Product review: Cure for blisters - Bodyglide Anti-chafe Balm

For years I suffered with blisters on my pinky toes when I walk for more than 30 minutes. I tried various remedies which did not work until I found Glide. Even orthopedic shoes did not fully cure the issue. But Glide did. I put a little bit between my toes, smooth it out with a finger, and I can walk all day without any ill effects.

Glide does not feel greasy or slippery, it just works. My skin feels softer too. My blister covered pinkie toes now look smooth and pretty like baby toes! One large bottle lasts a long time (more than a year of daily use).
I use the smaller 0.45 oz bottle when I travel. I don't leave the house without applying bodyglide to my toes, it is now part of the routine like applying deodorant.

If you have a problem with blisters on your feet, I highly recommend it!

You can find travel size Bodyglide Anti-chafe Balm on Amazon by following this link


Tiy can find "Bodyglide" full size on Amazon by following this link


Ali Julia review ★★★★★

Food review: Thursday Cottage Lemon Marmalade

I love lemon marmalade. Lemon marmalade is pretty hard to find on the store shelves in USA, so I was excited when I saw two different lemon marmalade in gourmet store in Rockport, Mass. Thursday Cottage Marmalade was one of them. It comes in a fairly large bottle (16 oz) and has a nice deep golden color. Lemon marmalade is pretty common in UK, and this one is made and imported from England.

Thursday Cottage Lemon Marmalade is a true marmalade not a jello, it has a medium cut lemon rind and has a pleasant texture. I am attaching a photo under customers photo in which you can see the content rather then the label. About a year ago when I purchased a "lemon marmalade" Fruitfield Little Chip Lemon Marmalade on Amazon, I received a jello which had no strips of fruit. I was disappointed as I don't like jellos. The texture was not obvious from the description or the stock photo as the photo showed just the label. Hopefully my photo will make the texture of the content more clear: Thursday Cottage is not a thick jam all through out but has a good amount of fruit especially at the top.

The marmalade is rather sweet (I prefer my lemon marmalade a little tarter) and has a bit of tang of bitterness from the rind (in a nice way). Overall I liked it fine, although it was not the best I ever tried. I use lemon jam when cooking as well straight out of the jar with my tea.

List of ingredients:

Raw cane sugar
Lemons
Gelling agent
Citrus Pectin
Prepared with 35g of fruit per 100g sugar content
Total sugar content 60g per 100g

Nutrition Facts for serving size of 1 tablespoon (20g):

Calories 50
Total fat 0
Sodium 0
Total Carb 12g (4%)
Protein 0g


You can find "Thursday Cottage Lemon Marmalade" on Amazon by following this link

Ali Julia review ★★★★☆

Product review: G&F Long Cuff Oven Gloves-made of Dupont Nomex & Kevlar

I am a bit of klutz and these gloves do a great job protecting me! I am attaching a collage of two photos that I will referencing in this review to help me illustrate some points.

I LIKED:

1. These gloves are long (see photo #1). They cover enough of my hand that I can stick my hands in the oven to pull out a pie sitting in the middle of the oven without worrying that I will burn my hands on the sides of the oven. I used the gloves to move a pie dish in and out of 450 degree oven and felt no heat at all. Much better than my old gloves.

2. I love having gloves rather than mittens. For example, I was able to cover the edges of the pie with foil in the middle of the pie baking while using these gloves. Before I was always uncomfortable from the heat and fear of touching the pan itself. Since I did not have to be super careful the procedure to cover to edges took half of the time it took me before I had these gloves.

3. The threads (the light part) used to weave the glove are made out of Nomex & Kevlar, so the entire glove is made out of this material, it is not a coating. The green parts of the gloves are silicone to provide a non-slippery surface. These gloves have multi-layer construction.

I DID NOT LIKE:

1. I think it they came in various sizes rather than one size it would be better.


THE FIT:

I have fairly small hands, I normally wear small gloves. Photo #1 shows my hand on top of the glove so you can see the fit. It fits fairly comfortable in width (both fingers and the palm of my hand), however the fingers are quite a fir longer than my fingers. Photo #2 shows me pressing my fingered hand against a surface so you can see the access material. In practice this fit works fine, I was able to do even somewhat delicate task of wrapping aluminum foil around the edge of the pie pan. However, if you have big hands these gloves might be too tight/small.

Overall, I am very pleased with these gloves! I never felt so comfortable around a hot oven before.

You can find these gloves on Amazon by following this link


Ali Julia review ★★★★★

Mobile App Review: Woot Check , Free App (7.7 Samsung Galaxy Tablet, Android)

Woot is aimed a bargain shopper. The site offers one item in each of five categories: home, kids, shirts, wine, sellout. Sometimes they have Woot plus items, which means one or two additional items will appear in a category for limited time.

You need to shop at Woot with a totally different mindset. You cannot look for a good price of an item you want, when you use Woot you are just looking for anything they have at a discount. There is no search, you need to look under each category.

Today's sellout deal is Topsy Tomato Planter for $3.99 and $5 shipping. At first, I thought it was a good deal although the shipping charge made me wonder if I can do better on Amazon. Amazon offers for Topsy Tomato Planter for $5.68 and it is eligible for free shipping. So Woot deal is not such a good bargain after all. So even using Woot doing a bit of research is always wise.

The app works very similar to the main site. You need to look at each category, there is no search added in the app. So I am not that crazy about Woot shopping experience but the apps works reasonably well, although I wish there was a search function.
This app works well on my Samsung Galaxy 7.7 Tablet (my Galaxy 7.7 review) running Android HoneyComb 3.2. I had no technical problems and the app scales to my screen size very nicely.

This app is free from Amazon Android Store and
You can find it on Amazon by following this link.


Ali Julia review ★★★★☆

You can find reviews of other mobile apps I use under Blog Label "Galaxy 7.7 Tablet" on the left navigation pane of the blog.

Product Review: Griot's Garage 11146 Speed Shine

I purchased Griot's garage Speed shine / glass clay / paint clay on a recommendation of a auto enthusiasts forum I follow. I have been using paint clay on my car for a number of years (using Mother's products), but this was my first experience with glass clay. I used it with Griots shine and the combination worked very well. The deposits on the glass were removed without cleaving streaks.

Speed shine has almost no scent, provides good cleaning and and a good surface for the clay to glide on. I enjoyed working with it.

I am attaching a collage of 2 photos that I will be referencing in this review.

The 35 oz bottle is fairly larger, photo #1 has it next to a ruler for relative size. The sprayer worked well - a nice generous even spray. Photo #2 shows how much I used during one cleaning during which I only used it for claying the windows, I did not use it on the body of the car. I was a bit surprised how much I used in one application.

You can find Speed Shine on Amazon by following this link.


Thumbs up overall!

Ali Julia review ★★★★★

Mobile App Review: iTranslate - Machine translation software , Free App (7.7 Samsung Galaxy Tablet, Android)

I am fluent in several languages and was pretty impressed with this app. I tested with a realistic tourist phrase which was fairly complex "I would like to visit your best art museum. Can you give me a recommendation and how to get there."

I selected English from the left drop down list, typed in a phrase in English, selected the second language from a drop down list on the right. I was impressed with the translation, the grammar was perfectly correct. Next to the text there was a button which pronounced the translation. The pronunciation was excellent and sounded like a native speaker. The intonations sounded "computer generated" but completely understandable. I tested Russian and Spanish. I am attaching a screen shot with the phrase and the translation in one of the languages I tested. This was the first random sentence that came to mind, I did not try to find a phrase that would be translated well. I was quite impressed with the results.

The words that are not understood for the purposes of the translation are displayed in English. When I made a typo in one of the words (the word recommendation) in English, the word was displayed in English in the translated section, but when the entire phrase was pronounced the correct word was used in both Russian and Spanish. I know a little about how Google translation logic works, and the fact my typo was handled so well made me think that this app is using Google translate. I experimented some using several translation engines in the browser and was able to see the same results using Google translate, and much worse results using two other machine translation packages.

The only slight negative of the app is that the advertising at the bottom of page is animated and never goes away. I found the flashing from animation a bit distracting. However, given the high quality of the application itself I am willing to live with it.

Supported languages:
Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish


This app works well on my Samsung Galaxy 7.7 Tablet (my Galaxy 7.7 review) running Android HoneyComb 3.2. I had no technical problems and the app scales to my screen size very nicely.

I am quite impressed with this application and it will be very helpful during foreign travel.

This app is free from Amazon Android Store and
You can find it on Amazon by following this link.

Ali Julia review ★★★★★

Mobile App Review: TRARIS Deluxe (Tetris like game) , Free App (7.7 Samsung Galaxy Tablet, Android)

I am a big fan Tetris-like games and found that I am really enjoying this one.  Traris has a much larger variety of blocks than a traditional Tetris game, they are clever and uniquely shaped. In addition, you have a variety of options to melt and reshape the pieces, so it gives you a lot more options to consider and I am finding it re-freshening and challenging.  The graphics are intricate, the controls are well designed.

I found the music a bit repetitive but you can turn it off while still keeping the sound effects. I like playing with just the sound effects, no background music.  You can control the blocks either by using gestures on the screen or by using the buttons at the bottom of the display.  I found that I prefer the buttons.  I posted a screen capture which show the clever shapes and the buttons, which include a "drop" button which allows you to speed through the easy portions of the game and the "melt" button which gives you many additional options to consider.

This app works well on my Samsung Galaxy 7.7 Tablet (my Galaxy 7.7 review) running Android HoneyComb 3.2. I had no technical problems and the app scales to my screen size very nicely.

Overall, highly entertaining!


Ali Julia review ★★★★★

You can find reviews of other mobile apps I use under Blog Label "Galaxy 7.7 Tablet" on the left navigation pane of the blog.