Hulu = Huge Time Waster

A year ago we got rid of TV for a reason. We watched too much of it. Now, I'm tempted once again by Hulu, where you can watch a selection of TV and movies for free, as long as you're willing to sit through a few ads. (Editor's Note: I am not making any money on the embedded ads in the clip below.)

If you've used Hulu, what do you think?

If you haven't seen Friday Night Lights yet, here's your chance. Season 1 was amazing. I liked it so much that I could not wait a year for the DVD to come out. So, my parents recorded it on their PVR and then babysat for us so we could watch season 2. It was not worth it and we gave up halfway through. I don't understand how a show that good could turn that bad that quickly.

 

Meowing Behind the Toilet

Unless you came here looking for pictures of monkeys jumping for your 8th grade science project or unless you're my own parents who read this because you have to, then at some point in your life you've probably gone online to connect with others so you don't feel so alone.

Brain, Child is one of my favorite paper magazines and each issue they put a few articles online. Donna  Eis' Online, Off Kilter is a fascinating look at online communities for moms. It's a great read for anyone who's ever belonged to an online mom's group and it happens to contain one of the best metaphors about a deaf cat that I've read in a long time.

New Year, New Design

I want to thank Mrs. Flinger and Karen at Swank Web Style for all the great work they did on my new site design. Let me know what you think.

Review: HP Printer and Photo Book

As I mentioned last week, the Parent Bloggers Network recently sent me an HP Photosmart 626 Printer and two cloth bound photo books to review. Here are my thoughts.

Printer Setup

The printer was super easy to set up. It's designed to work directly with your memory card. Just pop it in and then edit or print your photos. If you want to print photos from your computer, you must purchase a USB cable separately.

For a printer that's designed to help you create a photo memory book, I didn't find this very practical. If you're making a photo book of your most recent vacation I can see how all of your pictures could still be on your memory card. But if you're making a photo book of your children's first year of life (as I was) and that child is now 4.5 years old, you're going to need the USB cable to get those photos off of your computer.

I can see how working directly from the memory card would be really helpful for a technophobe since you don't have to worry about compatability issues. Personally, I want my printer to come with a USB cable.

Printer Touch Screen Functionality

The PhotoSmart 626 works with a touch screen that pops up out of the computer. You can navigate your photos using the included stylus or your finger. I found both work equally well. The touch screen makes it simple to crop photos, remove red-eye, and adjust photo brightness. I found the results to be similar to the basic photo editing software that's included with most printers.

If your camera records video, you can even use the touch screen to play the video, although without sound.

My one gripe with the touch screen is that I'd prefer to view the pictures on the large screen of my computer to determine how they're going to look before I print them.

Printing

The prints from this printer are similar in quality to my Canon i560 and my Dell Photo AIO 922 printer. The major improvement is how easy it is to print borderless photos of different sizes. However, you also can't print any photos larger than 5x7.

The HP printer also includes a very cool feature called Get Creative. Use it to draw on photos with stylus, add frames, special effects, clip art, and captions. This is a great feature for anyone who fancies him/herself a scrapbooker and will come in handy when I finally get around to creating those photo books.

Troubleshooting

As I tested this printer I never found cause to refer to the troubleshooting and support section of the user's guide, but I read it anyway and found it to be very simple to understand, which can't be said about many tech products these days.

Discounts

The Parent Bloggers network asked me to mention that you should check Sunday circulars for specials on the printer itself. For 20% off the Photo Books at the HP Home & Office Store, use COUPON CODE: AC8595.

iPod Resurrection

Perhaps you remember that a few months ago my red iPod Nano decided to go for a swim with the help of my four year old and was ruined because I have the patience of a four year old. I have since purchased a new Nano and I'm getting used to it, especially since I finally found an armband that fits it with the sensor for my Nike Sport Kit, thanks to a useful article at iLounge.

Meanwhile, my old, red, dead iPod has been sitting around on the kitchen counter. Some, like my husband or the Fly Lady, might call this clutter. Others, like me, might call it a talisman against further gadget disasters.

So, you can imagine my iSurprise when I returned home from a run and found my old iPod playing in our iGroove.

Me: How did you make it work?

Marco: I plugged it in and turned it on.

It turns out that everything but the screen works just fine. Now it's basically a big iPod Shuffle that's not quite as user friendly. I feel pretty stupid assuming it was broken because nothing appeared on the screen when I tried to charge it. So, my plan now is to take it to an Apple store and plead my case to them to fix it for free. I only bought it in February of this year, but the warranty doesn't cover accidents.

Any iPod experts out there have a better idea?

Review: Kajeet Cell Phones for Kids

I should probably get to my disclosures up front in this one, because there are a few. I first heard about Kajeet, the new cell phone service for kids, when I got an e-mail from Craig Peters, their director of online marketing and communications. Craig wrote me back in June because he'd found the Jumping Monkeys podcast and he wanted to introduce me to Kajeet. He gave me a little bit of background about the service and we discussed the possibility of Kajeet sponsoring Jumping Monkeys.

Kajeet sounded really interesting, but I have to say that I didn't spend too much time thinking about it. Kajeet is aimed at tweens and we're light years away from that stage in our house (or so I'd like to believe.)

A few months later MomCentral asked me to review a Kajeet phone for their blog tour. I signed up and they sent me a phone and a $20 phone card to try out the service. I played with the phone for a few weeks, checked out all the features on the phone and the Web site and I was really impressed. It's obvious that the Kajeet phone service was designed by parents, not just people who try to imagine what parents might need.

Kajeet used kid beta testers to help design the phones, so I would hope that that means that tweens would like them. Since I'm not one and I don't have one, I can't tell you whether all that tween-speak on the Web site and the phone controls is appealing or annoying to kids. I can say, however, that as a parent I'm very impressed with the parental controls.

I never gave much thought to kids cell phones, but the more I read the more I learned just how dangerous it might be to give your child a regular cell phone. First consider the fact that standard phones allow your child to call anyone (thereby automatically giving anyone their cell phone number). Many plans allow you to buy ringtones and sign up for difference services. That's basically the same as handing over your credit card to your child. They'll be charged for those services and you'll be the one who has to pay.

Here are a few ways Kajeet can help you manage your child's cell phone:

• You set who your kids can call.
• You set the hours when your kids can call, to help keep them from making calls at school. (The exception to this is that they can always call home and they can always call 911.)
• You give your kids a phone allowance, which can help teach them how to budget their money. They can buy ringtones. They can buy wallpaper. They can text or make phone calls. One they've spent their allowance, that's it.
• There are no contracts and no monthly fees, thereby allowing you and your children to be fickle about the plan. Instead you get charged by the day.

I am not buying my children (ages 4.5, 2.5, and 2.5) a cell phone anytime soon. But when the time does come I'm definitely going to consider Kajeet and I'd recommend it to anyone with tweens who they think are ready for their own phone.   

Don't Sign Up for Quechup

I recently received an invite to join Quechup (I don't want to link to it).

Someone I work with told me it was a scam and so I thought I'd check it out so we could write about it for the security site I work for. I signed up and when it asked me if I wanted to send invites to the friends in my e-mail inbox, I declined. Then I deleted my account.

A few days passed and then today I started getting notifications that I had been sending requests to people to join Quechup. Even though I declined when it asked if I wanted to invite friends, even though I deleted my account three days ago, it still sent a spam message to every contact in my gmail inbox. That was over 700 people, not including the listserves I belong to.

So, if you got a message from me, please don't register. I'm not on that network and I don't recommend their sneaky spam tactics. The message they sent on my behalf is not a virus. It won't damage your computer, but if you sign up it might send messages to everyone in your e-mail inbox.

The worst part is that I tried to send apologies and I got so many returned e-mails that now Gmail has suspended my ability to send e-mail for 24hrs. They think I'm a spammer.

My only consolation is that this spam has given me the chance to reconnect to lots of people I haven't talked to in a while. Also, I'm not the only one who's angry about this. See more posts about it here:

• Quechup is Rotten
• Are you Getting Quechup Spammed?
• Wired: Quechup the Social Networking Platform Sweeping the Globe (via Spam)

Public Service Announcement: Wet Technology

You are running out the door to the gym with your daughter. At the last minute you realize that you've forgotten your iPod, so you rush back into the house to grab it and stuff it in your gym bag. You are walking to the gym and about halfway there your daughter decides that she doesn't want to carry her water bottle anymore.

"Here, Mommy."

Either you trust your four year old to screw the cap of the water bottle on all the way or you are just plain stupid. Either way, you toss the water bottle into the same pocket of your gym bag that you just tossed your iPod.

You drop your daughter off at the kid's area of the gym and head over to start your workout. That's when you open up your bag and notice that your iPod is FLOATING IN A POOL OF WATER. That's right. Your gym bag is made of some space age waterproof material so the water that spilled out of your daughter's water bottle doesn't soak through, but pools there in the pocket.

You pull out your iPod. Your beautiful red iPod.

Up until this point you could have done all of these things and there's a good chance that your iPod would have still been OK after you let it dry for 48 hours. It would have made an amusing story, but not a story that left you with no iPod or left you stealing your husband's iPod because he only uses his two or three days a week when you use yours two or three times a day. You could have done all of those things, just as I did, and your iPod might have been fine.

Here's where the Public Service Announcement comes in.

If your iPod or any other computerized gadget should be submerged in water, do not turn it on. Let me repeat myself. DO NOT TURN IT ON. Let it dry in a warm place for 48 hours or perhaps dry it with a hairdryer.

If you let it dry completely, there's still a chance that it will work perfectly. But if you try to turn it on when it is still filled with water, you will see the screen turn all wacky. That's its way of telling you that you've just fried its brain. I know this because I did this.

The worst part of this story is that I lost my Mac Powerbook a few years ago in the exact same way. Annabella wasn't even two yet and handed me a glass of water. At least that's what she was trying to do when she tossed the entire glass on the keyboard of my laptop. If I'd let the computer dry before I turned on, it might have been OK. It wasn't and neither is my iPod.

Can someone please tell me that they've done this too, so I don't feel so horrible about myself?

Google Sense of Humor

Traveling from San Francisco to Amsterdam? Use Google Maps and don't forget to pack your bathing suit (see line 29.)

Found on Mighty Girl.

Wikipedia notability

I was recently listening to the NPR Technology podcast (worth subscribing to, if you're a lapsed geek like me) when I came upon an interview with Slate Columnist Timothy Noah about his Wikipedia entry. Apparently Noah recently noticed that his bio on the online encyclopedia was labeled as a "topic of unclear importance" and subject to deletion.

This got me thinking about my own Wikipedia entry, which I did not create, have never edited, and is often the source of much amusement among my friends and co-workers who never watched TechTV. This also got me wondering about the people who created the entry and continue to edit it. Anyone can find this information by clicking the history tab on most entries. I did this and what I found out was kinda disturbing, in that "too much information" kinda way. For example, one user went directly from editing my bio to editing the Wikipedia entry on "fake orgasm."

Of course it also got me wondering why I wasn't marked for deletion. From the NPR interview, the best that I can guess is that I haven't been evicted yet because the eviction police haven't found me yet. Noah makes the argument that the very nature of the Web makes it unecesary to limit entries in Wikipedia, but I have to disagree. I'm not saying that I want to be deleted, but if someone decides I'm of unclear importance, I'm willing to accept that. It will simply make me want to do something of more clear importance.