kylegilbert

I don’t know if Mr. Wizard was into  microscopes, but I’m sure he would love this little hand-held device that I bought for my daughter’s birthday last weekend.

It’s called the Bionic Eye, and it’s made by Eye Clops.  It plugs into your TV, and it has zoom levels of 100x, 200x, and 400x.  The best part: it only costs about $30.

Below you can watch a video of me testing out the microscope.

Even if my daughter doesn’t end up playing with it much, I’m going to get hours of fun from this thing.

If you happen to know of anything that’s especially cool to look at under a microscope, please tell me about it.

Really love the new iPhone app for Facebook – especially because you can view pages and add them to the home page.

That reminds me.  If you haven’t already, you can become a “fan of” Faith Promise.

Today we launched our first Internet Campus with iPhone streaming, and it went great. Josh was kind enough to get me some screen captures on his iPod Touch, and you can see them below.

The Faith Promise Internet Campus continues to make progress, and thanks to the help of Brad Roberts and the folks at Light Cast Media, we’ll be testing out streaming on the iPhone this Sunday at 10 & 11:45 am. This is a brand new technology, and I’m glad we get to jump on board so early in the process.

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can test things out by going to http://faithpromise.org/icampus. If you go there on an iPhone or iPod Touch, you should just see a iPhone specific countdown page. From there, you’ll be able to select whether you want the stream with or without sign language. (Yes, you’ll be able to stream the sign language video on your iPhone.) Even without an iPhone, you can see what it looks like here.

If everything goes well, in addition to the iPhone stream, we will also see substantial improvements with both our audio and video quality. Matt James has helped me to set up a better encoding process, and Phil Bledsoe helped me to work out some kinks in the audio – providing the iCampus with a better range of sound.

What a blessing to work with such a great team! Pray with me that our iCampus will continue to make an impact in the lives of people online.

OK, enough playing around.  Today we’re serious, and I’m looking at a the top three web apps that have been especially helpful to me over the past few weeks and months.

1) YouVersion (mostly the iPhone app) – This application continues to be something that I use at least once a day.  I’m still doing my daily reading on the iPhone, and they keep making improvements on the .com site as well.  Really an amazing resource that you need to check out, if you haven’t already.

2) Mvelopes – This personal finance application is really top knotch.  It’s taken the weekly chore of entering and classifying expenses down to the simple process of dropping the expense into the corresponding virtual envelope.  I expect that I’ve already saved dozens of hours in the few months I’ve used their system.

3) Freshbooks – This is a time tracking and invoicing application.  I’ve always been bad at tracking my freelance time, and many times I’d end up doing updates for free, but now I’m able to easily track my time and produce invoices from the time I’ve spent.  I’m still new to this one, but I’ve been very impressed, and the corresponding iPhone time tracking application is very helpful.  Best of all, they allow you to manage up to three clients for free.

I thought it would be cool to mention a few web applications that I’ve found to be especially useful over the past few weeks, but I think I’ll save that for tomorrow.  Today, instead, I want to mention a useful hilarious web program that had me laughing like a fool at my desk today.

It’s called Translation Party, and what it does is take an English phrase and convert it to Japanese using Google’s translation API.  Then, it translates the Japanese back to English.  It repeats the process until the two phrases match in English and Japanese (“equilibrium”).  Google’s translator is good, so sometimes nothing too interesting happens, but sometimes it gets pretty funny.

Here’s a couple that turned out pretty good:

Sample One

Sample Two