Google, to celebrate Pac-Man’s 30th anniversary on May 21st, released an internet version of….what else but…… Pac-Man! You can play it right from your own computer without a roll of quarters! What a Frugal Tech’s dream! Top of your coffee and go have fun at Google by clicking to Google Pac-Man
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Tags: google, on-line gaming, pac-man
Need a cheap way to see if your broadband provider is ripping you off with service or being honest? There are many free tools on the market that will let you do just that. In a nutshell, these tools will, via your browser, let you check the speed at which your provider is sending you information from the internet (your download speed), and the speed at which you can send information to the internet (your upload speed).
One of the best seems to be from the FCC. Their Consumer Broadband Test site is powered by Ookla, but, it feels a bit easier to use. All you do is click to their site, and for free (love that word!) a test runs and reports back if you are really getting what you paid for. There are other services that will do the same thing, and Broadband DSL Reports lists hundreds of them by country in case you want to do some compare tests. We did and the FCC site test powered by Ookla was in the same range as other tests we tried.
So, keep RCN, Comcast, Verizon honest and do a simple test. You might find you need to have a conversation with your provider to insure you get exactly what you paid for; now that’s a value the Frugal Tech loves.
Tags: broadband, cable, Frugal Tech, internet, speed test
Have you ever had a program, document, presentation or web page on your screen you needed to show someone but you needed to describe to them something about the page in words or maybe by circling parts of the page to tell them? Ever found that frustratingly difficult to do between trying to screen capture part of your screen then paste a .jpg into Open Office, Google Docs or MS Powerpoint? I know we have here at Beck’s Cafe. But now there’s a tool called Jing that makes this process crazy easy to do.
Jing let’s you capture your screen then paste it or save it and then send the URL of it, to anyone. You can annotate your screen by drawing lines, arrows or highlighting. You can narrate your screen by recording your voice describing what you want people to see. We’ve been using Jing here at Beck’s Cafe both on MS Vista and Windows XP machines this whole week and it’s worked wonderfully. We’ ve captured web pages, and parts of other documents, drawn lines and arrows, narrated what we wanted (some would say yipped orders – ouch!) In every case Jing has made our communication easy.
What are some uses for Jing? They list the following ideas though we are sure once you use it you’ll have a bunch of your own:
- Collaborate on design projects
- Share a snapshot of a photo or document
- Narrate your vacation (or new baby!) photos
- Show the results of a software bug in action
- Comment verbally on homework (what a great tool for on-line education!)
And of course, as the Frugal Tech LOVES a good value, Jing falls square into that realm. Jing has a nicely featured free version AND a pro version with more capability. We’d recommend Jing and suggest you give it a whirl too and help your communication shine! Get your copy of Jing at this link: Jing Project
By now you know the Frugal Tech loves a value! She’s not cheap but she has to spend her dollars around wisely. So what if you are among those souls who actually uses their phone for a phone and yet you know you’d like to do a bit more with it? Well have no fear for SMS, Short Message Service, or texting, and MMS, Multimedia Messaging Service, are here!
Unbeknowst to most of us, even the dumbest of phones is smart at the computer level smart (see our previous post on Sproxil for a nice example). With technology shrinking and packing ever more circuits closer and close together, even the most basic of phones has more capability than most of us would otherwise imagine. The technology of SMS/MMS is one way to access this technology. They alone allow you to communicate with a myriad of internet services to help you do what you need to do without the cost of a smart phone.
One site with two excellent tutorials on this is makeuseof.com They have written two tutorials that you’ll find handy to teach your old phone some new tricks:
- How to Make Your Mobile Phone Smarter with SMS/MMS Part 1
- How to Make Your Mobile Phone Smarter wit SMS/MMS Part 2
Great reading and good tips to make your technology more frugal today!
Slideshare is a free service that claims to allow users to share any “Powerpoint, word documents and PDF portfolios with our without voiceover”. And sure enough it is! We’ve been testing Slideshare for the past 3 months here at Beck’s Cafe and it works terrific. As advertised, you can upload either Microsoft Powerpoint presentations or Adobe PDF files (we’ve not tried MS Word yet) and share with whomever you like! This is a tremendous boon to those of us who need to share presentations with others to cut down on travel or to say something in Powerpoint that would be much harder to communicate with via a simple email.
The process is straightforward. You set up an account (for free with small charges for premium services), fill out a profile for yourself (or not, it’s optional) and upload your files. From there you simply give someone the link on Slideshare to your uploaded presentation and your good to go! Here are some examples:
- A presentation on Transgender Care from The University of California:
- How to Make Cupcakes
- Totally Cute Overload Presentation
What you essentially have is a low cost broadcast platform and for the Frugal Tech that’s an awesome tool for all kinds of educational and fun things. You could use it to
- Broadcast work presentations to other teams in your building or in other locations.
- Use it to put up technical or other information then send the link via email to someone then talk them through the presentation (important if your presentation is big or attachments are blocked)
- Use it to store your presentation to bring up at a symposium or other talk you do – you don’t have to bring the presentation with you then
Another nifty point is that Slideshare then lets you take the material and connect it to the world via Twitter, WordPress, Facebook, Buzz, or Blogger. You can also embed the presentation in a blog post or other web site to just show it from your site vs. having someone follow the link back to your presentation at Slideshare. Finally you could do a voice over on your presentation and then, when someone sees your presentation there is a voiceover that essentially turns it into a webinar! Now that is cool!
So go get frugal with your tech by getting your own account at Slideshare and share your presentations with the world!
We had high expectations for the Jupiter Jack. It’s promise was to turn your car radio radio into a speakerphone for your cell phone and it promised to do it for $20. $20 for a full stereo speakerphone is a frugal tech’s dream so we scoffed up the cheap device, so nicely pitched by the now deceased star pitchman, Billy Mays.
Using it was a snap as advertised. Simply unpackage it, plug it into the headphone jack on your cell phone, then tune your radio to 99.3Fm and voila! Hands free, high fidelity driving. While driving while using your mobile isn’t a terrific idea, hands free is preferred over using your handset certainly and Jupiter Jack promised a remarkable opportunity to make our chatting lives on our mobile easier.
We tested the Jupiter Jack first, from our Beck’s Cafe parking lot. It worked incredibly well. My Blackberry Curve on Verizon Wireless was clear sounding and static free. The receiver caller in our tests had a Samsung clam shell type phone on Verizon Wireless. I had placed the phone down on the passenger seat, turned on my phone then tuned in 99.3 and Jupiter Jack supplied the link to our car stereo to create a clear stereo sound on my receiving calls and clear sounding calls on the sending side. It was that easy.
But before we continued our test we noticed some annoyances. The Jupiter Jack seemed to require us to play around too much with the radio and phone so that we were listening to the radio, then getting a call, then shifting back to 99.3. Easy enough of course but it felt awkward and just as much a distraction while driving as any other method. But for $20 whose to argue?
We then gave it a road test and this is where Jupiter Jack failed for us. We were driving down a major highway in the Boston Area and the Jupiter Jack transmission was garbled and static filled on the sending end and the receiving end. Our call receiving tester was using a Blackberry Curve on Verizon Wireless as well, so we could reasonably limit the variables in our testing. Once we did the math of having to muck around tuning in channels when receiving a call plus poor call reception and the Jupiter Jack was less a Frugal Tech’s dream and more a hassle to use; plus we’re out $20. Jupiter Jack is a nifty idea but for The Frugal Tech an idea can’t just be cheap it has to work well; it has to be a good value for the consumer. Jupiter Jack, unfortunately, is not. You can read more reviews of Jupiter Jack at Amazon and at Does The Product Work.
If anyone has upgraded to WordPress 2.9 and experiencing the following weird behavior:
- Trackbacks not working
- Scheduled posts not posting and reporting “missed schedule”
Then you likely have one of these three errors:
- Could not be converted to UTF-8 / WordPress should cache failed feed fetches so as to avoid overloading feed sources
- Fatal error: Call to undefined method WP_Error::__destruct()
- Cron stopped working with standard configuration
There’s three patches that can be easily applied to fix your hair pulling issues in a jiffy. You can find them over at Semi-Logical under the post: WP 2.9 three bugs, and how to fix them.
You may also find fixes at this wordpress.org/forums support post. Ther are three or more pages of discussions and justifiable complaints but the fixes are there: 2.9 Schedule Posts “missed”
The errors were frustrating, no question about that. But, the wordpress community responded amazingly. The problem happened and in 24 hours there was a fix. Here at Beck’s Cafe we should have waited a bit till WP 2.9.1 to upgrade but we upgraded the cafe to 2.9; lesson learned on first run software. WordPress is open source software, free to download, has a great support community and rocks as a CMS for developing web sites and for blogs. But, as open source, sometimes things get through the development community that shouldn’t. None-the-less, it’s a testimony to the commitment by the wordpress community that things have been tidied up as fast as they have. Now, I definitely need a second cup of coffee 
WOOT.com does one thing and one thing only – gives you dirt cheap prices on a limited available hot item, alot of times a techie item, once per day. And it happens at exactly 11:59PM Central time (U.S.). At that time, and only at that time, not a minute sooner nor a minute later, one hot item is placed up for sale at some insanely low price. Once the item is sold out, that’s it. Nutin’ more until 11:59PM when a new item is trotted out.
It’s a fun and different concept and one in which you might get yourself something fun for dirt cheap; like your own roomba room cleaning robot! It’s about 12:30PM now, so if whatever they are selling today is gone, you’ve got plenty of time to see what’s next for sale at Woot.com
Well, I wouldn’t have believed it frankly unless I had tried it out here at Beck’s Cafe in our kitchen, but, the George Foreman Grill, model GR20B is amazing. I mean this is the real deal in grill magic! And, I promise, I am not getting paid to write this.
We got the little wonder here at Beck’s Cafe for $10.00 It was on sale and there was an instant rebate. How can you go wrong? So shuffling it back to the Cafe we unpacked the little gadget and started grilling away. Unpacking it was a snap; just open the box, flap it down on your counter and give the grille a quick clean and you are ready for grilling magic. The package also includes two small trays that are oblong in shape and two spatulas. The trays are to catch the fat that rolls off what you are cooking on your grill. And catch fat they do since the George Foreman Grill actually sits at an angle with the back section up a couple of inches and the fat rolls off what your grilling into the oblong trays. The spatulas are shaped so you can easily scrape drippings or other food matter off the grill without harming the grill’s teflon coated surface. Finally, George nicely provided a little booklet on how to use his grill and that booklet has a page on approximate times to grill your food.
The grill has a clam shell type design and has a top and bottom grill and both are heated when you plug the grill in. Note, there is no on/off switch, you just plug your grill in to start it and unplug to stop. Because both the top and bottom have grills that are heated, your food is compressed slightly and grilled on both sides simultaneously. You lay your slab of meat on the grill, pull down the top of the grill and presto. The design of the George Foreman Grill is similar to an electric waffle maker if you’ve ever seen one of those.
We first tried to grill up salmon fillets. The handy user guide/mini-cookbook notes that salmon filets take about 4 1/2 minutes to grill up to 170 F.It took a little longer than that, about 5 minutes, and they tasted great. Moist and juicy with a nicely grilled exterior to them. And, a bonus, after chilled, the salmon filets tasted terrific cold. Oh and you know how fish can make your home or cafe smell icky? Not with the George Foreman Grill. The smell of the grilled salmon was intoxicating!
Next up for our palate was boneless chicken breast, those grilled to perfection in about 9 min to 10 min. The grill’s surface is large enough to acomodate two nice sized chicken breasts. We tried steaks: yummie. We tried hamburgers too; they grilled great but HOLY COW whatalotta fat in the tray after. We had super lean hamburg but the George Foremen Grill showed us that even lean hamburg is a big mound of fat.
At Beck’s Cafe, we grill alot now with the George Foreman Grill. The price is right for one now, and the food is delicious after. Oh and one last thing. We’ve heard the George Foreman Grill newer models are more bells and whistles and not quite as handy to use. If you’ve got a hankering to grill, it might be best to scarf up one of the GR20B models if you can find one.
Way back in July 2006 we ran a story on ZDNet’s free on-line seminars, “At The Whiteboard“. Our post was entitled, “Good Tech Learnin’ for Free” and we weren’t kidding. It was both good and free and is still running today for some quick understanding of key technologies.
Since then a number of other free on-line webinars has popped up and GuruTube is another great one. Like ZDNet’s “At the Whiteboard”, GuruTube features knowledgeable and sometimes famous speakers on a variety of interesting and timely topics. While ZDNet tends to focus on technology, GuruTube focuses primarily on business and marketing. The webinars are 4 to 8 minutes in length and chock full of information you can use right away. A helpful bump in your knowledge. And of course, the Frugal Tech found them to be a nice value since she found them to be free and to be of good quality. A great combination. Go grab a nice iced mocha cappucino and have a look for yourself at GuruTube.
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