You called, and we respond! Since we didn’t have time to address all your (awesome) calls in this week’s main episode, we added this bonus voicemail show. Highlights: We describe some of the technical magic that automatically strips, converts, and positions the voicemails that come in to all the various GWC podcast. We hear MG listener Barb’s take on tea — and tell you about the thoughtful (and tasteful) gift we received this week from Adagio. We address the question of Windows vs. iOS vs. Android for non-powerusers. We discover that some families need color printing and ponder cheap (and painfully expensive) color printer options. And uber-geek Shooter digs into the iPad capitative touch screen specs and tells us how they might affect the design of iPad styluses. Thanks again for calling in your killer thoughts and questions!
First off, thanks to Juan, via Audra and Chuck, for turning me on to loose-leaf tea brewing!
recap of my favorites:
I like to start my 0-dark-thirty mornings off with Golden Monkey and a tsp of local raw honey.
My most favorite blend from Adagio is Valentines. It’s decadently flavorful. I’ll drink this the rest of my day and just keep adding ice to it till it’s seriously diluted. This is a good thing, as I don’t want to end my day on a caffeine high!
For those of you who’d like to replicate the ice tea you get at most drive-thru and restaurant locations (liptony-like), Try the Assam Harmony or the stronger Assam Melody. Both are very good, and much fuller flavored and consistent when you brew your own! The Sampler Packs are also a great way to branch out with low expense!
If your mornings are a fire drill like mine, and waiting for the kettle to wake the whole house hours earlier than necessary seems like an unworthy gamble (and then its denizens want to kill you and you kind of want to do yourself in, first!), you might think of investing in a Hot Shot type water dispenser. It’s quiet and it gets up to 2 cups of water hot in about a minute- quicker if you use less water (pick it up at amazon via the GWC kickback link)
Everyone has their own preference for sweeteners, but I like the Sugar in the Raw or Splenda. If I don’t have time to brew my own, I’ll get the drive-thru tea with a splenda and extra ice (for dilution). Sugar in the Raw doesn’t affect the flavor of the tea as much as white sugar or other sweeteners, and the calories are negligible for me as I don’t add any more and I just keep diluting all afternoon. Did I mention I get a lot more fluids in my day this way? Ossim.
I’ll heat up about a cup and a half of water from the water filter on my sink and toss almost 1 tbsp (or 2 packets worth) of the raw sugar into my 32 oz reusable Seaworld cup (perfect size for the cup holder I modded in my bus!) and pour some of the hot water in there to melt the crystals and the rest in my Ingenuitea brewer. 1 heaping tbsp of Valentines brewed for 3 1/2 minutes (I don’t like it bitter) and pop it on my cup over some ice to cool and mix and topped off with more ice and whoosh! Out the door! Whole process takes about 5 minutes.
I wish I could find a koozie that’s perfect for my seaworld cup, but I improvise with a folded over paper towel I wrap around the cup and secure with a rubber band. It’s recyclable and reusable! Keeps it cold and keeps the ice longer.
Maybe I’ll mod some freebie koozies we have no use for with a needle and thread…?
Did we ever find out what is in the Modern Geek blend? When ordering teas online, I’m fiercely loyal to Tealuxe because they’re a small company with which I made a personal and meaningful connection in college. But if Adagio is as tasty as y’all say it is and they’re going to be so awesome as to make a Modern Geek blend, I think I can spread my business around and order from a second company.
Thank you for doing a geek podcast, you guys REALLY inspire confidence that you know your poop in everything you’ve discussed thus far. In an era when product reviews are abundant and opinons are skewed by favoritism and $$$ I feel confident that your advice will lead me down the right path with my time and hard earned money. It’s also very GWC of you to include the knowledge of community pros to expand the content you can offer. 
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Thank you for giving me a term that I’ve been grasping at for a while now: F.M. I’ve spent WAY too many hours digging WAY too deep into things and have recently tried to convey a sense of balance of understanding between practicality and “boy, it would be cool to understand this” to a new employee, F.M. puts it in one term. Well, two words…:groucho:
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The approach you espouse in choosing the right product for the right person at the right time should be applied almost universally. Every couple years I’m frustrated by base station emulator manufacturers (we test and repair wireless devices: handsets, tablets, netbooks, wireless broadband mod/dems) because they tend to oversell us on features we don’t want or need.
-We don’t need an in-depth protocol tester, that was all worked out by Qualcomm during chipset design.
-We don’t need a conformance tester, that was performed by the device manufacturer and the carrier repeated it during their approval process.
-What we need is a tester to verify functionality of a device: output power, sensitivity, transmitter modulation quality, and interference rejection. We need it to have a simple UI and we need it to be FAST and RELIABLE.
There are two manufacturers that understand where we’re coming from and they are MUCH easier to work with than the others.
- In regard to cable management, that “corrugated black tube with a slit down the side” as you said has many different names, I call it split loom and it’s GREAT stuff. I’ve had to build some seriously Frankensteinian work stations over the years and it really helps keep things organized, it’s also nice when a prospective customer comes to your facility and sees that you keep your equipment tightly organized. Unfortunately my desk at home is a rat’s nest. :oops:
Once again, thanks for doing this.