My Favorite Older Tech that last

Living in a fast pace world there’s so many new things coming out every day and we try to keep up by having the latest tech on our side but this not always possible for all of us tech lovers out there as we can’t always afford it or sometimes the newest just isn’t always the best. 

It is true that the life cycle of our consumer items has greatly shrunk these past decades, but there are some manufacturers that still produce durable and reliable products that are 2 - 3 years old and still solid. 

The Pros :

• No surprises, they’ve proven to be reliable and durable
• They are way more affordable then the latest version
• They are affordable for most of them especially used or refurbished

Cons :

• Not all can be for professional/commercial use
• Not the latest, but the title is pretty clear about that

In this series I will go through some of the Tech I own and have given me satisfaction so far : 

1. Apple iPad mini retina  2, 32GB Wifi

This device is just amazing in performance as long as used as it was initially meant for : consuming media . The 8’ Retina display is plenty for surfing the web, watching youtube, catching up on email, news, etc.. It is very portable (even fits in my jacket pocket) and with a good battery life. I’ve had this for nearly 3 years now and it’s brilliant. The iPad mini 4 is available as well but the only advantage from this one would be the finger print sensor which I can live without.

Price : 319 $

2. Apple iPhone 5S, 32GB

Though you do have your iPhone 6 & 6S with better performance, the iPhone 5S is a great smart phone and can be bought for a decent price now. It’s got a retina screen, supports the latest iOS 9 update and therefore you get the same apple experience with maybe a 0.5s lag (but you can surely live with that!. It’s design is still trending as Apple’s latest iPhone SE has the exact same external look.

Price : 272 $

3. Samsung S6 Edge  

This has come as a surprise to me as I really don’t like Android devices, as the environment is just way too overloaded for my taste. This phone has a slick design (hard to differentiate from the new S7) and is very quick with a QuadHD display and great camera, it’s currently my backup phone for work as it manages well email attachments (though Apple has made progress in that department) and file transfers.

Price : 519 $

4. Bose Mini Soundlink 

The wireless Portable Speaker is just my favorite of it’s kind. Being often on the move, this is a must for music fans but not only. I found many uses for work during video conferences or for personal development when I’m catching up with my audio books under the shower or in my bedroom. It has great battery life as I don’t recall picking it up uncharged thanks to the charging dock included. With it’s all metal build, the device has a premium look and feel for what think is a reasonable. I would recommend getting the cover as well. 

Price : 179 $

5. Raspberry Pi 2B

This one maybe a bit tooo much on the geeky side but I use it solely as an SSH server for remote access to my home network and computers on a secured connection. As most of the devices I have at home are connected this is a great mean for me to interact with my home LAN when needed without having to setup a VPN. I often work on my desktop and forget to save the file on my dropbox or such, or when some one at home needs tech support. There’s a new version out Pi 3 for the same price of 39 $ US and is a better deal with 1GB of RAM. 

Price : 39 $

6. Blue Yeti USB Microphone

This mic is recognized as excellent value and deliver professional grade sound. It’s very solid (and heavy as well) with a full metal build but also a many controls directly on the mic (gain, headphone volume, different patterns and mute). At 105 USD, this is a very decent price to pay if you want to take your sound quality up a few notches.

Price : 129 $

7. Jaybird 2X Bluetooth earbuds

This is my everyday pair of earbuds I carry around to use with my phone (as it has an integrated mic) and listening to music. It provide amazing sound and is great for working out (being sweat proof) and fits perfectly in place. it provides different size foam and silicone buds (but go with  foam for comfort). It last with me easily throughout the day without the need to recharge and are relatively affordable for this category and quality of build. At about a 100 USD now instead of 179, they're a steal!

Price : 103 $

8. Audio Technica M50 Headphones 

These headphone I use when working on my desktop or for any type of recording. They are extremely comfortable for long hours of use, durable and survived the human tornado that is my little toddler. Prices at under 150$ they are better than most headphones over 300$ and I owned top range Bose headphones with noise cancellation.

Price : 125 $

9. Macbook Pro 2013 with 15” Retina Display

This has been my companion for work, audio, video and photo editing for the past 3 years now. Though it only has 8 GB of RAM, I run my virtual machines smoothly on it and offers a decent speed all around. I do wish it was slightly lighter but you are getting a great Apple product. The screen is impeccable with retina display and offers enough ports and outputs to plug in all your accessories without the need of any adaptors. As Apple is not charging much more for the newer versions I 

Price : 980 $ (used)

10. Time Capsule 2012  with 1 TB storage

Backing up your data on a regular basis is a must if you rely like me on your computer on a daily basis, but the process of schedule the task regularly is just not convenient and this is where the time capsule is amazing. With the Time Capsule software offers automated backups as soon as you’re in your wifi network. It serves also as an access point, easy to setup with the airport utility and  

extremely reliable (I never had to reboot it). It’s also expandable thanks to the usb port you can add an additional hard drive if needed and has 3 Gigabyte Ethernet ports.

Price : 74 $ (used)

11. Logitech Performance MX Mouse 

Though I have a track pad for my iMac, I never thought I’d miss having a mouse until I’ve tried this one. It is a lot more resting for the arm and offers me great comfort. I thought I would miss the multi gestures and multi finger controls on the track pad but this mouse had many configurable buttons to make up for these and the scroll wheel is just amazing. It may seem like a luxury to pay 60$ for a mouse but it was definitely worth it for me.

Price : 62 $

12. GoPro Hero 4 Black Edition 

Though this is not quite an old piece of tech, it’s been out for nearly 2 years now but is still the best of it’s kind. It films in 4K (but I use the 1080p 60 fps in most cases) is incredibly resistant and offers great quality images and videos. The only down side is the battery life as in high resolution, you can film about 30min therefore make sure you have at least 3 batteries to make sure you can enjoy this when going out. The Gopro 4 offers also tons of accessories for filming in any conditions and positions being the market leader, the 3rd party kits work fine (exception being the battery). 

Price : 499 $

13. Google Chromecast 

The Chromecast is the best device on the market for enjoying your media on a TV set while being highly portable. Though many other devices offer the same functionality they often come with a power adaptor while the Chromecast plugs straight into your TVs USB port making it easy to setup anywhere on the go. I use it for work as well whenI need to make presentations. The newest device doesn’t offer much more in my opinion besides colors and the possibility for connecting it to the rear of a wall mounted TV set. But since they are the same price, I would recommend  getting the newer version.

Price : 35 $

So that’s my lineup of best tech, I hope this will come in useful. I know there are many other pieces of tech out there but these are definitely my favorite and I use on a regular basis. You will find below an amazon public list with all these items. :

http://amzn.com/w/198HKTX813EGA


Please comment as I would love to have you feedback!!!!

Pinterest: Pin it on button iPad

How to pin it for free on iPad !

I know this may seem like a stupid post, but while going through the Appstore I've noticed that some greedy programmers were taking advantage of people for ignoring this trick and sold it through Apps that go from 1.99 to 0.99 $. It may not seem much but given the 11 million members combined with the over 200 million iOS users, you can make a quick million dollar with this scheme but I'll give it out to my blog fans for free ;)

I myself got into Pinterest last week and was struggling to find a way to use the pin it bookmarklet on my iPad and iPhone like on my desktop. As usual the first thing I thought was that : "Hum ... there must be an app for that ...".  And indeed an app did exist but the one for iPad wasn't a native app and you had to use that awful x2 button (There was really no point in creating such a hideous thing, not very Apple like...). I then started digging through the Appstore and found a few third party apps that between 0.99 and 1.99$ just to be able to pin stuff through Safari : And this is when I started looking for workarounds and a pretty simple one came to mind.

Actually the only thing you need to do is make sure your bookmarks in Safari are synched in iCloud and add the Pin it button to your bookmark bar (go to the Pinterest website, about section, pin it button, and drag and drop the pin it button to your desktop browser bookmark bar) and .... That's it !

The same bookmarklet will appear in all synched iOS devices and will work the same way as on your desktop or those 1.99$ apps.

I could've gone straight to the point since the beginning but there would be no fun in that !!!!

As usual feel free to comment and click on some ads for support !!! Thanks.

PS: Forgot to mention that you do need to have a mac for this to work but nowadays who still owns a PC !?

Must Have Apps On your new iPad: Paid and free

First of all, the iPad is an amazing piece of technology. Since bought my iPad 2 3G (loving it) started enjoying reading again and it's given a break to my over exploited MacBook. I've put up a list of apps I think are a must have on your device but left games out of my selection because the AppStore top chart is full of it and it's really not the main reason why most of us bought an iPad in the first place!

I know that this subject has been discussed on several sites but I thought it would be worth sharing my experience on the iPad and the programs I enjoy using on a daily basis. With over 100,000 apps (and counting) for the iPad and 350,000 for the iPhone you just cannot afford the time and money to go through all of them, so I'll make sure you don't miss out on the best.

He are a few apps I strongly recommend and use on a daily basis:

iWork suite: Pages, Numbers and Keynotes Paid





I never thought I would find myself doing such work on my iPad but these apps give you nearly the full power of their OSX versions. I'm working on quotes, finalizing documents and making keynotes presentations through my iPad which is about 10 times lighter than my laptop. Believe me they are fully worth the $ 9.99.

Zinio: Free





If reading was one of the main reasons you purchased your iPad for and that you enjoy your magazines, then Zinio is the software for you. You have a large selection of the worlds most popular magazines (I believe it is the largest digital selection) with crisp display, subscription possibility and offline viewing. It's simple, efficient and relatively cheap.

TuneInRadio: Paid




I use this app every morning to listen to some news radio or music It has an amazing selection of radios from all around the world at a high quality bit rate as good as satellite radio, with album cover artist name and song title. The TuneIn account allows you to sync preferred stations throughout all of your apple devices.

Blogpress: Paid





This is the app I'm currently using to post this article. It's simple and rich on options. It's capable of connecting to all the popular blog platforms (Blogger, Drupal, MSN, Joomla, Wordpress, My journal, Tumblr etc..) and allows integration of Picassa, Flickr for photos. So far it is the best app I know for this.

iDiskFree




If you have a MobileMe subscription then having the iDisk app is handy if you need a free app for access to remote storage. It offers basic functions such as browsing, viewing and sharing.


Mykeepass: Paid




If like me you use keepass ( a great open source and standalone) password management software, then Mykeepass is for you: as it is the iOS version of keepass. It is simple and secure as nothing is stored online, it's all local but you can store your password file on any remote storage if you prefer having access to it online and synced.


Selbuk: Free




This is an amazing app I recently discovered and I'm sure you won't find on other blogs. As a small business owner, I needed an application that could create a client, product and supplier database, manage my stocks and follow up my accounting and invoicing. If these are your needs look no further because this little gem brought to us by some Spanish developers is very promising and so far the best of it's kind. I forgot to mention that it includes a cloud service as well. I'm really looking forward to the upgrades to make it more stable and maybe a cocao interface.


Dropbox: Free




Does not need to be introduced anymore but this app is essential if you own an account. Not only it is a great cloud storage app, but also a great document viewer for many formats. I had some ms words documents come out formatted better from dropbox than Pages (although Pages is a great app too).

Goodreader: Paid





This software is the best in the AppStore for accessing any kind of remote storage (iDisk, Dropbox, Googledocs, FTP, WebDav etc..) and can open the most common files (doc, xls, ppt, PDF, images etc...). The app even allows editing and annotations and is worth every single penny.

Evernote: Free




It is a great piece of software for taking notes and keeping them in sync throughout your apple devices. But I mainly use it for my studies and making flash cards. Really it's up to you to find out how it can help you but a must have to organize some ideas and notes.

Google: Free




Honestly I don't find this app exceptional but it's convenient as you have all google services indexed in it. Besides the photo search function, I think it's just a collection of shortcuts to google services. Nevertheless it's practical.

Instapaper: Paid




The iPad app is simple and clean. Does the job flawlessly and the navigator integration is clever.

Flipboard: Free




It's one of the most innovative apps for iPad, offering a whole different and amazing way to consult social websites. On top of that it is a powerful rss reader, bringing to life your favorite readers in a flipbook format.

Skype: Free




Although FaceTime is a great app offering high quality image and sound, it's just not cross platform and doesn't offer the possibility of sending text. Also I get to keep my current friend list. But you have to regret though that there is no native app for the iPad?

UPDATE: There's now a native Skype app !!!

Alarmed: Free




Surprisingly enough the iPad doesn't come with a clock application but there are a few on the AppStore for every need. I found this app simple with a neat interface and decent functionalities for the price ... FREE. And it does the job.

2Do: Paid




There are a few task managers out there but this one is my favorite as it just offers so much details to include in your tasks such as contact, note, voice memo, photo, location and great options as MobileMe syncing and task sorting by nearest location which can help you optimize your movements. You will also enjoy the nice and polished interface.


These are the main apps I currently use on my iPad and believe that you'll find them being useful for taking full advantage of the capabilities of your device.