Scott Adcox

Grilled Cheese Academy – A real education

Financial Illiteracy Is Killing Us – Seriously, are there any non-profits focused on teaching financial literacy to kids? I will volunteer to help.

Tooth Regeneration Gel Could Replace Painful Fillings – Just ordered up some jelly beans to celebrate this news.

Facebook Places vs. Foursquare – Foursquare has a game/awards (kinda). The question with FB places is “why?”. Then again, you could probably ask that question about 90% of the content there.

Furman’s FIRST Running Program – No. Junk. Miles.

Lifehacker: Our List of the Best Android Apps – Already using most, so I’m linking to this mostly to validate my choices.

“I think the Internet is the most dangerous thing invented since the atomic bomb” –John Mellencamp – Sounds like Johnny Cougar doesn’t like having his cheese moved.

What Should I Do About My Virtual Life After Death? – Adding this to my list. It’s pretty far down, but on there nonetheless.

Real Estate’s Gold Rush Seems Gone for Good – hmph

Moving on – An early shot fired against book publishing. There will be more.

Fake Drink Spills save seats – Genius!

Lottery Ticket Art – Don’t throw away those scratch off tickets…you could still be a big winner!

If this passes, hopefully someone with some sense will just install a “switch” in the Oval Office and put a label under it that says “Internet”. It won’t do anything, but that’s ok. The people involved clearly have little understanding of what they’re talking about anyway. We could give Al Gore a lifetime position that requires him to flip the switch when he turns in for the night to cut back on the global warming or whatever other crisis the interwebs contribute to.

Even if the president ordered all U.S. Internet companies to block, say, all packets coming from China, or restrict non-military communications, or just shut down access in the greater New York area, it wouldn’t work. You can’t figure out what packets do just by looking at them; if you could, defending against worms and viruses would be much easier.

“Shutting down” the internet isn’t anything like closing the freeway. It’s like shutting down radio, television, and newspapers all at once. We don’t even have a radio, cable, or a TV antenna at our house, so how would we know the webs had been shut down (for our protection)? You know what that means…get ready for the phone systems to get wrecked as part of the collateral damage with people calling up their internet providers because they can’t do the Googles or log on to the Facebooks.

HT Les Jones at NoSilenceHere

And by “your” music, of course I mean music you ripped from CDs that you own or downloaded legally online. Also, the files have to be unencrypted.

Click over to mSpot to sign up and upload your music.

Oh, and you need an Android device to use the mobile version of the service.

The free version includes 2Gb of storage. Can’t wait until Google comes out with their own version of this service.

HT Gizmodo

I’m really not trying to bully up on Facebook. Really, I’m not. Besides, I’m just one guy, and they have millions of users. But, again, the scariest thing about FB to me is that they just don’t seem competent enough to handle the responsibility of possessing your personal data:

“We were recently made aware of one case where if a user takes a specific route on the site, advertisers may see that they clicked on their own profile and then clicked on an ad,” the Facebook spokesman said. “We fixed this case as soon as we heard about it.”

I’m sure Google knows more about me than Facebook ever will, but there’s a (very slight) level of trust in their competence I don’t have with FB. I’m willing to let them slide on that initial Buzz snafu. Plus, the tools they provide are way more useful and powerful than Farmville and Mafia Wars.

Feel free to “Like” this post by the way.

Now that Google has purchased Picnik, presumably to try to better contest Flickr in the online photo sharing market, I’m hoping they take a huge step to offer something Flickr can’t come close to. They already offer amazing photo organization at home (Flickr doesn’t), but it’s not quite where it needs to be yet…

I absolutely love Picasa for the desktop. If you haven’t checked out its ability to do things like facial recognition, geotagging, nametags, etc you are in for a pleasant surprise. The one hangup for me is that there still isn’t a Picasa server I can run at home. We keep all of our photos on a NAS drive, which means that we have to install Picasa on every computer in the house in order to catalog them on each machine. And if I run facial recognition on one machine, those results don’t show up on another. What I’d really like to do is serve up the Picasa database  (not just the photos themselves) to any client machine on my network. With all the work Google is doing to empower the cloud, I’m hoping the next step for them is to help empower my local cloud (fog?).

I did find this solution, which looks like a pretty decent workaround, but I want the real thing. Maybe even add some accounts that let different users on my network comment and rate photos? Some accounts can edit, some can only view? Basically, I want to be able to do anything I can do on the web on a local server. Still, not complaining about this amazing (and free) software.

Inspired by this post via Instapundit, I thought I’d build a little Google Spreadsheets chart based on nothing but some semi-random words. People love charts, right?

Below are the number of Google results I got today from doing a search on “Obama is a _______”. I did this for my own amusement, and I wouldn’t put too much stock in these results. Everyone knows that popular opinion and popular vote count only matter on Wikipedia and if the guy you wanted to win the Presidency didn’t.

Feel free to suggest your own phrases in the comments, and I’ll update the chart.

I’ve been waiting patiently for Sprint to update the HTC Hero to Android v2.1. First it was going to happen in March. Then April 9 was the date. The latest date I’ve heard is April 16…we’ll see? Anyway, there are several apps I’ve wanted to grab for a while, but couldn’t get because I’m stuck on version 1.5. Yeah, I know I could root my phone and do it all now, but I have too many other things to do to waste time trying to fix my phone after I screw it up.

New Google Maps

Turn by turn navigation is the big selling point. Sprint’s turn by turn navigation is atrocious. Ok, maybe that’s not fair. Once you have it running, it’s not too bad, but I’ve found it’s much more convenient to just use Google Maps without the turn by turn feature. Another reason it will be great to have Google Maps work with another little gem I want to grab as soon as I get the upgrade…

Google Buzz

I haven’t given up on it yet. In fact, I think it still has the most potential. As soon as it will let me post Buzz->Twitter it will probably be my go-to social app. But right now I can’t even use the Buzz Widget. It’s sort of ironic that it’s already out there for the iPhone, but I have to blame Sprint/HTC for using such an old version of Android (hurry up with the update!)

Google Earth Mobile

It’s just a toy. But it’s one of my favorite toys to use on a computer. On second thought, maybe I don’t want this on my phone. The ability to multitouch and fly to your current location are very cool. I’ve been in a situation recently where I was trying to use landmarks to navigate (Maps and GPS fail), and this would have been very helpful. Again, the ability to apply layers is very cool, and I’m interested to see how well the multitouch navigation works with it.

FlyScreen

FlyScreen will actually run on Android 1.6, so until the Sprint Hero is upgraded to 2.1  you can’t use it yet. But this is a really cool little app that replaces your stock lockscreen with stuff you use the most. That means fewer clicks/touches to do the things you do the most. Not a good app for people who always lock their phones, but for those of us who seldom leave the house, it’s perfect!

Thick Buttons

If you have fat fingers (literally) like I do, this app will make typing emails and texts on your touch screen a heckuva lot easier. It predicts which letters you are going to want to type next based on the letters you’ve already typed and enlarges them, making useless letters smaller. As someone who types reasonably fast on a standard QWERTY keyboard, I’m constantly frustrated by typing on that tiny screen.

From: 5 Tips for Power Users

Now that you’ve got the buzzes hitting your inbox under control, let’s get serious about organization by using Multiple Inboxes.

There are some really good tips here, but the multiple inbox tip is probably the best. Even if you aren’t using Google Buzz (or don’t want to use it), multiple inboxes is a huge feature in gmail that will go a long way in keeping you organized.

Oh, and here’s a good article for the Buzz haters–how to disable Google Buzz. And there’s more to it than just clicking the link at the bottom of the page.

9 Studies That the Anti-Vaccination Movement Says Show Links or Bury the Truth – And a few notes on them. I don't understand the Latin parts, but I think the idea here is that these things keep a lot of people from getting really bad diseases, err, alive.

iPhone Is Buzz Compatible While Most Android Phones Aren’t – "Currently there is only an estimated 28% of Android devices in use that are capable of taking full advantage of these services. This is due to the fact that lower Android versions browser does not support HTML5, although the gears requirement is meet". How's that for ironic and frustrating?

Google Buzz in Enterprise – Will Need to Overcome Google Apps Limitations – More on Google Buzz in the Enterprise. This argument against it (for now) makes sense

A Butcher’s Tips for Avoiding Cuts in the Kitchen – We just bought a knife sharpener, and it scares me to have blades that will actually cut things now. Although, a sharp blade is probably safer.

A newspaper starts exiting the Web – Huh?! I guess if you're trying to kill your newspaper, it's better to kill it as quickly as possible instead of letting it suffer.

A “Miss Me” Billboard I Can Get Behind – For realz.

5 Reasons Why Google Buzz Will Fail – Funny!!!!

Consumer debt will hold back spending, holding back economic growth. – Don't be ridiculous. We just have to "get banks lending again". Right.

…and why Wave may not.

When I was watching the presentation for Google Buzz, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the functionality was duplicated in Wave. So why could Buzz catch on where Wave hasn’t?

Because it’s not something “new”. It’s just something in addition to the email everyone is used to working with.

In large organizations, services like Yammer (which I love) are too much of a shift in mindset for too many people at once. But if something is introduced as simply an extended feature of a tool you’re already using, the game changes.

The enterprise LOVES its email. It’s smart to build a service on top of that instead of trying to establish a new service altogether, which is what Wave tried to do.

What I really love is that both of these products are coming out of the same company and look to be competing with one another on some level. The end user will be the ultimate winner as these two groups within Google try to make their product the standard.

As Sharepoint…either way, it was (sorta) nice knowing you.

Google Buzz

• Better group management than Facebook
• Share photos and videos inline from Picasa and Flickr
• Reduction of noise of posts you don’t care about (interested to see this one in action)
• Comments at your inbox instead of going to a site.
• Suggestions, suggestions, suggestions.
• Oh, and instant indexing of your Buzz’s–VERY important for bloggers.
• Unbelievable location based features

And still, I think the most potential is in the enterprise.

If it would only write to Twitter. Lot’s of people have a lot of equity built up over there and aren’t going to want to throw that away.

Consumer debt will hold back spending, holding back economic growth. – Don't be ridiculous. We just have to "get banks lending again". Right.

Booze Camp Nashville – EVERY city needs something like this. You can keep your geek breakfast.

Teenagers Are Kind of Over Blogging – I think that headline is a little misleading. It should have read, "Like, Teenagers Are, Like, Kind of Over, Like, Blogging?"

The Day the Music Died – Pretty cool…check this out.

Bagged salad: how clean are packaged salads? – {insert your own joke using the word "toss" here}

Punching a Dude in the Face For Jesus – Love the marketing innovation here.

UI Concepts for Chromium Tablet – I like that Apple has set the bar so low on pricing. That's good for all of us, especially as competitors pop up.

Lost: 16 Hopes For The Final Season – I actually don't agree with a lot of these. For instance, I don't think Charles and Jacob are at the top of the battle for the island. Jacob maybe, but Charles is a mortal. I think.

Facebook blocks ‘Web 2.0 Suicide Machine’ – All of your facebooks are belong to Facebook. Got it?

Photocheck.in for Foursquare – Since Orlando is so close, I've had a chance to mess with Foursquare some. Not that there's really anything huge going on in Melbourne, but it's close enough. Here, you get to be the Mayor of places like Publix and Panera (although I'm the current Long Doggers Mayor as well), and I don't think many other people in this little village are playing along. But photo checkin is a really cool idea for places like Sea World and IKEA, where I actually have taken some photos and almost forgot to 4S checkin.

WordPress 2.9.1 – This is supposed to fix some pingback issues. I've been using Delicious to auto-generate a lot of posts based on stuff I bookmark, and I've noticed that my posts don't seem to ping the other blogs I've linked to the same way they would if I wrote a post in the editor. Not sure why this would happen, since the ping is supposed to happen at publish time. Hopefully this was just a WordPress issue and is resolved.

Facebook Rolling Out Redesign To Some Users – I'm trying to quickly set the over/under on how long it will be until I see the first post in my FB feed of someone complaining about the new layout. Tentative line is 35 hours.

Some Google Wave Bots – I suspect lots of people got busy at the end of the year and the Google Wave hoopla died down. It may be coming back big this year, and here's a list of useful bots to add to your account. If you're on Wave, let's make an effort to communicate that way!

George F. Will – Catastrophe and survival – Read it. Again.

Do More, Buy Less – A huge positive from a recession. This goes hand in hand with the fact that people are saving more. I'm still amazed that people at the top continue to contend that the answer is to "get credit flowing again." Well, I'm not really shocked that they say it. That's what benefits them and their friends. But I am amazed that so many people buy it hook line and sinker.

Google and HTC Working On a Chrome OS Tablet – Want.

Using Google Apps? 5 Ways to Avoid Getting Hacked – I really need to get around to doing these things. Looks like you could make it happen in less than 15 minutes and save yourself a lot of heartache.

WordPress 2.9, oh so fine – Just updated, and this should force a post. The image editor and easy video embed are nice!

Common Laptop/Netbook Positions to Avoid – I'm just going to pretend I didn't see this.

Nullification: Friend of Liberty – Well Texas?

Jesus Was Cool – "Be nice to each other." Pretty simple. But wait, there's more…

Developer Resources for Android – This is on my to-do list. I swear. I even have an app idea that will be huge for a very small market.

Jerry Taylor discusses global warming on the premiere of Stossel – I missed this inaugural episode and haven't had a chance to watch this yet, but it looks to be interesting

Drunk Four Year Old Steals Christmas Presents – Shock and awe.

Augmented reality sounds like a really cool thing. And I guess it is. Or am I just obligated to say that?

Being truthful, when I watch videos like this one, there’s a part of me that would gladly pay $20 for a whole seat, even though I’ll only need the edge, to watch monster trucks (real ones, that waste tremendous amounts of fossil fuels) roll over neatly stacked bricks of smart phones.

Disclaimer: I’m astronomically ignorant, so I really like to use the Google Sky app to find constellations and to see what the sky looks like on the other side of the earth by pointing it at my feet.