Got a sliced apple you’d like to save for later, sans browning? No problem – just use a rubber band: Push the corer / slicer apparatus down through the apple until it is almost through, but all pieces are basically still together. Then put the whole apple back together again and stick a rubber band around it. This holds it together in your lunch pack and helps prevent browning.
A great tip for the brown bag crowd. Slamming Suggestions for the Humble Rubber Band [Wise Bread]
I’ve been saving this one for “unproductivity Friday” but I’ve been squeeing about it for a couple of days now…. We’re finally getting the game which will put Nintendo’s Wii to the use which all Star Wars nerds have been dreaming off since the console came out… Lightsaber duelling. I dont’ buy a lot of games, and I certainly don’t buy games “sight unseen” but I’ll be making an exception for this one. :)
Don’t have any matches or a lighter on hand but just happen to have fine steel wool and a 9-volt battery? Rub ‘em together and you’ve got fire. The likelihood that you are without matches or any sort of lighter but that you do have steel wool and a battery on hand seems slim, but either way this is a great bit of MacGyver ingenuity.
How to make fire without matches or a lighter [5min]Webapp Mango offers 11 free foreign language courses in Spanish, Russian, Greek, German, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Italian and Polish. Simply sign up with your email address and you’re ready to go. Choose any of the available courses and view slideshow presentations instantly. As you progress through the slides, you’ll be able to quiz yourself to see how well you’re doing. There are about 100 available lessons per course, and they seem to do a good job setting the foundation for conversational foreign language—and then some. Useful if you’re going abroad and need to speak to the locals.
MangoIt’s when you’re putting off doing that thing you’re supposed to be doing that you can get the most other stuff done. Oh, I don’t know, maybe you’re supposed to be writing a book but you’re ripping your 500-disc CD collection to iTunes and organising your shoe rack instead. The LifeClever blog says this is a good thing, especially for getting done mundane chores, and lists their favourite structured procrastination activities. What do you do when you can’t stand to work on that dreaded, put-off task? Let us know in the comments.
How to procrastinate more productively [LifeClever]Less than two years after their beta release, Yahoo Mail has begun rolling out of beta after releasing an onslaught of innovative feature improvements along the way. On the other hand, a whopping three years into their beta release, Gmail remains one of the most popular but stagnant web-based beta email apps around—and most of Gmail’s innovation since its release has come in the form of third-party hacks and extensions. The short of it: Google makes a great beta, but with Gmail they’ve been much too slow to actually take the application to the next level. Let’s take a look at some of Yahoo Mail’s killer out-of-the-box features in comparison to what Gmail is offering.
We’ve all been caught in the tsunami of Halo 3 hype, and it continues to flood us with no floaties in sight. If it’s not clothing, it’s a branded beverage, or a racing car, or even fancy toys. One would think with this diverse range of stuff that Microsoft’s marketing department simply went berko one day and slapped the words ‘Halo 3′ onto anything they could sell.
Well, it’s good to know this is not necessarily true. This Reuters story detailing Microsoft’s Halo 3 marketing bonanza mentions a few oddities that never saw the ink of the giant branding machine.
Items that did not make the cut were a “Halo”-themed lottery ticket, lingerie modeled after a female hologram character and toy guns based [on]the game’s weapons.
Lingerie? It may not have sold well, but I wouldn’t have ruled it out entirely…
DIY web site Instructables details how to build a simple gadget dock for the low price (less than a dollar) of a large binder clip and a small rubber band. In a nutshell, you just pinch the plug with your binder clip and use the clip’s arms as buttressing supports for the dock. I didn’t have a large enough binder clip, but after fumbling a bit with a smaller one with my iPhone, I can see how this could actually work—though it might put undue stress on heavier gadgets, especially if they use small plugs.
The Ridiculously Clever Dock [Instructables]Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Map addresses, get directions, manage locations, and preview Google Earth KML files in your sidebar with Firefox extension Mini Map Sidebar. When you’re browsing the web and you stumble onto an address you’d like mapped, just pull up the Mini Map Sidebar by clicking the status bar icon, then just drag and drop the address into the sidebar drop box. If you do a lot of mapping with either Google Maps or Yahoo Maps (it works with both), this is a nice little extension. Mini Map Sidebar is a free download, works wherever Firefox does.
Mini Map Sidebar [Firefox Add-ons via Google Operating System]“With proprietary operating systems increasingly designed to restrict and control the user, with digital ‘restrictions’ management, their users are subjugated even more now than before. If you don’t want chains on you hand and foot, your only escape is to switch to a free operating system.”—Richard Stallman
