Making the switch to organic can be difficult, especially when organic foods are often more costly than their non-organic counterparts. The New York Times describes a five organic foods guaranteed to make the largest positive impact—both in terms of your diet and the world—without significantly decreasing the cash in your wallet. For example: Ketchup: For some families, ketchup accounts for a large part of the household vegetable intake. About 75 percent of tomato consumption is in the form of processed tomatoes, including juice, tomato paste and ketchup. Notably, recent research has shown organic ketchup has about double the antioxidants of conventional ketchup.
The rest of the five foods include milk, potatoes, peanut butter, and apples. According to the article, going organic with just these five foods can have a huge influence both on your family’s diet and health and the culture of chemical versus organic agriculture. Head over to the original article for more on how and why switching to organic can effect your family.
Five Easy Ways to Go Organic [NYT]Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Open common URLs, bookmarks, and history pages by title from your address bar with the Autocomplete Manager Firefox extension. Yesterday we showed you how to enable Firefox address bar auto-completion, and while Autocomplete Manager does not perform the same sort of inline autofilling of text, what it does do is allow you to find and visit URLs based on page titles and bookmark names, any part of a URL, and lots of other useful options. It won’t be for everyone (I still prefer keyword bookmarks to all of the alternatives), but if you want to be able to perform history and bookmark searches from the same place you type URLs, it’s a handy extension to have in your toolbox. Thanks Alcyone!
Autocomplete Manager [Firefox Add-ons]The huge number of splogs (spam blogs) on the internet means search results you get from Google’s Blog Search engine can contain a lot of noise in the form of duplicate information that you really don’t want. The Google Operating System offers steps to show how to optimise Google Blog Search’s settings so that you get the best results you can. In a nutshell: 1. sort the results by relevancy 2. restrict the results to a recent period (last day) 3. restrict the results to English (or another language)
4. if you really have to sort the results by date, remove the posts that follow a spammy pattern (for example, add -”google alert” -site:blogspot.com -site:.info to your query), but make sure you don’t remove important results 5. check the posts that contain “References”
If you haven’t been using Google Blog Search, I’d highly recommend it. It’s an excellent tool for finding both late-breaking news and to get an idea of what people are saying about a topic—especially if you know how to increase your signal-to-noise ratio using tips like those included in the Google Operating System post. If you have been using Google Blog Search, let’s hear what kind of uses you’ve put it to in the comments.
Remove Spam from Google Blog Search [Google Operating System]Popular Mechanics says that a cotton ball smeared with Vaseline or ChapStick is “a foolproof fire starter.” The Vaseline works as your fuel, and once you get the Vaseline-soaked cotton ball lit, the flame should continue to burn under pretty much any condition. The Popular Mechanics article is rather light on details, so I also found a post on the Survival and Equipment weblog detailing how to make single-use petroleum jelly candles using cotton balls, petroleum jelly, and aluminium foil. You will, of course, still need a flint or match to get the cotton ball started (or just some steel wool and a battery).
Vaseline Candles [Survival and Equipment] 25 Skills Every Man Should Know [Popular Mechanics]If you’ve got an account with the Google-acquired one-phone-number-to-rule-them-all web application GrandCentral and a free dial-in number from the popular Skype alternative, Gizmo Project, you can use the two together to get unlimited free incoming calls. One major benefit of this is that—while Gizmo Project limits you to a Nevada area code with your free number—GrandCentral offers a wide range of call-in area codes for free. That means that no matter where you and your computer are, your friends and family can call your GrandCentral number and you’ll continue to get free calls through Gizmo. It’s always cheap for you and—if they’re in your GrandCentral area code—cheap for the person making the call. GrandCentral’s Gizmo support isn’t exactly new, but I suspect that whenever Google decides to re-open GrandCentral’s doors, a lot of users will want to jump on it.
GrandCentral and Gizmo…free calls everywhere [GrandCentral Blog]You’ve already found your cheap tickets and followed every other step of our Power Traveler’s Pre-Flight Checklist, and now the day is here. You should already have yourself set up for a relatively stress-free trip if you followed part one of our checklist, but now that travel day is upon you, here’s our suggested rundown of to-dos to make sure your travel day goes smoothly, you catch your flight on time and you get there in comfort and style.
With the popularity of sites like del.icio.us and YouTube, tagging has become (for better or sometimes worse) a standard feature of nearly every site on the internet, and virtually everyone has a pretty fair idea what tagging is and how to use tags online. But the latest operating systems from Apple and Microsoft also have tagging built into their filesystems, meaning that the same basic tagging ideas available online are also available for the files on your hard drive. It sounds like an excellent idea in theory, but it doesn’t seem as though offline tagging is taking hold. So we’re wondering:
Look up words, phrases, idioms, and acronyms with MetaGlossary, a dictionary that harvests data from all over the internet to provide users with rich, detailed results for particular search terms. MetaGlossary provides information about everything from song titles and phrases used in pop culture to standard dictionary words. It’s a decent alternative to Google’s dictionary, though it couldn’t find any results for some search terms that I tried. However, it was able to determine what “lifehacker” was, so it gets a thumbs-up.
MetaGlossaryNBC may be ending its relationship with YouTube, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still catch your favourite TV shows online.
