I always thought that making pizza was a huge, three hour ordeal because of the dough. Turns out I was completely wrong. I’ve been going crazy with this insanely simple pizza recipe which involves beer (really!) and has step-by-step pictures. Great stuff.
I was watching the NBA finals the other night and caught a new Canon EOS commercial featuring an original composition by instrumentalist Michael Montes. Instantly hooked. A little digging around on YouTube and some genius managed to reverse engineer the entire song and recreate it just by listening to it. Amazing stuff:
Time has a fascinating article about Svalbard — the subterranean “seed vault” located in Norway, which is trying to collect and save at least one sample of every plant seed in the world:
Svalbard is the ultimate backup — or as Fowler calls it, the “Noah’s ark of seeds.” The vault was built on the far northern Norwegian island of Longyearbyen, where the Arctic cold helps keeps the seeds viable, in case the electricity that powers the vault’s cold storage should ever go. (Seeds can remain dormant but alive for centuries if they’re kept cool and dry.) The location isn’t an accident — should something truly horrific happen, from extreme climate change to nuclear war, remote Svalbard should remain protected, capable of rebooting global agriculture. “This is an insurance policy we know we need,” says Fowler.
Too cool!
Hard drive loss (at home) is something nobody wants to think about. Imagine losing all of your music, financial data, documents, and perhaps most importantly — family photos. It could be caused by a virus, mechanical failure, fire, or even theft.
To mitigate the risk, you can backup your data to an external drive or use an online backup service like carbonite or mozy, but neither solution is adequate. Your external drive would be barbecued in a fire or gone in a burglary and the online backup services become too slow/expensive when you try to store 300+ GB’s of photos, videos, music, and movies.
Enter the ioSafe solo, a 1.5TB external backup drive encased in a fire resistant, water resistant, shell which can be tethered (locked) to a desk. This is a brilliant product. Highly recommended.
I hate voicemail, but until I saw the iPhone commercials I could never fully explain why. The commercials nailed it: regular voicemail is irritating because you have no control (”Press 1 to hear the next message”) and no visibility (Where in the seven message queue is the message from john?!?). In addition, many voicemail systems make you press too many buttons to get to that first message (’Scranton Man Faints from Voicemail Fatigue’).
Apple’s solution is to buy an iPhone with its “visual voicemail” fanciness. It’s an elegant one, but I’m not paying $500 for better voicemail. Enter <a href=”http://www.phonetag.com/”>PhoneTag</a>. PhoneTag is a subscription based service where you redirect your voicemail over to their voicemail system. Most cell phones and many office phones can handle this “redirection” by dialing a short code (which PhoneTag provides). Once redirected, any callers who reach your voicemail go into the PhoneTag system where they leave a message and–here’s the kicker–it gets transcribed into an email or txt msg and sent to the recipient(s) of your choice.
I’ve been trying it for a week and I’m completely hooked, and at only $0.35cents/message its not too expensive either. They push a little window mobile application that goes along with it, but as long as you have a phone with email or text messages you don’t even need the application. Recommended!
NPR recently aired an incredible story of a NY man who was mugged on his way home from work. Listening to the audio is the best way to hear it, but a teaser to get you started:
Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.
But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.
He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.
“He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, ‘Here you go,’” Diaz says.
As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, “Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.”
Continue reading at NPR… Wow.
