it to test it out. The app has a very nice looking, easy to use interface. There is a scrolling bar on the left side of the screen that allows you to scroll through previous days/months to see what you ate in the past and how many estimated calories you consumed on a day to day basis. When snapping your picture, you have the options of providing a brief description of your meal, as well as providing the location to which the meal was consumed at (via. the iDevice's location service).
Well, based on the initial two pictures that I snapped, I'd say it is actually pretty accurate. The app guessed the number calories in a cup of hot chocolate as between 103 and 155 and the number of calories in 4 butter cookies as between 115 and 173. When I compared these results to the official nutrition facts listing, I saw that the number of calories for both of the two items I consumed fell in between the range of calories that the Meal Snap app estimated.
 |
| Nutrition facts of Hot Chocolate |
 | ||
| Nutrition Facts of Butter Cookies |
So me, being the clever little genius that I am, decided to snap photos of a bunch of random objects to see how many calories the app would estimate that they would have. Apparently, my telephone has between 131 and 197 calories. That information will definitely come in handy for when I have run out of food and have only my telephone left to eat.
(edit: after further testing of the app, I found that if you do not add your own description of what the object is and let the device try to identify it itself, it will label it as "Not Food." I actually retook a picture of my telephone without adding the description myself and this time it was labeled as "Not Food" and said it had 0 calories. I assume that if you choose to not label the food yourself then the picture of the food is actually sent to a human who gives the food its label.)
A user on the official app store page for the Meal Snap app wrote the following:
All in all, I'd say this is a pretty awesome app to have. It would sure come in handy in a situation where the nutritional facts for the food you are about to eat isn't readily available (i.e. in a restaurant setting). Is it worth $2.99 though? Hmm... that's for you to decide.
Friday, April 8, 2011
It's Friday!
Friday! Gotta get down on Friday!
Everybody's looking forward to the weekend.
Everybody except for me that is ... I got a shit load of work to do over the weekend: big presentations for me to work on for Economics class and English class.
Oh well, let me tell you a little about my day or more specifically, what I did in each of my classes.
So this morning, in my Comm. Tech class, my group and I were filming a scene for our video project. We spent the majority of the period (40 minutes est.) filming but then realized that all our footage was useless as we did not have our backpacks on (we are playing the roles of high school students). That time was sure well spent. One of the scenes of our video involved me walking across a street on an intersection, so that's what I did. Unbeknownst to me, my parents were actually driving at that time and were stopped at that intersection. So they saw me cross the street, stand on the other side waiting for the light to change back and then cross the street again back to where I started. When I got home my mother mentioned this to me and asked why I wasn't in school. That was an awkward moment.
At lunch I had 4 slices of pizza. For only 70 cents per slice! It was delicious.
In Math class I spent the majority of the period learning how to play the classic card game Solitaire. This game is pretty much my new obsession. In fact, after I finish this post, I will go play it. My goal is to finish a game of Solitaire in less that 1 minute. That will probably take a bit of work seeing as how my current Solitaire stats are terrible.
In English class my teacher made us get into small groups and do a "modern hierarchy" chart in preparation for our Hamlet unit. I pitched in the idea to my group of doing an Animal Kingdom hierarchy. Which is what we did, except instead of using just normal animals, we through in a bunch of fictional/mythological creatures into the mix after I jokingly suggested that "Blue Eyes White Dragon" should be at the very top of the hierarchy. What I didn't know was that the teacher wanted us to present our hierarchy charts to the class. Needless to say, that was a very awkward presentation. The teacher must have thought that my group and I were retarded.
In Economics class I spent the period working on the work that I was supposed to be working on while I was in Math class (I would have played solitaire but my battery died).
Everybody's looking forward to the weekend.
Everybody except for me that is ... I got a shit load of work to do over the weekend: big presentations for me to work on for Economics class and English class.
Oh well, let me tell you a little about my day or more specifically, what I did in each of my classes.
So this morning, in my Comm. Tech class, my group and I were filming a scene for our video project. We spent the majority of the period (40 minutes est.) filming but then realized that all our footage was useless as we did not have our backpacks on (we are playing the roles of high school students). That time was sure well spent. One of the scenes of our video involved me walking across a street on an intersection, so that's what I did. Unbeknownst to me, my parents were actually driving at that time and were stopped at that intersection. So they saw me cross the street, stand on the other side waiting for the light to change back and then cross the street again back to where I started. When I got home my mother mentioned this to me and asked why I wasn't in school. That was an awkward moment.
At lunch I had 4 slices of pizza. For only 70 cents per slice! It was delicious.
In Math class I spent the majority of the period learning how to play the classic card game Solitaire. This game is pretty much my new obsession. In fact, after I finish this post, I will go play it. My goal is to finish a game of Solitaire in less that 1 minute. That will probably take a bit of work seeing as how my current Solitaire stats are terrible.
 | |||
| My first Solitaire game: 5 minutes with 181 moves made |
In Economics class I spent the period working on the work that I was supposed to be working on while I was in Math class (I would have played solitaire but my battery died).
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Reasons why Mozilla Firefox is better than Google Chrome
In this blog post I will be listing the reasons why I believe Firefox is better than Chrome. This post is not meant to sway you away from your current browser (if you are not using Firefox); I simply wish to voice my opinion on this matter.This post will not compare Firefox and Chrome to any other browsers such as Internet Explorer, Opera or Safari because Firefox and Chrome are what I consider to be the two best browsers out there right now which is why I will focus on discussing them in this post.
Note: Comparisons will be done between the latest stable versions of Firefox and Chrome.
Note II: This post is currently incomplete. I will finish it off later when I have some free time.
Here goes ...
1) Firefox has more customization options. Every single part of the browser can be tailored to your liking.
Don't like the way the user interface looks? There's a tweak for that. With the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), every single thing dealing with the UI can be changed. Users can tweak the Firefox UI to suit their tastes and preferences perfectly. Google Chrome, on the other hand, has zero customization available with their UI except for the ability of hiding the bookmarks toolbar, which isn't even worth mentioning as every browser can do this.
In addition to the standard browser options that Firefox has, additional user preferences can be viewed and modified in Firefox's about:config page. In there you can change the a multitude of things dealing with the behavior of Firefox. Chrome, however, only offers some very basic user preferences to its users.
----this section is incomplete----
2) Firefox has better add-on support.
3) Firefox has better tab management.
4) Chrome vs. Firefox benchmark results.
5) More to come soon.
------------------------------------
Common arguments people have for why Chrome is better:
"It starts up faster!"
Yes, because 1 second start-up time makes such a big difference, right?
"It loads faster!"
Yeah, by a few milliseconds maybe.
"It has sandboxing!"
This is a pretty useful feature admittedly; even if a site crashes one of your tabs, all of your others will be safe. But then again, I have been using the Firefox 4 betas and nightly builds for the past few months and am using the official Firefox 4 release now and have only experienced maybe 2 crashes during that time interval. Even when it did crash, I was able to start it up right after and continue right where I left off thanks to its nice little saved session feature.
So in summary, I would say that Firefox is an overall better browser than Chrome. The only thing that Chrome has over Firefox is that it is maybe a bit faster.The difference in speed isn't even noticeable though.
If you are a casual internet surfer who wants something that is fast and simple to use and don't need all of the extra features and add-ons that Firefox can provide then Chrome is a decent option. But if you are looking for a little something more then I would recommend you go with Firefox.
So what do you think? Feel free to voice your opinion below.
Note: Comparisons will be done between the latest stable versions of Firefox and Chrome.
Note II: This post is currently incomplete. I will finish it off later when I have some free time.
Here goes ...
1) Firefox has more customization options. Every single part of the browser can be tailored to your liking.
Don't like the way the user interface looks? There's a tweak for that. With the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), every single thing dealing with the UI can be changed. Users can tweak the Firefox UI to suit their tastes and preferences perfectly. Google Chrome, on the other hand, has zero customization available with their UI except for the ability of hiding the bookmarks toolbar, which isn't even worth mentioning as every browser can do this.
 |
| My Firefox layout: the UI has been made more transparent; the navigation toolbar, tabs, new tabs page, find bar, and bookmarks sidebar (not in picture), etc. are all transparent. Borders around the toolbar buttons have been removed and the height of both the tabs bar and navigation toolbar have been slimmed down a bit. |
In addition to the standard browser options that Firefox has, additional user preferences can be viewed and modified in Firefox's about:config page. In there you can change the a multitude of things dealing with the behavior of Firefox. Chrome, however, only offers some very basic user preferences to its users.
----this section is incomplete----
2) Firefox has better add-on support.
3) Firefox has better tab management.
4) Chrome vs. Firefox benchmark results.
5) More to come soon.
------------------------------------
Common arguments people have for why Chrome is better:
"It starts up faster!"
Yes, because 1 second start-up time makes such a big difference, right?
"It loads faster!"
Yeah, by a few milliseconds maybe.
"It has sandboxing!"
This is a pretty useful feature admittedly; even if a site crashes one of your tabs, all of your others will be safe. But then again, I have been using the Firefox 4 betas and nightly builds for the past few months and am using the official Firefox 4 release now and have only experienced maybe 2 crashes during that time interval. Even when it did crash, I was able to start it up right after and continue right where I left off thanks to its nice little saved session feature.
So in summary, I would say that Firefox is an overall better browser than Chrome. The only thing that Chrome has over Firefox is that it is maybe a bit faster.The difference in speed isn't even noticeable though.
If you are a casual internet surfer who wants something that is fast and simple to use and don't need all of the extra features and add-ons that Firefox can provide then Chrome is a decent option. But if you are looking for a little something more then I would recommend you go with Firefox.
So what do you think? Feel free to voice your opinion below.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Whopper Wednesday!
My day was pretty normal awesome, as always. I wrote a pretty difficult test (for me at least) in math class and pretty much bombed it. I didn't do much of anything in any of my other classes. The highlight of my day was eating a Whopper from Burger King for lunch. It was pretty good. Also a fight broke out after school in the atrium. I couldn't get a clear view of it as there was a huge crowd of people in the way but that shit got pretty serious.
I'm at home right now and just taught my computer-illiterate mother how to access her bank account online. That was perhaps even harder to do than my math test.
All in all, my day has been pretty "meh." Now to figure out how to advertise thisshitty awesome blog so I'm not just writing to myself.
I'm at home right now and just taught my computer-illiterate mother how to access her bank account online. That was perhaps even harder to do than my math test.
All in all, my day has been pretty "meh." Now to figure out how to advertise this
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Intro to my blog
Welcome visitor! My name is Vincent and this is my awesome blog. I will be writing about daily events in my life, my interests and other miscellaneous stuff.
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