The Frug Recommends

Don’t Get Robbed Blind Buying Prescription Glasses.

My journey to find the perfect $44 pair of prescription shades.

Just got back from a walk and I am really enjoying my new $44 prescription Ray-Bans. The walk was short but the journey to find inexpensive prescription glasses has been a long one.

Over years I’ve been ripped off buying prescription glasses.. I don’t wear contacts, so you would think that would save me some money. Not really. I need progressive lenses and have an astigmatism.

While my prescription is not that strong, decent lightweight progressive lenses are still pricey. In addition, since I don’t wear contacts, I need prescription sunglasses, which are another racket.

If you want a decent pair of prescription sunglasses, you need to buy them and then immediately replace the expensive tinted polarized lenses with your custom made prescription. Unfortunately, because they’re sunglasses, they often get smashed, bent, broken and sometimes lost. #firstworldproblems

I’ve got a decent track record with lost sunglasses, my wife SuperK does not. Still, I’ve lost a couple of pairs of prescription sunglasses over the years, and busted one other pair.

Here are a few of the many comical ways I’ve been ripped off purchasing glasses. [Read more…] about Don’t Get Robbed Blind Buying Prescription Glasses.

The Death of Chucklehead DJs and Bad Talk Radio Hosts.

05/14 by The Frug 2 Comments

By Brad Beckstrom

Here’s why you should dump satellite radio and chucklehead talk radio shows and start streaming podcasts.

Podcast-a-palooza

I remember when podcasting first got hot. It was around 2006 and people were discovering podcasts via iTunes, listening on their iPods. Podcasting had another growth spurt when the iPhone came out, soon to be followed by Android phones, and lots of options for listening to podcasts on all types of devices. But by 2011, listening to podcasts started to seem dated and there was less buzz about new podcasts.

At the same time, there were lots of new options like streaming radio apps, tunein and iheartradio as well as video blogs. People were busy looking at their phones instead of listening to them. Podcasts didn’t go away, but they stopped growing.

The Resurgence

About a year ago, things started to change. [Read more…] about The Death of Chucklehead DJs and Bad Talk Radio Hosts.

The world’s fastest workout. Super efficient and kind of crazy.

04/14 by The Frug 2 Comments

You’re going to start seeing more crazy people working out. They’ll be easy to spot. They’ll be running in place with all their might, then they will huff and puff for 10 seconds and drop to the ground pedaling their legs madly doing bicycle crunches. They will work through an entire set of 8 exercises in four minutes flat. These folks have discovered high-intensity interval training. HIIT. If they’re doing it right they will be putting out 100% effort in eight 20 second bursts. They will look a bit crazy. I am now one of them.

I used to hate workouts.

Not so much the actual workout but the whole time / getting ready thing. At one point , my whole workout (process) was an hour and a half. Due to this hassle, I would only get around to it about 3 times a week.

I then discovered (HIIT) high intensity interval training. I stumbled across HIIT while I was searching for the best exercises for a heavy bag. What I discovered was there was a ton of research on HIIT dating back to successful tests with Olympic speed skating teams in Japan. The original process was invented by Professor Izumi Tabata in 1996. It is also referred to as Tabata training. The basic concept allows Non-Olympic athletes like me to incorporate HIIT into a short 20 minute workout which provides the same benefits as a one-hour workout.

I do 8 minutes of warm-up exercises, 4 minutes of HIIT, and 8 minutes of cool down exercises for a total of 20 minutes. The catch is that during the high-intensity portion of the workout you’ll be going 100% in 20 second intervals with 10 seconds of rest for a total of four minutes.

You will look a bit crazy doing this.

For this reason, I prefer to do this type of HIIT exercise in my basement where no one can get hurt, other than me of course. I use core exercises as a warm-up (8 minutes), a heavy bag for the high-intensity part (4 minutes), then 8 minutes of cool down with weights (total 20 minutes). The heavy bag makes such a ruckus in the basement that it shakes the whole house. Recently SuperK came downstairs to create a quick video clip on her iPhone of this high-intensity heavy bag portion of my workout. The five or six people people who saw the video prior to it being deleted collapsed on the ground laughing.

I can only imagine how crazy I would look doing lots of different exercises, as illustrated here in this infographic provided by Tiny Hearts. The great thing about this type of exercise is that you can mix it up or focus on one type of exercise for your intervals like sprinting, spinning or boxing. [Read more…] about The world’s fastest workout. Super efficient and kind of crazy.

Find Your Treehouse. My one year experiment using Airbnb.

04/14 by The Frug 2 Comments

Find Your Treehouse

When I was in third grade, my dad helped me build a treehouse. I should say, I helped him. It was a great treehouse, larger than most with a solid deck, walls, and a gable roof. It was built in a huge tree that could easily support its weight. We had windows with large screens and even ran power via a long extension cord. I could run a fan, a radio, and even a small tv.

My stock value went way up for coolness of sleepovers among my friends. I miss that treehouse. It was a great place. For me, it was my “other” place. There was home, school, and the treehouse.

I think Airbnb, the travel app juggernaut, had people like me in mind when they started featuring photos of all kinds of lodging alternatives including: Yurts, Houseboats, Airstream Trailers, exotic treehouses and even old trains. It’s now the most popular page on their website. You can find it on their website homepage just by clicking “popular.”

I mean, who wouldn’t want to sleep on a boat or on a train or in a rainforest treehouse. These are the type of places where people can really get a good night’s sleep. And you get to skip buying the boat or vacation house part. Oddly enough, I started experimenting with Airbnb a few years back for business travel, not personal. I was headed to New York and sick and tired of business hotels that charge over $300 a night with nothing much more than free WiFi. And don’t forget about the 15-23% lodging and misc. taxes most cities add on. I found something much better on Airbnb for $130 a night in the East Village.

One of my best finds was a one-bedroom apartment in the center of the old city in Barcelona for $70 a night. Yes, you read that correctly — $70 per night. Prime location with balconies that opened out to one of the nicest parts of the city. It had WiFi, full kitchen and a living room. In a pre-war building with 15 ft high doors. A comparable room in a hotel would be close to $300 a night. [Read more…] about Find Your Treehouse. My one year experiment using Airbnb.

How to create your own personal search engine and remember everything.

01/14 by The Frug Leave a Comment

– Brad Beckstrom- Thefrug.com.

Have you ever scribbled a quick note, found something on your smartphone or online and bookmarked it, only to never find it again? Sure, the bookmark in your browser worked fine, it’s just you’re having trouble remembering some of the details, like what it was you thought was so great about the company, idea, article, gadget or piece of information in the first place. If the thought comes to you again this certainly makes it hard to find.

This can be especially frustrating at work. What was the name of that company that makes that free widget? Wazzle, Ziplot, Xplant. Search even becomes more difficult with all of the similar sounding Web 2.0 names out there. There’s just not enough information in most domain names or descriptions to make bookmarks very useful.

I have hundreds of bookmarks, dating back years. They are basically useless broken links from companies I don’t recall much about. I’ve found a better way.

On May 9, 2009 at 10:07 AM, I discovered Evernote. A free note taking, smartphone, web and desktop app linked to the cloud. I remember this because every note is automatically annotated with a date time and location. I took a picture of a place I wanted to stay at the beach. The photo automatically included a map and was now searchable by the address, name of the property, date time month location etc. Even the text in the photo of the sign was automatically synced and searchable. This included text in logos like Sunspot below.

I was just getting started. I also added the free Evernote App to my iPad , Google Chrome, and the desktop version for my Mac. All of these sync with one free Evernote account. This is where the personal search elements really come in handy. Once you add Evernote to your browser, you can clip and quickly tag information on any webpage. Evernote then saves all kinds of information to help you find that page in the future. You can add your own tags like “Taxes” or “Vacation“ or “To Do.” This browser plug-in / extension is available for most modern browsers and is super convenient for quickly saving a simplified version of any article, stripping away all of the extraneous screaming headlines and other unrelated information like banner ads with dancing monkeys.

For traveling, I like to add the airport code as a tag or note to make things easier to find. like PDX for an upcoming trip to Portland. The Frug likes to make reservations way in advance and this comes in handy when trying to instantly pull up flight, hotel and event details I lined up four months ago. It’s also helpful when you visit a city several years later and want to pull up your old info, like a cool restaurant or hotel you found. You can also clip any type of information and attach it to a to do or reminder in Evernote. Example: book this hotel next May.

The greatest feature of Evernote is the search function. You can obviously search in the app or in your Evernote account but the most useful feature is the search plug-in for your browser that displays all of your past related notes directly in your Google search results. So, if I search Dewey Beach not only do I get that note I created back in 2009, but also some important info related to a client program and a hotel reservation.

After a very short time, you will find yourself remembering everything and being of great assistance to friends, clients and family members who can’t remember the name of that thing we found or place we stayed. Because you’re primarily searching just your results, there’s much less muck to dig through to find what you’re looking for.

Here are my five quick steps to creating your own personal search engine with Evernote:

Go to Evernote.com and create a free account.
Download the desktop app and browser plug-in available for most computers.
Activate the browser plug-in or extension, Evernote calls this web clipper.
Get the smartphone app.
Start clipping, snapping, tagging and sharing anything that interest you. You’ll be glad you did later.

You’ll also be able to get rid of all those notes and scraps of paper that pile up on your desk and in your wallet.

Foil Speedcams, Avoid Traffic Jams, and Save $0.30 per gallon on gas with the updated WAZE app

12/13 by The Frug Leave a Comment

My wife and I are not speeders. Unless you call driving 8 to 10 miles per hour above the posted speed limit, just to keep up with traffic, – speeding. In the DC Metro area driving at the speed limit can be dangerous. We have both also been “unfairly” nailed by speed cams in DC.

To solve this problem, we recently installed the WAZE app. Wayz in addition to being a solid GPS app also allows users to share speedcam, speed trap and driving hazard info. These alerts then show up as icons with warnings. This also comes in real handy for avoiding accidents and bad road conditions. You can look at traffic reports along your specific route which makes spotting and avoiding bad traffic a lot easier.

After you’ve been using WAZE for a bit you can create your own icon which shows up on the map. The icons are a lot of fun, but in busy metro areas like ours the screen can get a bit crowded. These can easily be turned off in settings.

One additional feature I’ve recently discovered It is the gas option. To be honest, I don’t look at gas prices very often because I don’t drive very much. Playing with this app I’ve been amazed at the difference in gas prices, just on one main drag near our home. It’s not uncommon to find .30. .40 and even $.50 variances per gallon nearby. It’s like getting a free lunch with every fill up. Just don’t buy any of that gas station sushi.

If you’re planning a trip you can take a quick look at the live map in your browser before you head out. https://www.waze.com/livemap

Waze was recently bought by Google for just over $1 billion dollars, so I think they may be onto something. Google paid 1 billion but you can get it for free here