Tin And Tallow

The delicious smashburger you see below is from the Tim & Tallow, a Hilton Head Island restaurant that opened in early 2025.  “Tin” refers to the classic tinfoil wrapping used for their burgers, and “Tallow” refers to the beef tallow they use to cook all their burgers and fries.  They also offer craft coffee, draft & canned beer, wine, cocktails, and botanical seltzers.  We ate outside at one of the many picnic tables and watched a show on a monster, 4-screen TV.  A fun place to grab a bite to eat.

https://www.tinandtallow.com

This Old House

When we had our home office window replaced, I noticed the odd-looking nail you see below, which held the old window in place.  At first, I thought it was just the type of nail they used back in the 1950s when the house was built.  But after a fair amount of searching, I find that it's a masonry nail.  They are designed to attach materials to hard surfaces like brick, concrete, or stone (in our case, brick).  More information on these tough guys can be found at the following link.

https://concretecaptain.com/what-are-masonry-nails

Solitare

When I have a few minutes to burn, I like to play a game of Solitaire on my Pixel 7.  Recently, I had to find a new app, and trying to find one that didn't contain advertisements turned out to be a multi-day adventure.  Not only did apps say they didn't contain ads, but most of them did, and they were very annoying and sometimes impossible to bypass.  But after a lot of trial and error, I found the app you see below on the Google Play Store, which contains zero ads or any other annoyances.  Sorry, this is not available on Apple devices.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zeeron.solitaire

Spotify Lossless

I use Spotify as my audio streaming service.  They recently introduced Lossless audio quality, and I wanted to know whether I could hear the difference over their Very High quality.  I enabled Lossless only when I'm on WiFi and then tried it on our Bose Portable Speaker with an Ella Langley song.  I couldn't hear any difference, so I wondered if it was really using Lossless or my old ears were at fault.  That led to finding that the Bose Portable Speaker did not support Spotify Lossless.  Neither did our other main speaker, an Amazon Echo.  

The only two of our devices that supported Lossless were my Pixel 7 phone, which has a terrible speaker, and our Fire TV Cubes, which are attached to our TVs, which have fair speakers at best, and I could not hear a difference.  Then I thought that maybe our Vizio Soundbar would work.  No again, this time due to the lack of the Spotify Connect feature.  And my Google Pixel Buds 2 are no help since they use Bluetooth, which isn't fast enough to support the Lossless bit rate.

I'm thinking I may never know what Spotify Lossless sounds like, but after all the work I put into trying to find out, I'll just forget I ever heard of it.

https://www.soundguys.com/how-to-enable-lossless-audio-on-spotify-144194

Using AI To Extract Text

Years ago, as I was researching and documenting my family tree, I ran across a birth record for my maternal grandfather, which you see in the first image below.  Besides being tough to read, it's in French.  At the time, I had to go through some hoops to get it translated to English, but I thought this would be an excellent test of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to see if it could extract the text from this not-too-clear document.  I uploaded the document to Perplexity and asked it to "extract the text from the attachment".  In a few seconds, it delivered the text you see in the screenshot at the bottom.  Pretty cool.

https://www.perplexity.ai

Benny's Coastal Kitchen

Benny's is now my favorite restaurant on Hilton Head Island (HHI).  From the drinks you saw yesterday to the views, great service, and awesome menu, everything was over-the-top awesome.  I selected the Seafood Fritto Misto (Seafood Platter) shown below as my entree.  It's a plate full of fried shrimp, scallops, oysters, pickled vegetables, spiced aioli, and natural fries, and certainly more than I could eat.  If you get to the HHI area, I strongly recommend you get a reservation at Benny's.

https://bennyshiltonhead.com

Orange Crush

I've had mass-produced versions of an Orange Crush drink at Dewey Beach, Delaware, which are okay at best.  But the Orange Crush cocktail you see below comes from Benny's Coastal Kitchen on Hilton Head Island.  It's a delicious combination of Deep Eddy Orange Vodka, triple sec, orange juice, and a splash of Sprite.  I enjoyed this at the bar on the second floor of Benny's with a view of Skull Creek. 

With dinner, I had a Bourbon Peach Palmer and for dessert, an Espresso Martini, both equally delicious.  More on Benny's coming tomorrow.

https://bennyshiltonhead.com

Gutter Guards

Being seventy years old and climbing on a ladder twice a year to clean out our gutters had to stop.  We considered hiring a service to do that, but instead investigated gutter guards and selected the EasyOn Stainless Steel Micro-Mesh brand you see on the left side of the picture below.  They advertise as being easy to install, and that is very true.  I watched the YouTube video at the link below and found a couple of handy tips.  The guard slides under the edge of the shingles, and three sheet metal screws are used to secure it to the edge of the gutter.  Takes under a minute to install one four-foot section.  That doesn't include the time to move the ladder, which is 99% of the effort involved.  But at least every time I moved the ladder, I knew it would be the very last time.

https://www.easyongutterguard.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkfPbyM16M8

Keeping Warm

While exploring the features that are rarely used on a microwave oven for an article I'm writing, I came across the warming feature.  I had to consult our GE Cafe microwave's manual to see if we had that, and sure enough, we do.  Its purpose is to keep already-hot food at either a Low (150°F), Medium (170°F), or High (210°F ) temperature.  We tested it out by purchasing a Costco Rotisserie Chicken late in the afternoon and popped it in the microwave (shown below) on Medium for an hour or so.  

We could do this in our oven, but having another option is great, particularly if we have a party where people need to keep the food they brought warm until we eat.  

Using AI For Redecorating

This is the first of several blogs over the next months showing some ways to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make your life a bit easier.

We were shopping for a new winter bedspread to replace the summer one shown on the left below.  After a beige bedspread turned out to be a bad choice, I turned to my favorite AI tool, Perplexity, to see if it could recommend some colors based on the colors of our walls, ceiling, and floors.  I uploaded the picture, asked for some choices, and it delivered good options.  Without knowing if it could do it, I asked Perplexity to "replace the bedspread and pillowcases with a warm white color".  That result is the picture shown on the right below.  A picture paints a thousand words.

https://www.perplexity.ai