My new(ish) phone: Sprint HTC EVO…

Back on June 4th, I took a half day off work to go to Best Buy and get a new cell phone. What I ended up walking away with was far more than a phone. It was a little computer that has nearly constant access to the internet.

I ended up getting the HTC EVO on Sprint. The EVO runs the Android mobile operating system and does some pretty amazing stuff. As such, I wanted to touch on a couple of cool applications that I’ve been using. If you have an Android phone, you should use them too. Just pop over to the Android Market and search for the name.

• Twicca – This is the best Twitter app for Android, in my opinion. It is quick, customizable, and looks fantastic. Also, follow me on Twitter if you don’t already.
• Astro File Browser – I love this for 1) copying and moving files around my phone, mostly music and 2) it has a handy backup feature which will save copies of all your apps. If something happens to your phone, you don’t have to worry about searching the market and reinstalling everything. This app just takes care of it.
• Listen – This is a podcast manager by Google. It is still a little rough around the edges, but I love it thus far. I’ve never listened to podcasts before, but there is just so much interesting stuff out there.

I’ll be back with some more recommendations soon and some more in depth info on the EVO, including some screenshots of some of the great features and apps.

Eddie and the iPhone…

My friend and fellow technophile, Eddie, has a fantastic post over on his blog, Practically Efficient.

His feelings pretty much sum up my own. Apple has done some amazing things for mobile technology, but for me, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to jump full-on into the Apple ecosystem.

Check out this fantastic post in full.

Friday Night Links (06/25/2010)…

Welcome to a long overdue Friday Night Links. I’ve got an entire vat of links that need to be strewn across the internet, so I’ll try to pump out some extras over the next few weeks.

• DIY Flytraps – Granted flies around the Midwest aren’t nearly as numerous and large as they are in other areas of the world such as jungles and the tropics, but they are not fun either way. Personally, we’ve had some fruit fly issues and this guide covers traps from tiny to huge, so pick your size.
• 5 Ingredient/10 Minute Meals – The article links to a pdf, so you might want to print it out and keep it around your kitchen when you need to fix a simple meal in a pinch. If you don’t mind jumping straight to the pdf (warning: it’s huge), here is a link.
• Vinyou – This one is a beta project and many locales don’t have any events listed, but Vinyou is a tool for finding wine events (tastings, festivals) in your area. There is a nice large “Submit a Wine Event” button on the right side so you can let others in your area know about events in your area. Help these guys out as I’m sure they would appreciate it.
• Picrap – If you live outside (or within) certain countries, you can’t watch some online TV shows. Picrap attempts to fix that by allowing you to stream shows from countries you are barred from watching. I have not tried this out, but let me know if you do and how you fared. Hopefully this might help out some of my Canadian readers.
• Locals vs Tourists – Check out this Flickr set to find out where tourists congregate in various cities around the world so you can either join them or avoid them – your call. All the data is based on geotagged photos and isn’t specific to street names, just general areas.

Low-tech: Tomatoes and Hops…

At The Digitante HQ, we don’t have a yard, but we do have a great deck on the back of our house. Last summer it was quite spartan: a camping grill and two tiny hops plants were the lone residents.

This summer had brought quite the change: a baby pool, an infrared grill, and 4 heirloom tomato plants have been added to the mix. Additionally, the two tiny hops plants have grown to a couple of massive beasts this year, already standing about 8 feet high.

Here are some fun facts about a couple of the new additions:

• Baby pool – It was free and cleaned well before first use as we were not the first owners.
• Heirloom tomatoes – The typical tomatoes that people eat – you know, the round red ones – are called hybrid tomatoes. They were specifically bred to be uniformly shaped because they were first made back in the late-1930s to ship over to Europe to feed the soldiers during WWII. While they are convenient, they lost most of their flavor and juiciness. Heirloom tomatoes are the original tomato. They are funny-shaped with their lumps and bumps. They are also extremely flavorful, juicy, and come in many colors including yellow, green, red, purple and everything in between. Check out some pictures.
• Infrared Grill – Most grills cook by using the burners to heat up the air then the hot air blows on the meat being cooked. As you can guess, this dries out the meat, taking away its flavor and juices. An infrared grill has a piece of metal in between the flames and the cooking grates. The flames heat this metal and it in turn radiates heat onto the meat, allowing it to retain its juices and also avoiding charing from flame ups caused by leaking grease. I am fairly convinced you would have to try pretty hard to mess up burgers on this thing. Its amazing. Your next grill MUST be an infrared.

So that is my low-tech life. Hopefully once those hops plants get finished producing their cones, I’ll have something to drink while soaking my feet in a pool and eating a burger with delicious tomatoes on it. Now excuse me while I update my twitter account…

Back from Exile…

As you may (or may not) have noticed, I’ve been absent from the blogging scene. There have been a couple of reasons for that. The excuses range from summer to running to kids to work. They aren’t good excuses, but they are there nonetheless.

What I do want to share is what I’ve been up to and what I’ve got loaded up for you.

• WordPress 3.0 – If you don’t know what WordPress is, don’t be too concerned. It is simply the behind the scenes stuff that takes all this information that I have a makes it all pretty for you to look at. A new version is out and I’m going to be upgrading soon. Hopefully it doesn’t wreck my site!
• Sprint HTC EVO – So I’ve been a staunch BlackBerry guy for years now. But for years, BlackBerry has been standing still while new mobile operating systems like Android and iPhone OS (now known as iOS) have been making huge leaps and bounds. The iPhone is firmly planted at AT&T so that is out of the question, but Sprint, my carrier of choice, recently got a major Android phone called the EVO. I’ll fill you in on all its amazingness soon.
• Friday Night Links – This has been the thing I’ve been missing most over the past month or two. I’ve got a bunch of great stuff that I’ve been saving but just couldn’t get put up because Friday nights have been busy, busy, busy.
• offcolortv.com – So this isn’t anything coming up but my Biggest Loser blog over there had a huge thing happen. Fan favorites Sunshine and Oatmeal ended up answering questions over there for everyone. It was pretty amazing to have them there to do that. On a secondary note, I’m going to be doing admin stuff for offcolortv.com, so that would include making improvements and upgrades as well as tweaking the look. I’m trying to figure out how to put each author’s picture in their post, so if you have any ideas, I would love to hear them.

That is about it for the moment, but expect a second post tonight about my low-tech obsession as of late.

Friday Night Links (4/30/2010)…

I had four links for tonight, but apparently someone wasn’t happy about the content of one of them and it was removed. Let’s just say someone had a little fun with Costco’s generic pricing signs. If you Google “Costco prank” you can find a couple of examples of what they were up to.

Also, if you every have links that you would like to see featured here, I am always open to suggestions. Anyway, on to the links!

• Homemade Snickers – As a kid, I used to see Snickers ads on TV all the time, but I don’t think I ever had a Snickers bar until I was 10 years old or so. Enough of my deprived childhood though. You, however, can give your kids the joys of Snickers bars by making them yourself. Sounds like a delicious Saturday afternoon project. As usual, please send any leftovers to me.
• Knife Sharpening – Ever tried to use a razor that had been used about a million times? Remember what it did to your face? Don’t do that to your food! Sharpen your knives. The article gives some great advice in the body, but the comments really shine because it is real people asking real questions and the author is there to answer every single one. Great instructional article.
• Boeing Makes a Plane – Pretty self explanatory, right? The plane they are making is for Southwest Airlines and is called Florida One. It has the Florida state seal on it and it is uglier than sin. Watching the process is really cool though. If you can’t see the embedded video, click for the link to YouTube.http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/zKnsyYbfC60&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b

TQT: New Fonts…

The internet can be a scary place. The most terrifying thing you can do is type the word “free” into Google. An excellent example is if you want a few font on your computer and you end up searching for “free fonts”. There is an excellent chance that if you proceeded to the resulting links, you would probably end up with at least one virus on your computer.

Last week, I needed a cool font for a project I’ve been working on, so I did some research for a great place to get fonts that wouldn’t damage my computer. Here’s what I found: dafont.com.

From dafont.com, you can easily search for free fonts, fonts that require a donation to use, or even demo fonts that you can purchase. The search can also filter for styles (gothic, fancy), effects (distorted, metallic), or even dingbats which are just symbols and pictures. I ended up finding exactly what I wanted: an old-school typewriter font.

What do you think of the results?

I also want to include a little warning. If you end up downloading new fonts and using them in a shared document, the person you’re sharing with may not be able to view the font unless they have it install. However, they will be able to see it if the document is first printed as a PDF or saved as a picture, like mine above is. Otherwise, you will have to “embed” the font in the document (check out this article for more info).

If you do find a font you like, it is simple to install and every page on dafont.com give instructions that look like this:

• Windows 7/Vista: Right-click on the font files > “Install”
• Windows XP: Put the font files into C:\Windows\Fonts
• Mac OS X: Double-click the font file > “Install font” button.

Let me know if you find any great fonts out there as I’d love to have some other great fonts to use on various projects I work on from time to time. Also, if you have a go-to site for fonts, stock images, or other design elements, feel free to share with the other readers.

Friday Night Links (4/23/2010)…

I’m going to tear down the four or fifth or twelfth wall (or whichever one we are on at this point) and let you in on a little secret: I don’t have to be present to hit the ‘publish’ button to send these posts into the wide open internet. Thus, I am actually typing this post up on Thursay night, but it will be published without my intervention at around 4pm EST on Friday. Crazy, I know, but it is totally true.

Alright, enough of these shenanigans, let’s get some links.

• Crazy Chess Story – Of course it SEEMS like an oxymoron, but this chess champ actually had an amazing journey trying to get from Frankfurt, Germany to Sofia, Bulgaria. When not watching Lord of the Rings: Super Extended Directors Cut edition, they were dodging countries requiring travel visas, getting pulled over, and avoiding some of the worst potholes in Eastern Europe. It’s an incredible story.
• Compound Butter – Next time you bring home a nice salmon fillet or spicing up some veggies, make it quick and tasty with some compound butter. Just add some spices, garlic, lemon, or a plethora of other flavors to butter and – BAM! – compound butter.
• Medical Toys – I am a sucker for a good gadget and I’m also a health nut, so when those two things cross paths, you can be sure I’m there. My two favorite items mentioned are the sleep monitoring alarm clock with the silly headband and the wifi scale. I bet you readers can’t wait until my scale starts posting the ups and downs of me standing on the scale. Yikes.
• You’re Doing It Wrong – Mrs. Digitante and I bring up those commercials where the person is trying to strain a pot of spaghetti, but the noodles all dump out in the sink until they get that handy-dandy pot with the lid that has holes in it. The terrible acting and mock frustration the “doing it wrong” people show is pure hilarity. Now you can watch a wonderful tribute to all those suffering souls – giant red X’s included. If you can’t see the video below, click right here.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/08xQLGWTSag&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b

FYIJSYK: Facebook Privacy Update…

Look at this: two FYI-just-so-you-know posts within the span of a week. That is certainly a record. It’s for good reason though.

Facebook announced the other day that they are changing some aspects of Facebook – “Share on Facebook” is giving way to “Like on Facebook”, further integration between third party sites like CNN will be implemented, and your privacy on Facebook is becoming even less important than it already is.

Mark Zuckerberg spoke about this at the Facebook conference called F8. To read about the stuff that he unveiled, you can check out this PC World article which gives a very similar voice to my concerns.

Here is my main thought though: When I post on Twitter, everything I post there is going to be publicly seen. I know that and so I’m cautious about what ends up there. With Facebook, I post things there and I expect a level of privacy. Why? Because I specifically went in and adjusted my privacy settings to my preferences. Too bad that during a redesign, Facebook decided to make me re-opt into my privacy settings, but actually changed them all to be much more revealing than my originally chosen settings.

As a result of my concerns, I posted a message on Facebook asking if anyone would miss me if I closed my Facebook account and nobody responded. I probably won’t go as far as to close it, but I certainly am considering removing a good portion of the information I put there. Additionally, I am removing any applications I have loaded and will continue to monitor my privacy settings.

Facebook has destroyed a large portion of the trust I had built up with them when it was just my friends and those in my closed network (college, city) that could access my information. Now it feels like it is going to be the whole world.

Have you re-evaluated your privacy settings in Facebook? How do you feel about Facebook integrating into the rest of your online world? Let me know in the comments.

TQT: Queue YouTube to a Specific Time…

Ever have a long YouTube video that you want to share with others, but the good part is at the end? Well here is a nice little fix for you.

Since I gave my iPad the boot last week, I thought it was only fitting to demonstrate this technique with a Blendtec video of an iPad getting bent in half, shoved in an industrial blender, and pulverized into a powder.

The link for the video usually looks like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAl28d6tbko

If you click that link, you will end up watching entire 1 minute and 40 second clip. It’s very entertaining and you should definitely watch it.

If you want to get straight to the good stuff, you would want to start the video at the 55 second mark. You can easily have YouTube do that for you by adding the following to the end of the link:

#t=0m55s

You can modify the 0 and the 55 to whatever you want. The final link will then look like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAl28d6tbko#t=0m55s

Bam! iPad demolished!

If you want to watch another cool video starring The Digitante In Action!, check out the video below. If it doesn’t show up, click here to watch it at the YouTube site.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/JC5Qyqy7Pyg&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b