Super tiny usb storage

Seriously do want, this is great for the netbook crowd. My mini 9 has 3 usb ports that basically do nothing most of the time, and this is as big as the solid state drive I have running in the mini 9.

via gizmodo

Orwell diary

I have subscribed to the Orwell diaries and was struck by a recent post that listed a recipe for making cream cheese as a newspaper clipping. I cannot imagine that happening now!

Cream Cheese from Goat’s Milk. – The simplest cream cheese to make is the following, W. J. C. (Bletchley). To 1 quart of fresh, warm milk add half a teaspoon of rennet and stir well. Let stand for 12 hours then cut the curd into pieces of uniform walnut size with a curd knife or enameled ladle. Transfer the cut curd to cheese cloth, and hang up to drain for 24 hours. Then take down, add a pinch of salt and place in a mould stood on a small straw mat. Place another mat on top and slightly weigh down. Keep thus for two days, turning the mould over and weighting from the other side once during this time. The cheese is then ready for use.

Packing a Lunch could be fun

Lifehacker is at it again trying to help the pleebs like me get there brown bag game in tip top shape and pointed out the Latch Tiffin over at Happy Tiffin, and that got me thinking about my old and busted lined cooler lunch bag that has been in service for a little over 2 years now, and how I wouldn't mind an upgrade that gave me handy compartments so I could (hopefully) use fewer plastic bags. Given that the Tiffin is sold out in the size that I want and has been since the Lifehacker post I went looking for similar items and found the Bento lunch box and was excited that I could participate in the Bento culture and use cool Bento recipe and meal planing guides. I am torn, either will likely meet my needs, and the Tiffin can do Bento likely as easily as the Bento lunch box can, I just don't know which I should choose.

Business week follow up to Schumpater society

So I realize I am very slow to follow up to that Kauffmann.org video I posted the transcript of a while ago, but not long after I posted that I found that I am going to be a father sometime near the end of November so I have been making my home ready for a new addition. That said I saw a link in my facebook stream that made me think about that video and some synthesis on the actions and the road to recovery that The Obama administration has laid out and the perceived inaction by congress on some of his agendas. I believe that the Business week author and my friend on Facebook take the inaction on several pieces of rhetoric out of the Obama administration to be the status quo guarding its position, and to some extent they may be right, but at the same time they guarding their interests they may be guarding the public's as well. Regulatory structures create a burden on every industry that they affect, and this industry actually already had in place all the statutes in place to authorize the bodies needed to oversee them to take corrective measure that could have averted the bulk of the economic collapse. The trouble is that Congress (as pointed out by Carl Schramm in the Kauffmann video) actively tried to set the bench marks that for what was acceptable market activity. These benchmarks where somewhat politically motivated and inherently flawed, that prevented the respective delegate regulatory agencies unable to effectively police their area of regulation. Bad market benchmarks coupled with artificially low interest rates that where intended to "stimulate" the economy coupled with high overall market activity was an effective cover for the truly fraudulent mortgages (that where knowingly created on an hourly basis according to someone I know that worked in the mortgage industry) would have been easier to detect. Had the legitimate transactions taken on so many attributes that would have appeared risky or fraudulent absent the Congressional mandates for low income lending the worst of the worst mortgages that have reshaped the lending and financial institutions of this country would never have existed.

I know that most people wanted sweeping change, but I think that if you look at rushed knee-jerk legislation like the Patriot act and Sarbanes-Oxley we would be well advised to enact simpler legislation that ensured that Congress had less direct influence on daily policy in regulatory bodies, when you remove politics from regulation the bodies are more likely to stick to their mandates, and establish regulation that makes sense.

For the question as to whether the recovery is being flubbed I think that it is pretty clear that the stimulus packages in place that are making the credit markets more liquid again are only serving to extend the debt society that we live in. The Federal reserve lending system at its heart appears to allow fabrication of wealth via the partial reserve lending system. If banks had to have and transfer all the money needed to fulfill a loan, they would be much more careful about those loans they did give. I am not saying that this would necessarily be a simple or practical overnight fix, just that I bet if customers knew that their money could be lost (particularly in the face of defaults) they would exercise a lot more interest in what banks where doing with their money. They would likely go back to buying Government bonds rather than trusting their savings with banks, and it would make the revenue stream off of mortgages seem quite a bit more valuable than it currently is perceived to be.

Three the robot platform...

I saw this all over yesterday, but I have a question that the site seems to not do a great job of answering for me: what is the controller board that I am interfacing with. I looked and looked and finally I realized that he sensors where just usb accessories, and the controller is the laptop. This is an aluminum frame for holding your laptop and a usb hub to add crap to it. While the idea is interesting, other than fairly oblique marketing this is no different than other products that Servo magazine has been hawking for some time now.

What gives guys, you new to the hobby robotics scene?

Seattle May actually get it

I saw in the Seattlest recently that Seattle had dropped the price of compost bins from $100 each to $25 each or $40 for a pair! I had looked at the units before and balked at the cost of starting a composting setup, but $40 is a very low barrier of entry. So bravo Seattle for subsidizing seattlites who are interested in reducing their waste stream.

The Tow-N-Stow

Damn the Toolmonger for all the cool things that he shows me.

The Tow-N-Stow looks like it is a great solution for the townhome dweller of the modern urban city. Have a garage, but don't have a truck?

Interesting resources to reduce the amount of sms you send

If you want to send an email to someone's phone that only has text messaging you can use this handy list of provider gateway's

T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com
Cingular: phonenumber@cingularme.com
Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com
Nextel: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com
US Cellular: phonenumber@email.uscc.net
SunCom: phonenumber@tms.suncom.com
Powertel: phonenumber@ptel.net
AT&T: phonenumber@txt.att.net
Alltel: phonenumber@message.alltel.com
Metro PCS: phonenumber@MyMetroPcs.com
Helio:phonenumber@myhelio.com
Cricket:phonenumber@sms.mycricket.com
Centennial Wireless:phonenumber@cwemail.com

I found some of this info from Tech Recipes via Lifehacker, but the real cache is on Notepage