- BibMe – the fully automatic & free bibliography maker (MLA, APA & Chicago) — very cool
- Geni — i’m not really into family trees but this is actually kind of fun. I wish I could link trees with other users.
- Mobile google calendar — i stumbled on this yesterday on my phone. nice.
- Rich points to the sites to let you track private planes
- Retrevo – gadget search. Don’t know if this is useful yet or not.
Archive for May 2, 2007
Grabbag of useful sites
Seattle Power Tool Derby
MAKE: Blog: Seattle Power Tool Drag Race Workshops at the Hazard Factory. — this looks stupidly fun.
Ignition blog roundup
- Tong Family Blog: Best Seattle Restaurants — I use SeattleWeekly for recos but this is a good list too. Remember when CitySearch nee Sidewalk was actually useful for restaurant reviews?
- Lala’s music streaming plans get covered in TechCrunch
- Phil keeps knocking out Beyond411 features. And the app hasn’t bloated!
- Rich offers guidance on indoor sports photo lenses. I was super happy with my setup for lacrosse this spring but I will need to do something for basketball.
- Rich’s guidance on media players. VLC has saved my ass as well.
Stuff I want but don't need
- From Toolmonger, a magnetic alternative to pegboard. Pretty awesome.
- USB Fairy Lights — so happy!
- Steam powered RC Vehicles
- Wind Turbines — when I was a kid we had a wind power generator at our cabin, mounted on the roof — the whole cabin rocked on a windy night
- Animated power consumption monitor — why shouldn’t thermostats be fun like this?
- Swing analyzing watch — all that separates me from Tiger.
- Yet another awesome watch
- Damascus pocket knife — I love Damascus steel
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Products
The master of web domains
Seems like domain names are all super hot again — Kevin Ham, the $300 million master of Web domains – June 1, 2007
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Web
Lists
- The Big Picture | How to Fail As a Trader in 10 Easy Steps — “9. Trade with your emotions”. These probably apply to any investment business
- Ten most useful knots — I know I forgot these from boy scout days
- Top Ten VC Lies
Stuff I Want But Don't Need
- Grizzly Drill-Powered Hobby Lathe — another clever way to reuse a power drill. Not sure how large a part you could really fabricate on this but still. Oh and here is a hand’s-on review
- Alpine’s latest car deck — i love the crazy looks of high end car decks tho I have never purchased one…
- The LED Jellyfish Aquarium
- Universal Key Fob — just a concept but man do I want this
- TEAC Bone Conduction phones — because they look cool
- Generally I find USB hubs to be disasters but this one is awesome looking
Free Electronics Software
Found via Make, uC Hobby ? Blog Archive ? Free Electronics Hobby Software — a useful collection of resistor decoders, 555 timer info, schematic library links.
Here’s some more free links at Freebyte including pcb layout software, pinout references, datasheets.
and some more at epanorama.net including SPICE.
Cool train trips
Some of these look fun…
- Welcome to The Society of International Railway Travelers (IRT) — luxury trains, rail tours
- The California Native — particularly the Copper Canyon trips
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Vacation
Random useful and interesting sites
Found via StumbleUpon:
- Google sightseeing — a great way to see satellite photos of interesting world sites
- Test everything — a jillion tools for testing the construction, seo, and other characteristics of your site
- Computer Architecture — a one page primer walking you up from gates through to a complete simple computer.
- graph paper creator.
- Codswallop — one person’s view on the 100 simple web apps you need
Halloween 07 planning
Geez it is may and I haven’t done crap for Halloween planning. The time to buy parts and build is rapidly approaching. Monster Guts sent me nice reminder spam, I might try some pressure mats this year.
Viewing RAW images on Vista 64bit
Another Vista problem — Vista RAW image support getting better — despite the headline, you are screwed on 64bit Vista, the Canon and Nikon drivers won’t work. Sucks.
Recent Books — mostly modern fiction
- Spindrift by Allen Steele. First contact novel. Fine effort. Not particularly innovative but entertaining. The guy has won a bunch of SF awards so perhaps I should try some of his other work
- Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel. I’m not sure why I sti\uck with this. Tale of a medium in touch with the spirits of people from her troubled early life, and her own sorting out of that history. The characters are not particularly attractive. Something about the process of digging through troubling events of your childhood with eyewitnesses was appealing tho.
- Red Cat by Peter Spiegelman. One in a series of mysteries featuring PI John March. A great character and a great story of deeply flawed relatives and families. Worthy of the accolades it has received.
- The Futurist by Othmar. An entertaining farce. Witty. Probably won’t age well so read it now (I don’t think Catch-22 has aged well for instance).
- The Traveller by John Twelve Hawks. A novel in the illuminati genre, opens with great scenes and good characters. But sadly doesn’t develop much after that. The characters gain no emotional or moral depth and the plot is pedestrian. The author sets up a lot of storylines for subsequent books at the cost of this individual tale. If I’m at an airport and novel 2 is on the shelf I’ll buy it, but I’m not driven to find out what happens to these characters.
- The Bowl Is Already Broken by Mary Kay Zuravleff. I gave this 70 pages and then folded. The writing was just ok, but the characters were boring — lots of quirky elements but not emotionally engaging. The story seemed to be diving deeper and deeper into the petty politics of the museum world but seeming less and less relevant to any other walk of life.
And one non-fiction:
- How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman. Ok I didn’t really like this book. Some insight into doctor’s minds. But a lot of very articulate whining about how tough their lives are and how patients have to be more empathetic. Boo hoo hoo. The lives of sick patients are tough too. And most of the discussion is about really smart committed docs and how they struggle. In my experience docs exhibit a range of IQ and commitment and many of them exhibit less thoughtful behaviour. He does talk about some of the economic influences affecting doctors but he largely gives the profession a pass on this. I think there is a more painfully truthful story to tell.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Books
More Stuff I Want But Don't Need
- Toolmonger ? Blog Archive ? Mark On Wet And Oily Surfaces With Stanley’s New Marker — ok this might actually be useful at halloween time when I am working outdoors a lot. I wonder how it works on slimy mossy surfaces.
- Laser-guided scissors. Lasers AND sharp blades, awesome.
- Noise cancelling windows. So like, if you try to have a conversation in a room with these, does the sound just disappear?
- Programmable hose timer. Another thing I could actually use at Halloween to control flow of water to my fog system.
- leatherman for the garden. Because I am such a horticulturist.
- Quick prototyping material — seems like another useful Halloween product. Not cheap though.
- Ruggedized flash drive. Flash drives are moving from the utility to the fashion accessory category.
- Mobile basketball hoop. I am sure there is a whole post to write about “what to do with your trailer hitch that you never use”
- Brushed aluminum keyboard. Awesome
- Umbrellas for windy weather.
- Programmable hair. Strange.
HD Hard Disk videocams
I’m really wanting one of these such as the JVC GZ-HD7 Everio 60GB Hard Disk Drive HD Camcorder — tho the NYTimes review today pee’d all over its image stabilization which seems like a real problem. The other mentioned in the article, the Sony, saves the video in some goofy format apparently which will create a pain of its own sort. I’ve been using my old camera a lot recently and transferring the video from tape to pc or dvd is such a pain, i am really motivated to move ahead, but not sure either of these cameras is the right jump.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Photography
I Need to take a good course or read a good book on protein chemistry
This stuff fascinates me — Scientists watch on the atomic level how individual molecules recognize each other — here is one guy’s list on amazon — maybe this Voet text is the place to start
Recent Software/Services of note
- Amazon S3 storage costs drop – “Finally, this illustrates a subtle but important point of using S3. When I buy physical disks at SmugMug, those are sunk costs. They’ll never get cheaper because I’ve already paid for them. At Amazon, though, market forces and changes will cause their pricing model to continue to re-adjust downwards. As disks get cheaper, that $0.15/GB/month fee will drop. And instantly all of your storage magically gets cheaper, no sunk costs to worry about.” — seems like the modern version of the MSFT/Intel bet on Moore’s Law.
- Everybody seems to love this silverlight thing. Will be interesting to take temperature of it again in 3 and 6 months
- Beta of Comic Life — cute but I think I would tire of it.
- Phil keeps on improving Beyond411 — a stud.
- Drag a map around and see where the deals are – this is seriously awesome. Nice work guys! (Ignition is an investor).
- Foxtorrent firefox addon. Haven’t tried yet but seems like a nice idea.
- How to open Vista and Office packages — amazing that the world needs this. I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to open the office box.
- Google spreadsheet now with charts — which pretty much flips me over completely to google docs.
OSU 2007 TV Schedule
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Buckeyes