Category: Reviews

Website, Software & Hardware Reviews.

MP3 Sound Asleep Pillow Review

I couldn’t resist grabbing one of these after spotting an ad in a pc mag. I listen to music in bed a lot and it helps me sleep sometimes. I had in-ear headphones that weren’t too uncomfortable but twisting and turning was still a bit hard on the ears and mid-sleep self-strangulation was always a likelyhood!

I bought the pillow despite doubting it’s abilities to provide the same high quality sound earphones do and doubting whether the sound could be fully private and contained in close proximity to someone else. The price of about €27 incl postage was worth the gamble I reckoned so I bought one last week and it got here pretty quick.

MP3 Pillow

Thankfully it came with the correct attachments for connecting to my iPhone, namely a decent length stereo mini-jack (3.5mm) to mini-jack lead. That leads me to my first problem! Maybe I was expecting too much but surely, if you can put one speaker in a pillow, you can put two!? There’s only one as far as I can hear and it’s placed over at one corner of the pillow. What might have been better is if it had two speakers, one each side then you could put your head in the middle and get a surround sound, stereo effect?

The vendor’s claim that “only you can hear your personal sounds, so your partner can sleep in peace” is not strictly true unless you keep the volume way down or he/she cancels things out by snoring! I’m a bit of an audiophile so I need to be able to hear my music properly to fully enjoy it. Turning it up loud didn’t wake anyone else in the house either though it has to be said.

I think the real value of this is for people who’d like some background music or sounds to help them drift off, or even to listen to audio books. If you want to buy it to rock out to your favorite tunes in bed and not have someone next to you hear then forget it. Getting an extension lead and hooking up to the TV might be a cool idea too. Of course you could use it elsewhere apart from the bedroom, ie – car, plane journeys etc..

Worth buying though.

Grab one for yourself from Gstore.ie

Leon.

Ray Manzarek – The Doors Review

Anyone who knows me knows The Doors are (or were) my favourite band. I’ve got all the albums, T-shirts, read all the books, visited Jim’s grave, been in a Doors cover band and even got a tattoo of Jim Morrison on my arm! So I guess this gig like the previous 2 Doors gigs I’d seen could never have lived up to my expectations or memories, especially without Jim and Densmore. Their current tour seems to have been planned to coincide with the new Doors movie “When You’re Strange” which I’ve yet to see..

After a long, meandering (yeh, we got lost) walk to the new Grand Canal Theatre in Dublins refurbished docklands, we met with old friends from our gigging days and fellow members of our Doors Cover band “The End” bought a few ridiculously overpriced drinks and sat down in the very plush theatre to anticipate what promised to be something different – the Doors music accompanied by a 50 piece strong orchestra! I had a couple of well liked classical recordings featuring both Nigel Kennedy and George Winston so I knew it could work but it didn’t on this occasion.

About 10 seconds into the first song “Love Me Two Times” I turned to my friend and said, “this is going to be a  long night”!I think maybe the playing of both Manzarek, Krieger and the rest of the band and the orchestra was accomplished but either the sound engineer, theatre designer or booking agent should be shot. For nearly the entire gig, except for parts where the band played quietly or not at all, I couldn’t hear the orchestra one bit. Couldn’t pick out the strings, wind, timpani, nothing…Manzarek’s keyboard and Krieger’s guitar hurt my ears and the stand in lead singer who was way too young and fit looking compared to the other old rockers, was just a screamer and regularly cocked up songs including one memorable occasion when he fell over a monitor!

The song choices saved the nght a little bit with some of the more obsure Doors songs getting an outing for once with songs from all 6 Doors studios albums. It seemed like a totally different gig after the interval, still with sound problems but the audience came to life dancing and singing along, with a little element of anarchy, Jim would have approved! I suspect some drugs were consumed during the break!

I’m still glad I went if only to see 2 of the surviving members of one of the world’s greatest and most influential rock bands but I’m done now..

Leon..

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Here’s a video of the intro song, “Love Me 2 Times”:

Here’s some photos:

Mark Knopfler O2 Review

Happy to pencil off seeing another great of modern music at the O2 tonight and a real treat to see one of my guitar heros and one of the best living guitarists, Mark Knopfler, lead singer and guitarist with Dire Straits.

I mention his old band as not a lot of people I talked to beforehand seemed to know who he is/was! Dire Straits are responsible for all time greats such as “Money for Nothing”, “Sultans of Swing”, “Walk of Life”, “Romeo & Juliet”, “Brother’s in Arms” and a lot more, only some of which he played tonight, preferring instead to focus on his own solo stuff, not a lot of which I knew but it didn’t really matter to me what he played! I knew it would all be great and so it was..

I was here mainly to see Mark play guitar up close in his own unique, fingerstyle, brilliant way and to hear that unmistakable lead guitar, volume controlled, strat tone he’s become famous for. Him and his band didn’t dissapoint.

We were treated to an evening of musical and instrumental mastery with a seated (he blamed a trapped nerve!) Mark doing his trademark guitar swapping for nearly every song. He played Strats, Gibsons, Dobro and Acoustic all equally brilliantly and his excellent band all swapped between instruments ranging from Guitar, Upright Bass, Keyboard and Piano to Flute, Accordion, Pipes and a few I’d never even seen before. A very talented and melodic bunch who eased out multiple dynamic musical styles from Folksy to Ballad to Rock to Blues.

It was my kinda live music, very easy on the ears, not too loud, melodic, tap along and upbeat. The O2 acoustics were crystal clear and obviously suit this kind of music way more than some of the louder rock gigs I’ve seen there recently since the rebuild.

It was a shame the point wasn’t full but at least it gave me some extra leg room for once! It was still a decent crowd but for some reason they couldn’t sit still, with everyone constantly up and down for drinks etc..

Rock on Knopfler.

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WordPress Banner Ads Plugin Review

Blogs in general (including some of my own posts here!) are some of the most trafficked sites on the net and the first thing that pops into most people’s heads when it comes to monetizing that traffic is advertising. I’ve been using some of Tribulant’s excellent WordPress plugins and was delighted to see that they had a Banner Advert plugin as I needed one for a new online venture AboutLeitrim.ie.

wordpress-banners-plugin

Tribulant’s Ad plugin is compatible with the current version of WordPress (2.9.2 as I write this) and goes in easily in the usual way. Here’s a quick rundown on what the plugin can do:

  • Multiple Predefined and Custom Ad Sizes & Zones.
  • Multiple Sidebar Widgets.
  • Manual Embedding/Hardcoding into your theme.
  • Page and Post Embedding.
  • Order or Random Ads
  • Static Image, Text and Flash Ads supported.
  • Integrated Ad Banner Upload.
  • HTML and Google AdSense supported.
  • Banner URL’s.
  • Ajax Ad Rotation with Time setting.
  • Impressions, Click and CTR Tracking.

Some standout features for me are:

  • Template embedding of Banners and zones.
  • Ad Ordering or Random rotation (you choose).
  • Click Tracking.
  • Ad placement/Zone flexibility.
  • Ad duration settings.

The click tracking might be a method of charging your advertising clients per click or view rather than monthly, weekly etc..

The plugin is very reasonably priced at $30 ($149.95 for Developer/Multi Site version) and perfectly stable.

Demos, Documentation and Support available HERE.

Get it HERE.

Reverb Studios Reviews Suggestion

Customer Reviews of a companies products or services have become a very big deal online in recent years. Research has shown that if someone reads a positive review of your offering or service online they will be most of the way to buying from you!

On my own blog, the Reviews Category consistently gets more hits than any other and I myself would always look for reviews before buying anything.

I have recently setup a partnership with Ireland’s leading supplier of Review software for websites, LouderVoice. They can supply you with very simple to use plugins for your site that will allow visitors and clients to Rate your service or product and leave comments directly on your site. These reviews can be displayed prominently and should lead to greater sales conversions and excellent customer feedback. Customer reviews can also be routed to Twitter and Facebook for maximum exposure for your site.

Visit www.LouderVoice.com/About for more detailed information or to signup.

Please use the Partner code LV-REVERBSTUDIOS if you decide it’s for you!

Leon.

Daft.ie iPhone App Review

We’ve been looking for a house to rent or buy for ages now and I also have an iPhone, so app = handy being able to browse or search homes while in bed or while out and about actually lookin for houses ‘manually’. I’ve tried a few different property apps including MyHome’s and PropertyNews but the Daft one wins hands down.

Propertynews, while feature rich seems to have a Northern Irish/UK bias and I don’t like the map based navigation of MyHome. I prefer a simple list.

Here are the features and reasons I like the Daft app:

  • Ease and speed of use.
  • List type results with images and main details.
  • Photo viewer.
  • Comprehensive search filters.
  • “Nearby” Searches.
  • Maps.
  • Quick links to Call or Email agents.
  • Bookmark properties.
  • Sales & Rentals.
  • Sorting.

Hope we find a home to buy soon, only looking for about 7 years now..

Leon.

Avatar 3D Review

Took my time going to see this but finally managed to catch it last weekend in the Gaiety Cinema Sligo. It was difficult to avoid all the hype about this film in the last few months and the danger was that it would never live up to its hype. Some early reports suggested as is common with these films that the whole thing was FX and no plot. Well I’m happy to say that for me and my 3 fellow cinema goers it lived up to all expectations and surpassed them! Continue reading Avatar 3D Review

Paul McCartney O2 Dublin Review

Looked forward to this gig greatly. It’s not often you get to see a Beatle live and my favorite one at that!

The luas extension to the O2 from our Tallaght base was dead handy and we arrived in good time on a freezing night to grab a warming coffee and find our seats, or so we thought! It turned out that between the time I chose my seats while booking priority tickets online to the time I paid, I managed to go from securing great seats to standing only. Pretty disappointing as I vowed never to stand at a gig again after U2 in Slane. Bad back you see. I was pretty pissed of for a while as I thought I booked seats and I don’t know why there was a block and seat number on the printed tickets? Sure enough by the end of the night I was in agony both from standing and from the bitch beside me who seemed to think she was the only one at the gig and flailed around whacking everyone close to her.. Continue reading Paul McCartney O2 Dublin Review

WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin Review

One of the top feature requests by web design clients is of course the ability to sell items online and I’ve had to do a bit of research to find a suitable and robust shop plugin for my web design tool of choice WordPress. There’s a few smaller, basic plugins that do a job but for a proper cart the main plugin seems to be WP-ecommerce but I’ve had nothing but trouble with that, seems very buggy. Sometimes you just have to go commercial with plugins and get what you pay for! So here’s my recommendation for the best all round commercial wordpress shopping cart plugin at the time of writing.

wordpress-shopping-cart-plugin

It’s logically called WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin by Tribulant Software and its priced at a very reasonable, once off $49.99 for a single installation or $249.95 for the ability to add it to as many sites as you like. Here’s a rundown on the highlight features:

  • Unlimited Products and Categories.
  • Support for automatic Digital Product sales.
  • Multiple payment methods including Paypal and Manual.
  • Multiple Currencies.
  • Customisable shipping structure.
  • Discount Coupons.
  • Product Variations/Styles.
  • Inventory Countdown.
  • Product embedding in wordpress posts and pages.
  • Multiple widgets available.
  • Custom Fields.
  • Ajax powered content tabs.
  • Product Search Widget.
  • Multimple Regional Taxes.
  • Supplier Login.
  • G-Zip Compression.

The standout features for me are:

  • Stripe Payment Integration via extension. (Accept Credit Cards with NO Merchant or Gateway setup or monthly fees!)
  • Realex Payment Integration. (Both Redirect and Remote/Onsite methods)
  • Digital Product support.
  • Affiliate Product Support.
  • Ajax (fast loading) product information tabs.
  • Flexible pricing and shipping options.
  • Custom Fields.
  • Invoice/Order PDF generation.

There’s also a very interesting setting to make any product an External/Affiliate item. I also like the Recommended Retail Price option which displays the RRP struck out over the actual price. The checkout procedure is very nicely laid out in a step by step method which should help conversions and minimise confusion, a common problem on e-commerce sites.

The plugin is way lighter than its rival wp-ecommerce, is pretty much bug free as far as I can see and  is compatible with recent versions of wordpress including the current 2.8.5.

This is about the best e-commerce plugin currently available for wordpress and the price won’t break the bank.

Demos, Documentation and Support available HERE.

Get it now on the Tribulant site.

Leon.