Digital Dad®

Digital Dad Days

I had a pretty mellow Father’s Day this year, enjoying a range of homemade gifts, reading the NYT, even hitting a bucket of golf balls at the nearby driving range.

I did get a kick out of this post on the worst TV Dads of All Time.

Father’s Day is a pretty analog event, but I did think about how things have changed since I started this blog in 2004 – hard to believe it’s been over five years.

Some things have stayed the same – changing the ink in a printer, home networking issues, moving media around the home – perhaps these are the “classics” that we will always deal with.

But some things have changed – wiring a portable music player into your car isn’t as hard as it used to be, cell phones have become much more capable, digital cameras are way better. I have to now think about social networks as much as surfing the web safely.

I painted a rock with red paint when I was a kid and gave it to my Dad as a Father’s Day gift – a paperweight! I think it’s still on his desk. I suspect the handmade frame with my daughter’s picture will be on my desk for a long time as well, and I suspect there will always be plenty of Digital Dad stuff out there waiting to be discussed.

Fingerprints

I’ve had the Dell m1330 now for almost two years and one of the things that I found handy about it was the built-in fingerprint reader. It’s an easy way to log on and kind of cool.

Our kitchen PC, the Dell XPS One with Windows 7 RC, has a multi-logon, one for each family member. I looked around and found a unit on Amazon from Eikon (about $40)that has a nice slim silver profile, rubber backing and a decent length USB cord.

It comes with the Upek software suite (Upek? Eikon?). The install is very easy and then it’s time to enroll your fingers. The creepy part is when it asks you to enroll two fingers in case “one gets damaged.” Five swipes and you’re done.

You can still type in your password, but the cool thing is that whenever you swipe your finger, the PC logs out of whoever’s account is up and logs you in automatically. Very convenient and pretty cool.

This item enables you to keep your password private, away from your kids prying eyes, and makes it super-easy for kids to log into their own space.

Tidying up the widescreen

I have been using a widescreen display on my notebook for a couple years now. I paired that with a 24” widescreen Dell LCD and  Samsung 4:3 I use as a secondary display. The Dell display is connected via HDMI and the Samsung display via plain ol’ VGA. The Kitchen PC, as well all know, is a Dell XPS One with a 20” widescreen display.

I switched to Windows 7 and started to adjust some thing to take advantage of the new layout. One big change was moving my taskbar to the far right side. It makes little sense to have a taskbar at the bottom when you have a wide display and moving it to the side clear out your y-axis nicely. I also auto-hide it as well, personal preference, and it’s on the right because my second display, the Samsung, is to the left. Otherwise your taskbar is in the “middle” of your viewing window.

I peg my gadgets to the left with an opacity of 40%. It’s great that in 7 you can have them anywhere but I tend to like a clean organized desktop with virtually no icons except Recycle and these see-through gadgets.

Speaking of, I just upgraded my Facebook gadget to one made by BuildAGadget.com. It’s miles ahead of this one and light years ahead of this.

What’s your desktop preference?

End of the Softball Season

I blogged here back on March 27 about my new role as the coach of my daughter’s softball team.

She’s seven and this was her first year playing in the Bellevue East Little League. I volunteered to help and quickly realized that I was in for a full season of practices, clinics, games, schedules, and everything associated with Little League.

It was a very rewarding experience. We had a great set of kids, involved parents, and a good supportive attitude. There’s a fine line with seven to nine year olds where you want to push them to try their best and at the same time be very encouraging. We had our share of strikeouts, grounders between the legs, errant throws to first, but they were all learning experiences.

It was also a great opportunity for me to practice my patience, my empathy, and reconnect with a  game I loved to play as a kid.

A few of takeaways for me:

• Invest in a good schedule up front; I sent a doc out early with every practice and games, location and time
• Make sure parents have assignments – snacks, base coaches, practice coaches, organizing end of season parties and trophies – these all should be assigned early.
• Write out your practice drills – there are plenty of resources on the web but keep them short, well organized and diverse.
• Get to games early to get a short practice in – between the game schedules we didn’t get enough practices in. Getting to the game 30 min early gives the girls a good way to warm up with fundamentals
• Schedule your make up games as soon as the happen and don’t pile them up at the end of the season
• Have parents’ cell # on your phone
• Write out a consistent batting order and who plays what position inning to inning. Avoids arguments and pleadings. I kept the same batting order all season, so the girls got the hang of who is up next. In a more competitive league i may have switched it up a bit, but not much.
• Rotate the girls through all of the positions so they get the feel for each position. Not everyone wants to catch but some REALLY do.

At the end, I was the only one who used the Windows Live Group I created. Maybe it was the sign in, but there was no “digital community” around the team. I used it to keep master copies of the line up and stuff there.

Looking forward to next year.

TV On The Desktop

I downloaded the Hulu Desktop app tonight. Cool stuff. Caught up with a premiere episode of Glee. I’ve used Hulu on the web, which is fine, but the local app is much snappier and richer.

Watching TV this way makes sense, after everyone goes to bed and you want to tune in to a show. It‘s certainly not social, and it’s not a rich experience due to the small screen a typically “OK” speaker on a notebook, but I don’t have to record anything, I have a big selection, it’s free, and I can pause it and come back tomorrow night and watch the rest from where i left off.

The Hulu app also works with remotes, so it should play nice on the Dell XPS One in the kitchen – I’ll try that tomorrow.

An interesting take on American Idol voting

Good post on GigaOm this week on the mechanics of American Idol voting, prescient given the surprising upset of Kris Allen over Adam Lambert.

Net net, this isn’t really a vote. It’s more like an opportunity to register preference, if that preference gets through the system. The system is bound by input, as you can imagine the phone lines and SMS servers have finite capacity. For example, let’s say the capacity of the system is, say, 1 million “votes.” Person A has 10 million voting fans and Person B has 1 million voting fans. If the system can;t handle more than a million votes, then Person A and Person B will be pretty much tied in their “votes.” This is likely why the Idol votes are always close, and for me, explain the Lambert goof.

Full article here.

The New New York Times Reader

I’ve been a fan of the NY Times Reader for a while. It’s a great way to get your Times fix on the go with a very snappy and readable experience.

Good news and bad news. The good news is that version 2 is out. Bad news is that it’s now on Adobe Air platform rather than the Microsoft WPF platform. Oh well.

Still love the Times.

Laptop boost

There was a mention over at GigaOm  about getting more life out of your notebook, especially in these economic times. My Dad recently asked me a similar question, as he has a 17” large Toshiba “schleptop” that was feeling sluggish.

Net net, adding memory is your best investment for a performance boost. Hard drives are a bit trickier. For him, I also suggested getting a big, like 24”, monitor.

It was pretty easy for him to bring it into a Best Buy Geek Squad, have them do the upgrade and various “tunings” for about $100. Much cheaper than buying a new notebook.

I’ll definitely get Windows 7 on there this summer as well.

Hey Beertender

This one caught my eye and I figured I would reward myself with a Beertender. Maybe it was my success with the Keurig coffee maker, but I think beverage machines are pretty cool.

And what is cooler than this? Cold, fresh beer on tap. I set it up in my office at Microsoft but i figure I’ll bring it home for parties as well.

I did a bit of research and looked at this system vs. other 5 liter keg systems. This one uses the Heineken Draughtkeg. The Draughtkeg appears to be a Heineken invention and it integrated the C02 into the keg, as opposed to other 5 liter kegs that requires external C02 cartridges.

It’s simple and easy and even the first pour had a good balance of foam and beer. The downside, of course, is that there are only Draughtkeg Heineken (and Heineken Light) beers, so no variety. However I didn’t see a great selection of 5 liter kegs, either (Coors? Blecch). Hopefully we’ll see some variety in this form factor.

There are two companies that make Beertenders. One is Krups and their top model is $299. Kind of rich for what is basically a mini-fridge and pull spout. T-Fal makes one for only $199, so I went for that one (at Target, but they sell them on Amazon).

This model has two LEDs – one for power and one for “optimum temperature.” It took a few hours to get the keg to the right temp, but the keg started cold from the store. They say it  can take up to 18 hours to go from room temp to optimum temperature. Plan ahead.

it’s very quiet – a bit louder when it’s cooling but virtually silent after that. The black and chrome on the TFal is well done, although with the drip tray it takes up a good chunk of table space.

Father’s Day is around the corner, so here’s a refreshing gift idea. Ha ha.

Apple iPhone Baby Shaker

This is ridiculous. Clearly the Apple marketplace system is broken if this app is allowed to get onto the Apple Store.

“A company called Sikalosoft is currently selling a $0.99 iPhone application called Baby Shaker, as of Monday. The object of Baby Shaker is to stop the incessant crying of an infant pictured on screen by violently shaking the iPhone, at which point two red "x" marks appear over the baby's eyes. "See how long you can endure his or her adorable cries before you just have to find a way to quiet the baby down!" reads the sales pitch for Baby Shaker.”

More at CNET. Pathetic.