David Bottomley's Blog

We purchased the Renpho Bluetooth Smart Scale over a month ago and I wanted to report our experience with it.  We have been very impressed with this scale, especially for the price.  It has been a very reliable scale.  What is particularly impressive is the amount of data that it automagically provides based on nothing more than your weight and the electrical contact pads.  You do need to be barefoot for the scale to work properly, though it will work with socks too, just perhaps not quite as accurately.  It will weigh you with shoes, but you don't get any other data other than weight if you do that. If you use it properly, it provides you a wealth of data that it tracks over time for you, via an app that you install.  When you setup the app you create an account, so it maintains your data when you log back in even if you lose the app.  The data points that it tracks include: Body Weight Body Mass Index (BMI) Body Fat Percentage Body Water Percen...

As a geek, and someone who has worked in information technology for over 25 years, when I find a cool technology solution, I like to share my findings and experiences with other geeks.  I've used RAID arrays for nearly my entire career, which are redundant arrays of independent disks.  This is where you configure multiple hard drives in an array to provide for enhanced capacity, speed, redundancy, or all of the above.  Traditionally speaking, there were multiple ways to configure your RAID arrays depending on what you're trying to accomplish, I'm not going to cover them all because this can get very long but the common RAID configurations have traditionally been: RAID 0 which uses data striping across disks, which provides greater capacity and speeds up data access, but provides no redundancy.  If one disk fails, all data is lost. RAID 1 provides data mirroring, but no striping, so the capacity is that of half the disks, but if a disks fails, no data is lost, and ...