Reviews, Health, and Other Stuff: Software

Welcome

Welcome to my ever-evolving blog. It started out as a blog on Beachbody workouts and products, mainly when I was a Beachbody coach. I no longer coach, not because I don't believe in Beachbody's programs (I subscribe to Beachbody on Demand and use their workouts every day), I am just not a salesperson and hated that aspect of it. I am more than willing to answer questions about my experiences with their products and the various workouts, and I feel freer to do so without the appearance of giving a biased review of something.

I have also started adding reviews for various things I have purchased like movies, books, CDs, and other products. This was brought about by a fight with Amazon in which all of my reviews were removed over a completely bullshit allegation that I posted a review that violated their terms of service. After going back and forth with the morons in the community-reviews department (even after they admitted that my posts did not violate their guidelines) they restored my account (which took them six months to do), but I have been posting my reviews on my blog to have them preserved in case something like that happens again. And here, I will post uncensored reviews so I will swear from time to time and post reviews that may be longer than Amazon's character limit. Everything I post here on any topic or product is my personal opinion, and I take no compensation for any product reviews I post. I am a member of Amazon's vine program and because I get those products for free, I keep those reviews on Amazon only, but everything I have purchased with my own money, whether from Amazon or some other store/website/outlet, I will post here.

I also plan to do some longer blog posts on various topics, such as how to learn physics, how to get through calculus, and longer reviews of workout programs as I do them. Basically, whatever strikes me as interesting at the time. As you can see if you navigate around the blog, I had many years in between postings. During that time I was going back to school to get an engineering degree, and learning material that I avoided my first time through college was a different experience and one that gave me a lot of insight into how to do well in those classes, which I will try to impart here for those who are looking to get a science or engineering degree.

Showing posts with label Software. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Software Review: MATLAB & Simulink Student Suite

I purchased this when I was working on an electrical engineering degree. My school made MATLAB available through a Citrix web portal, but that was glitchy and slow, so I decided to get this to have it on my home computer. It was a bit of a pain to install because it does not have CD, it just gives you a code. As of 2015 when I purchased this, instead of having a dedicated website to download the student version you had to poke around on the website, which was not super intuitive. Once the download started it was fairly straightforward. You do have to enter an academic email address, so you cannot use a yahoo or Gmail address, but I had no issues getting it to work once I found the download link on the website.

Friday, September 30, 2022

Software Review: Microsoft Windows 8 - Upgrade

I got this back when I had a laptop running on Windows 7 that would not, despite multiple attempts, finish the upgrade to Windows 10. So, I got this thinking that I could at least get Windows 8 on that machine. It installs easily (if you have ever done a Windows OS upgrade you pretty much know what to expect). You definitely will want to make sure that any files you want to keep are backed up, but it did not delete anything critical on my computer as it was going through the process. And, of course, almost immediately after I installed this, the Windows 10 upgrade kicked in.

The look and feel of Windows 8 is a lot different than Windows 7 and any version older than that. It seems like 8 was the beta test version of Windows 10 because as far as the outward-facing stuff like the start menu and how you navigate to things, 8 is not that much different than 10. So, if you have an older version of Windows (hopefully on a machine that is not connected to the internet often because you are probably missing hundreds of security updates), this is a good way to get the OS upgraded.

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Product Review: OneNote 2007

I used OneNote because I was looking for a way to digitize the class notes that I had handwritten on paper and get them in electronic form without having to scan thousands of pages. This can do that, and once you figure out how to set everything up, it can do it well. However, it can be a pain (at least it was for me) to figure out how to have just continuous pages without having to add a new page every single time I ran out of room. It is much easier to just have a bunch of pages under each other that would start new when you get to the end of the current page. The notebooks, however, default to having to manually go to a new page almost like flipping through a book. That works great for some things, like daily journaling, but does not lend itself well to writing a lot of material at one time.