The Frug recommends

Never Pay For Cloud Storage Again.

Claiming your one terabyte of free space in the cloud.

By Brad Beckstrom.

It’s out there. The land rush is on. Free space. I’m not talking about a few free gigabytes of space, I’m talking free terabytes (1000 Gigabytes). If you’re like most people you have a lot of photos. They are probably out of sight, scattered around in all kinds of places, shoeboxes, disintegrating photo albums, old laptops, photo apps, and smartphones. Especially smartphones. As cameras in smartphones get better (Over 800 Apple engineers worked on the latest iPhone camera) we are taking more and more photos. We take photos of family, friends, pets, projects at work, that dent in our fender, photos of our stuff (a home inventory with photos can come in handy with the insurance company after that next natural or household disaster).

Wouldn’t it be great if we could store all our photos in one place and have them automatically tagged and categorized by date, topic, location, and then easily decide which ones to share with family and friends and which ones to keep private?

I recently got a crash course on photo storage options as I’m working on a project to publish 10,000 images over five years. I needed space for personal photos, work photos, and photographs for the project. If you count photography as a hobby and shoot high-resolution and raw images, up til recently online storage wasn’t a great option. Less than 100 full size image files from a modern digital SLR can take up more space than 65,000 pages of word documents. (about a gigabyte) High res scanned images can be even larger.

Don’t pay for cloud storage. [Read more…] about Never Pay For Cloud Storage Again.

This Once a Month Habit Will Change Your Life.

12/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

The 10 best tools for finding truly great books.

By Brad Beckstrom

Recently Tim Ferriss (Writer and 4 Hour Workweek guru) was interviewing Kevin Kelly Founding Editor, Senior Maverick of Wired Magazine and an expert on all kinds of cool stuff. Kelly has a crazy two letter domain name kk.org where he shares everything from his extensive list of documentary film recommendations, books, photography and all kinds of cool tools he’s come across. The interview was so fascinating that Tim Ferriss extended it to a second podcast and eventually a third. I highly recommend having a listen.

In the interview Kevin Kelly said one thing that really stuck with me. “ read one book (any book) a month and it will change your life”. I’ve always enjoyed reading, but over the years but I’d gotten more reliant on magazines, blog feeds, apps (like feedly and flipboard) and podcasts. Taking the time to find and read really good books had gotten pushed aside. I was doing quite a bit of reading but the problem with books is that it takes some time to find good ones. I’d often start a book and then not finish it. I might even have two or three books I’ve started on my Kindle app at one time, but after the first few chapters they just sort of trail off.

A lot of the books I’ve read, especially nonfiction, business, and finance books start out like gangbusters then end up trailing off and repeat themselves for the second half of the book. The Kindle app lets you download a sample to your device, but I found the samples are rarely enough to really get a good feel for the quality of the book as they wrap up pretty quickly.

Here’s a quick tip, if a book doesn’t hold your attention at least to the middle chapters dump it. You wouldn’t go around telling people you’re in the middle of a bad book. If you’re going to commit the time to finishing a book a month it should really be one that you enjoy, that you can’t wait to get back to. There are a lot of bad books out there but there are still many many good ones you just need some cool tools to find them. [Read more…] about This Once a Month Habit Will Change Your Life.

Is an Amazon Prime Membership worth it ?

11/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

I recently visited a friend and he mentioned that he had Amazon Prime but hadn’t used it much. I’m not a big fan of subscription services, people often sign up then forget them, or don’t use them enough to see any value. I see all kinds of examples of this, fancy gold cards, Netflix, gym memberships, Costco, BJ’s, Sam’s, all kinds of web based music services, shopping clubs, cloud storage, home security, the list goes on. Don’t get me started on cable company add-ons, or any software that “requires” paid updates or monthly fees!

Yet, over the years, I’ve either considered or used every every type of service I’ve listed here. Every year I recommend making a hit list that includes every service or membership that charges a monthly or annual fee. Convert them all to annual totals so you can see how much you’re spending a year on the services, then sort them by the total. Take a close look at each service and how much you’ve really used it over the past year. Start a spreadsheet in Google Docs and each time you come across a monthly or annual fee drop it in there. There’ll be a few you forgot about. Example: Spotify $9.99 Month x12 = $119.88 yr.……

This is about the time of year that we get charged our $99 Amazon Prime renewal fee. With Amazon, it’s not only the annual fee I want to take a look at but also the money our family spends with them. Once you sign up for Amazon Prime, you can get hooked on some of the benefits like free two-day shipping on everything from paper products to textbooks to dog food. Amazon is also great for hard-to-find items like instant unsweetened steel cut oatmeal or other items you may want to purchase elsewhere but would have to pay shipping on. [Read more…] about Is an Amazon Prime Membership worth it ?

How to create a Frequent Flyer Points Machine.

10/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

The tools you need to automatically earn 2% or 2X points on nearly every dollar you spend, creating a perpetual flow of frequent flyer points.

Most airline frequent flyer programs have become a joke. When I started travel hacking years ago, you could get a decent domestic ticket for 25,000 points and get tickets to the Caribbean and Mexico for around 35,000 points. No more. Sure you might be able to find one of those 25,000 point tickets they promote between two Rust Belt cities with a 5 AM departure and a three hour layover. Forget about flying anywhere near the holidays and get ready to hear them laugh if you’re looking to cash in points for a family of four directly with the airline, to let’s say the Caribbean, Europe, or even Florida. The airlines seem proud of the fact that they’ve become so superefficient through mergers and online ticketing algorithms that they only need to cough up a few regular seats per plane for frequent flyers, unless you’re willing to pay the premium, double sometimes triple points (then the seats will appear). I plan over six months out and I still can’t track decent ones down.

Unless you are flying alone, dealing with airlines to use your points is a waste of time. If you do get lucky and find a seat you can use points for, some airlines like British Airways will hit you with a $500+ “fuel surcharge” on top of the points you’re coughing up. On more than one occasion that surcharge to the UK or EU was more than the entire cost of the ticket from another discount airline like Norwegian Air or WOW airlines. Check out their $199 fares to Europe.

There is a solution.

I’ve been able to travel with our family of four once, sometimes, twice per year using high 2% reward credit cards. And yes, we were all on the same flight departing from and arriving to the airport we wanted. To do this we created a frequent flyer points machine using two cards from Chase, one business, one personal and an American Express card from Fidelity. [Read more…] about How to create a Frequent Flyer Points Machine.

How a Roman Emperor and a Greek slave helped me develop a life philosophy.

10/15 by The Frug 1 Comment

6 things the ancient Stoics can teach us about modern life.

By Brad Beckstrom

I don’t recall enjoying anything about philosophy class in college. It might’ve been that the class was early in the morning and the professor spoke in a whispering monotone voice, reading texts from ancient, long dead philosophers. I was too busy looking forward to have much concern for these lessons from the past.

I hadn’t learned much about Stoicism. The Stoics had largely gotten a bad rap and their philosophy nearly vanished thousands of years ago. These ancient Greeks, and later Romans, were depicted as stern characters that expressed little or no emotion in the face of tragedy, or even life’s grand victories. They internalized things and were indifferent to or unaffected by joy, grief, pleasure, or pain. That last sentence is right out of the dictionary. Holy crap, these guys seemed like a bunch of downers.

As it turns out, they are still largely misunderstood and only parts of their philosophy of life have been communicated over the years. The Stoics were actually full of joy and had truly advanced thinking on how to live the best life.

Discovery [Read more…] about How a Roman Emperor and a Greek slave helped me develop a life philosophy.

Going where you’re wanted….

08/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

Discovering towns, or entire countries, that will hustle for your business…

By Brad Beckstrom

I was in a jam. I usually take the family away for a few days around my birthday. This year some plans fell through and we skipped it. I was getting some heat from SuperK about getting away for a few days in July. The reason I was getting heat wasn’t because we don’t travel, we travel a lot. However, lately I’ve been visiting cities like Bangkok, New York, Seattle, Portland, Baltimore and Fargo as part of my creative quest to photograph 1000 different places in 100 different cities. The family was feeling a bit left out.

So, I wanted to make good on my promise and scrambled to find something very quickly. [Read more…] about Going where you’re wanted….