What is better than this?

Make your own lava lamps

2012-01-29T13:59:00.001-05:00

What you need:

- Clear bottles (we used old Gatorade bottles)
- Canola Oil
- Tap water
- Food coloring
- Alka Seltzer tablets
- A flashlight

Fill the bottle 1/4 full of water and the rest of the way with Canola oil. (leave about 1" at the top)

Place 5-8 drops of water based food coloring in the bottle and let them settle to the bottom.

Drop in an Alka Seltzer tablet, close the bottle and place your flashlight below and enjoy!

Most amazing rescue picture I've ever seen

2012-01-21T11:21:00.000-05:00

Dramatic rescue Firefighters rescue a family from a car dangling over a bridge after a fiery crash, Jan. 12, on Highway 101 near Buellton, Calif. The accident claimed the life of a truck driver.

A team of Navy Seabees happened to be passing by the scene, and the fire crew used a Seabees heavy forklift to stabilize the dangling car. A mother and her two daughters were taken to the hospital.

Mike Eliason / Santa Barbara News

A Little Boy and His Dog

2012-01-17T18:14:00.002-05:00

Where was I that day? (Using ifft, that's where)

2012-01-09T16:53:00.000-05:00

In my business, we track everything. I mean everything. After 40 years of history, we know how many calls to it takes on average to secure a new client.

Knowing this is step 1, creating a business plan to achieve your goals is step 2, and tracking it, well.. that's a pain in the you know what. Until today.

Enter ifttt, prounounced like "lift" with no "l", it is an acronym for If This Then That. When you use ifttt you write a "recipe" of tasks that follow: If this, then that.

For example, I read Twitter on the web, my iphone, my ipad, on the go etc. When I find a tweet interesting I would decide to either email it to myself, save it to instapaper, favorite it on twitter, or bookmark the article. A hot mess. Enter ifttt: I connected it to twitter and wrote this recipe:

If I favorite a tweet
Save it to Evernote
Email me the tweet

I also wrote a recipe to remind me to wear boots to work if it's going to snow tomorrow:

If it's going to snow tomorrow in zip code 18040
Text me to "snow's a comin', wear your boots"

You can write recipes using many services, stocks, weather, phone call, twitter, facebook, foursquare, and a ton more... but today I'm solving the question: Where was I that day?

Back to work. We use salesforce.com to track our calls - so at the end of the day or end of the week, each rep needs to go into SFDC and enter them. Most importantly, they need to actually remember who they saw and when they saw them. Needless to say - after a crazy day/week, it's not easy to remember.

The reps usually rely on memory, or an entry into their calendar, or... napkins? This is where iffft can help: Create a foursquare account and connect it to your google calendar. When you check in, it is forwarded to your google calendar (viewable on your smartphone or online), and time stamped. It looks like this:

Are you using ifttt? I'd love to hear your recipes.

Kickoff hits the upright!! (video)

2012-01-08T16:49:00.002-05:00

iOS multitasking

2012-01-07T14:54:00.000-05:00

Fraser Spears has published two posts detailing how multitasking and iOS works.

Most people (including myself believe)

All those apps in the multitasking bar on your iOS device are currently active and slowing it down, filling the device's memory or using up your battery. To maximise performance and battery life, you should kill them all manually.

Fraser summarizes by saying

Put simply: you do not have to manage background tasks on iOS. The system handles almost every case for you and well written audio, GPS, VOIP, Newsstand and accessory apps will handle the rest.

Here's my personal experience: On my iPad 1 the memory management is terrible. After using my typical 8 or so apps for about 30 minutes I see a noticable slowdown in processor speed and memory. I get a lot of crashes when using Twitter and Flipboard. To combat this, I purchased an app called System Activity Monitor, which in part kills all open apps and frees memory. If iOS perfectly manages the backgrounding of apps and memory why is this happening to me and why does System Activity Monitor help so much?

Fraser summarizes his most recent post by writing:

If I can summarise my point: killing apps manually is fine as a troubleshooting step but it shouldn't be part of your daily routine.

Well, I summarize by writing that if I wait until the memory usage is visibly sluggish and then kill the apps by double clicking the home screen and then cleaning the rest of memory with System Activity Monitor, the device returns to it's perfectly usable state.

In this picture I have 16 "open" or "recently used" apps in the background and the phone is noticeably sluggish and I launch System Activity Monitor. Note the Free Runtime Memory when these apps are "naturally backgrounded".

The apps are:

Air Video
Messages
Twitter
Instagram
Diptic
Photos
Mail
Music
Camera+
Camera
VirtualWallet
Phone
Google
Facebook
Calendar

In this shot, after about 10 seconds System Activity Monitor has done it's thing and freed up about 300+ MB of space. Back to normal.

What say you? Why is my experience so different from Fraser's?

Chopstick Instructions

2011-12-11T19:54:00.001-05:00

The history of the universe displayed in one year

2011-11-30T18:13:00.001-05:00

This really puts things into perspective for me. Let's take care of our natural resources.

Type just like a hacker in the movies

2011-11-27T07:20:00.001-05:00

http://hackertyper.com/

I feel like I'm in CTU.

Average worker pay vs. average CEO pay

2011-11-26T09:04:00.001-05:00

Post-it Note

2011-11-25T20:54:00.001-05:00

Thank me later.

What does MT mean in a tweet?

2011-11-13T12:35:00.001-05:00

Technical Twitter abbreviations:

MT = Modified tweet. This means the tweet you're looking at is a paraphrase of a tweet originally written by someone else.
RT = Retweet. The tweet you're looking at was forwarded to you by another user.
DM = Direct message. A direct-message is a message only you and the person who sent it can read. IMPORTANT: To DM someone all you need to type is D username message.
PRT = Partial retweet. The tweet you're looking at is the truncated version of someone else's tweet.
HT = Hat tip. This is a way of attributing a link to another Twitter user.
CC = Carbon-copy. Works the same way as email.

11-11-11 11:11:11

2011-11-11T11:11:00.001-05:00

Sportsmanship

2011-11-07T18:24:00.001-05:00

This, NO THAT. Wait.

2011-10-31T18:28:00.001-04:00

October Snow Pictures

2011-10-31T13:01:00.000-04:00

All three taken with Olympus E500 with Sigma 2.8 150mm macro lens in my front yard.

Ron Wayne's $2.6 Billion Mistake

2011-10-30T11:20:00.001-04:00

Is this snowfall a record?

2011-10-29T13:25:00.000-04:00

I've been seeing lots of people post about this early snowfall, and thought I would do a little homework.

Here are the historical snowfall amounts by month according to weatherbase.com's Bethlehem PA history

Looks like the average snowfall in October is: Zero.

According to The Weather Channel:

Pre-Halloween snows are a rarity in the Northeast but they have occurred before. One of the earliest events on record occurred with a coastal storm on October 3-4, 1987, when close to 2 feet of snow fell in portions of the Catskills and Vermont’s Green Mountains. Residents of Washington D.C., Philadelphia, New York and Boston saw one of their earliest snowfalls on October 10-11, 1979 when a small low pressure system and just enough cold air blanketed parts of the major metropolitan areas with a trace to a couple inches of snow.

The difference 90 minutes makes: Snow Pictures!

2011-10-29T11:55:00.001-04:00

People Are Awesome

2011-10-22T19:50:00.002-04:00

People Are Awesome 2011 - Streaming

CSI for real: No more blurry photographs

2011-10-11T06:50:00.001-04:00

Photoset: A Red-tailed Hawk eats a Chipmunk

2011-10-10T18:33:00.001-04:00

During a visit to Hawk Mountain this weekend, we saw this spectacular site:

Taken with Olympus E500 with 150mm Sigma 2.8 lens with 1.4x converter.

No Siri? It's ok - your iPhone already has voice commands!

2011-10-10T13:31:00.000-04:00

I won't be upgrading to the iPhone 4S because I'm in a 2 year contract already - but that means missing out on all the cool features of the 4S, the biggest one being Siri.

Don't fret - you probably didn't even know that you already HAVE a voice control in your current iPhone. It's simply called "Voice Control", and here's what it can do.

Use Voice Control: Press and hold the Home button until the Voice Control screen appears and you hear a beep. You can also press and hold the center button on the iPhone earphones.

Call someone in contacts Say “call” or “dial,” then say the name of the person. If the person has more than one phone number, you can add “home” or “mobile,” for example.

Make a FaceTime call to someone in contacts (iPhone 4) Say “FaceTime,” then say the name of the person. If the person has more than one phone number, you can add “home” or “mobile,” for example.

Dial a number Say “call” or “dial,” then say the number.

Control music playback Say “play” or “play music.” To pause, say “pause” or “pause music.” You can also say “next song” or “previous song.”

Play an album, artist, or playlist Say “play,” then say “album,” “artist,” or “playlist” and the name.

Shuffle the current playlist Say “shuffle.”

Find out more about the currently playing song Say “what’s playing,” “what song is this,” “who sings this song,” or “who is this song by.”

Use Genius to play similar songs Say “Genius,” “play more like this,” or “play more songs like this.”

Find out the current time Say “what time is it?” or “what is the time?”

Cancel Voice Control Say “cancel” or “stop.” You may enjoy reading a blog that I like - called Paul's iPad, he has great content and a topical article on Siri on the iPad2 here.

The 4 best features of iOS5 (Video 1:25)

2011-10-08T11:23:00.000-04:00

Hey all - I made a quick video of the best features in iOS5. Enjoy.

Somewhere in Stillwater NJ

2011-10-06T13:50:00.001-04:00