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…

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

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

Friday Night Links (4/16/2010)…

I’m teetering on the edge of a food coma after filling up on heavy Italian food at Buca di Beppo. Whatever! I’m still bringing you two food links tonight in the FNL. Get ready to be hungry.

• Make Your Own Sriracha – This is the sauce of the gods. Instead of being fiery hot just for the sake of being fiery hot, Sriracha sauce adds some fantastic garlic flavoring. If you want to tweak it even further you can add your own flavors. Personally, I’m thinking some sesame oil might be great.
• Cool Stuff – If that description sounds like it is generic and non-specific, then you obviously haven’t clicked on the link yet. I linked directly to the gadget section, but there are some amazing things in the other sections. How about these hotel rooms?
• Earthquake Notification – Live in a subduction zone? Not sure what subduction means? Well, if you live on the West Coast or along the Mississippi River, there’s a chance you are at risk of encountering an earthquake. The US Geological Survey actually has a text message or email notification service so you will know if an earthquake hits your area. It requires an email address, but you can actually have an email sent to your phone via text message by following the instructions at this link.
• Food Porn – Don’t let the name scare you: this link is safe for work. It is just ridiculously awesome looking (and tasting, I’m sure) food laid out in all its glory for you to lust over. On recommendation of my wife and regular Digitante commenter Jenny, we clicked through for about 15 minutes and our living room was filled with constant ‘Ooo’s and ‘Ahh’s. See? It’s sounding more and more like porn now, isn’t it. Do yourself a favor and click though the pictures. You won’t regret it.

Friday Night Links (4/2/2010)…

Man, it is getting really tough to keep up here with everything I have going on. I’m not slowing down anytime soon though and actually my Tuesdays just opened up immensely. But who cares about Tuesday? What I care about is Good Friday Night Links!

• Crazy Airports – Ever thought about building an island that is 4 square miles in the middle of a harbor so you can have an airport? Why not? Everybody’s doing it. Everybody is also landing on the beach, driving their cars across the runway, and creating massive solar arrays to power their airport. Sounds like you have some catching up to do. Regardless, the pictures are pretty amazing and I highly recommend you check out the island airports on Google Maps satellite view. Here is one to get you started.
• Homemade Things That Should Not Be Homemade – If you know me, would it shock you if I said my brother and I have actually made very similar inventions in our lives? I’m sure it wouldn’t. But don’t let me yammer at you. You need to check out the pictures. My favorite: the scaffolding. Also, be on the look out for the thing. Digitante dollars to the person who finds it first and leaves a comment about it.
• Beet Hummus – My most popular posts in FNL has by far been the food postings. You’ll notice Jenny’s comments strewn about in each food post. Well, here is another one for you. I saw the color of that hummus and knew I had to have it. Gorgeous. Wonderful – now I’m hungry.
• Clothes Folding Robot – This robot is programmed to fold clothes, but he has never folded THESE particular clothes before. He analyzes the shape, size, which direction it hangs, and then folds it properly. Good luck trying that technique out on my dress shirt that sat at the bottom of a pile for a week. Even my iron on full blast can’t help that shirt. Here is a direct link in case you can’t see the video below.

  http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/gy5g33S0Gzo&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b

Ignite Indianapolis 2010…

Just to recap from last night because I’m lazy:

I attended an event called Ignite Indianapolis. The premise is there is a docket of speakers who are equipped with a Powerpoint presentation and the subject can be whatever they want. The catch is, each slide shows for exactly 15 seconds and there are 20 slides, so the full presentation is 5 minutes (it is also referred to as Pecha Kucha). Timing and pace are everything: some presenters hit their next point exactly as the slide flipped, others rushed through their thought as slides kept turning despite their fumbling of words, and others had speeches with long pauses waiting for the next slide to appear. It’s amazing how long and short the same 15 seconds can feel. I will cover all the presentations with some critiques tomorrow.

Hey! What do you know? Here are the critiques and comments in order of appearance in the program:

1. Ken Christie, President, The 543 Group – He used to work for Disney as an “Imagineer.” What that means is he came up with all the cool rides and displays you see when you go to Disney World. Due to the format, I didn’t get to delve into what he invented and worked on which would have been pretty awesome, I would imagine. Imagineer? Anyway, he went through the process for being creative and it was pretty cool to see something as off-the-cuff as being creative has a structure to it.
2. Dustin Wortman, Student, Ivy Tech – Dustin was, mostly by self-admission, an Anime nerd. I’m not really into Anime, but he did a nice job of covering information on Anime, Manga, and Hentai. Fun fact: Hentai literally translates to ‘pervert.’ Alright then. If you don’t know why that significant, I would recommend NOT Googling it at work.
3. Ann Edwards, Design Strategist, Point Brake – Earlier today I read and commented on Ann’s blog. She certainly looked nervous but her statistics that she presented were pretty amazing. I can’t remember them off the top of my head, but they involved massive exposure gains by companies when they did simple redesigns of product packaging and other small changes with huge impact. Maybe Ann will swing by and post some stats or a link to her presentation.
4. Joe Wilkert, GM & Publisher, O’Reilly Media – I was disappointed by this one. The title was ‘iPad: Important or Irrelevant’ but I’m not sure why the term irrelevant was even included in the title. The entire presentation was a big, fat iPad love fest. I think it’s save to say Joe has an iPad on order with Apple.
5. Stacie Porter-Bilger, CEO, Hoosier Academy – I was extremely interested in this one because Hoosier Academy is a school where the students only go to the physical school grounds once a week. The rest of the time, they are completing homework online. It felt very relevant to me. Having a pair of 1-year olds who are growing up quickly will do that to a person.
6. Daniel Poynter, Founder, GNIC.org – Daniel is in the midst of an experiment (or art project, as he calls it) where he found a person and asked them, “Who is the awesomest person you know?” He then went to the person that was awesome and asked them the same question. Additionally, he is recording all the conversations he has along the way. There were some very interesting responses in there.
7. Jason Moriber, Principal, Wise Elephant – This was far and away the most entertaining of all the presentations. Jason was bounding around the stage, waving his hands, and generally being a complete lunatic. His slides were hand drawn on a whiteboard and very clearly described what he was talking about. The same speech given orally only would have been a snooze-fest, but the active, visual way Jason presented created a huge impact in my brain.
8. Kevin Makice, PhD Candidate, IU – The thing that I loved most about Kevin’s presentation was his cadence. He didn’t match what he was saying to each slide, but it didn’t matter because he was making points that were already impressed on your brain by prior slides. Example: He spend the first 5 slides talking about robots in general and in the meantime slides flashed up with phrases on them. On the sixth slide, he rehashed those five phrases. I felt prepared and I also felt like it was ingenious.
9. Bob Mattax, Developer, Developer Town – Alright, when a presentation is called ‘Why Houses?’ and the guy works for a company called Developer Town, I just assumed he is a real estate guy. Who cares? Wow, was I taken for a loop when I found that he actually builds little “sheds” for software developers. Here’s how it works: you have these little plug-in-able houses on wheels. They have a light on the outside that indicates the occupant is busy, customized paint and features, and windows so you can see in your coworkers house. These little houses are supposed to be placed in a warehouse which is far less costly than an office cube-farm. Outgrow your warehouse? Unplug, wheel them in a truck, take them to a larger warehouse, and plug them back in. Amazing concept.
10. Brian Shafer, Co-owner, Walnut Valley Bison – This presentation made me hungry – both for a nice bison burger and for a tour of the bison farm. The visuals in this presentation were stunning: piles of bison skulls 30 feet high and 2,200 lb beasts staring down the camera. Not to mention, I would have never expected a presentation at this sort of even geared toward bison.
11. Dan Miller, Owner, VCS Indy – This presentation probably was struggling the most for timing and content. Dan under-estimated the amount of time each slide was going to take, relative to his speech and was playing catch up the whole time, even skipping parts that he couldn’t get to in time. As for content, I find computer viruses to be a quasi-interesting subject, however, I’m not sure this was the crowd for it. I’m guessing half the crowd was against him because they were Apple fanboys to begin with. In the end, no solutions were offered – just information – which made the whole thing feel kind of pointless. Dan, if you point out a problem, you HAVE to offer a solution.
12. Doug Karr, CEO, DK New Media – While other presentations may have been more interesting, informative, or entertaining, Doug’s resonated with me the most. I’ve worked in corporate America for nearly 10 years and there is nothing I hate worse than meetings. They keeping you from doing what you need to do, you get more work while you are there, and the people running them have no idea what they are doing until they take your idea and use it as their own. Wow, so frustrating. Meet or die? I’d rather die.

If anyone has a link to all the presentations, I would love to see that in the comments. Additionally, if you were a presenter, let me know how you feel about my critiques! And don’t worry, I plan on presenting at the next Ignite Indianapolis so I may rue the day I ever laid into these guys…

Friday Night Links (3/19/2010)…

I worked with some spectacular clients this week and got some of their big computer issues put to rest. If you have any computer issues, be sure to contact me from the About The Digitante page. Otherwise, you can just move on to the linkiness to follow:

• Solitary Man in Detroit – When most people talk about living off the grid, it most involves government conspiracies and bunkers in Montana. But if you are Glendale Stewart, all you really need is an RV and a tax auction property in Detroit. He built a little fence, has a bicycle-powered battery that lights his RV, and a bucket under the toilet outlet that gets transported to the sewer when it gets full. He got laid off a few years back and his current situation arose out of necessity. It’s a crazy story, but it certainly points out the resourcefulness of some people out there in the world.
• Spinach Vitamin Boost – Ever wonder if the amount of vitamins in spinach and other greens increases as it gets exposed to light? Me neither. Fortunately, some nerdy scientist guy did and he found that green leafy stuff exposed to supermarket-like conditions actually increases its vitamin content. Buy the older stuff!
• Cubicle Fish – Do you get lonely at work in your cubicle? I know I do. ‘Maybe I need a fish!’ you think to yourself. But the big question is what kind of fish do you get to keep your company? My buddies at Lifehacker tackled this and all the logistics that go along with it: tank, supplies, and of course, the fish.
• Parallel Parking Tutorial – It seems like either people know how to parallel park or they just plain don’t. If you fall in the don’t camp, there are a some instructions and some videos that can teach you how to parallel park like an expert. If you are ready to graduate to All-Pro level, check out the video below to learn the advanced techniques. Click here if it doesn’t show up for you.
  http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/P7Eqn_BiQus&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b

Friday Night Links (3/12/2010)…

I’ve got a big 4 mile run tomorrow bright and early. It’s the St. Patty’s Day Run and I am actually shocked to realize that St. Patrick’s Day is this week. Wow, time is flying by. Time for the links!

• Edmonton Water Usage (http://thedig.in/ce) – This one is pretty crazy: It’s a consumption map of the water supply for Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The green line is on the day before the Olympic Gold Medal game between the US and Canada and the blue line is the day of the game. That, my friends, is a lot of peeing Canadians. It is really amazing to see graphs like this, showing the pull things like sporting events have on our lives. You know a bunch of people are watching TV, but you don’t really think about how it affects other things like water consumption.
  

  Image from http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/03/chart-of-the-day-3.php

• Visualize the Internet (http://thedig.in/cf) – The internet has come a long ways since Al Gore invented it. The BBC has a nice little move/animation showing the internet spreading like wild fires across the globe. I would be interesting to see a similar animation for other tech like cars, TVs, and electricity. Let me know if you know where to find something like that.
• Milk Origins (http://thedig.in/cg) – If you are concerned about where your food comes from, you should definitely check out this link. You can find out, using the code on your carton of milk, exactly where it came from. This is helpful in finding milk that is produced near by, made by reputable farms, and most importantly, fresh when you get it. Try it out and see how long of a trip your milk takes.
• Complete Popular Science Archives (http://thedig.in/ch) – Alright, I’m a super geek, but anyone who’s even remotely interested in science and technology in general should head over to Popular Science and browse their archive of 137 years of magazines. They even left the period advertisements in there.

Friday Night Links (3/5/2010)…

Friday, Friday, FRIDAY…

The weekend is here and I’ve got some good plans: sis-in-law’s birthday dinner, moving a friend, fixing a computer, making USB flash drives filled with goodies, and a couple other odds and ends. But for now, I’ve got some links.

• Homemade Granola Bars (http://thedig.in/c3) – Man I love granola bars. I will point out that I love crunchy ones, but if someone happened to make these and drop them off at my house, I would definitely eat them and sing your praises. If you didn’t quite get what I said there, “Bring me granola bars.” Clear?
• iPod Auction (http://thedig.in/c4) – Pictures speak volumes. I’m heading over there to put up my ‘$52 reward’ sign tomorrow. Hopefully nobody is smart enough to put up a $53 sign. That would just be CRAZY.
• Survive a Tsunami (http://thedig.in/c5) – After concerns about tsunamis from the recent Chilean earthquake, I saw this guide from the US Geological Survey that has a ton of pictures, charts, stories, and tips on how to survive a tsunami. I think the amazing thing is how low and how high the water actually goes. Additionally, the pictures of the before and after are pretty scary as well. Below is my favorite chart.
  

  Image from USGS website: http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/c1187/images/fig17.jpg