NY Brick Steak

When I saw NY Brick Steak & Crab-Stuffed Shrimp on the menu at Frankie Bones on Hilton Head Island, my dinner selection was done, although I had no clue what a "brick" steak really was.  After a little research, I found that it’s almost always a New York strip steak that’s either pressed while searing or cut thick and rectangular.  Add two garlic-butter roasted breaded shrimp stuffed with blue crab dressing, whipped potatoes, green beans, and bacon bordelaise sauce, and it was a dinner to fondly remember.

https://frankiebones.com

Chrome Split View

Google added Split View to its Chrome browser in version 142, and it's going to be a favorite of mine on my Mac Mini with its 32-inch display (it's really a TV, but that's not important).   Split View allows users to display two websites side by side within the same browser tab, as you see below with Amazon shopping on the left and Walmart's website on the right.  Instead of clicking back and forth between tabs or opening, resizing, and repositioning two windows next to each other, all you do is click on the tab you want on the left, and then select the tab you want on the right.  This will help me when I'm writing this blog and conducting genealogy research.  Read more at the link below.

https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-split-view-feature-3613155

Mobile Reminder

YouTube TV has a nice search function to look for shows and movies.  When you find something you like, you can click the plus sign and it will record it the next time it airs.  That's nice, but do you have to go check your recordings every so often to see if they're ready?  Not if you click on the bell and set a reminder, like I did for Frosty The Snowman, one of my favorite Christmas shows.  Since I set the one you see below on one of my Fire TV Cubes, I'll get a text message when it's available.  For smartphone and tablet apps, those use the normal notifications on the device.

Google Photos Remix Feature

Google Photos recently introduced a "Remix" feature that allows you to take a photo and turn it into one of eight different cartoon styles.  I used it to create the image you see below from a picture taken at a recent wedding we attended.  To find that option, launch Google Photos, tap the three dots, then tap Remix.  Scroll through the styles, then tap Generate.  Your picture will be displayed in a few seconds.

More information can be found at the link below.

https://www.androidcentral.com/apps-software/google-photos-explains-how-remix-will-work-availability-upcoming

Using AI For Translating Text

Last Monday, I blogged about using the Perplexity AI Chatbot to read a handwritten letter and extract the text, which you see in the first screenshot below.  But as you will notice, it's not in English; in this case, it's in French, of which I barely know a few words.  So, I asked Perplexity to "translate the text to English", giving the result in the second screenshot.  That's one of the differences in using AI Chatbots over regular web services: it remembers the answers and the context of previous questions, allowing you to ask follow-up questions.

https://www.perplexity.ai

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