Stay tuned.
Mosquito warfare.
Stay tuned.
Category: Gadgets
Speed bump.
Today we had our broadband upgraded. We used to have download speeds around 2 Mbps and upload speeds of about 1/4 of that. Which we perceived to be getting progressively slower. Today my phone logged these speeds:
Not too shabby. I used ookla’s free speedtest app on my iphone to measure.
To see how much faster I can now upload a photo to my blog, I picked this one from my Paris trip.
Wow. That upload was very zippy! This is a shot along the Seine. The Left Bank is, well, on the left. Île de la Cité is to the right. The bridge in the foreground is Petit Pont, and Pont San Michel beyond it. It was such a lovely fall day. See, I’ve almost forgotten about yesterday’s Super Bowl loss……
Stained glass trilogy.
I’ve enjoyed playing with the iPhone app called Brushstroke. It’s a pretty versatile app for adding water-color / oil painting effect to photos.
These are three shots I took in different cathedrals on my birthday trip to France, with a little post-processing with Brushstroke.
Notre Dame. Paris:
Cathedral Notre-Dame de Chartres. Chartres:
Sainte-Chapelle. Paris:
Yet another little luxury.
Monte and I are thankful for many things – very fortunate and blessed.
Annddd, with that being said… we indulged this Christmas in a 12V television & DVD player for the boat. Actually, each of us bought the other a TV and wallmount for the boat, heh heh 😀 That was worth a chuckle on Christmas morning. We picked the best of the two and returned the other. And today we went to the boat again so that Monte could finish up the wiring, and we brought a DVD to try when we fired everything up.
It works GREAT! I’m looking forward to trying it out while at anchor in our favorite cove.
A view from the penumbra.
Crazy weather here. It rained and poured this morning. Then we had an hour or two of sunny blue sky, which afforded a glimpse of the partial solar eclipse through a hastily-made pinhole camera.
Then the cloud bank rolled in again with rain. I’m glad mom had a chance to watch it, if only for a half hour or so.
Pretty cool.
The next solar eclipse will be on August 21, 2017. Mark your calendar!
Tuesday night Broadway.
We went to see War Horse tonight at the Bass Concert Hall. I was more taken by the intricate, life-sized horse puppets than the overall story. But, it was opening night, and was well done.
Tulip hexaptych.
I may have mentioned that I love tulips. 🙂 And, I’m always amazed at how much they continue to grow after I put them in a vase. I brought home a bunch of gorgeous light pink ones on Saturday. Then I proceeded to take a snapshot for the next six days to capture their growth day to day. Kinda cool.
A new find.
Whoa! I just discovered that my iphone camera app will take panoramas. Can you guess where I am for this momentous occasion?
There’s nothing better than homemade pasta.
Tonight Monte made pasta. I “helped” by hovering over the stove while he was making a light white wine sage cream sauce repeating how hungry I was.
Homemade pasta is nothing short of amazingly delicious. We have pasta roller and pasta cutter attachments for our KitchenAid mixer that make the prep pretty easy.
He used Mario Batali’s recipe for basic pasta dough. You can find a version of the recipe here. He made a smaller batch (3 eggs and 2.5c flour) and kneaded it for 10 mins, letting it rest for 30 mins before rolling & cutting. Here’s the finished product. We cut it fettuccine size. Yummmmmmmm
Imitation is the finest form of flattery.
We love to make homemade pizza at the house. Monte has longed to have a wood-fired pizza oven of our own. We opted out of one when we remodeled the kitchen a few years back. For Christmas this year I got him a Kettle Pizza kit for making pizza outdoors, on the grill. It had great reviews and seemed to be worth checking out.
We also love the pizza from our local Brick Oven pizza restaurant. We like to call it the second best pizza in town – next to ours. 🙂
There is one pizza they make that is fantastic and we have always wanted to try making it ourselves: the Tuscan Truffle.
So…tonight we fired up the kettle and gave it a go. And…. We NAILED IT!
Here is a shot if our first try in the kettle:
Tuscan Truffle pizza
The “sauce” is a mushroom pesto – made out of sautéed mushrooms, parmesan cheese and truffle oil puréed in a food processor. The toppings are prosciutto and mozzarella cheese (just a little, not much of either). It only took about 5 minutes in the kettle pizza oven. After removing, add arugula and grated asiago cheese on top to wilt / melt from the heat of the pizza. Drizzle a little more truffle oil on top and VOILA! Delicious.
Reverse.
Temperatures outside have dipped into the forties. The cold weather is now here. You know what that means. Switch from AC to Heat in the house. And [drumroll] time to reverse the ceiling fans!
But, which way, you ask? Conventional (aka google) wisdom says the blades turning Clockwise (when viewed from the floor) is what you want when you’ve got the heat on. Counter-clockwise when the AC is on.
Also, you should celebrate with a seasonally appropriate beverage. 🙂
Determined 12th (wo)man.
I ended up traveling to New York today. Unfortunately, the only flight I could make work had me in the air during Monday night football – Seahawks vs Rams.
I worked the technology angle to listen to the game while I was eroute: iPhone + NFL App + NFL Audiopass + airplane mode + inflight wifi + earphones = 🙂
The streaming would drop from time to time, but I followed most of the game.
Nerd alert.
I have only recently entered the realm of the hyper-connected, making the leap to an iPhone just a few months ago. In that time, I have run across a few apps that I find either mildly entertaining or incredibly useful – enough to install them and use regularly. Scrabble and Temple Run 2 fall into the former category. I thought I’d share one of the latter category with you today.
Monte and I joke about the “magic shopping list” that’s hung on the wall ever since Monte and I have been shacking up. Monte can write something on it, and it magically shows up a few days later. We also have a “magic laundry basket,” but that’s another story.
Anyway, upon recently running out of the nifty paper notepads that I use for the magic list, i thought… there must be an app for this. After a quick search online, I found a free one: GroceryIQ. I’ve successfully used it for 2 shopping trips so far. You can add items either by typing them in, or using a barcode scanner, or by voice recognition. The app has a database of brand items that you can choose from or just enter a new, generic item. The app also has coupons integrated, and also has some way of keeping track of item prices, but I haven’t figure out how to use those features. I’m just enamored with the virtual shopping list idea. I like that I can mark items that I buy regularly as “favorites” so when it comes time to make up the list, I can add the regulars easily. I also like the fact that you can order the categories that items show up in however you like…meaning that you can set your list up so that the order the items appear in your list is in the same order as you find them as you navigate the aisles of your particular grocery store (yeah, kind of geeky). But the best part is that multiple users can share the same list – independently adding items to the same grocery list. This meant that to render our magic list completely virtual, Monte would have to install it on his phone and give it the thumbs up (no small feat). He did…….and voila! The app passed the test. Check it out – they have an app for Android and iOS.
She’s baaaack!
Oh, the malaise of a Thursday… unceremoniously stuck between “Hump Day” and “TGIF.” Is there a motto for Thursdays?
Well my highlight for today was picking up Julie from the airport. She’s back for school – the semester starts in a few weeks. She plans to move in with a friend that she met last semester, so we’ll be empty nesters soon. Since she passed her RN exam over the summer, she’s official now and is hoping to work at a local hospital while she’s going to school. What a kid!
And, before I sign off… here is a link to a short (5-ish minutes) TED video a colleague sent me today. It has a 10 tips/shortcuts for using technology more efficiently. I knew about most of them but not all. The first one blew me away….who knew?
Happy post-humpday TGIF-eve!!
Sheila365 