Yes, you can fry eggs on a waffle iron

 Posted by on 21 October 2011  Everything Else
Oct 212011
 

Holy crap! What a great idea!

Of course, I don’t own a waffle iron, but I suspect that I soon will, especially now that I know this.

And ESPECIALLY since I traced the idea for waffle-fried eggs to a blog called Waffleizer — apparently dedicated to answering the question “Will it waffle?”. Here are a bunch of things that, yes, will waffle.

The idea was picked up by the Novice Chef Blog, and thence to Craft and to Neatorama and to Gizmodo. They are all recipes for a waffled croque madame, but since I’ve never had a croque madame in my life, I’m just going to stick with awesome fried eggs.

Original source: Recipe: Waffled croque madame – Waffleizer.

Easy DIY project

 Posted by on 27 April 2011  Everything Else, Photography
Apr 272011
 

Any photographers out there who have been in the game for awhile will probably have (or had) a film camera. And with film cameras, comes film, and pages and pages of negatives.

Personally, I have a whole box full of them. They’re all digitized now, but it’s hard to get rid of negatives, you know, just in case.

Which brings us to the above picture. Instead of throwing away those old negatives, you can make a really cool lamp out of them!

Over at the craft website Poopscape, there’s a detailed explanation on how to make this, with basically a $10 lamp and some glue. Very neat! And very easy, too.

(Via. Thanks for the tip, Alawna!)

And now, to clean absolutely every spill …

 Posted by on 28 March 2011  Modern Life
Mar 282011
 

This is a little longer than it needs to be, but it appears astonishing. From what I can glean from the comments where I’ve seen this posted here, here and here, the “magic” is in the tiny little conveyor belt that surrounds the spatula bit that retracts and extends.

That belt is “sticky” to liquids in a way that picks them up without pulling or pushing — or smushing — them.

Apparently, it was developed first as a way to deal with sticky dough in a large-scale bakery.

Bent-fork egg ‘cup’

 Posted by on 24 March 2011  Modern Life
Mar 242011
 

I love the creativity involved in repurposing a fork to serve as the stand for hard-boiled eggs. I also, when I thought about it, loved the fact that now, you’ll be able to use a full set of cutlery in eating a hard-boiled egg — the knife to crack it open and slice the top off (to scalp the egg, really), the spoon to, uh, spoon it out, and the fork to hold it while you do.

Three other things that I thought of:

You can also bend the tines of a fork outward, wrap the handle around your knuckles and turn the fork into a prison weapon. I forget where I first learned that, but it wasn’t in prison.

In light of the capitalization debate, I thought long and hard about the quotes I put around “cup” above, in the headline (but not here — here, they are unequivocally appropriate, since I am quoting from the headline). In the end, I decided that they were appropriate since the egg holder was being described as a cup, yet wasn’t, really.

Thirdly, I don’t eat as many hard-boiled eggs as I’d like. Delicious! They were an Easter tradition growing up.

(From What I Made, which has FULL AWESOME INSTRUCTIONS, via BB)

And here is the solar system

 Posted by on 23 March 2011  Modern Life
Mar 232011
 

An “orrery” is, according to Wikipedia, “a mechanical device that illustrates the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons in the solar system in a heliocentric model. They are typically driven by a clockwork mechanism with a globe representing the Sun at the centre, and with a planet at the end of each of the arms.”

This one, of course, is Flash-based, not mechanical. And, like many orreries, it suffers from the fact that it is not to scale — either size or precise time. But it’s still cool. And it does have the benefit of being able to switch between Copernican and Tychonian models of the solar system!

Click here to see it in the full size of your browser.

(Source, via MeFi)

Wikipedia’s history of the world

 Posted by on 22 March 2011  Everything Else
Mar 222011
 

Gareth Lloyd and Tom Martin downloaded 30 gigs of Wikipedia articles, looked for ones that referenced both a location and a date, and then plotted those coordinates in this video. There are 15,500 events spread out over the 1:42 (and 2,500 years) in the video.

It gets quite beautiful at the end.

Here is Gareth’s blog, explaining more about the process. Here is an article from Flowing Data, which notes that he made the data freely available — so what else can you do with it?

Natural nuclear reactors? Astonishing!

 Posted by on 21 March 2011  Modern Life
Mar 212011
 

If any good can come out of the devastation in Japan, perhaps it will come from public education about nuclear power — education to show both its positive and negative sides, and to demystify it. One of the messages that scientists and commenters are hammering home is that radiation is natural. Even though too much too fast will kill you, that’s the same for radiation as it is for, say, water.

But you can definitely hear people arguing that “natural” radiation doesn’t kill — only this special, enhanced, totally-monkeyed-with “modern” radiation that we’ve been unnaturally producing in our nuclear plants.

Well, to that, I present a concise paragraph posted by MetaFilter’s bq:

The first nuclear reactor was in Africa, 2 billion years ago. Two billion years ago, there was enough uranium 235 in a naturally occurring deposit in Africa to fuel a nuclear fission reaction. In 16 separate locations, spontaneously occurring fission reactions went on for some hundreds of thousands of years, cycling multiple times per day. A picture of Fossil Reactor 15. The American Nuclear Society info site.

That’s right — a natural nuclear reactor.

Or evidence of a long-gone pre-human technological civilization.

(Photo, the Oklo reactor,  from NASA’s Astronomy Photo of the Day, Credit & Copyright: Robert D. Loss, WAISRC)

Radiation dosage chart

 Posted by on 20 March 2011  Modern Life
Mar 202011
 

(Click for full-size)

This chart, created by xkcd’s Randall Munroe (with help, sources here), does an excellent job of putting radiation dosage into context — especially with all the fear and uncertainty surrounding the current problems in Japan. The danger is Japan is real — it could get a lot worse, very quickly — but for the moment, the radiation from spending a day near the Fukushima reactor is somewhere around the amount you’d get from a mammogram.

Six months … 2,200 miles … one trail … five minutes

 Posted by on 10 March 2011  Modern Life
Mar 102011
 

Interesting stop-motion condensation of what must have been the trek of a lifetime for one Kevin Gallagher.

I have often dreamed of doing a massive, multi-month walkabout — the Appalachian Trail, which is seen here — is a classic. But there’s also the Pacific Crest Trail, the fledgling Continental Divide Trail and plenty in Europe.

Really, when I think about the 50-mile hike (coming this year, promises!) I think of it as a tune-up for something bigger and better.

Choose life: How the ‘Trainspotting’ posters came to be

 Posted by on 9 March 2011  Vintage/Retro
Mar 092011
 

I can’t think of a more common poster to have hanging up in the rooms or dorms of my (misspent) youth. Can you believe it’s been 15 years since the movie Trainspotting came out? Yikes. I listened to that soundtrack about a gazillion times, and I can still probably recite the order those songs were in. (There were some good ones, too … “Perfect Day”? Wow.)

One thing I hadn’t thought of was just how iconic these posters were — and how influential. I guess when you’re the right age, you just assume that things that resonate with you will of course be influential.

Looking back on these posters from a decade and a half on, it’s pretty amazing how well they still stand up — how modern they still look, how fresh. So it’s interesting to read an interview in Creative Review with the design team behind them. There was a lot of hard word, obviously, a lot of inspiration, and a lot of luck:

We had been initially given a still by the film distributors, PolyGram, from the film Backbeat, as a kind of visual guide for creating the Trainspotting poster campaign. But we hated the image and wanted to come up with something better. The film company had approved the idea of the individual shots for a character-based teaser campaign but the main image for the final poster was to be a group shot of the actors in a tight huddle. It wasn’t until we tried to get the actors into the group shots that the friction started. It was at this point that we realised that whilst the characters from the story were in a gang, they were by no means friends who could implicitly trust each other or want to be seen in a tight huddle-style group photo all hugging and being chummy in the manner that was initially planned.

Read the whole thing.

Then go watch Star Wars and think about how Obi-Wan used to be a heroin addict. It adds layers to that film. It is equally informative to see Trainspotting’s Renton as a proto-Jedi who turns to drugs because he can’t make sense of the Force.

These shoes are biodegradable

 Posted by on 8 March 2011  Modern Life
Mar 082011
 

I have heard of fair trade shoes made of recycled materials before, but Oat Shoes are a leap past even that. They’re made entirely of hemp canvas, bio-cotton, cork and certified biodegradable plastic. From their site:

OAT Shoes is a brand-new initiative in shoe design combining attractive style and biodegradable materials to produce sneakers that not only look good, but leave no mark on the environment when you throw them out. Bury them in the garden, woods or compost, water regularly and flowers will bloom from your old kicks!

I cannot seem to find, on their website, any information on whether flower seeds are actually embedded in the shoes, or whether they just biodegrade into good soil — and let’s be clear, biodegradable plastic has kind of a spotty record or actually, you know, biodegrading.

But still — cool!

 Older Entries  Newer Entries