Travel power strip… w/ USB charging ports

How cool is this!  If it’s pretty light, I may have to buy one.  Review on ZDnet Blogs

These cookies are SO addictive!

My mom recently brought back some Cornflake Butter Crunch cookies made by School Kine Cookies company in Hawaii. They are simply awesome! Buttery goodness + a great texture and crunch thanks to the cornflakes.

Maybe I should order more…?

Solar Panels for the home?

It’s a great idea, but the upfront costs are too high…  I visited the Sun Power website and they have a calculator that can help you estimate the cost savings and approx cost of the project.  For me they seemed to estimate about $20,000 for the panels minus a $2000 Fed Tax credit.  Plus my electric bill would be about the same.

I wish more R&D would go towards funding technological advancements of this technology.

Interesting home theater additions…

Not sure why I never heard of these before… but they seem like components worth keeping an eye on going forward. Maybe I could pre-load images on such a device? Would there be any value in that to local customers?

Galaxy TVisto 3500

Galaxy 3500 IPTV Digital Multimedia Gateway

and here’s a “remarkably similar” product…

G-TECH’s G-PLAY

which was designed to compete with La Cie’s Silverscreen

and of course there are other digital media players, but they aren’t nearly as feature rich - such as the Creative ZEN Vision W

then of course, there’s the AMAZING Archos Generation 5 players… Sweet!

Drobo cool, but…

I just read about this new storage device… Drobo.  Basically a hard drive enclosure that automatically manages the storage and protection of the data.  To the PC it appears as an external hard drive, however it may actually contain a mixture of different sized hard drives.  Drobo takes care of all the data replication and disk management, so you’ll never have to worry about a hard drive going bad or running out of space.  If a disk starts to - you’re notified by a simple light, then just pop out the old/bad hard drive and push in a new one.  It was good enough to pick up a CNet Editors Choice, fwiw.  You can also view this quick demo on Buy.com TV.

I’d love to get my hands on one of these… they sound sweet.  Unfortunately they don’t run very well with Linux (officially) so it may be a while before I pick one up… not to mention that they’re a mere $500 bucks (without any hard drives).

On the to-do list… Tile Backsplash

Add a tile backsplash to our kitchen. I like the “mini-tile sheets” they used in this example.  Would be good to do similar things in the bathrooms too…

HGTV article

Something to try with old iPods…

I was looking to see if my iPod will support the Vorbis OGG file format (same quality as MP3, but smaller files).  Sadly no… but I did find this open source project underway:  iPodLinux

I will have to try this with one of my old iPods.

Here’s a list of portable media players who do support OGG…  I may have to get one at some point.

Cool New Toy to Save for… UMPC

Ultra Mobile PCs are not brand new, but they are getting better and better — and this one runs Linux!

http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/16/intels-mid-umpcs-so-long-xp-vista-hello-linux/