Three-Word Review Get it. Now. More Than Three Word Review DevToys is a Windows app which provides a series of helpful tools for developers. We know they're helpful because in many cases, there are popular websites which provide these tools. For example, there is a built-in PNG/JPEG compression tool, similar to what TinyPNG offers us.…
Upping My Audio Quality Game
A few months ago, Anthony Nocentino discussed his Pluralsight setup. I decided that this was a good time to take advantage of a friend's knowledge and upgrade my system. Obligatory Warnings Before I get into the setup, I have to lay out some warnings. You get two classes of obligatory warning here: first, that I…
What’s in the Travel Kit? 2021 / 2022 Edition
Now that we've had a few in-person conferences again, I figured I'd put out an updated "what's in the travel kit?" type of post. I'll limit it to key equipment, as you don't want to know how many "USB-C to something" cables I have floating around... Computers I typically travel with two laptops. Most of…
Product Reviews: the Desklab Monitor
Back in 2019, I joined in on a kickstarter for the Desklab monitor, a portable touchscreen 4K monitor. This seemed like a great idea for me, as hey, I do a lot of travel and it's really nice having a second monitor around. It wouldn't be convenient while traveling, but at the hotel, having that…
Update: PolyBase Revealed
I jumped the gun with the Cyber 5 sale, but PolyBase Revealed is available for pre-order. You can pre-order the paperback edition on Amazon for $27.99, get the Kindle edition on Amazon for $24.99, or buy the eBook directly from Apress for $19.99. When I originally spec'd out the book, I estimated that it would…
PolyBase Revealed for $7 During Cyber Week
Springer + Apress have a huge sale going on between now and Monday, December 2nd. You can get computer science ebooks for just $7 using the discount code CYBERWEEK19 on the Springer website. This includes PolyBase Revealed, scheduled for release in January. List price for the ebook is $19.99 and $27.99 for the softcover version,…
OneNote And Onetastic
I am just a little bit late with this, but I wanted to talk about some things I picked up at a talk Ricardo Wilkins (t) gave at DogFoodCon last year on OneNote. I use OneNote a lot to keep track of what I'm doing, what I'm supposed to do, and generally what I need…
ChuWi Vi10 Thoughts
About a month or so ago, I purchased a ChuWi Vi10 tablet. Now that I’ve had the device for a bit, here are my thoughts on the tablet. First of all, dual booting is not a joke nor is it a novelty. It really runs Windows, and it runs Windows pretty dog-gone well, even with…
Thoughts On Various Software As A Service Tools
This is a good time to be a developer on a small team or start-up; at this point in 2015, it feels like a lot of long-standing infrastructure problems have been automated away if you're willing to pay for the service. With that in mind, here are some quick reviews of various platforms that I'm…
SSMS Tools: SSMSBoost
I've historically been a huge fan of Mladen Prajdic's SSMS Tools Pack. It's a full-featured tool kit which solves a lot of problems and I highly recommend it to anybody who uses SSMS. I'm not averse to spending money---after all, the other two products on my list are paid tools---but I wanted to see what…
36 Chambers - The Legendary Journeys: Execution to the max! 