Check out the Gorillapod, a $25 octopus-armed tripod that allows you to fasten your camera to almost anything. This would be super-handy when I’m out hiking. I wish they mentioned the weight on their site though. Depending on what those arms are made of it could be fairly light or relatively heavy. This goes on my wishlist.
[via gizmodo]
Man, the medical establishment can drive one nuts. Check out the results of an 8 year study on the effects of a low-fat diet in this article in the New York Times. The answer? Not much at all in terms of the incidence of heart disease and various cancers between the women on the diet and the ones who were not. This is apparently one of the most comprehensive studies of this nature ever conducted, and the results have thrown things into confusion for dietitian and physicians trying to advise their patients, including folks like me. The article is well worth a look for anyone interested in healthy eating.
One of the side effects of the warm winter has been that Soolin has actually picked up a couple of ticks, including one in January which I would have thought was impossible. As a happy coincidence, Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools site mentioned a cheap apparently very safe and effective tick removal tool, the 
. I just added this to my amazon wishlist – as soon as I’ve used it to remove a tick I’ll post a review. Even if it’s only mediocre though it has got to be better than my current ‘work at it with tweezers’ method of removal.
The original Day of Defeat, built on the halflife engine, was a really good team-based fps mod back in the day. Tons of folks still play it today in fact. Valve released a sequel built on the halflife 2 engine, and this weekend they’re offering free access to it. Check out their site for the details. It’s worth trying if you’re a fan of wwII fps. Personally I think it’s completely overshadowed by the superb Red Orchestra, which is also getting a retail sequel, even though Day of Defeat has much better graphics. Still, they feature different play styles, Red Orchestra focusing on tactics and teamwork whereas Day of Defeat is much more of a run and gun action game, so they both have their place on my hard drive and this is worth a look if you haven’t already purchased it. You can start the download today so that it’s ready to run by the time friday evening rolls around.
One word of caution. This probably requires one to register for a steam account, and some folks really hate steam. I think it’s the future of software distribution so there’s no sense in gnashing one’s teeth over it, but whatever, follow your own instincts there.
I’m a gadget freak, of that there’s no doubt. Even analog ones occasionally interest me. Case in point is the Aerobie Aeropress, which had its moment as a web meme a few weeks ago. I bought one on a whim and have been using it on the weekends for the last couple of weeks. This thing makes the best coffee I’ve ever had. It’s relatively easy to use once you get a hang of how to work it, and cleanup is a breeze compared to a french press. My only complaints are that by the time I have my cup of joe in hand it’s substantially cooler than I like it and the maximum capacity of the thing is perhaps half of what I would normally call a cup of coffee. Still, it’s become the way I make coffee on the weekends when I have the time to do it. It’s actually faster at brewing a cup than my pot is, but it’s a hands on process. Anyway for ~$30 this is definitely a worthwhile investment if you’re a coffee fan, even if it’s just for the novelty of trying an alternative approach to brewing.
Ok this one is a doozy. If you grew up in the 80’s and think the string of arcade games Williams put out then (Robotron, Defender, Stargate, Joust) represent the finest the form had to offer, you’re going to love Gridwars. It’s actually a clone of a small game that comes with the new Xbox 360, and its spiritual predecessor is William’s Robotron with slight shades of Atari’s Tempest. You need a dual stick controller to really play this, like a usb connected ps2 pad, though you can play using the keyboard. You move in any direction with one pad whilst shooting in any direction using the other. Various geometric shapes spawn and attempt to smash you while techno plays in the background and the screen pulsates with your activity. It’s still in beta but even in its current form it’s essentially perfect. I’ve been completely mesmerized by it since I stumbled across it. Horde those smart bombs, you’re going to need them!
[this is win32 and mac only, sorry linux folk]
For whatever reason consumption of shirataki hasn’t taken off in the US despite its being popular with diabetics and healthy eaters in asia. It’s a noodle made from the root of the Konjac plant. It’s super high fibre and super low carb, which is basically perfect for type 2 diabetics who miss the pasta in their diets. I’ve known about it for several years but only recently managed to find some locally when my grocery store started carrying some of the House Foods line of products. It’s expensive relative to regular pasta – a single serving costs about $1. It’s somewhat easier to prepare than traditional pasta. It comes packaged in water, and you rinse it and dunk it in boiling water for about 2-3 minutes then drain. It’s chewier than even the most al dente pasta, and is very bland, almost tasteless. It’s also very low calorie so it’s perfect if you’re on a diet. Like tofu it tends to absorb the flavor of whatever it’s prepared with. It’s become a staple of my diet and allows me to prepare a lot of my old favorites, things like spaghetti with meat sauce, tuna casserole, and stir fries served over noodles (I crisp the noodles slightly when I have this by frying them in olive oil for a couple of minutes). If you’re a diabetic and crave pasta this is the solution. If your local store doesn’t carry House Foods’ products consider filing a request card for it, or check local health food and specialty stores. You can also order online from places like Konjac Foods, though you have to order in relatively large quantities (~10 pounds for about $40 with shipping). Shelf life is about a year so it’s not really a problem so long as you have storage space. Konjac Foods also carries a broader variety of shapes, including lasagna noodles, so soon lasagna will be back on my menu. Check it out if you’re on a diet, or a diabetic who’s counting carbs but craves pasta.
If you’ve ever spent any time with linux chances are you’ve seen the multiple desktop metaphor many of the GUI’s use. The idea is you have multiple desktops and you can plant various application’s windows on separate desktops. When you want to work with your browser, switch to the desktop where it lives, want email? Switch to that desktop, and so on. Once you get used to it it really helps with window clutter. There have been implementations of this for macs going back to the System 6 days, and some of them were essential tools for me over the years, though all seemed to be relatively buggy. I happened across a pretty solid OSX implementation today that’s free, desktop manager. It’s pretty slick – it puts a navigation window on your toolbar, and you can pop up a larger navigation window if you like. It seems pretty stable in a workday’s worth of testing, though it seems to be a little wonkey interacting with expose. It’s well worth a look despite this though – hopefully the expose issues will get straightened out, and in the interim it’s still a decent implementation of the virtual desktop f0r OSX.
I’ve been working my way through Chris Pine’s Learning to Program:
It’s a great book, though it’s taking me longer than I expected to work my way through it. There are exercises at the end of each chapter and a couple of them have taken me several days to work through. Most recently I was stuck on one for almost a week. I mention this in the context of my first Amherst nightmare because I woke up in the middle of the night last night with a dim sense of dread and anxiety over the new job at Amherst. Nothing especially surprising in that, I had the same kind of thing going on when I was getting ready to come to Skidmore. What was cool though was that as the dream state faded, like a flash bulb the solution to the exercise I was stuck on popped into my head – ‘just use array.sort!’ (I’m paraphrasing for brevity’s sake). I fell back asleep but remembered the episode when I woke and sat there over coffee fiddling with the program I was working on and lo and behold, it worked. Three cheers for serendipity!
Bleezeris a competent little blogging client. What’s most interesting about it is it’s truly cross platform – MacOSX, Win32 and Linux. It’s also free and could be a perfect solution for a campus environment where you’re trying to standardize your blogging tool on all platforms. Spell checking, integration with the popular tagging systems, media uploading and support for the major blogging platforms are all there. It’s also has a tiny footprint and runs relatively quickly despite its use of Java.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 