Pick Your Own Produce

I went blueberry picking today at a local blueberry farm.

I did a little pricing and it seems like blueberries are going for an average of €1.50 per 125 grams, which puts them at about €12 per kilo. I don't know about you, but at that price I cannot afford to eat blueberries... unless I pick them myself! The "you pick" blueberry farm here charges €3 per kilo if you do the hard work yourself!

I found this Pick Your Own website which looks like a fantastic resource for finding pick your own farms. I'm going to submit a couple that I know of in The Netherlands and see if I can do a bit more digging around to find others local to me here.

Picking your own Works for Me! What works for you?

Snap Links

It seems like a lot of blogs use Mr Linky to do their blog carnival link ups, and this is a good thing because you have a handy dandy list of links to click on instead of having to dig through comments and find links that way. It can, however, be a bit tedious to click on all 30-40 links (or 300 if you are talking about Works for me Wednesday's Mr Linky).

I have found a solution! It's called Snap Links. It allows you to open multiple links at once, and I loooove it. I even put off upgrading to Firefox 3 until they had a compatible version.

Snap Links only works on Firefox, which I'm sure all of you very smart clever people already use. If not, you can download it here. Then you can download and install Snap Links here. Once installed, all you have to do is right click (keep holding the button down) and drag the box until it selects the links you want to open.

Let go of the button and the links you've selected will pop up in new tabs.

Geez, I have a lotta bookmarks in my quick-link bar... but look at the opened tabs! Those are the links that were selected in the previous screen shot.

In addition to using it for Mr Linky posts, I also like to use it when I'm doing a random Google search and want to check out several of the hits at once. It's also good for "Link Roundup" posts. Maybe I'm just really lazy but I hate clicking and going back and forth between tabs and windows when I don't have to!

I don't recommend clicking on all 300 links at once because your computer will likely have an aneurysm and then you will be sad. 10-15 links seems to be a pretty good number, and it also breaks the list down into bite size pieces! After you've read your snapped links then you can go do something else for a little while, it's almost as good as a kitchen timer for allotting a certain amount of time to computer time.

So, Snap Links works for me! What works for you?

The Quandary of Laundry

This week's Works for Me Wednesday is backwards. Instead of ME imparting my vast knowledge of everything* on you, I ask you for help.

I grew up in a desert climate. This meant you could wad up your towel into a ball and leave it somewhere and it would likely just dry out and not end a smelly mildewy musty disaster. Now that I'm living in a swamp very humid place I have been having issues with musty laundry. I figured out if I wash stuff on hot that takes a lot of the yuck out, but I have a lot of clothes that aren't hot water friendly and doing all my laundry on hot is not electricity bill friendly. I started putting vinegar in the rinse cycle and that's helped a bit but it seems like after I get wearing my stuff the smell starts to make it's way back, especially if I get wet (which happens a lot here).

So, my question is this: What do you do to get musty gross stubborn smells from your laundry?

Check out more backwards Works for Me Wednesday and pass on your smarts there too!

*Haha, April Fools. I don't know everything, just almost everything!

Cheap Phone Service with magicJack

Living in another country can mean having expensive phone calls if I want to call home. Martijn was concerned about this and set us up with a VOIP (internet telephone) service that usually works okay. It has some quirks though and if my mom wanted to call me, she still had to make an international call.

Enter the magicJack.

The magicJack is a USB device that has a regular old phone jack on it. This way you can plug a regular telephone into your computer and make free domestic phone calls (and very cheap international ones!). It's quite small -- about the size of a Zippo lighter and a little bit thicker.

My dad started carrying these in his store, and brought one home for my mom to activate and test. She got it going with no problem and started telling me how wonderful it was. The international rates to The Netherlands (and much of the rest of Europe) are 2 cents per minute which is quite a lot less than the phone card rates she was getting previously. I was really only half listening to her about how wonderful it was because we already had the other VOIP service and I wasn't really sure this would be any better.

We ended up meeting the guy that invented the device when we were in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show. It somehow came out that I didn't actually have a magicJack for myself and they gave me one to try out.

I gotta say, I am impressed.

Here's how to get started:

• You purchase your magicJack through the website (or a retail store such as RadioShack) for around $40.
• Try not to swear as you cut open the impossible to open package (seriously guys, why must the packing on this kind of thing be SO ANNOYING).
• Plug the magicJack into an open USB port on your computer and let the software install.
• Follow the prompts on the software to set up your account and choose your phone number.
• Verify the e-mail address that you signed up with.
• Plug any old telephone into your magicJack and make your first call!

I had absolutely no problems getting mine up and running (neither did my mom, and she's not as computer savvy as me). In about 5 minutes I was able to register and select that I wanted a Utah telephone number. You must be running Windows XP, Vista, or an Intel based Mac in order for the magicJack to work. You also need to have a high-speed (broadband) internet connection.

As with anything, you'll have both your pros and cons. Here are the main points I noticed.

Pros Quick and easy to set up Really inexpensive- the purchase of the device for $40 includes a years worth of service ($19.95 to continue after the first year) Local phone number for my parents to call me on You can take your magicJack with you wherever you go. I have a Utah telephone number but will be using mine in The Netherlands. It's not tied to any one computer so you can take it to a friends house and use it there if you need to as well. Call quality is pretty good. I did hear a little bit of an echo at the beginning of a couple of my phone calls, but I get that with my other service too so it's more of a VOIP problem than a magicJack problem.

Cons You must have the computer on to use this device. One of the things I liked about our other VOIP service is that we've got a little box that connects to the router which allows us to call even when the computers are off. If you have a slow or dodgy internet connection, your call quality can suffer. Doesn't work with Linux Chat-based web only support

I don't know that I would advise dumping your landline in favor of the magicJack, but I do think that it's wonderful for long distance and the fact that I can have a local to my parents Utah telephone number!

Cheap phone calls Work for Me! I'd love to hear what others do for long distance, especially for international calls.

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Free AudioBooks

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We have gobs of music, but what did I REALLY want to listen on Big Daddy? Audiobooks! The problem is... I'm stingy (and I have no income). I didn't want to PAY, so I did some digging around and came up with a few good places that you might look if you are cheap and stingy (and have no income) like me ;)

• Overdrive - You can do a search here for titles and see if your public library offers the service. Lucky for me I still have a Davis County Library card. Downside to these is they do have DRM on them and you can only "check out" the books for a limited amount of time. You -can- burn some, but not all, of these books to CD if you won't get them entirely listened to within 3 weeks.
  
  
  
• NetLibrary is another website some libraries use. You need to contact your local library and see if they offer this service. Davis County Utah uses both this service and Overdrive. Netlibrary works similarly to Overdrive, but does have a downside if you use an iPod or a Zune- neither of those devices will work due to DRM restrictions.
  
  
  
• LibriVox "provides free audiobooks from the public domain." This is a great place to get the classics. Files are available in both ogg vorbis and mp3. Another cool thing is this service is completely volunteer based and there are books available in multiple languages.
  
  
  
• Literal Systems- They have a small selection of audiobooks and short stories.
  
  
  
• LoudLit.org "is committed to delivering public domain literature paired with high quality audio performances. We pair together great literature and accompanying audio." This website has a few novels, some poetry, short stories, and children's books. Some books have embedded text which is kinda neat too.
  
  
  
• AudioBooksForFree.com- I wanted to like this site more because it appears to have quite a lot of content. There -are- free audiobooks, but you will pay for them in terms of it being highly inconvinient to download them and the low bitrate (8kbps). For example: You want to listen to Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. This isn't a short book by any means, and is divided into 43 files. 43 files that you must download ONE AT A TIME. That paired with the low bitrate makes this probably one of the last sites I'll look at. You can pay to have them zip the file and you can also pay more to have a higher bitrate. I'm not so sure it's worth it with the other options you have available to you.



• Podiobooks.com has "serialized" audiobooks which are made in podcast format. You can download them via an RSS feed (using podcast software) or by directly downloading episodes from the site.



• Project Gutenberg has both human read and computer generated audio books from the public domain. This site also has a wide variety of languages.

The last two I am going to mention aren't free, but sometimes have free offers.

• Simply AudioBooks- A little bit like Netflix but for audiobooks. I used this service in the US for a little while and I actually really enjoyed it. It's about 15$ per month and they mail you the audiobook CDs. Right now they have a free download with no strings attached. I didn't like the book, but someone else might.
  
  
  
• Audible.com always advertises a free download, but this is usually if you've never been a member before and sign up with them. VERY occasionally they'll offer a free book with no strings attached. You get the most bang for your buck with their subscription service, but you can buy individual titles.

Free always works for me!