Brad Enslen: Everything Else

New Life for My Old iPhone 3Gs

2012-05-10T08:48:00.000-05:00

As some may know I my current phone is an HP Pre 3 running webOS. While I like the phone it lacks one critical app: Amazon Kindle. My HP Touchpad has a Kindle app that works fine, but Kindle was never made for the Pre 3. My problem was I often like to read a few chapters in bed before retiring and to do this I need a backlit screen and I like something small and light weight that I can hold in

Switching from Android to webOS Cellphone

2012-03-03T15:33:00.000-06:00

The post office delivered the webOS HP Pre 3 phone I ordered today. This means that Monday I will visit my local ATT Wireless store and switch carriers and phones. I decided that trying a webOS phone was an itch that needed to be scratched lest it really bother me. The Pre 3 was never released in the USA, but the phone I bought was made for ATT and it's network, just never distributed. So I

My To Do List for this Weekend

2011-12-17T06:49:00.001-06:00

My to-do list for this weekend: 1. Bottle 6 (US) gallons of IPA. 2. Eat pancakes. 3. Pay bills. 4. Cuss quietly under my breath while doing #3 (above). 5. Do Christmas cards. 6. Formulate: a Big Plan. 7. Watch A Christmas Carol (the 1950's one with Alistair Sim) on DVD 8. Have Moose and Squirrel arrested. 9. Dust. 10. Save World. There, it is always good to have a list.

NYPD, NYC and the Press

2011-11-19T14:33:00.001-06:00

Media Can Avoid NYPD Arrest By Getting Press Pass They Can’t Get | Threat Level | Wired.com Freedoms erode away a little at a time. The Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD wants the Press to apply for permission first before they cover something. In a free society it does not work that way, the Press covers news wherever it happens. No permission needed in a public space. My question is: what is

Alan Simpson: "There is a tipping point coming"

2011-11-18T05:55:00.001-06:00

BBC News - Alan Simpson: 'There is a tipping point coming' (Video) This is well worth watching. Simpson is one of my favorite conservatives and he's a straight talker - telling us what we need to hear not what we want to hear. He's right. Watch the whole thing.

eMail on Android: Use the App Stupid

2011-11-02T06:35:00.001-05:00

Duh. Well it takes me awhile to figure these things out. The native email handling within the Android OS pretty much sucks for web based email accounts like Yahoo and Gmail. If you use those web mail accounts then use the apps from Market Place instead. With the apps you get a cleaner interface, and most important PUSH email. On the Yahoo mail app you get to see thumbnail photo attachments as

3 Search Engines that Protect Your Privacy

2011-10-31T10:14:00.000-05:00

Most people in the US use one of the following search engines: Google, Yahoo or Bing. All three do a great job at search, however all three also do a great job of tracking everything you and you family searches for. These search engines like it even better if you are logged into one of their services (email, blogging etc.) but they can also track yo via queries coming from your IP address and

HP and a Windows 8 Tablet

2011-10-29T11:18:00.003-05:00

News is out that HP will come out with a Windows 8 Touchpad in 2012. The problem with the Touchpad was one of releasing webOS a little bit too early, before it was ready, and the design of the tablet hardware which was too thick and too heavy. Probably also the price. Build quality was good. The OS was good but a little rough. HP's big failure with the Touchpad was not putting enough

Politicians Need to Actually Accomplish Something

2011-10-29T07:55:00.000-05:00

I hear campaign speeches from the President that masquerade as serious policy proposals. From the Republican Presidential debaters, I hear all manner of blather and nonsense. From Congress, no original ideas, no clue just sound bites that pander to the lowest common denominator. From all the interest groups: tea partiers, State Governors, local government, talk radio/TV types plus those from all

Reunited: HP Touchpad and Me

2011-10-28T12:00:00.000-05:00

I scored a 32GB HP Touchpad on a 'daily deal' type site for $240! The tablet has arrived and I've set it up as a 'guest tablet' in the living room for visitors to use. My previous 7 weeks experience with a Touchpad told me a couple of things: 1. the webOS operating system of the Touchpad is very good and it can run Flash and HTML 5 plus true multitask, 2. surfing the Web was in some ways a

Goodbye! Yahoo! News!

2011-10-07T05:37:00.002-05:00

After more than 10 years of being the first place I go to on the Web each morning, I've finally removed Yahoo News from the bookmarks on my startpage. Every time Yahoo redoes the page and makes it more Web 2.0ish it seems to work less well on my Chromium browser. (I'm not all that impressed with Chromium either but I have limited choices on Linux.) As an aside, there is a pattern here: Yahoo

Glass-Steagall and No Balls in Washington

2011-10-06T06:31:00.002-05:00

One of President Obama's biggest failures is not leading the charge to put the Glass-Steagall Act back in place separating investment banks from community banks. This isn't an anti-capitalist law. It served us well for 50 years and if you understand the concept of Original Sin and understand that Man is a greedy little SOB then you know exactly why such protections were imposed.

Kill Lists and Secret Panels

2011-10-06T06:00:00.000-05:00

Something about this makes me very uneasy: Secret Panel can Put Americans on "kill list". It strikes me as wrong in the same way that secret, warrant-less searches are wrong or that secret laws are wrong. I do not think the government can just arbitrarily suspend the Fifth Amendment when they find it inconvenient. This is not just a liberal concern, many conservatives are also uneasy about

Windows Mango vs iPhone 4S vs iOS

2011-10-05T18:32:00.000-05:00

So this summer I switched smartphones from an iPhone 3Gs to an HTC Evo 3D (Android phone) on Sprint. All said, I'm pretty happy with Sprint. However, while I don't hate it, I find myself less than thrilled with Android. It does everything, but it's human usability is pretty bad compared to iOS. Enough so that, most of the time I find myself mildly annoyed with Android. Since then Microsoft has

More Than Spending Cuts Needed for US

2011-10-03T11:14:00.000-05:00

Spending cuts alone will not solve the US economic problems. It is going to take a combination of spending cuts, economic growth and judiciously raising revenues in order to reduce the deficit. The trick is knowing when and where government should spend money and where to cut. Cutting everything is not a good approach. The problem is we do not know how to prioritize spending cuts and

Wikipedia: Zombies Ate Burns Harbor, Indiana

2011-10-01T13:18:00.000-05:00

The following was originally published by me on April 7, 2010: I got a message on the internets yesterday asking me if I had put the Great Zombie Coverup info about Burns Harbor, IN in Wikipedia. Unfortunately no I didn’t, but I am jealous as heck of whoever did! I am on record as saying I thought zombies might be lurking in Porter Co., but I was thinking Hebron (still think so,) not Burns

How Long Till China Buys Us?

2011-09-30T14:50:00.000-05:00

I heard this on a business show on NPR: "How long will it be before China quits loaning us money and starts buying up American companies? We are not quite there yet, but soon." It's going to start happening.

Where to go from Facebook?

2011-09-29T08:07:00.000-05:00

A lot of my friends on Facebook are upset by the changes in the timeline feed. I have to say I find the changes annoying too. So if Facebook annoys you enough where do you go: Google+, Twitter or Plurk? There is no guarantee that those social networks will not annoy you with changes in the future either. 1.) What I propose is that you start your own blog. Like this one. And post to it just