apps

It’s Screen Time. Making the most of your smartphone addiction.

By Brad Beckstrom

I’ve been playing with the screen time tracker on my iPhone. Apple recently introduced screen time tracking in response to legitimate public concern about rampant addiction to looking at our iPhones.

Apple hid this app in the settings section so if you look for it on your home screen or search bar you won’t see it. You need to go to settings and search for it. I really don’t feel there’s enough data in there for me to decide if I have a smartphone problem but I should keep an eye on it. Actually, I already know I have a smartphone problem. I really don’t need another app to tell me about this. I just want to manage it.

[Read more…]

How to protect your credit and get free 24/7 identity theft monitoring.

11/18 by The Frug Leave a Comment

By Brad Beckstrom

If you’ve ever used a credit card, online accounts, applied for loans or online offers, you’ve most likely already had parts of your identity stolen. Somewhere someone is keeping a file on you and that includes your Social Security number, addresses, recent passwords, and other information like your mother’s maiden name.

About once every year or so we get a new credit card number when fraud is detected on one of our two credit card accounts. This is a pain especially if you use online bill pay or financial tracking tools like Quicken or Personal Capital. (Everything needs to be updated, again.)

However, it’s relatively minor and common compared to full-on identity theft. Identity theft can come in many forms. Over the years we’ve experienced people successfully changing our address and getting a new credit card sent to them. Another fraudster created an actual credit card replica that was successfully used at Nordstrom and several other brick-and-mortar retailers. We’re also part of several data breaches per year including big ones like recent Target and Experian breaches as well as smaller ones most people never hear about. [Read more…] about How to protect your credit and get free 24/7 identity theft monitoring.

Stop filling your mind with random stuff. It’s time to go on a high-quality, low information diet.

12/16 by The Frug Leave a Comment

By Brad Beckstrom

I thought I had this all figured out. A few years ago, I decided to get on a high quality low information diet. I would avoid traditional news sites and only follow a small group of highly trusted writers, using a RSS feed reader. I would update and pare back this list regularly and categorize the writers I followed by interest. The feed reader I use is called Feedly and allows me to group my favorite writers into categories like business, family, personal development, photography, comedy, sports etc. The feed reader is very effective at stripping out distractions, especially all of that click bait, and fake news, you see at the bottom of many websites, even on many major news and network websites. My plan worked well. Each evening my feed reader presented me with a personally curated news stream from a group of writers I trust with very little distraction. No clickbait, no banner ads, no fake news.

Then two things happened. Apple launched an app called “News” that I started playing with after a recent iPhone upgrade. Then the election cycle began. This news app is comes set up like a feed reader for the big news sites. I found myself following multiple networks, major newspapers. Any spare moment I had, standing in line, having some lunch, I started filling up with this news app. Then I felt I needed to share things on Facebook or Twitter which led me to click on more stories shared by friends. There was so much garbage out there about both candidates, I’d quickly spiraled into a news consumption addiction. I’d gone from high quality, low information to just information and way too much of it. Not only did my other feed reader start to fill up with unread articles, I also found myself thinking less about what I wanted to create. I was too busy absorbing all of the news to think about much else. As a dieter might say, I fell off the wagon. [Read more…] about Stop filling your mind with random stuff. It’s time to go on a high-quality, low information diet.

Making Sleep Awesome Again.

09/16 by The Frug Leave a Comment

Nine Ways I’m Improving My Sleep and Fighting Fatigue .

By Brad Beckstrom

I shouldn’t complain, after all, I’ve spent a half a century on this planet without a major illness. I’m not sure my second half-century will go as well, but let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. In return for my overall good health, I’ve gotten to battle my share of ongoing “nagging conditions.” I think “conditions” is a good word for these because they are a state, a circumstance in which I operate, they are ongoing and generally unyielding to my efforts. I have learned to live with these conditions and manage them on a day-to-day basis so that they’re generally unnoticeable to others and, on a good day, unnoticeable even to myself.

What is my condition? Boogers. That’s it. That’s what I’ve called it since I was a kid “Boogers”. The official medical term is Sinusitis, Basically your nose overreacts to everything and fills up with some sort of snot that dries up in the night and turns into boogers. It’s sort of like having a mild cold all the time. Immediately people think “oh, you must have allergies.” Nope, I’m allergic to nothing. I’ve been tested probably 5 times, even once at the National Institutes of Health. After sprays and meds didn’t work, top docs told me, “oh, the problem is your deviated septum. Surgery can fix that.” I got a second opinion, “yep surgery will fix that.” I got the surgery, it didn’t fix it. It’s my condition. It’s not going anywhere.

I was told that these sinus problems need to be addressed or they can lead to sleep apnea which can lead to stroke, cancer or DEATH. So, now these boogers could kill me if I didn’t get rid of them. Or more likely, my wife will kill me for my loud snoring, [Read more…] about Making Sleep Awesome Again.

Are GPS apps rendering part of your brain inactive?

07/16 by The Frug Leave a Comment

How to vastly improve your experience with maps and keep your head from getting lost in the map on your smartphone.

By Brad Beckstrom

Cartography – The study and practice of making maps.

Remember paper maps? I’m talking about the big unfolding kind they used to give you at tourism offices, AAA or full-service gas stations. How about the slick plastic coated ones that you could access with one hand on the steering wheel trying to navigate in a city like Rome or Washington, DC? Or the jumbo 50 page city or county map books they used to sell at office supply and convenience stores for about 18 bucks, still popular with some realtors and salespeople who work in remote areas or haven’t jumped on the smartphone bandwagon yet. Or the mother of them all, The Rand McNally Road Atlas hundreds of pages just waiting to be explored. I always had a thing for maps. I was always up for exploring out-of-the-way places, and maps helped me get there.

When my boys were younger, we used to play a game called “spin the globe”, wherever you land, you have to go there. I remember once my oldest son spun the globe and landed on Yakutsk, Russia generally considered to be the coldest inhabited city on earth with average temperatures of -58°F. He immediately added the city to the weather app on his phone and kept an eye on the place, occasionally sharing the sometimes ridiculous low temperatures. I don’t think I’ll ever see Yakutsk but I have a feeling he might.

Once GPS came along I knew I was hooked. (Finally an answer for my lack of direction in life.) I played around with some of the earliest handheld GPS units, the kind where you had to load a CD onto your computer then somehow transfer maps to the GPS unit. These early units were popular with boaters because it’s very important to know where you’re going on the water. You also need to know about a third dimension, the depth of the water so you don’t end up on a sand barge, as I occasionally did. At least I can blame the fricking GPS unit versus my lack of preparation with paper navigation charts. [Read more…] about Are GPS apps rendering part of your brain inactive?

The Frug’s List. The best free things on the internet (I’ve used for over a year).

06/16 by The Frug Leave a Comment

By Brad Beckstrom

I should have made this list sooner, but I don’t like recommending something unless I’ve used it for a while, especially if it’s free, or it’s often too good to be true cousin (freemium). Since I started this blog in 2013, I’ve written about all kinds of free things on the inter-webs so I thought it would be a good idea to consolidate these into an ongoing list that I can update when I discover new free things, or get pissed and take one off the list. You can be sure that if it’s on this list I’ve been using it for at least a year.

Some of the items on this list are what we call “freemium”, meaning the initial version of the app is free, with more full-featured versions available for a fee. I won’t include them on the list if I don’t feel the basic version will fulfill most people’s needs, and I’ll be sure to mention if it’s ad-supported or freemium. These are not in any particular order, but in the future, I’ll add my latest discoveries to the top of the list.

Craigslist, the granddaddy of useful free things on the web. Craigslist has been one of my favorite tools for getting rid of stuff, whether it means posting a curb alert to have your old stuff hauled away for free, unloading old computer equipment for cold hard cash, or selling some sports tickets without some service adding 20% to the price. It’s free, it’s useful, it works. The more you use it, the better you get. Always remember to use photos to get your items noticed. My favorite craigslist story was when our local UPS guy came and hauled away an old sofa that The Salvation Army would not accept.

Google Apps for Work. Including Drive, Calendar, Docs, Gmail. I’ve been using Google’s online suite of apps for years. It always amazes me that I can create or find something much faster online in my browser than I can waiting for slow apps from Microsoft and Apple to grind through their bloated routines. After 6 years, I am currently using about eight gigs of the 15 free gigs of storage Google includes with my suite of apps. If you’re worried about security, you can even add two factor authentication. You’ll get a code sent to your mobile device if you try to login to your documents from another browser. You can also sync and backup your docs to your computer using Google Drive for your desktop.