As I write this, I’m in the midst of preparing myself for The Mother of All Golf Trips: 8 guys from around the country, Fort Lauderdale/Miami area courses, 10 rounds in 6 days.  Preparation includes getting the clubs and travel bag ready, doing a little stretching, and mostly engaging in e-TrashTalking.  It should be a great time; can’t wait!

Here are a few articles of interest I came across recently:

Top 10 Ways to Travel Smarter, Safer, and Cheaper @ Lifehacker.  A good, basic list; I’ve written about several of these, but there are a couple of areas I haven’t touched upon: readying your smartphone or laptop for travel, and how to protect your home while you’re on the road. Check it out.

Ever have a zipper pull tab come off?  (Or have TSA cut your zipper pull tabs??)  There’s a neat Instructable that shows one way of dealing with this problem:  Wire Zipper Slider Handle! (I didn’t come up with this title.)

Shopping for an Apple product? Choose refurbished every time  Rick Broida makes a very compelling case for buying Apple refurbs; definitely worth consideration! – @ CNET

One word to describe John Kenney’s We Are The One Per Cent @ The New Yorker:  hysterical

Jeff Doubek hits on a favorite topic: idiots who fly, in Passenger Etiquette – 8 Annoying People You Meet on an Airplane – @ Doubyland

Tim Leffel offered up a Practical Travel Gear staff rundown of Our Favorite Travel Gear of the Past Year in a recent post. For my money, one of the neatest items on the list is actually an app!

Have a great rest of the week, and travel safe!

I have three Gmail accounts: one that’s associated with this blog, my “standard,” everyday Gmail account, and one that I use solely for online ordering and signing up for offers.  Switching between them has always been a pain: I’d have to log out of one, then log into another,- until I discovered that you it’s possible to toggle between accounts in a second or two.

All you need to do to make this happen is go to google.com/settings and enable “Multiple sign-in”  –

Just click on “Edit” adjacent to Multiple sign-in, and you’ll see this (click on image for a close-up) –

You’ll be prompted to check the three boxes: this is intended to alert you to the fact that not all Google products support multiple sign-in.  Note that Mail, Calendar, Google+, News, Voice, and Reader all function just fine.

You may have to log out of your account for the changes to take effect. Once you do, switching between accounts couldn’t be much easier: first, click on the drop down box in the upper right hand corner of your mailbox, then click on “Switch account,” as shown below:

All you need to do after that is click on the account to which you want to switch:

Note that Multiple sign-in only works with desktop browsers now: you can’t use it on your phone.  For the services which don’t work with Multiple sign-in (e.g., Blogger, Picasa), your account will default to the first account you signed in with during your browsing session.

Hope you find this of use!

If you find yourself taking too much time trying to figure out what On Demand or Netflix flick to watch, check out Moviegram.  This beta site instantly provides IMDb, Metacritic, and Rotten Tomatoes ratings, as well as the film’s trailer:

What’s more, if you click on the individual ratings (IMDb, etc.), you’re taken to the detailed ratings from the site you’ve selected, so you can learn a bit more:

Although I’ve cropped it from the first image above, Moviegram also provides the trailer.  The site is a great way to quickly narrow the list of films you want to see.

Check it out here:  Moviegr.am

Late last week I downloaded Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, and spent the weekend doing little other than devouring its 528 pages. A first novel with a wonderful mix of fully realized and in cases, marvelously flawed characters, The Art of Fielding centers about a shortstop phenom from South Dakota named Henry Skrimshander who, as pro scouts begin showing up at his Division III games, loses his (previously) unerring ability to throw to first, and much more. The Art of Fielding isn’t The Great Gatsby, but it’s very well written and wildly engrossing  …and you don’t need to be a baseball fan to enjoy it.

On to a few links of note I’ve recently come across:

The 10 Best Amazon Reviews. Ever. Thanks to Adam Penenberg of Fast Company for putting together this greatest hits lists of snarky and funny reviews of ridiculous products available from Amazon.  A favorite?

Here’s the review:

As a special bonus to my readers, here’s an item which should have been on the list, along with a couple of great comments:

OK, back to serious mode:  yet another “How to Hack Travel” article, but you’ll likely find some useful tips here –  The Ultimate Travel Hacking Guide – @ Lifehacker (written by Matt Kepnes, aka Nomadic Matt)

A number of commenters might have taken this video a bit too seriously when it appeared on Foodista: Natalie Tran with a tongue in cheek look at “Cooking in a hotel room.”  Here’s an example of one of the more negative comments:

This is disgusting. Someone might want to use that iron for its intended purpose! It would take far less time, energy, and “ingenuity” to just go out and find some food, or pack it in your bags to start with. How about I come over and cook a cheeseburger on the engine block of your car — how would you feel about that?

Uh, it’s a joke, people.

eBags is running a 25% OFF “Friends & Family” promo this week – it ends Saturday evening. Click here to take advantage. (Note: if the link doesn’t work for you, just use code EMFFSAVE25 at checkout; not all brands are included in the sale, unfortunately.)

Finally, a deal that you also may find useful:  50% OFF everything at Belkin during September (electronics, networking gear, gadget cases, cables, entertainment devices, & iPhone/iPod accessories) this month.   Belkin.com  Use code FB50

Enjoy the rest of your week!

If you’ve managed to escape all the hype about Spotify, congratulations – you’ve found a hiding spot that Osama Bin Laden would envy. The noise about the streaming music service has been everywhere – even noted Western philosopher and parenting expert Britney Spears has recommended Spotify!

What’s the buzz about?

Currently available only in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France, Spain, the Netherlands and (as of this week) the United States, Spotify boasts a catalog of 15 million songs. Downloading and installing the program takes a minute or two, and songs from the seemingly endless catalog are available in seconds with a mouse click. Here’s a quick (1 minute) video that’ll give you the basic rundown:

The service is available in three flavors – Free (available by invitation only), which lets you access the service but sprinkles in some ads; Unlimited ($4.99/mo.), which eliminates the ads and enables you to take your music abroad; and Premium ($9.99/mo.),  which additionally enables you to stream music to your portable device and experience upgraded sound quality.

Request an invitation

Spotify also lets you listen to music already on your computer, so your iTunes library is available from the Spotify dashboard. Searches take a second or so, and with 15 million songs, you’re guaranteed to find whatever music you enjoy – from rock, blues, classical, jazz, electronica – you name it. Even Ms. Spears’, er, body of work is available.

There’s a lot to like here.  If you’d like to request an invitation for the free service, click here:  Spotify invitation 

7.19 Update

Screenshots

Here are a few quick screenshots that capture some of Spotify’s capabilities. When you search for an artist, tracks are returned in terms of popularity; of course you can also search by album (or artist, if you’ve searched for a song title) — (click on any of the following images for a close-up)

Note also that thumbnails of this artist’s albums appear at the top; click on one, and you’ll see just the tracks from that album:

Drag the songs you like into a playlist (you can create custom playlists; in this case I dragged songs into “Misc”). After doing so, the tracks appear in my Library, along with the tracks which were already in my (local) iTunes library. Access your account from another computer, and all the tracks you’ve gotten from Spotify will be available to you. The “Local Files” folder includes those tracks which were already resident on that particular computer, by the way:

Here’s a shot of the Spotify homepage:

Finally, you can create custom playlists; log on with another computer, and they’ll be available to you. If you opt for one of the premium versions, you can listen to these tracks offline.

All in all, I’ve really been wowed by Spotify. Definitely check it out.