Coding with Fountain Pens

This is what my wife was saying half-way through Das Boot.

Mario Batali describes how to sauce your pasta properly in this video.  Summary: you’re using too much sauce.  You’re still using too much sauce.

The Library of Congress has a Flickr stream up that updates as they scan images from their archives.  There’s a lot of interesting content available.  This photo of ‘Auto-Polo’ reminds me of Whirlyball, except significantly more dangerous.  I see they have a pro account.

Truly new thinking always has to break through a barrier of skepticism before gaining wider adoption.  I’m sure this is true of Urban Farms, an idea that at first blush sounds slightly crazy, but may have real benefits.  It seems that in a world of increasing transportation costs, producing food right in an urban center could have some desirable economic motives, although frankly I have no idea if the numbers would really work out or not.

Technically, what first comes to mind is the difficulty of distributing sunlight into the structure.  But maybe you don’t need full on sunlight to grow some vegetables, and incident light could be diffused somehow over a wider area in the building by light piping.At any rate this might actually be something worth seeing in Vegas if it gets built.

I may start a regular feature on Mr. Fusion, and today’s story is a piece in Wired discussing transforming garbage into jet fuel.  It sounds a little more limited that Doc’s banana peel and beer can approach, and “5000 degree plasma arcs” would seem to rule this out for installation on your stainless steel sports car anytime soon, but it’s a start.

I was at Borders the other day, and it occurred to me that they could potentially increase their sales by offering more tie-in to features such as your shopping or wish list on Amazon. Amazon probably won’t let the average bookstore harvest data from their site, but Borders and Amazon already have some kind of relationship since ‘borders.com’ goes to Amazon, and I think they could figure this out.

Imagine being able to type in your Amazon login at a Borders location, and having it print a list of books on your wish list or shopping list that are in the store, and where to find them? Or the ability to scan a physical book’s barcode to add it to your Amazon wishlist. Amazon is very successful as a book merchant, but sometimes there’s nothing like having a book in your hand to determine its qualities. It could be a two-way street as well, Amazon could get a commission for books sold in Borders after the shopper checked their Amazon shopping list.

They could also tie your Amazon account to your Borders swipe card to make the whole process even easier.

Banks need to catch up with the improved web interfaces that have become prevalent over the last several years. Where is the search box on your account? I should be able to type in an exact dollar amount and pull up all the recent transactions that match. Or a cheque number, for example. How is it I am still scrolling through the ledger to see if a cheque cleared in the year 2007?

Periodically I’ll dabble in Quicken or other financial tracking software, usually to give up as I just don’t have the time to keep it reconciled properly. Why doesn’t a bank offer category tracking or tagging of payees right on it’s site? No data transfer and potential security problem required. In fact, they should have enough aggregate data to make some pretty accurate guesses about how to tag debits automatically. Gas, or restaurants for instance. I know Yodlee has software along these lines, but I don’t know who’s adopting it.

You should be able to pull up pie charts from these tags, or line graphs of inflows or outflows. You should be able to flag a cheque number and get an SMS when it clears, or when your balance drops too low. Hopefully some of this functionality will be appearing in the near future.

The Clear Sky Clock shows overhead viewing conditions for astronomers with a unique graphical presentation of the information. Created with data from Environment Canada, time is laid out horizontally, and colored squares indicate cloud cover, transparency, and darkness through the next 48 hours. Nice, simple information design.

If you’ve ever tried to get work done in an environment that prevents you from doing so, you may appreciate this photo essay from The Guardian, showing the rooms various writers write in.

Themes seem to be a lot of books, and a modicum of clutter.

[via Lifehacker]

If you’re tired of wrangling broadcast times for television out of tv.yahoo.com or tvguide, I’ve finally found a simple, decent television calendar site. CAT allows you to display only a whitelist of the programs you’re interested, as well as simple nomenclature for episode numbers, mouse-over synopses, and correct time display for your time zone. All this in a clean, text based table.