New Years Resolution. Quitting Smoking - The Gadgeteers way

Those who know me know I smoke. This year however, I have taken a different approach to my usual attempt to quit my habit.

I spent allot of time reading with interest articles on alternate ways to quit smoking and came across E-Cigarettes when visiting "The Gadget Show Live 2009" in the NEC in Birmingham. I wont go into the details, you can read about the definition of it Here . Whilst the device I purchased didn't give me what I needed, I saw potential so started to research a bit more. I discovered a whole industry had arisen around vaping from the devices you can purchase to the flavours of liquid you could buy. I settled on a "510" type device,
and found that it actually worked for me. Whilst I didn't immediately move away from smoking at first, I decided to take the plunge during Xmas 2009. Over a month in and I haven't smoked normal cigarettes at all.

If you are a smoker and are interested in this, then feel free to check out some of the links below. Also at the bottom of the Blog is a link direct to "Totally Wicked E-Liquids site" which will give a 7.5% discount to you at checkout OR you can use the code LF10 for a 10% discount @ Liberty Flights E-Cigs. I am not promoting this to non-smokers .. please DON'T DO IT. However if you want to try and quit or want to move away from smoking cigarettes then this is worth a try.

Liberty Flights E-Cigs

Totally Wicked E-Liquid

This method will not work for every smoker, but having tried most normal methods for quitting, this has so far been the most successful for me.
Whats the appeal versus real cigarettes ? Well, I get my nicotine fix still, I don't stink, I feel better, my family is happier and these things aren't as harmful as Cigarettes. Google is your friend if you want to look into this.

I've also found some friendly communities of like minded people through some of the forums out there and discovered a nice support network in the process as well.. So far, all in all a positive experience. Forum links below.

Liberty Flights Forums

UK Vapers Forums

Totally Wicked E-Cig Forums

CHANGES ARE AFOOT HOWEVER

The MRHA (UK equivalent of the US FDA) is looking ( on behalf of our government) to "regulate" the use of Nicotine in recreational products. This could potentially be very bad for the "Vaping" industry as a whole. I can understand some of the reasons behind it, but my concern is that there will be an outright ban on said products without any thought for people who are using them as a very good form of NRT ( Nicotine replacement Therapy). This is a current hot topic for most of the forums above. Obviously lots of people have their own opinions on what is actually happening, but interestingly enough, nearly all of those people don't want to see our alternative method of smoking being made illegal. We will see what happens, but don't let it put you off trying to get away from the "evil" weed :)

Thanks for reading this one.

The iPad – is it out of date already?

Like Mélissa Theuriau, the iPad looks great but makes no sense to me whatsoever.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the iPad recently.  Mainly because every time I watch the Internet, somebody’s talking about it.  Or about John Terry bedding the wife of one of his football buddies.

Most of the people talking about the iPad thingy are full of praise for the way in which it’s going to revolutionise the computer industry.  I have to say I’m completely unmoved by it.

This isn’t because I dislike Apple – admitting to this sort of heresy in public is likely to have me swinging from the pub sign before the day is out – but I do have to confess I’m not a huge Apple fan.  It’s a personal thing, you understand.  I don’t like football, either.

I did, however, watch the launch of the new iPad with some interest.  Everybody was talking about it, so I didn’t want to miss out.  But when Steve Jobs produced a very big iPhone, all I could think of was Dom Joly’s mobile phone sketch on Trigger Happy TV.

The iPad is undoubtedly very pretty, but then Mélissa Theuriau makes watching the French news interesting too, even though I have no idea what she’s saying.

And that’s my problem with the iPad – it looks fantastic, but I have no idea what it’s saying to me. 

It does everything the iPhone does, on a much bigger screen, yet it doesn’t fit in my pocket.  The iPhone has that wonderful twiddly thing you can do with your fingers that allows you to zoom in and out of pornography easily whilst watching it on the bus on your way home from work.  The iPad does the same, just on a bigger screen so the bloke sat behind you can enjoy exactly the same bit of the movie that you are.

You can read e-books on it, which is probably causing Amazon’s Kindle some sleepless nights.  And so on and so on.  All the arguments for and against the iPad have been heard countless times.  No point in repeating them here.

There is no doubt that Apple’s latest baby will have put the willies up one or two manufacturers, but despite the Apples Are Ace crowd screaming that it signals the death of the PC and the printed document, I can’t quite believe it does.  In fact, it may already be out of date.

This video, featuring MIT genius Pranav Mistry, takes “smartphone” computing to a whole new level that even Captain James T. Kirk would struggle to get his head around.  Best of all, this technology’s apparently already available.  And Mistry has made it Open Source…

The video’s fourteen minutes long, but it’s worth finding the time to watch.  It might cause the iPad some sleepless nights.

jQuery moment [.empty() BEFORE .load()]

OK I know its probably jQuery 101 stuff but I have been writing things like this.

var loadingimage = '';

$('#divID').html(loadingimage)
.load(url)

It works, it works fine, but after a while you are going to eat up memory.


Now, this is just blanking the content and not actually deleting the content from memory, what I should be doing is this:

var loadingimage = '';

$('#divID').empty()
.html(loadingimage)
.load(url)

Lesson learnt, for head slapped.