Today...

[Albel]

It's been a while everyone. Wanted to keep you updated on my health concerns if I may. This is quoted from my facebook;

 

"So everyone, I wanted to let you all know that a few months back I was diagnosed with a heart condition. I don't want to get into the nitty-gritty about it, but the Cardiologists suggested surgery to insert a catheter to fix said problem. My family and I decided to get a second opinion on the matter in Charleston before we decided to get surgery done. I wanted everyone to know that the stress test came back good (running on a treadmill for 12 minuets was't fun!) and I have decided not to have surgery done. We are going to monitor the situation, and I feel as though I need the surgery, the option will always be there. *awkward white boy dance*

 

So all is good, back to your awesome night :D"

 

If anyone would like to add me on facebook seeing as I am not on near as much anymore, you are more then welcomed too. Just send me a message on here and I shall respond ASAP.

 

 

[Tesset]

Heart conditions suck, I feel for ya dude. Though, according to others, the scars from heart surgery look bad ass. I'm not sure I agree, but hey, whatever.

 

In other news, tonight I checked my bank account's balance online. I opened it up, and there's about 850 dollars on there that's not supposed to be there. I check the balance, and the payment I made on Saturday for tuition has just magically disappeared. I had checked it Saturday night to make sure it went through, and it had, since I only had about 700 dollars in there. So I checked my tuition dues on my school's website, and they're gone too - I apparently don't owe anything, but I didn't pay it either.

 

I don't want to [bleep]ing deal with this. I hope to god that this was my Regent's Scholarship finally kicking in and paying the rest of my tuition like it promised, because otherwise I'm going to end up paying late fees and dealing with shit, and I'll still be out $850 I shouldn't have had to pay. Argh. This isn't even worth it, seriously.

 

Also, I paid $30 for an album tonight. Apparently I think I'm rich or something.

[Serpent Eye]

Ahh, reading through this topic makes me glad I'm done with school.

 

Although work is more or less like homework for me now, so fu life ;_;

[Furah]

Just bought a Nexus 7 :). Experimenting with it, although it seems to lack a place where all the apps are listed and that I can just kill them all with a single button instead of going into each of them (My cell has that built in android). Might have to find an app to do that.

 

No! Bad Sbrideau! Bad!

 

Killing your apps is a very good way to flatten the battery. You see, in Android, and iOS, when you're not using an app and switch to another app the app is just put into a frozen state in your RAM. This won't drain your battery like using CPU cycles will, which is pretty much the only way for an app to drain battery life. If you kill an app and want to load it up again, it now has to load everything from the internal memory, rather than the RAM, taking longer and using up more of your battery. To test this just grab one of the many battery monitoring apps (I use GSam) and check the battery % usage of apps compared to how long it has been running. Just start up a game and then switch to your browser and don't open the game for a few hours. Now look at that nice 0.0% usage with a few hours of it running (provided it didn't get removed from the RAM to make room for newer apps.)

 

If you really want to increase battery life, reduce your brightness. Even at roughly half-way, I can get more than 90% of my battery loss through the screen being on.

[Randox]

Hey, I know someone did some playing around with blackberry playbooks (and I imagine this has been done with other phones and tablets) seeing what drained the battery, and the screen lighting level was just staggering. Cranking the screen up to 100% from 0% absolutely annihilates the battery (it seems to account for ~50% of the battery drain I think). As a really odd side note, its battery drains a fair bit slower when videos are played in full screen. Apparently a full screen video is less work for it for some reason.

 

For cell phones, the actual battery murderer is using it as a phone. When you make or take a call, it cranks up the power the antenna uses (to get a signal usable for more than short communication bursts to the cell tower to let it know that it exists) several times over. Using cell tower internet will also drain you pretty quick the more you use it, since again, to get a usable signal the power usage has to go way up.

 

My torch does pretty well for screen life. Back in like March when we got stranded on the way back from the states in the airport, I watched a good 7 hours or so of Babylon 5 on my cellphone, using headphones and having all its wireless abilities turned off because I didn't need them (and the more wireless stuff your using, the more power your asking your battery to provide). That said, I keep my back light very low, and the back light consumes way more power than the screen just being on does.

[Omar]

On a similar note, watching videos full screen on my netbook is less choppy than on a web page.

[Sbrideau]

Just bought a Nexus 7 :). Experimenting with it, although it seems to lack a place where all the apps are listed and that I can just kill them all with a single button instead of going into each of them (My cell has that built in android). Might have to find an app to do that.

 

No! Bad Sbrideau! Bad!

 

Killing your apps is a very good way to flatten the battery. You see, in Android, and iOS, when you're not using an app and switch to another app the app is just put into a frozen state in your RAM. This won't drain your battery like using CPU cycles will, which is pretty much the only way for an app to drain battery life. If you kill an app and want to load it up again, it now has to load everything from the internal memory, rather than the RAM, taking longer and using up more of your battery. To test this just grab one of the many battery monitoring apps (I use GSam) and check the battery % usage of apps compared to how long it has been running. Just start up a game and then switch to your browser and don't open the game for a few hours. Now look at that nice 0.0% usage with a few hours of it running (provided it didn't get removed from the RAM to make room for newer apps.)

 

If you really want to increase battery life, reduce your brightness. Even at roughly half-way, I can get more than 90% of my battery loss through the screen being on.

 

Thanks for your post, I know you're a knowledgeable person in this, so I guess I'll follow your advice. I wonder why being able to kill all came built into my cell's android though. Probably has to do with the version (2.3.5 in my phone and 4.1 in the Nexus) I guess if it's just in a frozen state in the RAM it's alright. I already have the screens in both my phone and the tablet on the lowest luminosity.

[jasignhagj]

Just bought a Nexus 7 :). Experimenting with it, although it seems to lack a place where all the apps are listed and that I can just kill them all with a single button instead of going into each of them (My cell has that built in android). Might have to find an app to do that.

 

No! Bad Sbrideau! Bad!

 

Killing your apps is a very good way to flatten the battery. You see, in Android, and iOS, when you're not using an app and switch to another app the app is just put into a frozen state in your RAM. This won't drain your battery like using CPU cycles will, which is pretty much the only way for an app to drain battery life. If you kill an app and want to load it up again, it now has to load everything from the internal memory, rather than the RAM, taking longer and using up more of your battery. To test this just grab one of the many battery monitoring apps (I use GSam) and check the battery % usage of apps compared to how long it has been running. Just start up a game and then switch to your browser and don't open the game for a few hours. Now look at that nice 0.0% usage with a few hours of it running (provided it didn't get removed from the RAM to make room for newer apps.)

 

If you really want to increase battery life, reduce your brightness. Even at roughly half-way, I can get more than 90% of my battery loss through the screen being on.

 

Thanks for your post, I know you're a knowledgeable person in this, so I guess I'll follow your advice. I wonder why being able to kill all came built into my cell's android though. Probably has to do with the version (2.3.5 in my phone and 4.1 in the Nexus) I guess if it's just in a frozen state in the RAM it's alright. I already have the screens in both my phone and the tablet on the lowest luminosity.

 

It's still worth killing apps that you don't plan to use for a while so you don't run low on RAM. I know my old Motorola Milestone would start to freeze up if I had too many apps in the background. Might not be such a big problem with a newer phone though.

[RpgGamer]

lol, anyone see the end to that seattle v. packers game?

 

Is Mayonnaise a penalty?

 

today this:

 

[Furah]

Sbrideau, you may be interested in knowing that Google are running a 5-day sale on some apps on Android for 25c, with different apps being on sale each day. It just started today, and some pretty big name apps are on sale. Picked myself up an office suite for uni work, a fitness app, and a racing game.

 

It's still worth killing apps that you don't plan to use for a while so you don't run low on RAM. I know my old Motorola Milestone would start to freeze up if I had too many apps in the background. Might not be such a big problem with a newer phone though.

 

Odd, it shouldn't be. Android, and other Linux-based OSes (as well as Mac and iOS, could be the same with everything *NIX based) manage their RAM far differently to Windows, in that you don't need large amounts of RAM free to smoothly run your programs. Obviously, if you have some memory hogs running in the foreground you'll run into problems, but it's not a common problem that I know of.

[Sbrideau]

THanks! It's also fun that they gave me a $25 credit on my google account because I bought the Nexus :P.

[Racheya]

So I woke up last Sunday, Dave was excited about an app idea he had, and i, in the excitement decided that I should go and write a novel!

 

So I decided to do NaNaWriMo this year and ffs I really hate myself for deciding that I was gonna write a novel >.<

[Save Toshy]

I woke up. Got ready. Now school. Living the dream? Nope. Xp waste =P

 

 

 

[Furah]

I have amazing news, after 9 months I, yes, I who said I would never have kids, am finally...

 

 

able to drive! I sure missed it. Drove a few friends and out of it I got $25 in fuel. Only about $10 worth left. Also got $20 which I spent all of on food and drinks. I also got 4L of coke and half-a-dozen cans of Woodstock. So I got $80 of cash/items for $15 of fuel. I'll need more money for fuel soon though, as I'm left with ¼ of a tank.

 

[Distracted]

Tomorrow we're visiting the Flemish Parliament building in Brussels, should be a pretty chilled out day.

[Randox]

Today is an exercise in doing assignments before they are due. I did one already that I should have done over a few days in 2 hours, because I have had this procrastination problem for a long time, and I've learned to poop out high quality work really quickly (which is actually a valuable skill). I almost wonder if I still procrastinate not just out of habit but because I realize that I can work much faster with a closing deadline (like, 2 to 3 times faster than I would if I had no rush). I just need to learn like I'm about to be late without the danger of that being possible.

 

I also had a short math quiz today, right after I got up (always fun). I'm a bit rusty with my general math skills, but I feel like I know a lot more than I seem to be aware of. After not knowing what to do for like 30 seconds its like another part of my brain just went 'you obviously have no idea what your doing, move over, I got this' and bam! Math happened.

 

And lastly, I was at the school bookshop looking for staples, and I discovered they have 0.3 pens. Almost as good as my 0.5 mechanical pencils. Not quite, but very close. Seeing as I take all my notes in pen so that I can actually read them later, this is very nice. I did not know they made pens that fine.

[Tesset]

So I woke up last Sunday, Dave was excited about an app idea he had, and i, in the excitement decided that I should go and write a novel!

 

So I decided to do NaNaWriMo this year and ffs I really hate myself for deciding that I was gonna write a novel >.<

Me too! Except I'm writing 3 long poem story things instead of a novel, but still. I'm actually pretty excited.

 

You posting progress or anything anywhere?

[RpgGamer]

October is depressed college student month.

 

BRING ME YOUR FEELS

[Sbrideau]

Not depressed at all. Starting to do stuff like making routes and stuff on actual routers rather than just packet tracer. Same with the servers, instead of theory we're actually installing domains and exchange servers and stuff. This is the most fun I've had in college so far.

[Randox]

I like October. October has Halloween in it. You'd need some extra mid terms to counter Halloween.

[RpgGamer]

I like October. October has Halloween in it. You'd need some extra mid terms to counter Halloween.

 

night of drunk girls dressed super [bleep]ty is a hard experience to counter. Shame it doesnt happen til the 31st

[Randox]

Heh, my best costume ever was as a knight. Problem with that is that I literally can not get the breast plate on and off myself, because I don't have two elbows in each arm, and the armour itself restricts the movement you need to buckle it up. I could always get someone to help me, but the entire thing is a gigantic pain in the ass. It looks ridiculously awesome though. I had a lot of fun with that one in the schools haunted house, pretending to be a dummy.

 

I think my grim reaper costume gets the most use, because being the grim reaper is awesome. It does have the serious drawback that I can't actually drink anything with the hood on though. I was a pirate last year because why not, but I might see if I can think up something else this year.

 

I might actually go for the armour again this year. I haven't used it in a while, and it's quite good. I do need to get the gauntlets stitched back together though, some of the seams in the leather let go. I also need to sort something out for the helmet, or just not wear it, because it is redicously large, and if I wear it without any padding it tilts forward so that the eyes are around my nose.

[champion]

It ain't even October. But October is probably one of the better months of the school year really: my birthday, Halloween, resonable weather, and the fact that school hasn't gotten too hard yet.

[stevepole]

Who said Halloween is a one day event? Last time I checked it's a week long celebration. You're just not doing it right.

[Bows]

Hi Serpy. :3