Non-toxic house plant
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
I finally found a plant I can have in my house that will safely coexist with my cat. After finding plant after plant that I liked I would check the list of plants poisonous to cats and would inevitably find it listed. These included the Snake Plant (Sansevieria Laurentii), Corn Plant (Dracaena Massangeana), Rubber Plant (Ficus Elastica), Weeping Fig (Ficus benjamina), and Madagascar Dragon Tree (Dracaena Marginata). I came across the Bamboo Palm (Chamaedorea) and it was actually listed on the non-toxic plant list. As soon as I got it home my cat was gnawing on the leaves so to rectify that I dusted the entire plant with cayenne pepper. Shortly thereafter I found my cat drinking heavily from his water bowl so here’s hoping he learned to stay away. And I have my green thumbs crossed that this palm won’t die. Similar to the Bamboo Palm is the Kentia Palm (Howea forsteriana) and Lady Palm (Rhapis) which are also non-toxic hardy indoor plants that are a good choice.
Combining iPod with a home entertainment system
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
I had bought an Onkyo iPod dock that allowed me to control my iPod through my Onkyo receiver and remote control but found it a frustrating experience. I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t switch between playlists or artists (very basic functions like next, previous, stop, pause) but I couldn’t see the menu from across the room anyways. I was happy to see two great new products from the literally hundreds of new iPod accessories on the show floors at both CES and Macworld Expo recently. The Griffin TuneCenter and the DLO HomeDock which both let you see the menu on your television. In my opinion the TuneCenter is less expensive and more featureful. There’s even a wifi enabled option.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) cheat sheet
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
The voicemail on my employer provided cell phone was not working so I decided to call the provider, US Cellular. I went through their Interactive Voice Response system which took over 4 minutes, waited on hold a bit, then the phone started ringing (yay, I get to talk to someone!) but then I was disconnected. Argh. At this point I remembered the IVR Cheat Sheet by Paul English that lists numerous businesses, their public phone numbers and the process to bypass their IVRs. US Cellular’s IVR bypass consists of pressing 0 twice after choosing English. After I did that the phone rang and I was talking to a real live human! Thanks Paul English!
Santiago Calatrava Architecture
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
Santiago Calatrava is my favorite architect, his designs are unique and anthropomorphic. I was surprised to learn that he had done the new white concrete Quadracci Pavilion for the Milwaukee Museum of Art (I need to take the short trip there soon). My favorite tower of Calatrava’s is Turning Torso in Sweden. Recently a 2,000 foot tower in Chicago has been proposed which would make Chicago the homeplace of the country’s tallest building.
PocketMod: Free Disposable Pocket Organizer
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
PocketModis a great personal organizer for me. I dislike PDAs and using my iPod or cellphone for notes is too cumbersome. I can just carry my pocketmod in my wallet…now if only I always had a pen with me.
Mashup mania
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
I’ve been listening to a few different mashup albums over the past few months. Of course, there’s the infamous Grey Album by DJ Danger Mouse that combined Jay-Z’s The Black Album with The Beatles The White Album. But much more brilliant is the work of The Kleptones who’ve combined dusty Queen songs with classic and modern rap on A Night at the Hip-Hopera. Yoshimi Battles The Hip Hop Robots and From Detroit To J.A. are also available from The Kleptones and are really good spins as well. Not quite on par with The Kleptones, but just as genius, is a mashup by DJ Cappel that blends Sinatra with Notorious BIG on Blue Eyes Meets Bed-Stuy. Not a mashup but worth mentioning is a complete soundtrack to Super Mario World covered by one man.
WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
I RSVP’ed to attend a screening in my area of WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price. It’s directed by Robert Greenwald of whose movies I’ve seen include the documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism which I really enjoyed.
Gmaps pedometer
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
I found the project Gmap pedometer, to be quite useful. It is one of the many recent web projects that are taking advantage of the Google Maps API, such as finding cheap gas, webcams, or Chicago crimes. The Gmap pedometer let me enter the route I go on when I jog and than calculated the distance, 2.0814791576196074 miles a leg or 4.1629583152392148 miles roundtrip.
Useful Firefox extensions and RSS feeds
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
I found the Firefox extension Bookmarks Synchronizer to be really useful for having my bookmarks available to me at both work and home. I installed the extension on my main home and work machines and it uploads/downloads via FTP (HTTP/S also available) the Firefox bookmark file, xbel.xml, from a publically available server. The 0.9.6 version of Bookmarks Synchronizer does not work with Firefox 1.0PR but I found the authors website had a version called bookmarksftp.xpi here compatible with 1.0PR. In other Firefox news, I really enjoy using the extension Sage, the RSS/Atom feed aggregator. Firefox 1.0PR introduced live bookmarks, which is an RSS reader but I still prefer Sage as it’s a bit more mature. A couple recent additions to my feeds include the one provided by mp3blogs.org which I find useful for discovering new music, Netflix finally offers RSS feeds so I can follow new releases, and watchcow.net offers a feed builder to track Amazon products or wishlists.
Marriage of BitTorrent and RSS
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
Salon has a decent story on the marriage of BitTorrent and RSS for television programs, which I’ve talked about before (and am a fan of).