Some guy managed to film his cat grabbing a bat from mid air. I love how the cat looks a little surprised at first, then walks off casually. I’m surprised the bat wasn’t moving at all in its mouth, I guess it was killed/unconscious already at that point. And the crunchy chowdown:
It’s officially meant to resemble the lines in snow and ice left by skis and skates, but c’mon! We all know the Olympics are filled with stoners but this might be too obvious!
The new Danger Mouse album is “out”, and it’s pretty fantastic. Due to a dispute with his label EMI, it won’t actually be released. Apparently there will be a 100+ page booklet featuring photos by David Lynch, with a blank CD-R included in the package. No word on when. “For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.”
The Iggy Pop track is my favorite so far, the lyrics are classic: “I’m a mix of god and monkey”
Hear the album streamed here, (download those tracks here? or full stream in 1). Or find it torrentially which I believe is better quality, @160kbps.
The album features: Iggy Pop, Wayne Coyne (the Flaming Lips), Frank Black (the Pixies), James Mercer (the Shins), Julian Casablancas (the Strokes), Gruff Rhys (Super Furry Animals), Jason Lytle (Grandaddy), Nina Persson (Cardigans), Vic Chestnut, Suzanne Vega, David Lynch
Apparently their works are in the public domain thus perfectly legal. I discovered this trove after reading this article about how Orwell wrote 1984 while suffering from tuberculosis in the last years of his life.
YouTube has recently added new sections of which you may not be aware, here they are in case you’d like to waste more time than you probably already do there. There is a LOT of stuff available.
EDU: if you’re feeling cerebral. Boatloads of vids from various universities. Click Directory once there to see. There are entire courses available to view (e.g. @MIT)
TV Shows: impressive mix of classics and newer stuff.
The NYT released an interesting graphic of which U.S. counties suffer the worst unemployment. Go there and hover over them to see. You can zoom in as well.
Just learned about this site iHerb.com. No it’s not just herbs, they have all kinds of supplements, health care products, toiletries, etc. Good deals, check em out. Their prices on some stuff pretty much blows away anywhere else. Free shipping >$40, otherwise a $4 flat rate UPS ground.
Deals I especially recommend (big bottle=great deal): SweetLeaf Stevia extract. It’s alcohol-free unlike most other stevia extracts. 0 cals, no glycemic, natural sweetener. Use it in tea, smoothies, cooking, whatever. Singing Dog Organic Vanilla Extract: This price is unreal. I paid this much for a tiny bottle of it at the grocery store. Good stuff, I like to use it in my morning banana cacao sorbet concoction. Dr. Bronner’s Almond 18in1 Soap: This soap is pretty amazing. I’ve only recently got into it, but I guess it can be used for all kinds of things, even in the dishwasher or clothes washer. Little bit goes a long way. The almond scent is pretty delicious. Earthrise Spirulina: I can’t speak for this product as I haven’t used it yet, but the price is very hot. Spirulina has many purported health benefits, it can be sprinkled on a salad or used in a smoothie.
I love this. I haven’t bought it, but its existence did lead me to dust off my copy of Myst Masterpiece Edition and get it working in Vista. The iPhone app takes a whopping 727mb of space, and requires 1.5gb to install. The price is $5.99. I love this trend of classics being resurrected to the iPhone for low prices. First Wolfenstein, now this. Next up, Doom and Riven please.
Ubuntu Linux 9.04 was released last week (up from 8.10), and it’s better than ever. If you’re uninitiated, there’s frankly no better time than now.
You can try it out without affecting your system in the slightest. Head to ubuntu.com, grab and burn the .ISO (aka Live CD), and boot your computer with it in the drive. You should see an Ubuntu boot screen and something to the effect of “Try Ubuntu without making changes to my computer”. Select that and your system will boot Ubuntu, running from your CD and RAM. In other words it’s completely temporary, everything you do will be gone at shut-down. But it’s a great way to check for compatibilities with your system such as video, wireless networking, and other various hardware. Just don’t judge the speed of Linux when booting from a Live CD, since anything you do is loading off the CD instead of hard drive, so things may open sluggishly.
Why Linux? Let me break down some pros:
installation ease. Installation is a breeze. It will happily install itself alongside your existing XP/Vista. You can choose to install to a new partition on your C: drive, or to another drive. I highly recommend first defragging the drive you plan to install to, multiple times if necessary. Back-up files on your Windows drive which would make you cry to lose. If possible, try shrinking the Windows partition first, but otherwise Ubuntu can make a partition for itself using the free space on your drive. Be a little careful. If you have a system which cannot install from a CD, you also have the option to create a USB drive install kit. (System->Administration->USB Startup Disc Creator). I had to do this on my laptop which has a bunk CD drive. You can boot the Live CD on a machine with a working CD bootup, then create the USB from there. (Note: if your system doesn’t boot from CD, it may be easily fixable in your BIOS. Look for Boot Priority or something to that effect, you may just need to move your CD drive above your HD. Or likewise to enable booting from a USB stick. I had to do this on my laptop.) Linux will install a boot menu called Grub which appears at bootup and gives you the choice of which OS to boot. You can tweak the options for this from Linux->System->Administration->StartUp Manager. (If you’d like more info about installing a dual boot of Linux with Vista already installed, here’s a guide. There’s also info for installing Vista with Linux installed first, here.)
fast. Compared to Vista especially, it’s very snappy. And none of the fscking incessant HD thrashing that Windows does. My semi-old laptop runs much happier with Linux than it did with XP. If you want to run an even cleaner Linux installation because you have a wicked old comp or are just a wicked minimalist, there are other Linux installation packages (aka distributions, or “distros”) which come with far less installed and running, but likewise may require more setup or tinkering on your part. See here for more on that.
free.Always. Nuff said.
secure. You basically don’t even need anti-virus or spyware apps with Linux because they’re not really an issue or concern. When security patches ARE needed, they appear that day, not every 2nd Tuesday of the month of whatever.
software. Firefox, OpenOffice 3.0, and GIMP come already installed, as well as many other free open source software solutions. Many more are available via the “add/remove programs” equivalent, which is much better than that of Windows. See here for more apps or just google it.
classy. Something about running Linux is just classy in my opinion. Maybe it’s the screaming lack of Arial everywhere. Maybe it’s the “alternative” nature of it all which makes me feel like the cool kid that I am. Whatever it is, there is definitely a certain je ne sais quoi.
Compiz. This is a suite of highly configurable visual effects. Desktop cube, wobbly windows, transparencies, zooms, etc. Look it on up the youtube to see.
Conky. Conky is a sweet desktop resource monitor, and more. Ultra customizable if you don’t mind tinkering with text files. See my screenshot, this is my setup for now. You can have it display weather details, resource usage and graphs, to-do lists from a text file, and email box counts (which is the 22 in the lower right of my screen). If Conky is too much for you, Screenlets are the next best thing.
highly customizable. You can customize pretty much everything. Boot up and login screens, window schemes, fonts, colors, mouse pointers, etc. http://www.gnome-look.org/ is a great resource.
compatibility. Out of the box compatibility with Windows files. You may see a slight issue with text file interoperability, the solution is just to start using Notepad++ to edit texts in Windows. There is a Windows emulator called Wine which comes installed, you can use this to run just about any Windows software, even games. Or you can use VMware or virtualbox to run entire Windows or other operating systems from within Linux, allowing you to completely ditch a dual boot.
subtleties. There are just little bits and bobs around Linux which are just simply done better than Windows. I don’t have specifics at the moment. Here are a few: 1) you can mouse-scroll windows that aren’t in the foreground just by mousing over them 2) before the screensaver kicks in, a slooww fade-to-black occurs, which is cool for watching vids without missing a frame. 3) The calculator shows everything you enter on the line so you know if you’ve typed that + or not, etc. 4) When you capture the screen using PrSc or alt-PrSc, a pop-up appears which shows a preview and lets you choose the file name and save location, or simply choose to copy to clipboard. 5) When you rename a file, only the file name is highlighted by default, not the extension. This way you can just type and press enter without having to reenter its extension (oh yeah, and linux actually shows you file extensions out of the box). 6) Toggle hidden files display with a simple Ctrl-H.
online knowledge. There is a wealth of info online about Linux. If you have an issue or a question, there’s a 99.9% chance someone else has too, and there’s a solution in a forum somewhere. Just google it.
career. After teaching yourself Linux, you can put it on your résumé. More and more companies are starting to use Linux instead of Windows, and your expertise could give you the edge over other candidates.
Cons:
learning curve. The basic stuff like navigation and where to find things will take a couple days to get used to, but it’s the the terminal commands and things like that which can take a bit more learning. But hey gotta keep the noodle sharp right?
breakability. If you F something up, there is a small possibility that you could break your Linux bootup, hah. This can happen especially when toying with video driver stuff. But as long as you run a dual boot, or have another system to Google things on, and have half a brain, you should be able to rescue it just fine.
Some vids about just how terrible trans fats, MSG, and aspartame are. So much evidence is known of how bad they are, yet they’re all still legal. The whole of it just speaks to how sketchy the system is, and how we should be so wary of anything processed or artificial lest find ourselves guinea pigs of the FDA. Not just with foods either but all kinds of chemicals that we are poisoning the earth with.
Trans fats: The scary thing about trans fats is that even if it says 0g on the label, the FDA allows it to be up to 0.4g and it’ll be rounded down to 0 for the label. You very rarely see anything containing any grams of trans fat according to the label, but I’d be willing to bet that tons of products have it snuck in there and they get to round down to 0. They probably lower the serving size to accomplish this too. A person could eat 6 servings of such things in a day, that could be over 2g of trans fats all the while the label said 0. Again it could also come at a restaurant and you’d never know it. “hydrogenated” or “partially hydrogenated” oils. Avoid them! It’s a shame that whole cities (like NYC back in 2006) place bans before the FDA even thinks of it.
MSG: The scary thing about MSG (other than of course how bad it is for you) is how it’s disguised so innocuously as other things in ingredient lists. Like “hydrolyzed vegetable protein”, “autolyzed yeast”, “hydrolyzed yeast”, “yeast extract”, “soy extract”, “protein isolate”, even just as “spices”, or “natural flavorings”. Be deligent with your label reading, or better yet avoid that processed crap all together. But it’s ALSO served up in restaurants, you gotta be diligent.
Aspartame: This vid series is called Aspartame and MSG are Poisoning Us, but it’s really just about aspartame and how it causes brain tumors and various other things. It’s kinda long but near the end is a pretty sad story about how a woman was convicted for poisoning her husband who died of methanol poisoning, the actual suspicion being that it was from the component of aspartame. Stevia gets mentioned in the credits; it’s a joke how aspartame is still approved for food use but stevia isn’t.
If you are interested in keeping track of your caloric and/or nutrient intake for the purposes of improving health or losing/gaining weight, I recommend taking CRON-o-meter for a spin. It is free open source software for Windows, Mac, or Linux. You input each item you eat and it tallies all the nutritional data for you. You may find this too tedious to be doing long-term, but I recommend doing it for a few days or a week to see how some of the numbers look, you may be surprised at the results. You can run a report which will show you daily averages. It’s also very informative in that you can see the nutrient breakdowns of various foods, and learn to eat more of certain things if your diet lacks in certain nutrients.
It has a pretty large database of foods, but if you don’t find something, you can also add the food manually. Keep in mind that if the food is not in the database, it may be a sign that you shouldn’t be eating it (i.e. processed crap).
You can also group a set of foods into a custom recipe for ease of adding later (but be aware that if you alter the recipe later it alters it in your previous days also).
You can alter your nutrient goals if you don’t like the predetermined RDA’s for you. (Some RDA’s are BS, as influenced by the meat and dairy industries. For instance the protein and calcium recommendations are too high in my opinion.) It will show you what proportion of your calories come from Protein/Carbs/Fat. You can alter this target ratio. You can track your weight or other parameters on the Biomarkers tab and use it to graph them over time. Remember: to lose a sustainable pound per week of fat, shoot for a daily 500 calorie deficit.
There are on-line solutions for this kind of thing as well, namely fitday.com and nutridiary.com, which I admittedly have not tried. I like CRON-o-meter because it’s light, snappy, simple, powerful. I don’t feel the need for any extra functionality.
Remember it’s best to eat whole fresh ripe raw organic fruits and vegetables, and not rely on supplements. It’s best to avoid refined sugars and starches, processed foods, and dairy.
