Matt Blum, Editor in Chief at GeekDad
Cool Tools Show 117: Matt Blum
Our guest this week is Matt Blum. Matt is a dad, a geek, and a software engineer, who’s been writing for and editing the GeekDad blog for almost 11 years. He foresees the day soon when he’ll need to buy a new house just for his books, games, LEGO sets, and Funko Pop! Vinyls.
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Show notes:
Pixlr Editor
“Writing for and editing a blog I need to do a lot of image manipulation here and there. Pixlr will never replace Photoshop, but it does the basic things that you usually need to do to graphics … You can crop, you can resize, you can tweak the color balance, you can stitch pictures together. You can even do things with layers if you really want to. What’s great is that … whatever computer I’m at I can do it, and I don’t have to worry about booting up some extra program. And it’s just dead simple.”
AfterShokz bone conduction headphones ($50-$180)
“The idea is that rather than having to stick buds in your ears, these don’t actually go in your ears at all. They just kind of wrap around your head, and they sit just in front of your ear. And they use your skull, essentially, to conduct the sound, and you hear it just as clearly as you would over regular speakers. It’s a little different, but you get used to it very quickly. And the very nice thing is that your ears are still free, so you can still hear things around you, which, I mean, it’s designed for people who go jogging so that they can hear somebody if a car is coming or if they can hear if somebody is approaching them for safety.”
Hiku shopping button ($30)
“This is a marvelous tool for any family, particularly those with teenagers. It’s a wifi-enabled button that magnets to your fridge and can scan barcodes of things you’re using the last of, or you can talk to it. It all goes to a list on a server which you can get on your mobile device or use to buy stuff at Peapod and a few similar services.”
Rugged Geek Portable Car Jump Starter ($125)
“This is a device nobody with an automobile should be without. This way you don’t have to depend on a stranger or wait for AAA if your car needs a jump-start, or if your tire is losing air. And it works as a power brick for mobile devices, too.”
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