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.