The List:

It's not about what you need. It's not even something you would get if you had the money. It's what's sooo cool, you gotta note it.

Land Rover Type II

The Land Rover Type II (1958-1970) or III (1971-1983) are both fantastic trucks. They come in different lengths from stubby to quite long. As a fun toy, I would prefer the 109" wheelbase models, as the extended length would only be more wait to pull around with no use. (The model in the picture is a '69 type II 2.63 ltr. six-cylinder. Note they advertise this will seat 7 (3 in the front, 4 in the back, with 2 on a bench facing each other.) It _might_ have seatbelts.

Nacra F18 Infusion Catamaran

Ahh... A man and his boat.... Probably one of the fastest dingy racers out there. Fully equipped with dual trapezes and a spinnaker. The only other mandatory missing item would be a house on the water close to a fleet to race against.

Fortis SPACEMATIC GMT Watch:

Watches have started to go the way of the dodo in the sense that the phone in your pocket is a much better time piece then the device on your wrist. Thus this has pushed the wrist watch to a piece of jewelry rather then a tool. The problem I have with this is that the mens watch has become overun with busy noise. There are too many dials and sparkles to be able to simply tell what time it is.

I like the Fortis SPACEMATIC GMT watch because one look tells you the time. They have removed all of the noise, and made a very clean watch face that tells you both the time, and GMT time as well.

Wood/Hand Carved PC Case:

Suissa Computers Canadian company which makes the ultimate "green" PC case. What a great idea! The ultima te PC mod! These come fully equipped, but with a box like that, you could simply stick whatever you want in it, and in the future upgrade the motherboard and not need to replace the power supply or case. They have a bunch of very clever non-conventional shapes for the cases. I hope this catches on, and we see more and more hand crafted works of art for the tools that we rely on, and look at every day.

Worlds Best Keyboard

The Optimus Maximus Keyboard does not have silkscreened letters to tell you what button is what. Instead, each keyboard is its own full color OLED screen, and you can program whatever you want for each key. A bit overpriced at more then a grand a pop, but very-very cool!

Jensen Model #51:

Demonstrations of everyday physics are a good thing. An actual working model of a steam powered power plant is a very good thing. Jensen used to make these, and there are a couple of folks out there who have rebuilt them and documented their results. (very nice) They are excellent examples to how both steam power works, how it is controlled, and how it is harnessed to create electric power. ...The little electric generators are very cool too!

OnLine Training/Teaching

Read this article in SFGate about a guy who is making a living (or almost) teaching online.

• Salman Khan, math master of the Internet:

post turtle

(it's an old story with many versions, but it does seem very appropriate. ... much more then the original version about Prez Bush...)

While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75-year old Texas rancher whose hand was caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to Sarah Palin and her bid to be a heartbeat away from being President.

The old rancher said, ‘Well, ya know, Palin is a post turtle.’

Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a post turtle was.

The old rancher said, ‘When you’re driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a post turtle.’

The old rancher saw a puzzled look on the doctor’s face, so he continued to explain. ‘You know she didn’t get up there by herself, she doesn’t belong up there, she doesn’t know what to do while she is up there, and you just wonder what kind of dumb ass put her up there to begin with.

Waiting for the Movie...... (will it ever arive?)

Years back there was the cannonball run across America. There is a guy making a documentary about the movie called 32 hours 7 minutes, which was the time it took the winning car to travel from New York to LA. Wired had a good writeup on some of the work done for the moving. Unfortunately, I think the webpage has said "almost finished" for the last 8 years....

On the driving like a nutbag topic, there is another race called the Gumball 3000 Rally (see intro vid) where a bunch of rich guys deck out their calls, go to lots of parties, and drive like freak shows on public roads across the globe. (looks like fun) During one of these events, which are a bit popular in Europe, a cop in Italy gave one team a bit of a hand. The video is fantastic; the cop has a psycho lead foot and the racing team almost has a hard time keeping up with him.

NetViz is Dead! Long Live NetViz!

Simple html Editor????

I want a text editor that I can use to jot down notes, and write documents. Basically I'm looking for a tool to be able to replace a lab book.

Of all things the first most important requirement is that the files I create need to be in some very standard, open source format so that 8+ years from now, they still work fine. The second requirement is that it's easy and quick to use.

For bonus points (and this is where I get hung up on), I want it to be able to have basic formatting abilities like adding pictures (preferably via a paste rather then linking files), and making tables and spreadsheets. I also what to make sure that I have only ONE stylesheet so that all the formatting always looks the same. I'm also really keen on the file format being html. Of all the formats, this one offers all the flexibility and compatibility I need. But the final requirement/issue is that the html code be very clean and minimal, and not the uglybarf that microsoft would produce.

So what are the options that I have seen so far:

• Bloated word processors like Word or Open Office
• Online tools like Evernote and google docs
• Text based tools like vim, editplus

I like the bloated software because of all the products I have used, they are the easiest to create files with. Adding images, charts, etc. is always really easy. The problem is reviewing the files later. With word for example, it's a really bad tool to use if your document has lots of images. It can take forever for word to draw out all of the pictures, and if you want to save to html, then a very small file ends up being massive with all of the extra code that is created.

Evernote has been helpful in keeping notes because of it's simplicity, but it's user interface is very much lacking in ease of use, and while it's really easy to go through all of your docs, I would rather have them locally in the event that they are business work and can't be stored "beyond the firewall".

Text editors are really great in the speed to take notes, but the lack of formatting kind of drop them out of the running. Sure I could use them to write raw html files, and I have with bluefish, but that goes against the speed requirement.

So what's a dude to do? Couldn't there be a basic editor, that was not to huge, thats file format was html, and that used a standard, single style sheet for all formatting?

I did see some other tools that looked interesting. Here's what I have found so far:

• CKEditor: Very close to what I'm looking for, but its for websites, (not standalone files) and it does not have the "paste" capability when dealing with images.

P4 Merge is TIT!!!

Seriously, there is no better dif utility out there then perforce's P4 Merge.

Take two files, and see what the differences are between them. Really useful for changes to code, router configs, or in this case apache httpd.conf files.

(click image to see larger version)

Need Dials and Blinkin Lights

One thing that computer manufactures don't seem to get is the importance of eye candy. (OK, so they get the booth bunny idea, but that's not what I'm talking about.) I'm talking about dials and blinky lights! (aka blinkenlights)

DIY Life has a write up on how to add analog tach gauges to your computer, and have them report on different variables from the server. (from load, to usage, etc.)

More dial goodness from Gizmo. (from an old P-51 Mustang cockpit)

Pandora's Failed Business Model

I'm totally bummed! Pandora was this online radio station that enabled you to customize your playlists so that you listened to more of the music you liked to hear, but still heard new stuff that was within that range. (Their website explains their product and how it works better.)

It started out as a completly free, and an add-free service. This worked well to bring in users, and increase their name recognition. Then they decided to introduce commercials into the radio stream to try and keep them afloat. Being spoiled on the add free music seen, it was a bummer to listen to the silly adds, but the product was good enough, and if I really didn't want the adds, for a fee i could join a subscription and get the music add-free.

Well now it seems that they can not keep themselves afloat with the adds, so they are now are forcing users to pay for service. At first I thought it was a joke, as it seems like such a dumb idea.

What are they offering? (a) radio station, (b) ability to customize music listening in a clever way. There are plenty of online radio streams out there that don't charge. Why would anyone pay for theirs? If I got to specifically list the songs I want to hear, and how often I want to hear them, that would be one thing, but pandora is simply a radio station. You say you like stuff, and it plays stuff ~like~ it. You don't get to hear what you want. Why would you pay for that?!?!?

To me, it looks like they have yet another failed business model. I wonder how long it takes for them to go the way of nabster?



The crazy part of all this is that their doom lies directly in the lap of the music industry with all of their stupid and greedy fees that they are tacking on to online music. My guess is that Pandora was responsible for a huge decrease in online music piracy, as folks could listen to good music via them, rather then having to deal with the hassle of downloading their own music and coming up with their own playlists. Now with the end of pandora, I bet music copying will go up.

External Laptop Mouse!

MoGo Mouse BT: I had a sales guy show up with one of these. Very cool! He said it was not the nicest mouse he had ever worked with, but it has the best storage system: keep it in your pcmcia slot.

So rather then having to lug around an external mouse, dig through your bag to find it and then untangle all the cables and plug it all in, instead you pop this out of your pcmcia bay in your laptop! It charges while in your pcmcia bay, and links to your laptop via bluetooth.

Make Your Own Vacuum Tube

Great Video,
If for no other reason, then just to admire the great workmanship!

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/01/make_your_own_vacuum_tube.html

Tiny, Low Cost NAS!

Very Cool. Get some external USB drives, and plug them into this baby to create a very nice, low cost NAS.

Addonics NAS Adapter

( I guess I should not get rid of the p1 in my basement running gentoo w/smb/nfs. Just thinking of how long the power bill savings would pay for this new toy.)

Radition Levels For Cell Phones

Wired has a nice article about research on how much juice is hitting your head from your cell phone. (see Study Reveals How Much Cellphone Radiation You’re Getting)

The entire power list was put together by Environmental Working Group and can be found here:
http://www.ewg.org/cellphoneradiation/Get-a-Safer-Phone?allphones=1

Cell Phone News:

Some sites that have good writeups on new cell phones:

Business week has a good column where they discuss
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/reviews/cellphones/

I so gotta try this....

There's a nice how-to to hack a road side sign. (ok, I would not really do this because it could be unsafe, but wouldn't it be cool!) btw, the key thing should not be too big a deal.