Skip to main content

Favorite Things: May 2018 Edition

New series of monthly (my intentions at least) things I'm really enjoying...

Ride Report

Ride Report is an app which uses your phone's location data to automatically keep track of your bike rides.  For each ride it asks you a simple survey "How was your ride."  After collecting enough survey data from rides Ride Report can generate a map showing the worst and best rides for a city.  Some cities are even using this data to make better transportation decisions.  

I'm not sure if this app will work at a smaller scale for a city like The Dalles, but the idea is very cool.  The more people the use it the more helpful it will be.  At this point I've only ever said my rides were great and being the only user in town this is very unscientific. I highly recommend using this app for fun and better city planning or at least better informed fellow cyclists.

Libby

Libby is an app which allows you to borrow ebooks through your local library.  For some reason it is much easier for me to get through a book quickly if I have it as an ebook on my phone.  Libby combines the convenience of ebooks with the price of the public library (AKA free).  The ereader itself has a different interface but is pretty comparable to Google Play Books and Kindle in my opinion.  

 There are a few drawbacks to getting your books this way however.  Popular new books have very long wait times.  If you place a hold on a hot new piece of fiction you might have to wait for six months plus.  Also, the duration of the loan is shorter than a normal book from the library.  Only 2 weeks.  So if you're like me and it takes you a while to work your way through a novel this might not always work for you or you'll have to be interrupted in the middle of your story (this happened to me while reading Carrie).  

 If you use a public library (or at least The Wasco County Library) and have a device to read ebooks Libby is wealth worth trying out.

Good Fruit Grower

This article and video interview of my cousin Nick Anderson reminds me of how blessed I was to grow up on a farm.  Having a family life that requires you to learn how to work and parents who teach you how to have fun doing it is one of the greatest gifts a child can have in my mind.  I can't really take my kids to work with me so this one of those virtues I'll have to pass on to my kids some other way.  



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ubuntu games?

    One of the things I have been doing very little of for the last several years is PC gaming.  This is probably mostly due to a complete lack of a Windows machine in my life.  Plus with all of the great games available for Android my needs as a casual gamer are more than met.     However, this years humble bundled has reignited my interest in PC gaming.  I got it and installed a couple of the games on my Ubuntu machine.  So far they are a lot of fun especially VVVVVV .  This got me asking "what else can I play on Ubuntu?"  Turns out there is a plethora of free open source games, some awesome, some not so much.  Many are available from the   Ubuntu Software Center and many you have to hunt down around the web.     One thing that keeps many Windows users from Ubuntu (or any Linux OS for that matter) is a supposed lack of games.  This is simply not the case.  While yes many of th...
2 comments
Read more

New Years Resolutions 2014

  I don't normally do new years resolutions.  I typically keep a long list goals in my head; I'm sure some of them fall out every once in a while.  But I figure it is not bad to write  some of these goals down and put a 12 month deadline on them.  Writing down, publicly stating and setting deadlines for goals is like some kind of weird magic sauce that makes you actually want to get shit done. Pay mortgage down to $110k   Having a 30 year mortgage with a 0% down payment we essentially started out behind and only making slightly more than the minimum monthly payment has not given us much progress.  Even with adding on to our house we are still under water. As it sits now the mortgage is at about $129,700.  I'd like to get that number down to $110,000 by the end of the year.  That will set us up nicely to be able to refinance and start saving for another house.  According to my lender if we keep making the normal payment I will b...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ubuntu Games: Retro Blazer demo

    Loved blasting Nazis in  Wolfenstein?  Hacking apart demons or whatever in Doom?  Just plain get nostalgic for running around inside a pseudo-3d environment, gunning down your enemies?  Me too!        Retro Blazer is a truly retro FPS based on the Darkplaces game engine .  Missed using arrow keys?  They got you covered.  Retro Blazer just released a demo/alpha test for all us FPS lovers to download and play.  It's a lot of fun and so far the alpha release seems very stable.  Don't worry about  the game crashing to much.       To play Retro Blazer on Ubuntu simply download it , unzip and execute the proper binary (probably  darkplaces-linux-x86_64-sdl and  ignore all those .exe files...).  The game is also available on Windows and OS X. Get it!     If you are a terminal junky  here is a quick how to.  Fir...
Post a Comment
Read more