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Every year I receive a text message on my cell phone reminding me that my minutes are about to expire. For the last 5+ years, I’ve added $10 worth of minutes every October to keep the plan alive.

Just $10/year for cell phone use?

I hope you will indulge me and allow a non-technology post.

Recently I found myself with a bottle of Coconut Rum and didn’t know what to do with it. I like rum and I love coconut, so this was a good problem to have. Google to the rescue, but as much as I enjoy rum AND coconut, nothing tasted as good as a Piña Colada using the standard mix in a bottle from my local grocery. That seemed sad to me, so after trying a few recipes like

• Coconut Cola (great if you like coconut and rum and cokes)
• Coconut Orange (a little too tangy for me)
• Goombay Smash
• Rummple
• Deep-7
• A Day At The Beach
• The Bianca Pop (good to get an evening started)
  You can find more coconut rum drinks.
  I decided to try to smooth some of the bite a few of those drinks had by mixing things I liked, while not getting too complex. I call it TheFu:

TheFu Recipe

Use a Highball Glass

1. 3 oz orange juice
2. 3 oz pineapple juice
3. 1 1/2 oz coconut rum
   Fill glass with 50% crushed ice, add rum, then add both juices and stir.

Nothing too complex, but the OJ and Pineapple really complement the coconut rum. Without both juices, there’s just a little too much bite for me. I tried drinks with just 1 or the other. It was a tough day of experimentation. ;) Sure, there are other drinks that can be made with a few other ingredients, but I was
a) thirsty
b) without those other ingredients.

The Piña Colada is still very tasty, but who wants a 350 calorie drink all the time when a 200 calorie drink that is pretty easy to make, without any mess, no blender to clean up, is just slightly less tasty? I still like the coconut rum and coke just as much, but as long as there’s OJ and pineapple juice in da house, this new drink will be it.

Perhaps I need to pick up some grenadine?

7/3/11 Update: Seems there’s a very similar recipe to TheFu called Jack-is-Back

• 2 oz Coconut Rum
• 2 oz Pineapple juice
• 2 oz Orange juice

similar, but not quite.

What should kids know to be reasonably safe? That’s a tough question.

Below is a draft Kid-Safety Checklist for parents to work through with their kids.

All kids do need to know these things.

Almost everyone likes Facebook and Twitter. We reconnect with our friends, they connect with us. People we don’t even know want to know us – that’s pretty cool, until it isn’t.

This will be old news for some folks. Keep reading … Here’s a story about someone named Wigginbottom who tweeted just a few too many details.

Had to reflash my Nokia N800 last week due to some sort of error. That fixed everything, however, it meant that I needed to reload all the applications – which is fine. It never hurts to reload the apps and wipe the trial’ed software off.

• Map Sources
• GPS Routes
• POI DBs
• Turn by Turn Voice Prompts

Maemo Mapper Sources

Anyway, the main app on this portable to me is Maemo Mapper a GPS tool. Previously, it was pre-configured to provide VE Maps, OpenStreet Maps, Yahoo! and Google Maps for street, satellite and hybrid maps. This time, only OpenStreet Maps was provided. I need to find how to add these other views.

• OpenStreetMap – Traditional “Mapnik” “http://tile.openstreetmap.org/%0d/%d/%d.png”
• Google Maps (street) “http://mt.google.com/vt/v=w2.95&x=%d&y=%d&zoom=%d”
  I hear that Google changes this from time to time.

Layers

Layers are maps which have transparency so they can overlay the map you are using and add additional information. For example to add Road and city names on Google Satellite or Google Terrain maps.

• Google Traffic “http://mt.google.com/mapstt?zoom=%0d&x=%d&y=%d”
• Google Labels “http://mt.google.com/mt?v=w2t.88&&z=%0d&x=%d&y=%d” (use with Google Satellite or Google Terrain for labels for cities, roads, etc., i.e. “Hybrid” maps.)

Download GPS Routes

There is good news. In my search to find those old map sources, I uncovered a fix to the routing by address. I never had this working before. It is really simple .

Maemo Mapper configuration as follows: Menu → Route → Download… and change the domain portion of the Source URL to http://gpx.geotags.com/ Leave the cgi-bin/gpx.cgi?saddr=%s&daddr=%s portion remains the same. It was good to see it work. Very nice.

POI Databases

Over the years, I’ve added a few Points Of Interest databases to the device. Chains of cheaper gasoline stations, my preferred fast food chains and Walmarts. You never know when you’ll need to buy something at a Walmart on a trip. I also have a list of over 1,000 waterfall locations. If I’m near a waterfall, it is nice to know it and stop when in the area. I need to build a list of hiking trailheads and parking areas.

Turn by Turn

flite is needed for a Synthesized Voice telling you to turn left. There are lots of dependencies that may not be easily achieved.

By some standards, my 10,000+ digital photo collection is either very large or trivial. I suspect that professional photographers probably have hundreds of thousands of photos. Many of those will have different post-processing.

Organizing, backing up and archiving digital photos and images doesn’t have to be complicated to do well.

Organization

As you take the photos, place them into your organization. If you delay more than a week after returning from that once-in-a-lifetime vacation to Africa, then you probably will never perform any useful organization. Below are 8 steps to help you organize your photos efficiently.

These days, there is a real desire to have videos on your network, but not loose any of the features that the source media provides. Things like multiple languages tracks, director’s comments and other interesting audio tracks. I like to listen to the Spanish soundtrack and have the Spanish subtitles displayed for movies that I already know. It has been possible to have all this by ripping the full DVD contents and using an appropriate playback device for a long time, but that uses a bunch of storage – perhaps 4x more than needed if modern video codecs are used.

Updated 12/2014:
Jump to the bottom of the article to see the updates.

People new to Linux or UNIX often don’t understand that built into the GUI system is a way to remote into pretty much any server in the world and have a program running on the remote machine, but displayed back on your Linux desktop. It is built in and has been for 30+ year of X/Windows. It doesn’t matter if you use Ubuntu, Redhat, Solaris, AIX, or if you use Gnome, KDE, XFCE, MWM, TWM – this solution is at a lower level. If you have a GUI on Linux or UNIX, it is built in and actually works really, really well.

Remote Applications over the WAN

For about the last week, I’ve been in the Fort Collins, CO area for my niece’s wedding. That required about 6 hours total, but if I’m going all that way, I want to make it into a mini-vacation.

During the trip, I saw elk, bear, bear cub, rattle snake, rabbits, HUGE grasshoppers, millions of grasshoppers, gray squirrels, ground squirrels, and a few fish. A few interesting photos are below.

This morning an email was waiting from a travel friend. It was this link – http://www.galeriaelcuartito.com.ar/ – lot’s of FLASH, sorry.

I think that this week is 2 years since we visited this fantastic pizzeria in Buenos Aires. We enjoyed it enough to eat there twice – including the last night in town.

Since returning from that trip, I’ve had pizza, but only about 5 times. I’ve been ruined because I thought that I knew good pizza. I was wrong all these years. None of them compare. To me, El Cuartito has THE BEST PIZZA IN THE WORLD …. so far. It is cheap too. Primera buenos!