Baby Bottle Reviews

There's a load of them out there, quite over whelming to be honest, so here is a review of the ones we have tried.

Dr Browns Natural Flow -This has a air venting system which is simple and works very well, we use this bottle a lot and rather like it, but it does have some issues.

The cons to this, there are a few parts that come apart to make it work, which is more hassle to wash, also the lid doesn't pinch the nipple but relies on a disc that you put into place behind the nipple to stop it leaking when your on the move, this is a major hassle to take out and not lose when in a hassle, and this is the main draw back to this bottle. Also the neck of the bottle is fairly narrow so you have to be careful about pooring in formula or you could make a mess. The pros, it does work very well in venting the air and minimising burping with our baby and the bottles are study and don't leak when you use the disc. 3/5

Playtex Ventaire - This we got as a free sample and though we would like because it has a vent system to reduce gas and the angled head means it is easy to tilt up and feed the baby, it also doesn't have many parts and is easy to clean. The major downside to this though, if there's any moisture or air in the base when you screw it on, the bottle won't seal and the milk will drain right out of it, which can be a problem when your tired at 2am trying to make a bottle on the quick. The bottle also feels fairly flimsy so it might not take to as much abuse. 2/5

Green to Grow - This is now our favourite and prefered bottle. It's an organic bottle, BPA free and all that, so nice and healty. It's also fairly study and the lid clamps on the nipple to prevent it from leaking and works well in that regard. The cons to this bottle, there's no special anti gas feature, but we generally don't have a problem with gas. The other problem is the curved shape of the lid, which means when you put it down it has a habit of rolling away and could get lost which will make a mess of the bottle, this really isn't a major problem, but it could be if you are on the road. Also when you buy the larger sized bottles, it comes with a stage one nipple when you'd generally be wanting either a stage two or three for that sized bottle. 4/5

Adiri - This originally was our favourite bottle and it worked great when our baby was first born and very small, because of the soft rubbery feel and appearance, it was most breast like for the baby to get used to, so it worked great when the baby was lying down, also the wide opening makes this very easy to fill up with forumla or milk. The problems with this bottle, you can't change the nipple stage size, so you have to replace the whole unit and it's fairly expensive for a one off bottle, also the capped lid doesn't do a great job of clamping the nipple which causes this bottle to leak quite a bit when on the move. The way that it is made also means you have to fill it up upside down, this can be a bit awkward to do late at night to read the measurements. The venting base does work quite well though, but like the Playtex bottle, it can cause a milk leak if put on when wet. For newborns at home 5/5 after a few months 2/5

First Years Soothie - This bottle came with the breast pump and what we like is the wide opening which made it easy to fill up with formula, and also it's quite short and stout, which makes it very stable, which is great. This bottle travels well too as the lid fits onto the base of the bottle so you won't lose it when it use, but the extra wide stance of the bottle does make it difficult to fit in many of those insulated bottle holders. There isn't any real con to this bottle apart from not being BPA free, there is a slightly creepy face in the nipple, had we not been given other bottles we probably would use more of these. 4/5

Think Baby - This is another great bottle, more as a transitional bottle between breast feeding and bottle and from bottle to sippy cup. It's another BPA free etc health bottle, but has a soft nipple that's shaped more like the tip of a sippy cup. The one we are using has handles to help the baby hold it up as a cup which she seems to really like. This also has a wide opening making it easy to fill and the lid locks firmly into place to stop leakage and also has a flat top so the lids won't roll away on you. 4/5

Boon Spoon Squirt - This isn't actually a bottle, but it's a great spoon to help start feeding of rice cereal and for feeding whilst on the go. You fill the handle up with the food and you squeeze to pour a drop of food onto the spoon. This does work really well, but the plastic cap that seals it for travel is a bit tricky to snap into place and there's no where to keep it safe whilst you are using the spoon. 4/5

6 Month jabs

Well it was time for some immunisation jabs as well as a bit of a catch up, but those went well. Also had a flu jab on top, which I also had as well, taking an aspirin really helps there.

The jabs went pretty well, though worth having an outfit that you can get the legs out easily in. Also having it done around feeding time is quite good, because you can be giving the bottle which helps sooth the baby, well with ours it certainly helped.

The bottle, and a cuddly teddy to take her mind of things, holding her hands and staring into her eyes while she got jabbed, seemed to help minimise the stress and crying. Still a horrid experience, but it did seem to help bring her back to her jolly self pretty quickly.

Baby Travel Tip

When going away and filling your big nappy bag...make sure all the nappies are the right size, by swapping out the nappies now and again, that way, you won't end up with a couple of size 1 nappies at the bottom of the bag when your baby now is a size 2 nappy wearer...

TrendNet TEW 424UB Wireless USB adapter

TrendNet TEW 424UB Wireless USB adapter.

I've had mine for a while now, a bargin at $20 a while ago, seems to be found for between $15-25 these days.

It has a few flaws that people complain about, mostly relating to it over heating which causes it to do a memory dump and blue screen your computer, especially noticeable with Windows Vista for some reason, even using the latest Trendnet drivers, or using the Realtek generic drivers, no difference.

I had this problem happen to me a fair bit, but I discovered it is easily fixed. It comes with what appears to be a useless extension that the device plugs into and which then goes into a usb port, this puts the device about 5 inches further out. Bending this flexible extension into a "L" shape allows the device to free stand in the air, away from any surface. This has kept it cool, and I've not had a crash with it since doing this.

It doesn't like being plugged into the back of the desktop if there isn't any air flow, nor does it like resting against the desk if plugged into a USB hub, which was how I had it set up, but now free standing in the air, it's golden.

The speed of the device is consistently good. The software included with it is basic, but it works, and you really don't need it with Windows anyway. Certainly very easy to connect and get working.

I'd recommend it as certainly good value for money if you need a simple wireless connection for your desktop/laptop.

Acer Desktop Update

Well I've had a lot of fun with my new desktop, not.

After a couple of weeks, the system started to fail. The screen would garble up after about 20 minutes and the system would freeze and when hard booted up, do the same again until the system had cooled down. It was a suspected blown graphics card and should have been a simple fix but it wasn't. What happened, I went through technical support via Acer online web support. This went on for a couple of weeks, being told to do things I had already done to see what the actual problem was, which involved a system restore, re-install graphics drivers, check graphics card and memory were seated properly and to try other monitors. Not of that fixed the problem. Though to be fair, the person replying was polite and did respond in a pretty reasonable time.

He was just unable to provide me a contact number or arrange any help there after. The contact number to arrange me sending in the machine at first was disconnected. Later in the week, it had a pre-recorded message to go online and hung up on you rather than putting you on hold to speak to a rep as instructed in the email support.

Fixmyacer.com is the website to go, which wasn't where I was pointed towards initially. Anyway, I arranged the repair and went to UPS for ship it back to them, out to Texas, which cost me $40. I really should have just bought myself a new graphics card, but that's beside the point, it was under warranty.

A month later, I get my system back, the repair report said they had re-seated the graphics card. Low and behold, twenty minutes after I booted my system, it failed again. It would seem that they ignored my repair report that the system fails after 20 minutes.

Email support got me no where, just told to send my machine back. I wasn't impressed, another $40 and a month for some knob shite to not fix it again? Just slightly pissed and unable to get anywhere.

I first found The Acer Guy who seems to want to help and has a great blog about what is happening with the company, but he's based in Europe. He did after I emailed him offer to try and help.

I also went to the Better Business Bureau and they were fantastic. I lodged my complaint, they contacted Acer, and within a half hour of that, someone from Acer called me up to arrange for a prioritised fix on my system, which is within 5-10 days rather than the 2-4 weeks. They also paid for Fed-Ex shipping, I just had to drop my machine off at the local Fedex store.

The system arrived yesterday and they did replace the faulty graphics card and so far, seems to be running well again.

The details you'll need to make the BBB complaint, to the company US headquarters, which is in California, so you would file at that BBB chapter -

Company details:

Complaint against : Acer America Corp

Acer America (USA only)
Acer America Corporation
333 West San Carlos Street
Suite 1500
San Jose, CA 95110
(408) 533-7700

Mudbox 2009

Autodesk has been releasing some sneak peak videos of Mudbox 2009 which look awesome and some really handy new features.


The old Siggragh preview is also worth a peak as it shows a lot of things in action.

Boston Post Mortem

The IGDA's local chapter, the Boston Post Mortem September monthly meeting was sponsored this month by GamerDNA so a big hand of thanks to them for the talk, the food and the free drinks.

Jon Radoff who heads the organisation gave the talk, which was about gaming trends covering the big hits of COD4, GTA4 etc and the world of MMO's.

It was interesting to see how Rock Band faired against Guitar Hero in the long term in the amount of usage spent by players.

There was a lack of coverage on the indie market which I felt was a shame because it would have been interesting to hear how indie developers fair against similar competition - How Castle Crashers compares with other indie released games in regards to sales and level of actual game time players put in, because it is another realm to the large marketed big budget games, and for many studios, this kind of data would be far more valuable.

The venue, the Skellig is a charming venue though with a good bar and space at the back for the event to take place, but these events are busy and seating is limited, this means it can be difficult to actually ask questions in the Q&A session after the talk. Jon was willing to answer questions privately, I just didn't think that benefitted the audience as much as it could.

The crowd was made up with a good mix of professionals in the industry, the location being fairly central and with a lot of free parking just behind the pub helping out a lot in this regard. There were a large number of students or recent grads from a local games art school there, they were interesting to talk with, but did make networking and job hunting more diluted for those already in the industry.