The blog of Abraham Williams

Build quality At first it felt cheap and plasticy compared to my Nexus 4. Now it feels right and the Nexus 4 feels heavy and the glass feels like it could shatter at any moment. And before you ask, no I did not get to customize the colors of my Moto X, I purchased the developer edition which is only available in black and white. Which is fine, I'd rather have that than a locked colorful version. Screen The screen is fantastic. Watching a video on it makes the phone melt away and leave only the media. Touchless controls The idea behind touchless controls is pretty cool, but in practical application, touchless controls are useless to me. This is 100% because of my security paranoia though. I have PIN on every mobile device I own and I trend towards the security side of the spectrum instead of the convenience end. Having to manually enter a PIN for every voice request completely removes the less from "touchless". My two hours of using the Moto X before conf...

A couple of days ago a post titled hackathons are bad for you started making the rounds. Here’s a standard recipe for a Hackathon. Gather a bunch of developers in a location. Supply them copious amounts of junk food, booze and caffeine. Tell them to get cracking for 24hrs. As a generalization that is somewhat accurate...but I’ve been a regular fixture at hackathons for several years now, and I’ve learned one very important thing: hackathons are what you make of them. Sleep There is an almost masochistic take on sleep deprivation in the developer community. (It might be true with other professions, but let’s focus on the devs.) It certainly isn’t specific to developers and it tends to be more of a cultural thing. Pinning this on hackathons is a bit unfair when you see the large percentage of Americans in general that suffer from sleep deprivation. Hackathons have time limits because they want everyone to have the same constraints, not because they don’t want you to slee...

One of the better eggnogs I've tasted this holiday season. It's nice and thick with no artificial flavor. It doesn't have much in the way of nutmeg flavor however. Buy it and add your own nutmeg.

The eggnog starts out rich and creamy as a good nog should. After a few moments of waiting for the pumpkin to kick in you find it is sorely lacking. You might as well just whip it and put it on top of pumpkin pie. It's OK. Buy if there is nothing better around.

Going into this testing I had very low expectations as I've never considered Hood products to be of all that high a quality. I was pleasantly surprised to find this actually has a decent pumpkin flavor. The eggnog was thinner than I prefer and had a little bit of an artificial after flavor but add a little nutmeg and clove spice and you have a decent pumpkin eggnog. It's OK and will do in a pinch.

The Mashery spot prize ( GoPro HD Hero 960 wearable HD camera), went to Screen Jumper by Abraham Williams - a Chrome extension that, as you browse Twitter, recognizes movie titles within tweets and injects movie trailers ( YouTube ), movie ratings ( Rotten Tomatoes API ) and movie schedules of nearby theaters. To the point that I made earlier about vertical hackathons, Abraham (a seasoned developer) was exposed to the YouTube and Rotten Tomatoes APIs for the first time ever, and now has new platform knowledge and experience in his toolkit. via Mashery

Note: This is an old draft what was never completed. Native screenshots! On the downside screenshots don't appear to automatically upload to Google+. People don't get merged. Take these two examples of searching for my sister and my boss by name. Each search shows each person six times. In the web version of Google Contacts there is only one entry for each so the extra entries appear to be from apps such as Twitter, and LinkedIn. The screen is simply gorgeous! Battery life initially is pretty terrible. The menu button jumps around a lot. Sometimes it is in the top right. sometimes the bottom right. Panoramas are awesome. Can't take a photo from the lock screen when using a pin. Love the built in encryption! Still lags some but much better then my Nexus S 4G.

Update : I now recommend you install Google Chrome  and  disable  the built in Browser as it supports encrypting all synced data. After picking up a gorgeous  Galaxy Nexus yesterday I was running into an issue where my browser data wasn't syncing to the phone. After a little Googling I found this is commonly caused by having all of my synced Chrome data encrypted instead of the default of only encrypting the passwords. These are the steps I went through to get my dat syncing again without losing any of it. The exact error I was getting was "Sync is currently experiencing problems. It will be back shortly." In Google Chrome open the personal stuff settings page by clicking this link or by opening the wrench menu, and click on "signed in with example@gmail.com".  Hit "disconnect your Google Account" to temporarily disable syncing from your browser. Visit the Google Dashboard and "Stop sync and delete data from Google". I waite...

A number of people recommended that I try Trader Joe's Eggnog so I must admit, I had high expectations when I finally did. Luckily it is a good nog besides being light on the nutmeg. It is nice and thick with a good flavor that doesn't taste artificial. I could barley taste any nutmeg so I recommend adding some (you do have nutmeg on hand right?) before consuming. Above average. Recommendation: buy with nutmeg.

Provides a delicious rich and creamy flavor but it is more of a vanilla cream flavor and less of an eggnog flavor. It is very enjoyable but don't expect the traditional eggy taste. Different but good. Recommendation: buy.