BzzAgent xbkrausx Uses GILLETTE FUSION PROGLIDE POWER RAZOR

GILLETTE FUSION PROGLIDE POWER RAZOR

“Introducing the Gillette Fusion ProGlide with FlexBall Handle Technology, the razor that responds to contours for a shave that’s preferred 2-to-1 over the former Fusion ProGlide.”

    For this Bzzcampaign I got a Gillette Fusion Proglide Power razor. This thing is a monstrosity of every conceivable gimmick I have ever seen on a razor. It has five blades, the head swivels vertically and horizontally, it has some special rails on the shave head for things, a comfort pad thingy, and it even vibrates. I think the R&D department just looked up every feature available on current razors and put them on it.

    When I received it my first thought was that this was just over the top. There is no way any of this could possibly be that much better than the store brand disposables that I use. Do these gimmicks really make that much of a difference? The short answer is yes, it makes a difference.

    It was really strange to shave with this at first. It felt like I wasn't putting any pressure on my face at all and I couldn't even feel it cutting any hair. To my surprise, once the shave foam was moved from the shaving area, I was shaved, which I wasn't expecting. This thing just glides over every contour and gives a fantastic shave with very little effort. I found that the only useless feature of the razor is the vibration, I shaved half my face with it and half without and there was no difference at all in quality or ease of use.

    This blog is all about usability though, so, how usable is it?

    I use cheap, store brand, disposable razors when I need a close shave, otherwise, I just use my clippers or beard trimmer. I have owned several reloadable razor handles in the past and have always found that the cartridges are more expensive than they are worth. The Gillette Fusion Proglide Power is a fantastic razor and is just not really for me.

    I do feel that women may really enjoy this razor. A mans face is mostly straight with a few curves that are easily negotiable with a different chin position. Women have a lot of angles that need to be negotiated that I think this razor would excel at. I would imagine that the risk of nicks would be minimal since it needs very little pressure and adjusts to everything.

BzzAgent xbkrausx Uses STARBUCKS® BLONDE ROAST

STARBUCKS® BLONDE ROAST

“Starbucks® coffee is known for being bold. But what if you want a cup that’s just as great-tasting, but not as dark roasted? Enter Starbucks®Blonde Roast coffees. It’s the coffee Starbucks has been missing — made for the people they’ve been missing.”

    We all know that if it's Starbucks, it's good (at least for us non-snobs anyway). Starbucks Blond Roast is smooth and tasty, but, I find it to be too light for my taste. The Blond Roast comes out too close to hot water, especially with the amount of cream I like. I could barely tell there was coffee in my cup when I brewed up a pot.

    I am not what anyone could call a “coffee person”. For most of my life I have just had what coffee was available to me and usually, it wasn't good. I like my coffee to be very strong with a lot of cream so, it's probably no surprise that I enjoy lattes and cappuccinos over a regular cup of Joe. Of course, better coffee is always nice, but I don't consider it to be a prerequisite.

    The consensus among those I have given coupons to seems to be the same. The Blond Roast is liked, but most prefer the more traditional coffee blends from Starbucks.

    The cost is also a major factor, the very good coupons I got in my BzzKit combined with store sales is just enough to make the coffee reasonably priced. At the grocery store Starbucks drip coffee runs at about $10 for a 12 oz bag. For comparison a 34 oz bucket of Folgers is like $14. Yeah, Folgers isn't as good but, I wouldn't consider Starbucks to be good enough to justify the price.

BzzAgent xbkrausx uses Cottonelle(R) Care Routine

  Here we go, my very first BzzAgent campaign.  The very reason for the existence of this blog.  My life, my essence of being.  I stand before you today to discuss a product very near and dear to our "hearts".  I speak of course about the cleanliness of our nether regions.

COTTONELLE^® CARE ROUTINE



    What is the Cottonelle(R) Care Routine you ask?, well here it is from the Cottonelle(R) site.

"Want the ultimate in clean? Try Cottonelle Clean Care* Toilet Paper with Cottonelle Fresh Care* Flushable Cleansing Cloths. Crave a little softness? Reach for Cottonelle Ultra Comfort Care* Toilet Paper and Cottonelle Gentle Care* Flushable Cleansing Cloths. Need something more tender? Grab Cottonelle Gentle Care* Toilet Paper and Cottonelle Gentle Care* Flushable Cleansing Cloths.

No matter how you put together your Cottonelle^® Care Routine, when you use Cottonelle^® Toilet Paper and Flushable Cleansing Cloths, you'll walk away feeling fresh, clean and confident."

  Before I get too much into this I would like to start with an aside; Cottonelle Fresh Care* Flushable Cleansing Cloths is a terrible, long, and forgettable name.  How about just "Wet Wipes", or "Flushable Cloths", or just "Fresh Care Cloths".  It is redundant to call them flushable or cleansing cloths as both are implied in their function.

  Now, I want to make sure I point out that I am a man!  I am a manly man who is fine with pine cones and sandpaper.  I will use small furry animals even.  When I got this campaign I immediately snubbed my nose, in fact, if you where to see me now my nose is currently snubbed towards this very idea. These are baby wipes!  Baby wipes are for babies, women, and sissies!  But, I made a commitment to using them and I did.

  It's actually kind of nice.  I started with a wad of regular paper and finished up with a Cottonelle Fresh Care* Flushable Cleansing Cloth.  Now I just use a couple of the "butt wipes" as my Mom calls them, which also happens to be a better name.  I had no doubt it would work though, people have been using baby wipes for themselves since they where invented.

   Since there is no real need to go into the function and usefulness as I am sure you are more than aware of what such a product can do, I will point out a few issues I have run in to as well as some alternative uses.

  As it would happen, my mom has actually been using these Fresh Cloths for some time, which is something I wasn't aware of until I told her of my acceptance into this campaign.  She has several of the older dispensers, which she didn't like at all.  Since they are an obsolete product I will just say they where very poorly designed (sometimes I wonder if these product development QA people every actually get the product to use for awhile).

  The new dispenser is far better than the older one.  It is designed in such a way that the cloths are very easily dispensed with the the new cloth ready and easily accessible for the next visit.  The lid closes without exposing the next cloth which keeps them nice and moist; unlike the old one which was easier to just open the loading area and use them from there. 

    Loading the dispenser has you directly touching the Cleansing Cloths after removing them from their sealed package so it is wise to have a towel or some dry TP ready, also finding a convenient location to put the dispenser is an issue.  Two of the three bathrooms in the house I am in have no close counter or shelf to put the dispenser on.  That means the dispenser is located inconveniently on the back of those toilets.  Some sort of self adhesive backing would be fantastic.  Maybe if Cottonelle(R) where to team up with Command(R) to create a dispenser that can be easily stuck to a wall and removed and replaced without damage so it could be placed in more convenient locations if needed.  I do find that in the bathrooms where the dispenser is on the back of the toilet I commonly do not use the Fresh Care Wipes.  However, in the bathroom that has the counter right next to the toilet I use them all the time.

  As I stated earlier my Mom has been using these for quite some time.  She actually likes to use them for cleaning up "messes" her cats make.  Cottonelle(R) Fresh Cloths work great for cleaning up "moist" messes on dark carpets without staining or bleaching them.  She says they also work well for removing make-up without the harshness of other methods.  I understand they even work well to clean up a cat after incidents in the litter box, though I am unsure the effect the chemicals may have on a cat after licking the area so don't take that recommendation from me.

  Overall, I have found that Cottonelle Fresh Care* Flushable Cleansing Cloths are pretty handy to have around for quite a few different applications.  Now, if they could make a more convenient dispenser.

Cottonelle Web Site:
https://www.cottonelle.com/products/dry-moist

Cottonelle Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/cottonelle

The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

    I know it has been awhile since I have posted an update, rest assured I am still alive and kicking.  I inherited several thousand slides from my grandfather and I have been busy scanning them.

  If you want to see them you can check my Tumblr at the following address: http://krausphotos.tumblr.com/

  I should have something up today about my BzzAgent product; Cottonelle^® Fresh Care^™ Flushable Cleansing Cloths.

Kraus Uses Christmas with the Copeland's

Rudy Copeland likes the way you look.

    My mother, step-father, and I where invited to have Christmas dinner with Rudy Copeland and his friends and family.  For those who are not in the music industry, Rudy is actually fairly famous.

You can check out his work here.

    Rudy is a blind black man in his 60's who plays the organ/piano and sings.  No, he is not Ray Charles, but he was a good friend of his. He also played with Solomon Burke for awhile and has a very large catalog of music he has contributed and has met President Barack Obama. He is a real character and just fun to be around and talk to.

    Pretty much everyone at the party was a musician or attached to the music industry in some fashion. The common theme through the party was that someone would grab an instrument and just start jamming a bit, then someone else would come over and jam along, suddenly, everyone was playing a jam.  It was a lot of fun to record as I kinda had to be on my toes on getting into position while chatting and hanging out with everyone.

    Keep in mind, some of these guys have played together before, however none of them have ALL played together before.  All the music in the videos was organic and unplanned in any way so I apologize right now for cutting off the beginning of a few of the videos..

Georgia

Summertime

Some jammin, though I suspect it is an actual song

More jammin

Georgia

I didn't get all of this one, we where leaving as it was playing.

    As a side note, all videos where taken with my Lenovo IdeaTab S6000-F tablet.  You can check out my review of this tablet here.

  I was pleasantly surprised by the quality I was able to get.  The video and audio capture is definitely not the best, however, it is far and away better than I was anticipating.

Kraus uses Linux

 By semi-popular demand, I am re-posting my Linux adventures that I wrote several months ago on Facebook.  Some have found this to be useful information so it seems appropriate.  This is the trials and tribulations of a first time Linux user looking for that one distro that has all the things a new user is looking for.

    Keep in mind I knew a lot less about Linux at the time than I do now.  However, it's a pretty good guide on what distros to try and the strenghts and weaknesses from a total novice.

Fedora

     Fedora is really my favorite distro with the GNOME 3 windows manager. It has virtualization already built into the kernel and because it's basically the beta for Red Hat, it's fantastic if you want to learn enterprise level Linux. It supports RPM YUM and APT and can run and install the packages for most other distros (with varying degrees of success). Fedora has rolling updates which means that it is always at the very latest kernel version. That can be good or bad, for me it's bad. The drivers for my Radeon causes Fedora to become unusable with it's current kernel. I will probably be trying it out again on the next update to see if the issue is fixed. Installation takes some fiddling with.

Linux Mint

    I tried Linux Mint with the KDE and Cinnamon windows managers. Mint (Cinnamon) is the most Windows like distro I used. I don't like KDE xwindows at all. The Cinnamon manager is fantastic. I really like all the features of Mint. My favorite is having "Open Terminal Here" in the right click menu on the file manager. Mint also had issue with my Radeon drivers. It also has some stability issues that I am sure I was the cause of but, it is way too unforgiving for trying to be the "Newbie Distro". Also, it's just a mod of Ubuntu and uses Ubuntu packages. If you are looking for a "My first Linux" I would suggest Mint (Cinnamon). Installation is super easy.

Puppy Linux

    Puppy is SUPER light weight, it's mission is a distro that can run on any computer, from a CD/USB with no issue. I actually have it installed on my old ass notebook and it runs as fast as on my desktop. It also runs very well from a USB stick (and I hear it runs great on a cd too). I also have this distro on my USB stick for repairing other computers. For it's light weight, it works with every piece of hardware I have thrown at it, right out of the box, and it's the only distro I have used that does that. I totally recommend this distro if you are new to Linux and really want to get into the nuts and bolts of Linux. They say it's good for pros as well except I have one really big issue with it, it's not a "mainstream" distro. It was built from the ground up by one guy. That means that it has a different file structure than other distros. While it is supposed to be able to use ubuntu/deb packages, they need to be approved/repackaged before being used reliably and installing from a tar ball is risky at best. Puppy also has it's own repositories and uses it's own package management, so no apt, yum, rpm etc. I consider Puppy to be one of the best tools a person who fixes computers to have. Throw it it on a thumb drive and you can get into any computer. If you have it on a 4gb+ USB stick there is no real reason to even install it to a hard drive. Should you decide to install it (once again I did install it on my old ass notebook) the installation is somewhat more advanced than most of the distros I tried. You will have to have some passing knowledge of boot loaders, MBRs and Linux super clusters.

Ubuntu

    Ubuntu has a lot of offshoots, for instance, Mint is just a repackaged Ubuntu. Now Mint is different enough that most separate it out as it's own distro, however, it's all Ubuntu under the hood. Then again, Ubuntu is a fork from Debian, so Ubuntu is all Debian under the hood. I didn't try Debian because although Ubuntu can run Debian packages no problem, Debian cannot reliably run Ubuntu packages. Ubuntu is also the single most popular distro right now by a wide margin. I chose to use plain ole' Ubuntu because it just works. My Radeon drivers work like a charm. It's really stable and difficult to break (by Linux standards). It has just enough power and ease of use for a Linux newbie coming over from Windows. The Unity windows manager is a modded GNOME 3 desktop. The layout is very similar to OSX with the exception that the object dock is on the left rather than the bottom of the screen. Installation is exceptionally easy and it even has the option to install along side another OS.

Bodhi Linux

   I would REALLY like to be able to recommend Bodhi Linux, but, for the Linux novice it is a bit too young.  Bodhi is Ubuntu that has been tweaked to make use of the Enlightenment desktop.  Unfortunately, Enlightenment is still a bit too unstable for prime time.  The Enlightenment windows manager has actually been around for as long as GNOME or KDE, it's just always been more of a small GUI shell than a full fledged manager until the last few years when the development team has started work to make it a full featured main stream windows manager.  It's light-weight and and super beautiful.  As I said before, it's also pretty unstable.    Bodhi comes with very few pre-installed packages to the point that people have put together "Bodhi Essentials" packages that can be found in the Bodhi repositories.

    In summary, if you have had the thought of trying out Linux, but you are not real savvy, I suggest Mint. If you are kinda savvy then Ubuntu or Fedora. I would suggest Fedora if you are interested in learning enterprise level Linux and don't mind having to troubleshoot issues with every update. For computer repair people it is a good idea to keep Puppy on a thumb drive or put it on some old hardware to bring it back to life as some usable equipment. I also kept my distro hopping to just the long standing mainstream distros. I found that many distros suffer from abandonment as soon as the team working on them moves to other things.

    I hope this helps with anyone's questions of where to start with Linux. I know I wish I had a similar write up a few days ago when I started shopping around.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    It has now been several months since I wrote this and as an update I am currently using Lubuntu exclusively on all my computers.  Lubuntu hits all the major selling points of Ubuntu in a light-weight LXDE windows manager and no bloat.  I would not suggest Lubuntu for the total novice though.  The reason being that Lubuntu has very little pre-installed software and the software it does come with is selected more for performance than usability.  So, unless you are familiar with what software is available for certain tasks it may be a bit overwhelming trying to find something to suit your needs.  I would still recommend either Mint (Cinnamon) or Ubuntu (Unity) for the very first time Linux user.  Both are pretty bloated and the windows manager uses a lot of resources, however, they have a lot of pre-loaded software, including several different packages of similar software which is nice if you are unsure about what software you want to use for a specific task.

Kraus Uses the Lenovo IdeaTab S6000-F

The Lenovo IdeaTab S6000-F is a 10” tablet with quite a lot of features for a small price.

    When I was researching a tablet to purchase, I had some requirements. I wanted an Android, 10” screen, expandable SD memory slot, micro-usb slot, good battery life, and of course, price. It also had to have a decent amount of on board memory and of course a decent processor and decent screen resolution. The options I cared least about was cell data connection, GPS, the number of cameras and their resolutions, or weight. The Lenovo IdeaTab S6000-F fit all my conditions with the bonus of being very reasonably priced. In fact, the more I research other, much more expensive, 10” tablets I have become increasingly happy with my purchase. With the exception of the Galaxy Tab, all other 10” tablets fall short in at least one of my primary requirements.

   This is not a blog about specs, but about usability. Specs can be researched anywhere. Just be warned that, there are several version of the S6000 and each has slightly different features. For instance, only the one with 3G has GPS and the S6000-L doesn't have a micro-HDMI port. The S6000-F that I have is advertised as having a radio, but it's not activated. Some people have figured out how to activate it though. So far it has had no problem running any games or apps I throw at it. I can play any 3D or physics games with no issues. Because of the not so good back camera augmented reality apps and other camera apps like Google Goggles, and bar code scanners aren't so fantastic and require some very specific lighting and angles to work well. The screen resolution is great for everything I have done with it and the visibility angles are fantastic. The battery life is epic! It seemed that the claim of a nine hour battery life was a bit optimistic. The second day I had it I used it from a totally full charge all the way down till it was totally drained. The total time was a bit over 12 hours. Right now that I have a lot more widgets and apps with push notifications and constant updates, I get about eight to nine hours of battery.

     If you want to hook your IdeaTab S6000 to your Linux box it can be a bit fiddly. I found a great guide for setting up your Linux box as a development environment for your Lenovo tablet here; http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=921169.

    If you are using Windows then you will need LeTools from Lenovo which can be found here; http://download.lenovo.com/slates/k1/letools/letools/.

    On a scale of “You get more than you pay for” to “Don't waste your money” it gets a solid “You get what you pay for”. While the Lenovo IdeaTab S6000 isn't as feature rich as much more expensive 10” tablets, it is definitely worth taking a look at.