All things considered, a pretty great forecast for dogsledding!
A cloudy day is natures giant soft-box. — Layne Kennedy
I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle ← I’ve done some playing with location-aware applications, mostly Brightkite, and this article rang true to some of the thoughts and challenges I had with them as well. Location-awareness brings a new dimension to the web, but it will take some time to figure out how to do it right. His example of how easily he was able to find out where a woman he saw taking pictures in the park lived is an eye opener.
Found via GrumbleDroid by Tim Bray.
Thermapen, Grill Like a Pro
A few months ago my neighbor Mike and I decided to put my Big Green Egg through it’s first real trial with a 12-hour brisket session. Mike is a stellar cook on all counts and I wanted to learn anything I could about grilling. As we were working the brisket through the hours we probed this large hunk of meat for temperature dozens of times, in dozens of locations. I’ve always had temperature probes and such, but Mike was using one of these high-end instant read digital thermometers and I realized this was a must for grilling.
I decided to be patient and put a Thermapen on my wish list for Christmas. Now that I’ve used it a few times I feel like every grill owner should just get one of these with their grill. Why?
First, a large piece of meat is going to have several different temperatures throughout the cut. The Thermapen is fast enough that you can take several readings and get “x-ray vision” into the meat. Before you even slice it, you know where the cut will be more rare and more well.
Secondly, when you are grilling at really high temperatures the grill itself gets so hot that it’s really hard to hold a probe in place for 10-20+ seconds waiting for a reading. Yes, you can put a big huge glove on but that takes a lot of time and results in fewer temperature checks. The Thermapen is so fast that you just probe it, read, and remove. 2-3 seconds tops.
If you love to grill, get a Thermapen. It gives you a lot more confidence on the grill. You can stop overcooking to be cautious. And since you can take a temperature so fast you can temp every single item on the grill before it comes off. Each and every cut can be just perfect.
Kopplin's Coffee
I’ve been doing plenty of complaining lately about coffee shops that are so inept that they cannot serve a passable shot of espresso. Note, I’m not complaining about the use of an automated espresso machine. I use an automated machine at home. I’m not that high maintenance. No, I’m vocal about putting 1 to 2 ounces of espresso in a 16 ounce paper cup. Or not even knowing what it is to just order an espresso. I recently suggested legislation to remedy this and Peter Vader commented about Kopplin’s Coffee and suggested I should try it.
With this sturdy recommendation I asked my neighbor and coffee connoisseur Mike if he wanted to join me and drive over there, about 30 minutes one way, to give this place a try. Obviously I’m not going to make a habit of driving 30 minutes to get a coffee, but if it really was special I thought it would be fun to try.
Kopplin’s is totally unassuming. It seemed like a simple, notably small, coffee shop with a few laptops open and a couple of people chatting at tables. The guy behind the counter was the owner, Andrew Kopplin, although I didn’t know that until I looked at the newspaper clipping on the wall with his picture in it. The first thing I noticed at Kopplin’s were the two Clover machines on the counter.
I knew a little about the Clover from a thread that had spread around the Internet a while back. Mainly, I knew they were $11,000 coffee machines. Not espresso machines, but single batch brewed coffee. Check out this video of the Clover in action to see what this is all about. There was a very big hubbub when Starbucks bought them in a desperate grasp for authenticity and coffee that tastes less horrible. To be clear, I’m no fan of brew, but I had to give this a try. We ordered a 16 ounce pot of the Guatemalan and gave it a try.
It was really good coffee. Extremely smooth. But, it was still brew. I enjoyed it, but the taste wasn’t what I like. For those that love brew, the Clover is probably a gift from the heavens. For me, the $11,000 is lost.
Onto the real reason for the trip, to give their espresso a go. In short, it’s about the best espresso that I’ve gotten in a coffee shop in town. It is incredibly deep with a very thick crema. The service is perfect, in an appropriately sized ceramic cup that has been preheated for a while on the top of the espresso machine. Kapplin’s seems to do a very fine grind, and the resulting espresso just drips into the glass.
We chatted with Kopplin himself for a little bit and he’s a really cool guy. Very nice, obviously knows his stuff. I give him huge respect for being in his mid-20’s and opening up his own place and making that all happen. And on top of making great coffee he is sourcing local ingredients, and even using milk from grass fed cows in his drinks! I don’t think you can go wrong with a trip to Kopplin’s.
Kopplin’s was named Best Barista by City Pages, listed as Ultimate Brew in Twin Cities Business and has great reviews on Yelp.
And last but not least, I really dig the logo.
DirecTV Canceled
A couple of weeks ago I finally pulled the plug on DirecTV! I wrote about the comparison I did between DirecTV and iTunes before, and we decided to jump ship on satellite television. I’ve rewired the cables in the house so the three televisions we have now get over-the-air (OTA) channels with their internal ATSC tuners and the ChannelMaster 4221 antennae on the roof. Each TV has had an Apple TV on it for a while, now with their expanded 250 GB hard drives.
Canceling
I’ve been a customer of DirecTV for 10 years so they tried really hard to save me. If you are looking to save a little money and are a customer, call up and they will likely give you a discounted rate as well as freebies for the next 12 months. They offered the kitchen sink to keep me around. Unfortunately for them my issue wasn’t just cost, but the technical inferiority of their solutions. The lure of synchronized content, no more IR repeaters, etc. was a lot more than just the cost savings.
While canceling though I got a little surprise, an early-termination fee.
How to make your customers unhappy
This summer we were getting hounded by DirecTV. They were robo-calling pretty much every day regarding our equipment, apparently it needed an upgrade. We had original TiVO DirecTV units and they were the MPEG-2 machines. I knew DirecTV was moving to MPEG-4, but also knew that was the end of the TiVo I so liked so I put it off. Finally I got back to them and they told me that I had a mandatory, and free, upgrade coming to move to MPEG-4 and relinquish the TiVo units I had.
I finally agreed, but knowing I was considering canceling in the future, I asked and made sure that this would not extend my term. I was told it wouldn’t, and the upgrade was free, so fine. This turned out to be wrong.
For all of DirecTV’s fawning over me for being a customer of 10 years I was all of a sudden a brand new customer that they had to recoup equipment costs out of. In the end, I ended up having to pay hundreds of dollars in early cancellation fees just to get rid of this equipment that was supposed to be free, and wasn’t supposed to extend my term. It was a very frustrating experience.
Perhaps most frustrating of all was when I asked to escalate this matter to a manager. The person on the phone said they had raised the issue and I should hear back soon. I waited, and after a week and not hearing I called back. They then informed me the escalation had occurred and been denied. I was confused since I never spoke to anyone. It turns out you cannot speak to them. Escalation is a black box that the customer has no visibility into. I handed them over their fees and bid them farewell.
Related: Read Steve Borsch's cancelation story as well.
Hello Television
We now have two venues to get television content. Watch it just like people have for decades over-the-air with the ATSC tuner or get it via iTunes. So far we do watch less TV because we no longer have a buffet to graze on, but I tend to think that is a good thing, not a bad thing.
I like 1 minute cause it’s just like an hour. — Mazie
Going to Red Stag Supperclub with Tammy because Andrew Eklund talks about it all the time. Must be good! Ordering a Surly Furious. 🙂
At the pharmacy again. Feel like this is happening more in recent years. Getting old?
How Shift Lenses Change your Life ← I haven’t played with a tilt-shift lens before, but seeing some of the cool things you can do with one it makes me want to play.
Poem on kids step stool.
This little stool is mine
I use it all the time
To reach the thing I couldn’t
And lots of things I shouldn’t.
At One+One.
“Fresh pain”?
Finished the book for my book club! Meeting is tomorrow, just in time. Now I can catch up on everything I haven’t been doing while reading.
Alocola Brings Location Info to the Web
My buddy Dan Grigsby has just launched his first iPhone application. The application fills an interesting gap, it allows a web site to get the location information from the iPhone. Sure, iPhone applications can do this with the iPhone SDK, but if you are a plain old web site or web application (and yes, there is still a place for them), Alocola will allow you to get that information via the web. Alocola is a helper application that Safari launches and then it just gets the location info and returns it back to the requesting website. Slick! Great idea.
All the cooler, Dan will be making the source code available under GPL2.
The next Minnedemo is now scheduled for February 6, 2009 at 7:00pm. It is free (as always), but registration is required so go there and get signed up. There are about 260 open tickets left at this point.
Even though it is free that doesn’t mean you can leave your wallet at home. Intermedia Arts is the host for Minnedemo and they have fallen on some difficult times. There will be an opportunity to donate Intermedia Arts (read more about them) and I think the Minnedemo/Minnebar community should show its support with some donations.
I really enjoyed the last Minnedemo (at the same venue). It is a great chance to connect with a great group of local developers, entrepreneurs and a wide variety of other people – each of them very interesting!
Hope to see you there!
Update (January 25th)
I didn’t do a good enough job looking through my calendar. It turns out we are going to be heading out of town on the morning on February 6th for a ski weekend up north. I’m going to miss this Minnedemo. Bummer. Hope everyone else has a great time!
January 20, 2009.
I use OpenDNS, and you should too!
A few months ago I switched my home network to using OpenDNS for domain name lookups. Prior to that I had typically ran my own DNS server on my home LAN. This was a near requirement for me because I hosted some of my sites at my house and I needed to resolve them to private addresses when on the home LAN, blah. It was annoying. I no longer do that, and no longer need to run my own DNS, and good riddance.
Note, if you don’t know what DNS is, or what name resolution is, you can probably stop reading now. ;-) If you are interested to learn more the DNS page on Wikipedia will get you started. Read it and then proceed. DNS is to the Internet like legs shoes are to walking.
I relied for a bit on Comcast’s DNS servers and they were fine but they didn’t give me any added value. I poked around and found OpenDNS and it looked really promising. I posted on Twitter about it and found a handful of friends of mine that are technical rockstars and had been happily using it for a long time. I guess I was slow to the party.
Anyway, after using OpenDNS for a while now I strongly endorse it. I would go so far as to suggest that anyone with the option of flipping DNS providers should switch to it. Some reasons.
Content Filtering
When you start using OpenDNS you create an account and you can manage how DNS requests should be handled. OpenDNS has a whole set of content filtering options and everyone should ask it to filter Phishing sites. Phishing sites have gotten incredibly good, and I love the fact that OpenDNS will simply not allow a computer on my network to go to a site marked as a phishing site. This alone is worth the switch.
The options are numerous for filtering. You can be as strict or open as you like. I think this is a great place to implement this sort of policy on a home network. No software to maintain, it just works and keeps working. This is how parental controls and basic Internet safety should be done.
Statistics
OpenDNS makes it really easy to get information on DNS requests. You can get a cool graph like this.
Okay, that is cool because it is a graph and all graphs are cool. But it is also useful. Let’s say that you got a virus or spambot on one of your computers. You would possibly notice a large spike in the number of DNS requests being issued. Sudden and large changes in that graph indicate something unusual is going on somewhere.
Other Stuff
To me this is enough to justify the switch to a wonderful free service. There are some other things that it does that may be cool. It allows you to great shortcuts, so in my house if you type “thing” into a browser it will turn that into “thingelstad.com” or “goog” into “www.google.com”. Firefox can do that too, but having it at the DNS level is nifty since it works everywhere (iPhone, Wii).
It’s free, you just create an account and change your router to start using the OpenDNS servers!