Q: Are there apps that can help me find vegan food options or vegan restaurants?

A: Great question Joti! There are a lot of great food-related apps out there for smart phones. Some are Vegan-specific, but some are general purpose apps which have Vegan and Vegetarian options.

A great app (and site) to start with is Urban Spoon. I suggest you get it regardless of your cuisine preferences. It is a really polished app, and more importantly it’s widely used so it has a lot of accurate, updated information, which is what you want in an app like this.

“Vegan” isn’t one of the options in Urban Spoon’s main search (“vegetarian” is, though), but once you find a restaurant that is tagged as “vegan”, just tap the word “vegan” in the app to get a listing of nearby restaurants that are vegan-friendly.

Another great general-purpose app is Yelp. If you have the Yelp app you can search for “vegan” from the main page, and it will pop up a list of restaurants. Actually, since Yelp isn’t just for restaurants, it will show you results like the nearby natural market as well.

As far as vegan-specific apps go, these is an app for both Android and iPhone called Happy Cow. It works a lot like Yelp, and the list it returned is pretty comprehensive and does include the local natural market.

There are also numerous vegan recipe apps – one example we found was I’m Hungry: Vegetarian Recipes. And if you can’t find a vegan-specific store or restaurant and you’re in a hurry, there’s an app called Secretly Vegan. Secretly Vegan lists common supermarket products that are vegan, so you can hit up your local convenience store confident that the stuff you’re grabbing off the shelves is vegan-approved.

On just the iPhone side of things, we found an app called VeganXpress, which works a lot like Secretly Vegan and tells you what vegan items you can find at fast-food chains and restaurants.

Other vegan iOS apps include Go Vegan with Sarah Kramer, which is a vegan recipe app with over 50 recipes. There’s also Animal-Free, which allows you to scan the UPC code or type in the name of the brand of the food to determine if the contents of the food is animal or plant derived.

If you’re thinking about going vegan, but you haven’t made the jump yet, check out 21-Day Vegan Kickstart by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which ?gives you recipes and resources to improve and regain your health and includes step-by-step recipe photos.?

So Joti, whether you’re ready to go vegan or just looking for some nearby vegan cuisine, there definitely is an app for that.

Hey everybody! After recovering from One Spark, the Deemable Tech podcast is back with tech questions to answer. Thanks so much to everyone that stopped to see us at One Spark, especially everyone that voted for us, and took pictures with us, like Jose! We received 222 votes, which gave us $1,041.30 of the crowd fund. It’s only a small part of what we need to fund a full hour-long public radio show, but it’s a start! The best part was getting to meet our fans, and getting to tell over 1,500 people in person, face-to-face, about Deemable Tech. Now, without further ado, on to the show!

Episode 36 – Printers Are Evil, But Fans Are Awesome!

DRAFT TRANSCRIPT

RAY: From WJCT studios in Jacksonville, Florida, I’m Ray Hollister, I’m Tom Braun, and this is Deemable Tech, technology worth talking about, and tech help worth listening to.

TOM: Got a question about your computer, smart phone, tablet or the Internet? Give us a call us at One Eight Eight Eight, Nine Seven Two, Nine Eight Six Eight, or send us an email at questions@deemable.com.

RAY: This week’s episode of the Deemable Tech podcast is brought to you by A Small Orange, Homegrown Hosting. A refreshingly different approach to web hosting. On the web at a small orange dot com.

And, by audible.com – get a FREE audiobook download at audibletrial.com/Deemable Over 100,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle or mp3 player.

*recap One Spark*

TOM: Hey, let’s answer some questions.

RAY: We have a voicemail from Joti:

TOM: Great question Joti! I remember meeting you at One Spark and discussing this. Thanks for sending this in!

So there are really a lot of great ?food’ apps out there for smart phones. Some are Vegan-specific, but some are general purpose apps which have Vegan and Vegetarian options.

Now Ray, I’m not vegetarian. Actually, I’m pretty… carnivorous. Are you?

RAY: *vamps* I’m neither for it or against it. I like food

TOM: Well even though I’m not too likely to order the tofu-burger at a restaurant, I do have a app that I love and always use to find restaurants. It’s Urban Spoon.

If you don’t have Urban Spoon I suggest you get it regardless of your cuisine preferences. It is a really polished app, and more importantly it’s widely used so it has a lot of accurate, updated information which is what you want in this kind of app.

I wanted to see if you can search for vegan restaurants with the UrbanSpoon app and you can, or at least for vegetarian restaurants. From the home screen select ?browse’ and then select ?types of food’ from the next screen. Then scroll down until you find ?vegetarian’. Now, all you vegan folks, I realize that being vegan is not the same as being vegetarian. Stay with me here!

On the list of vegetarian restaurants I selected one that I know is vegan-friendly. If you scroll down the restaurant’s profile a bit you’ll see a list of categories applied to this restaurant. Hopefully if you pick a restaurant that is vegan friendly it will have the ?vegan friendly’ category listed here. When you see that click it.

Voila! Now you get a listing of nearby restaurants that are ?vegan-friendly’. And I’m no vegan, but just eyeballing the list for my area it looks pretty accurate.

RAY: Another popular general-purpose food app is Yelp. If you have the Yelp app you can search for ?vegan’ from the main page, and it will pop up a list of restaurants. Actually, since Yelp isn’t restaurant specific it will show you results like the nearby Grassroots Natural Market.

TOM: UrbanSpoon didn’t bring that up because it’s not a restaurant.

RAY: But it’s a great resource for vegans and if you’re vegan you would probably want to know about it. That’s the good and bad thing about Yelp: it will give you more than just restaurants.

But Tom, you said there were some vegan-specific apps?

TOM: Right. On Android, there’s a vegan app called Happy Cow: Vegin’ Out. It works a lot like Yelp. The list it returned is pretty comprehensive and it did include the natural market. A lot of the restaurants don’t have ratings, though. I suppose if this app takes off people will help it keep its information more up-to-date.

There are also numerous vegan recipe apps, like I’m Hungry: Vegetarian Recipes. And if you can’t find a vegan-specific store or restaurant and you’re in a hurry, there’s an app called Secretly Vegan Free.

RAY: Wait, Tom, this app finds places that are… secretly free of vegans? Isn’t that the opposite of what Joti wants?

TOM: Hah, no, it sounds like that though. There should probably be a comma in the title: Secretly Vegan, Free. See, there’s also a paid edition.

RAY: Ok that makes sense.

TOM: Secretly Vegan

RAY: (Free)

TOM: lists common supermarket products that are vegan. So you can hit up your local Qwik-e-Mart confident that the stuff you’re grabbing off the shelves is vegan-approved.

Ray, what about apps for the iPhone and iPad?

RAY: Well, there’s an app called VeganXpress that is supposed to be on Android and iPhone that works like Secretly Vegan…Free. It tells you what you can find at fast food chains and restaurants that are vegan. It’s $2.99 in the App Store, but I haven’t been able to find it in the Google Play store, even though it is supposed to be in there.

There’s a lot of vegan apps iOS, including Go Vegan with Sarah Kramer which is a vegan recipe app with over 50 recipes in it that’s $4.99. There’s also, Animal-Free which is kind of like Secretly Vegan Free. With the app, you can scan the UPC code or type in the name of the food to determine if the contents of the food is animal or plant derived.

If you’re a Food Truck lover, like I am, check out Roaming Hunger Food Truck Finder. It shows you where all of the food trucks are within up to a 50 mile radius. You can limit the search to just trucks with vegan options. Unfortunately, the app does not include Jacksonville food trucks! Boo! I’ve already complained to the app developer.

If you’re thinking about going Vegan, but you haven’t made the jump yet, check out 21-Day Vegan Kickstart by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. ?The 21-Day Vegan Kickstart app? and I am reading this directly from the description, ?gives you recipes and resources to improve and regain your health and includes step-by-step recipe photos.?

RAY: Ray writes… wait, I didn’t write this.

TOM: I think there’s another guy named Ray, Ray.

RAY: Is his name Rayburn Hollister III?

TOM: No, probably not.

RAY: Yeah, I didn’t think so. Anyway, Ray-who’s-not-me writes:

I recently had a problem getting my HP 1300 All In One printer back on line using a Vista computer. When attempting to cancel an overlong print job, the printer was turned off and an attempt to cancel the print job by going to the printer icon and right clicking to cancel the job was made, but then the printer could not be put back online. I tried to (1) right click the printer icon to put back online, (2) went to printer properties and unchecked the print offline box, (3) unplugged and replugged the USB and power cables to the printer, (4) rebooted the computer, (5) uninstalled and attempted to reinstall the printer, and (6) downloaded the printer driver using both windows update and the HP web sites, all to no avail. Finally I (7) restored the computer to an earlier time when the printer was working and this fixed the problem. At one point when I was attempting to delete the printer, the circular icon continued to rotate indicating either that (1) the computer was in a continuous loop or (2) that the program had stopped working or was taking much too long, or (3) most probably the program was unresponsive. Why could I have had so much trouble getting the printer back online? I enjoy your show. Thanks for any suggestions to prevent this from happening again and/or how to get the printer back online short of restoring the computer OS to an earlier time.

TOM: Well Other-Ray, thanks for the question. It sounds like you did all the right things and took all the right steps. You unplugged the printer from the computer, power cycled both the computer and the printer, plugged the printer back in. When that didn’t work you checked for updated drivers on HP’s website. When even that didn’t work, you uninstalled and reinstalled the printer software.

Those steps should have fixed the printer.

RAY: So… why didn’t they?

TOM: Well Ray, there is only one possible conclusion: printers are evil.

RAY: Evil?

TOM: Yes. They are malignant devices manufactured in the bowels of Hell. They were designed by the devil to bring pain and suffering to mankind.

RAY: Wow, okay Tom…

TOM: Ray, do you know what blood is? It’s Satan’s printer ink.

RAY: I’m getting the impression you really don’t like printers, Tom.

TOM: You’re picking up on that, are you?

RAY: Yes. So why do you hate printers so much? What did they ever do to you?

TOM: Ray, I’ve told you I spent about a year living in Amsterdam, right?

RAY: Right.

TOM: Well I was working as a social work volunteer for a half-way house there. I did all kinds of jobs there, but of course when they found out about my IT background they put me to work troubleshooting computer issues.

Do you know what 90% of the computer issues I had to fix were, Ray?

RAY: I think I can guess…

TOM: PRINTERS! PRINTERS PRINTERS PRINTERS! And it was always the same story: ?Oh, it was working normally and then I tried to print and it quit working for no reason.? And then if you were really lucky you power-cycled everything, unplugged the printer and plugged it back in, and it worked. If you weren’t lucky, before you knew it you were at the local computer shop buying a new printer. Which would work fine for a couple of weeks before the inevitable happened…

Anyway, sorry, Other Ray, but there’s no good reason your printer stopped working, other than that one day it’s black soul awoke full of hatred for mankind and it took it out on you.

RAY: So, anything you can add as far as suggestions for troubleshooting printers? Other than calling an exorcist?

TOM: Well, I guess there are a couple of things. First, avoid pausing or cancelling printer jobs at all cost. That seems to inevitably cause printers to start spinning their wheels. To avoid having a big print job that runs amok, print big documents in chunks. Do ten, twenty pages at a time. That way you can make sure it’s printing correctly before you throw a hundred pages of precious printer ink down the drain.

Other Ray mentioned he has an HP. HP actually has a diagnostic tool you can run to identify printer issues. I don’t know how effective it would have been in this case, but it’s worth a shot. We’ll put a link to where you can download it in the show notes. This utility tool works on Windows XP and up, but sadly not on Mac OS.

There is one last trick you can try when your printer is giving you the evil eye: restarting the printer service.

• Click on START

• And then Go to RUN, which should pop up a small box for you.

• In the Box type “services.msc”

• A New pop up box should appear in front of you.

• In that Box to go “STANDARD” and look for “Print Spooler”

• Just do a right click on that and click on Restart/Refresh

Hopefully, maybe that will do the trick and get your printer running. But, I won’t make any promises. Because Printers. Are. Evil.

Erica writes: I have a cheap Android phone on the Walmart 1 on 1 plan. I want to know what is a good, cheap app to download and edit photos on Android.

TOM: Thanks for the question Erica. Well, as is usually the case with Android, there are tons of photo editing apps out there. And many of them are free.

Just go to play.google.com/apps and search for ?photo editor’. The one I use came with my Samsung Galaxy S3 and it’s called, inventively, ?Photo Editor’, but you can also download it for free. We’ll have a link in the show notes.

Another very popular app is PicSay. PicSay has both a free and pro version. It has many of the same features, plus it allows you to export images from the app to Facebook or wherever you like.

Both of these apps allow you to apply your usual filters, like sepia toning or color inversion. You can also crop, rotate, sharpen and things like that. One thing I like is that both of them allow you to apply effects to the image by touch. So if you want to lighten part of an image you just run your finger over that part. That’s pretty cool.

So I hope that helps you out, Erika. Generally speaking the benefit of having an Android is that the Google Play Market is loaded with free apps for everything. So when I need an app for something I’ll usually download the top two or three based on starred ratings and then try them out for myself.

Thanks for all your questions, and keep them coming. Call us at our toll-free number, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email at questions@deemable.com. Also, subscribe to the show! Search for Deemable Tech on iTunes or point your favorite podcast app to dmbl.co/pod.

Our producer is Sean Birch. I’m Ray Hollister, I’m Tom Braun, and this is Deemable Tech.

Thanks for listening. Have a great week.