Usb powered water bottle humidifier

Try to ignore the obvious/gratuitous mac in the background and see the beauty and awesome that is this tiny usb powered humidifier.


Via Lifehacker

Links to stuff you probably don't care about

Ever find yourself in need of Graphing paper, or Cornell Notes paper? No, well you're boring graphing paper is where all the cool work get's done. It would be handy from time to time to be able to print some of that stuff out for my occasional (frequent) larks into science land. Now thanks to the power and awesomeness that is the internet I can! Generated Paper has a bunch of templates, but to be honest it's all about the graphing paper.

Related and also crazy in it's own right One Thing Well is a collection of single purpose scripts and applications (web or otherwise) for that nerd in your life that doesn't care for Swiss army knife programs that suck at most if not all of their functions. (It's okay Busybox, someone out there loves you).

So Generated Paper via One thing Well via Lifehacker (duh)

Google Power Search

Given the amount of my day that I spend answering peoples questions by typing in the question to Google and reading them back the answer, I starting to think that Google Power Search courses should be taught to in middle school.  Perhaps with brush up courses every year for the truly dense.

So if you or someone you know could use some extra google-fu check out the power search courses.

Via Lifehacker

Keeping quite to achieve goals

According to this article on Lifehacker, you should keep quiet about your plans to ensure you complete them. It's an interesting theory about symbolic self-completion, basically by getting the praise for trying something you don't feel the need to actually do something. I don't have a large body of contradictory evidence, but I've told this blog and others that I was working on my mash tun false bottom, even shown it to some people and still worked on it this weekend.  I've talked about my skull carving and CNC projects, and am still working (very slowly) on those. I don't know that it's a pure 1 to 1 comparison given that all of those projects where underway before I started talking about them, but I feel like I have several personal examples that contradict these findings.

I've also followed several project build logs of others that documented their process from concept to completion with feedback, adjustments and still went onto completion. It may be that there is a specific type of person that feels like symbolic self-completion is enough feedback for them to not finish a project. One might even go so far as to call those people posers, people that want to be something, but might not have the will to actually be those people.  My lack of progress is time bankruptcy at home more so then praise being enough to sate my need to build something.

What do you think? Is there weight to this or is it more nuanced then they make it?

shovel/funnel out of a jug

There is no point to this really, but the open handle makes me think that it would be really useful to scoop and funnel grain into small containers.  I keep coming back to this image going that would be useful for beer or feeding chickens or ... really not much at all.

Make via Lifehacker

I apologize ahead of time, I have a lot of links in my drafts I'm trying to find the bottom of the rabbit hole.

File this link under awesome

So Lifehacker hit me up with a little shot in the arm about DIY Cheez-its.  Cheez-its you can make at home, yeah, never leave your fortress of solitude with cheezy goodness.

That is all.

Budgeting for Hobbies

I've got a couple of hobbies, and finding time and money to pursue them is something that takes a lot of effort.  Lifehacker's post on the matter offered some thoughts on how to get your hobby's under control and moving towards completion.  The tips are straight forward, make a list and organize it according to importance, then use that list to budget time and money to them as is appropriate.  It's very ecumenical but also predictable.

I have some vague hobbies, that are explored with whimsy.  Cooking in particular is one that is taken by seasonality of ingredients and sales on equipment so while I have nebulous goals with regards to cooking projects to complete I don't much plan my undertakings of cooking.  The concrete planning and prioritizing doesn't leave room for that so I tend to let money accumulate so that if something comes up I can pounce.  The beer barrel was an instance of this.  I've wanted to do some oak aging, and thought of buying a barrel but the relatively cheap barrel and my having a glut of cash on hand all made this come together.

Another thing that the "always make time everyday" mentality misses is the random association benefit.  Sometimes letting a problem stew in your mind will let you draw inspiration from other things that you encounter while you are not working on your project.  For me, having the Rise of the Meritocracy in the back of my mind for so long really helped me see how the notion has been absorbed en masse by the United States as I read other unrelated articles.  Had I completed the reading and note taking in a week or two I may not have been as mindful of the examples that I encountered during the more drawn out reading.   I also don't know that I would have spent as much time talking about it with people.  By dragging it out I experienced the book from many different mindsets and benefited from the diverse perspectives that I encountered by talking about it with others.

In any event how do you budget time and money for your hobbies?

Right Habits

Success is an interesting thing, easy to see when you're there but harder to see in process.  I waited out the olympics to post this link to the Lifehacker post on right habits.  I'll be the first to say, this struck me because I'm a swimmer, and I have some concept of what an amazing feat Phelp's first olympics was.  If you watched it, you know.  It was electric to watch him swim, there was something going on there.  I've attended swim camps, and have seen some of the techniques in the article generally applied.  Never with the success of Michael Phelps obviously, but the article is really worth your time.

For those not making the jump to the article, the thrust of it is success is a habit.  You cultivate it by creating routines that lead you to success and the the author covers a few that worked for Michael Phelps.  Small wins, create platforms and establish a culture where winning is contagious.  I think the small wins section is the easiest to wrap your arms around, and basically is about doing things that make you feel successful, leads you to do things successfully.  For athletes this is simple, most have a warm up routine and many have "race music" to help amp them up, applying this outside of athletics is a more interesting thought exercise.  For instance let's examine what I would call a successful brew day.

It starts several days in advance for me, researching a recipe and reviewing my brew processes.  I recall what I did the last time that I felt worked well, and think about the things I wasn't as pleased by to try and improve on.  Next comes having everything you will need on hand like grains, hops, yeast and any additives. I need my equipment sanitized, and clean.  I need enough purified water and my enough propane in my tank, but mostly I need to have enough time.  Invariably it takes me about 5 or so hours start to finish to get a beer done and in the fermenter, this includes the "second runnings" batch I've gotten in the habit of doing on my all grain beers.

Anyhow what did you think of the article?

Brain abuse

So perennial link bait site Lifehacker had this little gem of a post about brain abuse.

It's a short article, but the gist of it is your brain is important so stop using it ineffectively for things it doesn't do well, and don't do things that make it preform poorly.

Basically don't re-think things, leave things half finished, work on too many things at the same time, or try to rely on your brain to remind you of things.  It's some pretty good advice, even if the examples are pretty thin and little evidence is offered why this are abusing your brain I think most people can identify with the articles thrust and agree with some of his recommendations.

For me it's the half finished work and re-thinking that gets me into trouble.  I don't feel fully responsible for these failings as sometimes the trouble is reality has constraints and those constraints prevent me from finishing a project (time, money and expertise for instance are limiting constraints) that cause me to have to come back to projects to wrap them up.  All of that just forces me into rethinking items in an effort to prioritize projects as the resource become available.

Curiosity and being self taught

For the people that where around following forever ago when I did the a-z posting I have a bit of a follow up to that long as hell O post, with another article from lifehacker.  The subject is on self-taught, but really the author was getting at the same things I prattled on about towards the end of my post.  When you want to start learning there is no wrong or right, you are just trying to connect the dots and you start connecting them by collecting the dots.  You can start in the middle or the end or even the beginning, but the important part is that you're open to finding out that what you tried to do doesn't work.

You where just trying something any way, so no harm in finding out that it doesn't work right?  The correct answer is yes, but the practical answer that our society teaches is no.  It's no okay to fail ever, you have to succeed every time at everything you do, and if you cannot you shouldn't try.  At least you would think that is what we teach, it's what most people are trying to do.

Be open to weird, try something dumb who knows it might be fun!

Slowing down

Here's a link to an interesting human interest piece I suppose.  The article that Lifehacker sources is about an experience someone had while they where participating in a focus exercise.  The point of the exercise was to take a path that you normally take, but travel it at about half your normal speed.  He had some epiphany that was unrelated to, but happened because of the speed exercise, that he makes many habits and believes that they are important for him in his everyday life, but he said he didn't make it a habit to be happy.

The speed exercise is pretty interesting to me because I'm a fast walker generally.  I typically have a place to be, and the only thing impeding me is my pace so I walk fast.  I've been lifting for the past few weeks and my return from the gym to work is about half as fast as my trip there.  It's because my routine has been hitting my legs pretty hard, so I'm tired for the return trip.  I'm also using it as part of my cool down, but still I've been sort of participating in this speed exercise by accident on my own.  I don't find it to be so much a time of gratitude, or happiness, mostly just find myself avoiding getting walked on as people bustle about me.  So I think the main takeaway here is that the next time you find yourself stuck behind some jerk walking slow is to realize their not just some jerk walking slow.  They're likely some self-entitled jerk who thinks that their happiness is more important than the errands your trying to fit in on your damn break.  You should totally shove that hippy and give him a dirty look.

Marginally interesting commencement speach

If it speaks to you, or you liked the sandman comic book, or any of Neil's prior works it was pretty good and was tailor made to show up on Lifehacker.  He hit on so many things that Lifehacker seems to post about all the time.  The importance of liking what you are doing in the moment, imagining what someone more competent would do in your situation, advice on freelance work, and a few other topics.  I liked it because in my heart I imagine myself as many things, an artist is one of those.

R is for Rejection

In the continuing a-z theme and the vast levels of introspection started earlier in the week, we come to rejection.  This lifehacker article outlines the importance of staying true to yourself in the face of rejection.  What we don't know if the motivation of others, and this imperfect information will inevitably lead us to draw the wrong conclusions about why we where rejected.

The girl you asked out that said no, may have said no because someone dear to her passed away last night and she is in no mood.  The trouble is you will may never know that, with that in mind I offer this also relevant bit of research that indicates that rejection particularly intense and personal rejection stimulates similar areas of the brain to when we are feeling physical pain.

O is On the importance Of the adolescent mode of Operation

Okay so this is going to be another really long post, feel free to click past if you aren't up for some existentialism, musings on time and the value of childhood.

For quite some time I have been making the argument for the relative velocity of time, wherein we percieve time to pass more quickly as we age because of the incrementally smaller percentage of our life each unit of time represents to our continuum of experience.  More simply as we age every second is a smaller fraction of our total existence and therefore less notable and perceived as less valuable, we notice it less and less because it is a smaller fraction of our total life span.  To me this explained why time used to drag on forever as a child, at age 6 each second was 1/189,216,000th of my life, but age 30 it is 1/946080000th of my life from roughly 1/190 million-th to nearly 1/ trillion-th.  That is a huge shift in percentage and it is always becoming fractionally less and less.  I've been trying to explain this to people since High school, and still get eye rolls from most people that I try to tell about it.  There is a dearth of critical thinking minds in the world, and those that do think critically seem to discount the value of upstart minds.  Consider that the bulk of great science attributed to Einstein was done at the age of 24.

This time as perception idea that I've been dragging around with me has framed how I see the world for some time, but a few things of late have shifted my mind to believing that this velocity of time is just one filter on the lens of life, and there are other things that might temper how we perceive the passage of time in given moment.  Most people are aware of the concept of a body clock and how it affects us through out the day and the general statement that the exposure to pervasive digital/artificial lighting is shifting our natural phases and affecting our general wake sleep cycle.   These wakeful periods are affected by how rested we are.  This affect I'm sure has been experienced by most everybody at some point (seriously when you are tired the day can drag on forever).

Another potential way to affect it is engagement.  The saying "Time flys when you are having fun" is grounded in perceived reality, but I think it is more likely that time flys when you are mentally engaged.  Your mind is distracted from the perception of time because such a high percentage of your metal capacity is being focused on what you are doing.  Many of us have experienced this at work, where the day goes by quickly when you are busy but slowly when nothing is going on.  It also passes when you are having fun, but again I think fun always implies engagement.  I believe that this can be explained because time only exists as a metal construct, in that we perceive it, we measure it and ascribe it meaning it is a cerebral notion that we are moving through time.  By engaging fully in what you are doing, that part of the brain that would otherwise be acknowledged the passage of time in occupied.  Related would be the actual functions of hydration and nutrition.  If your body is not nourished the ability of the mind to perceive time time could be altered, thus affecting our perception (hows that for quantum state)

----------<aside>---------
I have always wanted to participate in a wake sleep study where they measure your average or natural day.  The problem with this is original studies where criticized for access to artificial light saying that skewed the results longer.  My counter argument is that, if it where dark and I literally where unable to do anything else I would sleep too, but the access to a way to change my environment so that I could continue to do things enables me to shift my natural day.  If I could choose so, my natural day would be closer to 30 total hours 22 waking and 8 sleeping.  The conclusion that our "natural day" is approximately 24hrs is basically concession to natural constraints and doesn't factor that we are no longer bound by those constraints.  The day doesn't have to be 24 hours, it can be as long or short as we will it to be!
-------------</aside>-----------------------------

So where is this going?  The title was about the adolescent state of mind, and I thought that the framework of time and how it is perceived was important groundwork for how children experience the world.  What I am proposing is that access to the childish mode of operating is the gateway to youth and vitality.  This difference is not just innocence but in frame of reference, and the willingness to explore.  Often as adults we come to the conclusion that I have matured enough now I don't need to explore new avenues, or gain new experience.  I know what I like, or can apply what I have already learned to the challenges that come up;  rather the frame with which I view the world is now set, I can get on living.  Lifehacker had a post about new experiences, and how they affect our perception of time.  The short version is that new experiences require more time to process than familiar one's there by elongating time.  I'm suggesting that those that seem young around you are the ones that see the world with fresh eyes, that seek the new and different for the sake of it.

One of the hallmarks of youth is risk taking, not just the end your life kind either.  The attempting things that you may not succeed at, trying new approaches to things (different ingredients or styles of doing something). This sense of adventure and discovery are essential elements of that which we identify as youth, and the value to your mind and personhood might extend.  In that sense it could be youthful frame of mind could be considered the open mode of operating.  As John Cleese was pointing out in my recent transcription post, the childlike state is open to combining ideas and searching for meaning.  To this end, the adolescent mind open to combining ideas, playing with them with no fear of right or wrong ideas only interesting and fun.  This is where adults can look for rebirth.

The value of childlike thinking hasn't always been recognized, traditionally they only one that was allowed to be creative where the oldest and most important people, while the younger people where supposed to pay attention and learn from their elders.  While I won't discount the value of experience in most fields, it is interesting how much new ground is uncovered by looking at the world with fresh eyes, and a young mind.


I'll leave you with an interesting video on the value of being young and how the baby boomers paved the way for the current generation to capitalize on the realization of the value of thinking young.



We All Want to Be Young from box1824 on Vimeo.

F is for Forget self-improvement?

Lifehacker by way of Deliberatism.com posted an article about focusing on the small as a methodology for completing the large.  If you read the comments back and forth on the post (not lifehackers) you see quite a range of responses attacking the underlying dogma that you should enjoy the steps you are taking not just the outcome.  There is a focus on outcomes, and the accolades of having completed something (run a marathon, wrote a book, ect.) that undermines the joy in the small steps to get there.  A runner that actually enjoyed running (for themselves no other reward needed) and wanted to run a marathon as an extension of that.  A person that loved word play and used a novel as a vehicle for that.  Now enjoying the small doesn't mean that you might not suffer in these small steps, but rather you enjoyed the struggle as well as the outcome.

I realize this is a stretch for F, but this stupid thing has been in my drafts for longer than I like and I feel like there is some meat to this idea.  I'm not sure if there is a simple set of concrete steps for people to follow but it strongly reminds me of the sensation I walked away from when someone gave me a book about the 8 fold path.  I wish I could remember the name of the book, I sort of disregarded it at the time (I was a college kid handed a book by what I think was a Hare Krishna in an airport).  Any how I think the author's point was about right intention, and perusing things that will make you happy not impress others.

boombox

Lifehacker shared an instructable for creating a portable "boombox" a while ago and I cannot seem to shake my interest in it.  It could be as this Geekosystem article points out that the boombox was the fastest adopted gadget in the last 50 years, and that nostalgia of listening to music with your friends in High school.  Regardless of the reason, and no matter how much of a hipster looking dbag the instructable author looks like I felt like there was something particularly interesting about this build

What do you think?  It's powered by AA batteries and uses this speaker this speaker and some laser cut acrylic and cnc cut MDF held together with fitted dowels.

ST Patrick prep

Some people will be needing this little bit of info in the near future, so I thought I'd help Lifehacker and Chow get the info out there.

USB wall socket

Now that everything is charged by usb it seems like we should be able to ditch those darn wall warts.  Seems a few other people think this too!

The first one is from RCA and it is just an external add on to your existing plug.  It is a pretty basic, easy to install and only costs about $20

Image via RCA

 The second one I found is more involved, you have to remove the outlet and replace it with a new one.  Not for the completely clueless for sure and it's clean look costs $25-30, but I like this look a lot.

Image via Apartment Therapy

Season Cast Iron

Wow, as I look over my draft folder it is filled (to the brim) with food items, and cooking articles.  Apparently I'm in the depths of a fat kid kick here.  Neither here nor there an article on how to season your cast iron, pro-tip is to use flax seed oil.  I get my cast iron looking like this by using it and I only clean it with salt and a paper towel.

Anybody else obsessed with the cast iron?

image via Lifehacker

Pinterest

I keep hearing about this service called Pinterest, and I am starting to see little "pin it" links on article for popular sites, but I really didn't have clue what the service actually you know did up until I read this post by Lifehacker. I think that the reason that I haven't heard of it is that I already have several strategies for managing the information that Pinterest was developed to manage.  For one I blog, when I find an interesting link I start a new post here and save the link.  Eventually I might post about it, but if I don't well I have it.  Then there are actual bookmarks and bookmark syncing systems.   I have moved away from this a little bit because my bookmarking hierarchies are retarded and get way way too deep and the nesting is out of hand.  Another strategy that I use for managing information overload is I remember broad strokes very vividly and then with a little google tomfoolery I can generally get to what it was that I was on about within a few minutes.  This strategy is a little hit and miss and really subject to my cognitive state when I'm searching and when I reading so the results have been mixed at best.  With enough interest I usually get there, unless the internet has borked and the thing I was thinking about has fallen off the internet (happens often for interesting things).

I may end up giving Pinterest a longer look and decide how they manage the backend, if they capture a snippet of the content on the end of the pin and keep it on their servers this could be really useful but if it is just a "bookmark" service that just pulls info via webscraping everytime you look this will be useless really quickly for my purposes.  I have an idea for testing, but because it's in invite only so I'll see if I get one.