voyhere.com

Most sites have search features nowadays. Sometimes they’re decent, sometimes they’re terrible. Sometimes they give you advanced sorting options, sometimes they don’t. Forget all that roulette and let the master do it: search any site with your warm and fuzzy Google. For example the following query narrows results to only those from voyhere.com:

search terms site:voyhere.com

Note the use of the top- and second-level domains only; don’t use any www or anything. Now you can employ/enjoy all of Google’s search refinements. If Google’s not your flavor I’m sure yours has the equivalent.

It’s summer time and a lot of nice fruit is in season.   Fruit is one of the best foods there is.  If you know what’s up, you buy and eat a lot of it.  However, fruit flies like it too and you may at one time find yourself with a swarm of the annoying buggers.  They find the mature, ripe, and rotting most attractive.  They don’t really go away on their own unless you give the kitchen a good clean and remove all attractants.

If you have an emergency, such as company is coming over, the absolute quickest way to clear a swarm is to use a vacuum with a hose attachment, or a Dustbuster.

But for more passive, lasting maintenance, make a trap:

1. Put a little apple cider vinegar in a shot glass.
2. Cover it tightly with plastic wrap.
3. Poke a few holes in it, large enough for them to fit, maybe a little bigger.

They fly in and can’t get out.  This trap will last a while too, mine has been up for a week.  You can “freshen” it by giving it a good swirl.  Yummy.

You can also use wine, beer, OJ, or regular vinegar I guess.  I chose ACV because I have a bottle of it which I no longer use.  I’ve also seen mention of adding a drop of dish soap, but I didn’t find it necessary.  The idea there is it removes the surface tension on the liquid and they get stuck easier.  Probably only necessary if not using the plastic wrap.

(I don’t take credit for this trap, it’s on the net in various places)

Many tips and infos on fruit flies here.

Update: I tried mixing a good-sized drop of dish soap in with the ACV.  The soap breaks the surface tension of the liquid so as soon as they touch it they drown in seconds and sink to the bottom shortly thereafter.  This is now my preferred method, the plastic wrap isn’t even needed, which attracts them better as well.

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.

Movies: ditto.

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.

Use Coupon Code GOT930 for $5 off:
iHerb.com

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.

http://spaz.ca/cronometer/

RSS.  You probably know what it is.  Or maybe you don’t.  Maybe you think you know, but don’t use it for whatever reason, like laziness or you don’t see the point of it.  If any of these is you, it’s gonna be ok, keep reading.

What it is: RSS is a stream of the articles from a site. It includes the article titles and an excerpt (or sometimes the entire post) and also sometimes an image or an attached mp3.  In your RSS reader, or a Firefox RSS plugin, you subscribe to these “feeds” of all of your favorite sites.  Then you can get a preview of them before you click them.

You may be asking:  “ok great but why is this any better than just visiting the sites directly?” I’ll tell ya why.

1) You visit a lot of sites.   2) Some of the sites don’t post new stuff all the time.   3) You still want to be aware of these posts without visiting that site all the time only to find no new content.

RSS is for you.  “Isn’t clicking each one the same as just visiting the site?” No, because of watch lists.  They basically alert you whenever one of your favorite sites gets a new post.  More on them in a bit.

If you’re in a work environment, browsing via RSS will probably result in many fewer bytes transferred, if you’re concerned about that sort of thing.  Or if you’re still on a (lol) dialup, RSS would be essential.

“I’m ready to check it out, what are my options?” Well you can get a dedicated RSS application, or you can use Firefox’s innate RSS capability Live Bookmarks, or use what I believe to be the best option: the Firefox Wizz RSS add-on.  If you’re with me, go get it and come back.  Here’s a screenshot.

Exhibit A.  Notice the toolbar and sidebar

Read more »

The search box in the upper right of Firefox should be a staple for you.  Here are some things you may not have known.

1. Ctrl-K gives it focus.
2. If you want to remove or re-order the searches, go to ‘Manage Search Engines’ under the dropdown.
3. You can also ‘Get more search engines..’ from that same Manage Search Engines screen.  It takes you to an add-on subpage; just key in the site you’d like to find a search for, e.g. IMDB.
4. Sometimes while web browsing you may notice that the dropdown in the search box will glow blue (color may depend on your theme).  This indicates that you can add a search for that site very quickly to your search bar.  Look for the option under the dropdown.  There aren’t many sites which feature this ability, but CNN is one example.
5. You can assign a keyword to a search on the Manage Search Engines page.  They work like this: you pick a few letters for a keyword, e.g. asd for IMDB, then you can type the keyword followed by your search terms in your address bar to quickly perform that search, e.g. ‘asd tom cruise’.   Note that you can also do this directly from basically any search box you find on the net, by right-clicking in it and selecting ‘Add keyword for this search’.   Ctrl-L gives address bar focus.
6. You can update the Google icon to their new favicon by following the directions here.

Trick I’ve discovered in Vista for muting just Firefox, say if you’re playing a flash game with no mute button on it and you want to hear your iTunes..

1: Click speaker icon

2: Click Mixer

3: Put your junk in that box

Not only is selectively muting apps highly useful, but this is also the place where you can permanently change the relative volume of anything which doesn’t have a volume knob.

Addendum 11/12/09: Now Ubuntu 9.10 has come on board with this capability.  Right click the sound icon and enter Sound Preferences (or via System->Preferences->Volume Control).   It’s on the Applications tab:

This add-on lets you click and drag anywhere on a page to scroll it, versus using your mouse wheel or using the scroll bar.  It’s a bit of functionality lifted from Internet Explorer.  I prefer it lately to the mouse wheel because it’s smoother, and allows for varied scroll speeds.  It’s similar to just using the scroll bar, but you can grab the page anywhere.  Great for use with a tablet pen, and it would also be nice with a touchscreen to emulate iPhone sweetness.

I recommend going ahead and using these 2 options, so as to leave your text selection and mouse gestures unmolested:

After installing, notice also that the add-on has placed a hand icon in the upper right of your ‘Fox; clicking this will toggle the functionality on/off if you’d like.  If you don’t like this icon, here’s how to remove it:  right-click some dead space at the top of your browser (try right below the URL bar) and you should see a context menu with an option for Customize.  Simply drag the hand icon into the pop-up window which has appeared, and it goes away, into that “sandbox”.  Learn something every day.

There’s also a new link to the Grab and Drag preferences under the Tools menu, which you can disable in the add-on’s preferences.

Nab Grab and Drag here.