Emergency Preparedness
Do you have an emergency supply of food and water? No? Luckily you can get 8,671 Servings of Gluten Free & Vegetarian Emergency Food from CostCo for $1799.99. That’s enough to feed a single adult for almost 8 years, or my household of 5 for a 1.5 years.
The food is provided by Shelf Reliance, specialists in food storage and emergency preparedness planning. Here’s an overview of what they are about:
At $0.21/serving (if you purchase the aforementioned CostCo pack), this is an interesting alternative to conventional daily or weekly grocery shopping on top of being an emergency source of food. It’s something to consider.
If anybody has tried this out, we’d love to hear your feedback and experience in the comments.
Thanks for the links, Tim!
Solving a Sudoku with Oracle
Being a database developer, I’ve seen some fairly interesting things you can do with Oracle 11g.
This beats everything I know thus far.
Oracle RDBMS 11gR2 introduced a new feature called Recursive Subquery Factoring. Besides being an alternative to hierarchical queries (classic “connect by” stuff), you can use it to solve a Sudoku…in 29 lines of SQL code.
Mind = Blown
Thanks for the link, Alex!
via Amis Technology Blog (Sudoku)
via Rob Van Wijk
xkcd Password Generator
It may seem counter-intuitive to have a plain English passphrase instead of a t0tta11y l337 password, but what it comes down to is how many bits of entropy you can generate while not following any predictable patterns.
Lifehacker has a great article explaining why old password tricks aren’t working anymore with the amount of raw computing power available today.
If you’re lazy and you want to make use of the XKCD passphrase method above, you can always lean on a passphrase generator.
My favorite combination is using LastPass along with its support for two-factor authentication. For those of you unfamiliar with two-factor authentication, the way it’s implemented with LastPass (and Google, if you enable it), is that a random number is generated that needs to be entered in after you provide your passphrase. This random number can either be SMS’ed to you or you can view it using the Google Authenticator app. That random number rotates every 15 or so seconds. It’s a little cumbersome, but in order for somebody to gain access to websites I use, they would need to know my LastPass passphrase AND physically have my iPhone.
Be safe, everyone!
Lifehacker – Your Clever Password Tricks Aren’t Protecting You from Today’s Hackers
Are Mobile Devices Destroying Your Body?
I’ll admit that I exhibit addictive behavior when it comes to my mobile device(s). If you think you fall into that category, the infographic below may be of some use.
via Lifehacker via How-To Geek
The Top 5 Regrets People Have on Their Deathbed
Why wait until your deathbed to come to these realizations?
Bronnie Ware worked in palliative care, comforting patients in the last three to twelve weeks of their lives. She compiled a list of the five most common regrets that she has heard over her years of experience.
What’s on your bucket list?
Photo by Michael Soliman
via Inspiration and Chai via The Next Web via Lifehacker
Fly or Drive?
When planning a trip or vacation for my family, two variables are king: time and cost. Do I want to subject a bunch of airline passengers to my squirmy, loquacious children for a few hours, or do I want to subject myself to my squirmy, loquacious and now cranky children for many many hours? How much will it cost?
Luckily, there’s a handy site that will calculate trip time and cost for driving and flying to/from your destination. In the example above, it makes sense to drive to Las Vegas from Los Angeles, but it would definitely be cheaper to fly to, let’s say, Chicago from Los Angeles rather than drive. Handy!
via BeFrugal.com via Lifehacker
EPUB to MOBI Conversion [Left Margin Problem]
For the small subset of people in the world who experience the “left margin issue” above when converting from EPUB format to MOBI format, here is a solution that works for me:
- Install Calibre and Sigil.
- Import your EPUB into Calibre.
- Convert the EPUB to EPUB. This normalizes the CSS stylesheet for the book. Under “Page Setup” set the left margin to 0.
- Open the new EPUB in Sigil.
- Open Stylesheet.css (or stylesheet1.css) (located under the “Styles” folder in the Book Browser on the left.
- Do a search for anything that says “margin-left” (or “margin-right”).
- If the value is anything other than “0”, change it to 0. E.g. “5pt” –> “0pt” or “1em” –> “0em” You will find multiple instances of this within the stylesheet.
- Save the EPUB and exit Sigil.
- Open Calibre and convert the EPUB to MOBI. Under “Page Setup” set the left margin to 0.
That should do it. It’s cumbersome, yes, but it gets the job done.
Based off of a post in MobileRead.com
Sync Google Calendar Colors and iOS
(image courtesy of Lifehacker)
FINALLY, a solution to an annoying problem that has plagued me ever since Google Mobile Sync was born is here: Calendar color synchronization between Google Calendars and my iPhone’s calendar. My OCD itched so badly that I would end up changing my Google Calendar colors to match the seemingly random vomit that my iPhone’s calendar would choose.
In a nutshell, don’t use Google Mobile Sync for your calendar. Use CalDAV instead.
Out of the nutshell:
- On your iOS device: Go to Settings –> Mail, Contacts, Calendars
- Under Accounts: Select your Google Mobile Sync account (mine was creatively named “Google”)
- Switch your “Calendars” to the “OFF” position. It will prompt you to make sure you aren’t smoking crack, but since you *are* smoking crack… the healthy, vegan kind… go for it.
- Click on “Add Account…”
- Select Other.
- Select Add CalDAV Account.
- Enter your account information:
- In the Server field, enter [ google.com ]
- In the Username field, enter your full Google Account or Google Apps email address.
- In the Password field, enter your Google Account or Google Apps password.
- In the Description field, enter the name you’d like to appear on the account (I named mine “Google Calendars”… creative, I know)
- Select Next at the top of your screen.
- Go to https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect (on any browser) and select the calendars you want to sync. Alternatively, Google Apps users can go to https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/your_domain/iphoneselect (of course, replace “your_domain” with your… uh… domain).
- Click Save
I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier. Enjoy!
via Lifehacker
via Google Mobile Help (CalDAV instructions)
Looking for a flight?
Looking for the best flight to your destination can be a painful experience. hipmunk aims to fix that by presenting one of the best user experiences I’ve seen for this type of application. By providing a Gantt chart-like UI that’s easily sortable (by price, stops, times, and agony—no joke!), you can see at a glance which flight works out best for you.
If you prefer the standard table text presentation of sites like Priceline, Travelocity or Expedia, why not cut to the chase and use, Matrix2, the search engine that all of those sites use:
hipmunk (via Lifehacker)
Matrix2 (via Lifehacker)
eBook Trifecta
Being the proud new owner of a Kindle book reader, I’ve recently rediscovered my love for reading (after switching wholesale to audiobooks, which I still listen to). Brian (a.k.a. seventyfourmanx), pointed me an eBook Trifecta:
- Calibre – eBook management software (for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows)
- Drinkmalk Stanza/Aldiko Catalog Site – A huge ebook resource
- Stanza – An eBook reader for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch and Android users
With Stanza and Drinkmalk, you have access to a huge catalog of eBooks that you can download to your phone and then sync to your desktop. When I started this Kindle craze, I was a little worried about having to re-purchase all of my books in eBook format. So far, I’ve found what I needed at Drinkmalk. (As a disclaimer, I’m not encouraging you to pirate books. I already own physical copies of these books and am just looking to have them available digitally.) The Drinkmalk library is only accessible via Stanza. Luckily, Stanza has the ability to offload those books from your phone.
The main star of this post, though, is Calibre. Calibre handles translation of eBook formats and maintenance of your eBook library. Its main feature is the ability to translate eBook formats. In my own library, I had EPUB and PDF versions of books. I was able to translate those into the Kindle’s MOBI format and copy them to the Kindle all within the app.
You can also add metadata to your eBooks such as cover images, author, ratings, ISBN, etc. This comes in especially handy when you are browsing through the plethora of free eBook libraries such as:
- Project Gutenberg
- Random House Free Library – accessible via Stanza
- Feedbooks – Free Content
Given all this, I already have a “stack” of books waiting to be read and re-read. This brings me much joy and happiness.
Thanks for the tips, Brian!
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