Boil the Frog

I found a cool app via Mashable this morning. Boil the Frog creates a progression between two artists, a kind of musical evolution. It creates a playlist complete with album art that you can listen to online. The example given shows how Miley Cyrus can morph to Miles Davis in 18 songs and, surprisingly, it makes sense. It is incredibly addictive!

I tried it out by turning my iPhone onto shuffle and entering in the next two artists. It took 19 songs to get from Rosemary Clooney (don't ask) to Al Green. Wow!

Give it a try! Enter your favourite artists or the two most random ones you can think of. Don't just think about the difference in years between the artists; genre, instrumentation, country and so-called 'popularity' all produce varied results. I had some fun with these combinations:

• Tom Petty --> Adele in 16 songs. (That surprised me.)
• Chuck Berry --> Cyndi Lauper in 14 songs
• The Who --> Sinead O'Connor in 9 songs
• Patti Page --> Rammstein took a bit longer with 26 songs.
• Prince --> The Hollies in 10 songs
• Split Enz --> Diana Ross in 11 songs
• The Pogues --> Fiona Apple in 11 songs

I forecast hours of geeky musical fun on the way!

New year, new habits

First of all, happy new year, everyone!! I hope your year has got off to a great start. Mine has. :-)

2013. A fresh start! A clean slate! So, what shall we do with it? Well, this is the time of the year that most people go crazy setting themselves impossible New Years' resolutions, of which apparently 88% fail inevitably fail. Still, we continue to make (and break) them - but not me.

I decided years ago to focus on living every day instead of feeling pressured to set myself up for failure in a few weeks' time. I'm not saying that I don't strive or aim for anything, but I'd like to think I'm smarter about how I live my life now and more determined to appreciate the little things that happen every day. I find bucket lists incredibly annoying; why make death the focal point of a project, when life is for living every day? (My 101 in 1001 project was fantastic, as is my recipe for living.)

There are some things I'd like to start in 2013; they are more like good habits I would like to develop than unrealistic resolutions I'm unlikely to achieve. Popular myth has us believe that it takes 21 days to form a new habit, but apparently there is no magic number.

I have downloaded the free Lift app for setting and 'checking in' with new habits. You can choose to join a range of habits that others have already set or make up some of your own. I won't bore you with the tedium of how often I plan to floss my teeth, but there is one new habit that I am really keen to establish: Cook a meal to freeze each week. I am hoping that if I can get ahead by cooking a 'spare' healthy meal each weekend that it will help to alleviate some of the Friday night tiredness/cheap and cheerful temptation/got home late "I'm too tired to cook"/"What's in the freezer that we can cook quickly" syndrome. I've made a start and already have one meal frozen, which I cooked alongside dinner on Saturday night. So far, so good.

In addition, I'm using MapMyWalk to keep track of my training for Round the Bays and have a small habit based around filling an empty jar with good things that happen, although my jar is likely to be more metaphorical than physical.

So how's 2013 looking for you? What do you have planned for this bright, shiny new year?

MapMyWalk

It is three months until Round the Bays hits Wellington and I am putting a team of walkers and runners together to enter this event. As a walker, I really enjoy the scenery around our coastline and look forward to three months of summer walks, so long as the weather behaves!

I have been playing around with MapMyWalk and went for my first walk with it today. MapMyWalk is a free multi-platform mobile app that uses a GPS tracker to stalk you while you are out walking. In return, it provides you with statistics about your workout, including the distance travelled, your speed, how long you have been walking, minutes per kilometre, as well as records of other stuff like food and nutrition, calories burned etc. Your stats are recorded within the app and you can also access them online, keeping a cumulative record of each workout or editing them to build up a picture over time. You can link your account to automatically brag about your workouts on Facebook or Twitter (I haven't) and even create a walking club to compete with your friends, if you are that way inclined. (I'm not.)

Although this morning's walk was not particularly remarkable, I enjoyed keeping track of my walking distance and statistics as the blue line tracked me down the road and back home again. Let's see what my account looks like in three months' time!

My iPod touch apps

Ever since discovering Free App A Day a while ago, my iPod touch has really come to life. I have only bought a few fully-paid applications but have downloaded lots of freebies. Free App A Day offers one free app for iPhone/iPod/iPad each day. I enjoy playing games, but am not too keen on action games or ones that eat my battery life before my eyes.

Here are some of the apps I'm enjoying at the moment. There are others, but these are the ones I use most frequently.

Classics
I've blogged about this before. The Classics app allows me to have 27 classic novels on hand everywhere I go. This is great if you are a bibliophile like me, or are caught waiting somewhere without a book to read or anything to do.

Build-A-Lot
There is something strangely addictive about building and rebuilding a community from scratch. Build-A Lot is not as complex as Sim City, making the challenges easier to dip in an out of when time is tight.

Fuzzle
Fuzzle is a fun game to play in short bursts, for example, when waiting in the queue for my morning coffee. It is a simple, untimed game which doesn't restart every time you open the application - it continues your saved game. Basically, you move the balls around the board to create lines of five balls of the same color. Every time you finish a row, the balls are removed. But after every other move you make, more balls are added.

Sudoku 2
I hadn't had much experience with solving sudoku puzzles before, but Sudoku 2 is great and has taught me lots. There are several different levels and the updates released have made the board and numbers even clearer to see.

Moonlight Mahjong
Use the touch screen to adjust the angle you view the game board or the size of the puzzle. Moonlight Mahjong has several different tile styles, and even one which uses numbers if you're having trouble finding matches. I randomly select puzzles to solve and they range from being relatively simple to quite complex.

Chicks
I have finally found a Lemmings-style game for my iPod touch. Chicks takes me right back to the 80s/90s when we first met little creatures who would fall off cliffs and bash their way through walls at our command.

Cooking Dash
I have spent far longer than I care to think about trying to master Cooking Dash. Flo dashes about trying to cook up meal orders for her customers, who are each only prepared to wait for varying lengths of time. The kitchen gets busy and the heat turns up a notch. The biggest frustration with Cooking Dash (and Diner Dash below) is that it doesn't save the game when you close the application - you need to start again from scratch.

Diner Dash
As above. Be warned: Diner Dash is also really addictive.

Do you have any recommendations of your own?

Dinner Spinner

I have just downloaded the coolest application onto my iPod touch. It's called Dinner Spinner and was released by one of my most often-referred to recipe sites, All recipes Australia New Zealand. There are both free and pro versions (guess which one this cheapskate has downloaded?), so iPhone users could even use it at the supermarket when umming and ahhing over what to cook for dinner that night! Once you've downloaded a particular recipe, you can save it as a favourite and even view it offline later.

The free version lets you choose from twelve different dish types (dinner, bbq, vegetarian, salad etc), thirteen basic ingredients (fruit, grain, lamb, chocolate, pasta etc), as well as cooking times. Simply 'spin' up your preferred combination and then view your matches.

Not sure what you're in the mood for? Fancy a surprise? Just shake your iPod touch/iPhone and let it choose a random selection for you to browse through. I can see that I'm going to have a lot of fun with this app. Buon appetito!

An offline wilderness

I am terrible at spending gift vouchers. Actually, I'm not a great shopper at all, but I can easily spend months pondering what to spend a gift voucher on and more often than not redeem them close to their expiry date. I have been carrying around $170 of Farmers vouchers for about six months now, a couple of $10 Westfield vouchers, and $20 credit at the iTunes Store. I finally used $60 in last week's Farmers sale (still more to go - actually, some of that came from trading in airpoints that were about to expire, lol), but the Westfield vouchers remain in my wallet.

While I generally like the idea of vouchers as gifts, either giving or receiving, it takes me more time than almost anyone else to research all my possible spending options before finally redeeming them, usually during some kind of sale or when I'm in desperate need of an item. I've always been like that; I'm not sure why spending is so hard for me when others seem to love it!

Next week, we are going away to a place with no cell phone coverage, no Internet access (I don't credit 13 KB dial-up as being 'Internet'), and very cautious use of electricity and water. Some would call that bliss; I call it cold turkey. I'll surgically remove my laptop from my side and switch off my cell phone before we leave, but have already collected a supply of books to read and a backup: my trusty iPod touch. Up until now, this prize has been an occasional toy; next week it will be my lifeline in a non-digital world! (Am I exaggerating? Not sure ...)

I have spent some time today preparing my iPod touch. My 60GB iPod holds my entire music collection but will be left behind; 16GB is a struggle for me, especially when sharing the available space with other applications, so I have put together some basic playlists to see me through the week. I also went shopping at the iTunes Store and almost spent all of my $20 voucher. Almost.

What did I buy? A few games that I've been playing the lite versions of, some more expensive than I would have bought myself (well, all of them really - I've only played freebies so far):

• Diner Dash - I would consider this a living nightmare in real life, but I've just signed up for 50 virtual levels and can't wait!
  
• Cooking Dash - ditto
• Fling - it's fun flinging things around on an iPod touch
  
• Fuzzle - strangely addictive
• Moonlight Mahjong - I've only ever played mahjong online and this is quite a cool version
• SimCity - I used to love playing this on my PC, so I'll see if I can achieve the same results on a 3.5" screen.

So, I'm nearly ready for my big week offline without email, Facebook, Twitter, blogging (although I might be able to prepare posts on my touch). Anyone would think I was heading for the depths of a jungle wilderness! I am looking forward to going away, really!