Photo of the day

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Homemade Labneh

So the photo of the day is a picture of Homemade Labneh. Labneh is a Lebanese food. It is basically strained yogurt with salt. You eat it with bread, olive oil, and can make sandwiches with olives. I loved this food growing up. My friend Samer taught me how to make it at home.For more information check out the wiki.

Here are the steps to making Labneh at home:

1. Get two (depending on how much you want, I always get two) 750g containers of yogurt.

2. Add a hand full of salt (or to your taste) to each container and mix well with a spoon.

3.Get kitchen towels and line the inside of a strainer that has small holes preferably.

4. Dump all the yogurt inside the kitchen towels and allow the yogurt to strain over night.

5.When eating it pour some olive oil on it and eat it with bread as you would any dip.

Ma Dang Sae Korean BBQ House Los Angeles

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This is Us At the Ma Dang Sae Korean BBQ Restaurant in Los Angeles. Filmed in HD with my Canon Powershot SD780IS
This is an all you can eat BBQ for about 14 Dollars, Pretty Cheap if you ask me. Food was amazing and atmosphere was great. Had a lot of fun cooking my own food!

My Ideal Place to Eat!

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Michael knew I would like this place, when he took me there it was as if I was in Heaven! This place has all the food I love, for $10. It’s All you can eat Salad, Pasta, Ice cream, Soup, Muffins, Bread, Garlic Bread, Pizza, Biscuits. At the end the owner or manager of the store told me to stop recording, so i did, good thing she didn’t make me delete the video. She probably thought i was doing this for competitive reasons? who knows, on the way out i took a muffin in my hand, and she followed me out. She thought i was sketchy after the camera incident.

Help a friend – Convert a file in iTunes

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So another friend (Nader) just asked me how to convert a .wav file to mp3 using iTunes. This one I remember from the top of my head because it’s an easy one.

1.First you have to set the output settings that you want in the general tab in preferences(itunes menu on OS X) (Edit Menu on Windows) (click on import settings).

2.After that import the file you want into iTunes. Then right click on the file, and click Create MP3 Version, or Create AAC Version depending on the settings you selected earlier.

Help a friend – Wireless range extender

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Today my friend Bandar helped me think of another new segment to by blog. I call it Help a friend. Since I am the techie between all my friends a lot of people ask me for help with computer related problems. Sometimes the direct answers of which can not really be found on google since they can be very specific. So I thought what a great idea for a segment on my blog; help a friend out, and possibly others online while also adding more proper content to my site!

Today Bandar asked me about extending his wireless throughout his home to some dead spots upstairs, and wanted to know whats the easiest way without having to plug a lan cable to his existing router. After doing some research I found that you can do it many ways, either by hacking an old router to use DD-WRT firmware. Or by buying a wireless repeater/extender. After quickly going to newegg and searching for wireless extender (wireless repeater didn’t yield too many results) I organized the results by best Rating. The best rated product for the job by neweggers was the Encore ENRXWI-G IEEE802.11g 54Mbps Wireless LAN Extender. According to most reviewers it’s easy to setup and does the job just fine. A quick view on the product page of encore usa provides this information for wireless extension.

ENRXWI-G Wireless Extender
ENRXWI-G Wireless Extender

Extender Mode
Place ENRXWI-G within the range of your current wireless network. Subsequently, ENRXWI-G can pickup signal from the wireless router (or access point) and transfer the signal further away than the original coverage area. You have thus effectively extended your wireless network without wiring or complicated configuration. Also, you can improve the reception at dead spots, areas characterized by poor signal quality, by placing ENRXWI-G between the dead spots and the wireless router.
Anyways thanks Bandar for giving me an idea for another great segment. Hopefully it will stick around!

Infolinks in-text advertising Review

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So I have been using infolinks for one month and one day. The way I found out about this in-text advertising website was actually from my google adsense ads. I found an ad that said get paid better than adsense. So I copied the code into my address bar and figured out the website without clicking on the link (Clicking on your own ads is Against Google TOS). I signed up and was approved within a day or two. It was also easy to incorporate into my wordpress blog using HeHeHunter’s Infolinks WordPress Plugin. So far so good. For the first couple of days I made on average a little more than google adsense. However lately after my rework of my website I have found that I am making more from adsense.

I have a couple of thoughts on how infolinks could improve their ads, which in return will increase revenue for all infolinks publishers. First of all since google adsense is the most commonly known online advertising platform, it is also the most blocked ads (adblock, etc). So with that said users on my site get to see infolinks more than adsense. Which means adsense is earning me more money relatively speaking. What I believe is behind this is the generic look to their ads. Which makes me feel that it’s useless to click on these ads (see picture below). Most of the time that I have encountered infolinks ads they point to info.com which I think should be improved. Scratch that out, now its starting to be very different and various different ads are showing yay! With that said I can not complain much for a company that is paying me. I hope this review helps you if you are deciding to use infolinks in conjunction with adsense(Which is not against Google TOS), and helps infolinks figure out how to improve their ads, both to increase their own revenue as well as publishers. PS. I have not made enough money from infolinks to receive payments yet. Finally you can easily contact infolinks if you have questions or comments, as they have been prompt with me.

This is what I think is too generic about infolinks
This is what I think is too generic about infolinks

Photo of the day

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Two Dollar Bill

I received a two dollar bill while in Vegas. I forgot to post it. Anywho it’s a very rare bill accounting for less than 1% of the bills in us Currency. There is a very cool website that you can track where a bill has been by typing in its serial number called Where’s George? After entering it into the website no other person has posted it on Where’s George. So thats a new bill into the system!

Dasparkhotel

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While in the airplane on the way to Los Angeles, I was doing some reading and found this really interesting Hotel called Dasparkhotel. It’s Located in Ottensheim, Austria. The hotel rooms are cleaned out drain pipes. This idea is really interesting, Green, and Cozy in my opinion. The coolest thing about the hotel is you pay what you want! You can visit their website here

Dasparkhotel Rooms
Dasparkhotel Rooms
Cross section of the hotel rooms at Dasparkhotel
Cross section of the hotel rooms at Dasparkhotel