Five Plants That Repel Mosquitoes – not a big deal here in Seattle but good to know.

Diary of a Crossword Fiend: How Constructors Try to Trick You – don’t even try to do the NYT crosswords later in the week unless you have embraced all these. I hate the “Phonetics and building blocks” class of clue, they seem cheap to me.

Almost here. Some stuff to get your blood boiling:

* EDSBS ? Archive ? PAC-10 FAN WOULD LIKE YOU TO KNOW HE GETS VERY EXCITED, TOO. – an awesome putdown of the Pac-10 and its tepid fan base. * MGoBlog rips ND Nation a new one

Oh and a composite XL spreadsheet of the season

* NITON XRF Analyzers for Toys & Consumer Goods – I saw this on a news program, testing toys for lead. totally cool. $1000 to rent for a week so probably ridiculously expensive. * iStraw – well we just had a case of giardia in the extended family so this looks pretty good * Urwerk Watch – another stupidly priced watch but awesome * Electric bike. Absolutely no need for this. * Two dimensional kid popup. This is a little disturbing for some reason. * Pie slice ejector. I only need this about once a year, but when you need it, you need it. * Hand made knives and tools. I’m not sure how functional, but they are cool * Puke inducing flashlight. A thousand and one uses. * Your Personal Moon.

Dark Roasted Blend: Tesla Power in Your Backyard – some awesome Tesla coil displays

Multimeter Tutorial - Measuring Resistance and How to speak Resistor

Installed this – An update is available that improves the compatibility and reliability of Windows Vista – as I was suffering from several of the named problems:

• The computer stops responding, and you receive a “Display driver stopped responding and has recovered” error message. You can restart the computer only by pressing the computer’s power button. • The computer stops responding or restarts unexpectedly when you play video games or perform desktop operations. • There are stability issues with some graphics processing units (GPUs). These issues could cause GPUs to stop responding (hang). • Visual appearance issues occur when you play graphics-intensive games.

My machine didn’t croak on install. So far, so good

It is nice to think that there is some field out there in which I can still be productive…

blog.pmarca.com: Age and the entrepreneur, part 1: Some data # This peak in productivity varies by field, from the late 20s to the early 50s, for reasons that are field-specific.

Dark Roasted Blend: The Rusting Monsters of Lopatino’s Mines – reminds me of my days interning for Marion Power Shovel, this is the kind of gear they produced. Awe inspiring.

Andy wants a google phone – A Sack of Seattle: Google phone.

You can get a long way there today:

* Google mail for your domain – navigate to m.google.com/a and install. This is the app for your own domain mail, there is a gmail equivalent at gmail.com/app * Google calendar – just go to calendar.google.com, it has a great mobile interface. and a great sms interface too * Google reader – www.google.com/reader/m * Maps – navigate to www.google.com/gmm/. another great app.

By the way, once you’ve installed all these, your blackberry will probably run out of memory and start autodeleting mail from your blackberry inbox with no warning. if you go to settings…advanced…applications, you can uninstall a bunch of cruft like all the language support you don’t need, all the crappy bberry apps and carrier apps you never use, etc. Love that MSDOS-style memory management

* Outdoor Garden Statues - Decor – some resin statuary up here that would be good in a graveyard setting * Inflatable Hearse – a little too cheesy maybe. but cool. * MAKE special halloween edition – ordered * Servo-Center. need to dig into more * The Hand. Would be awesome to play with

College Football Forum: “Fredo” Harbaugh: Even U-M Players Think He’s a Douchebag

Tong Family Blog: Don’t every drag and replace a folder – yeow, i would not have anticipated this.

On a more positive front, some good comments here re mac utilities for file copying, dvd burning