Amazon is on a crusade to provide its customers with product packaging that is easy to open!

You can read about the project, including a short list of Amazon’s partners in the project here:

Packages You Won’t Need a Saw to Open

Via Mental Floss

Popularity: 4% [?]

Last year, I learned how to assemble simple hobby electronics kits. Following my recent frustration at the basement flooding problem we are having (the sump pump stops working, the sump overflows, and the ADT sensor never triggers), I went and looked for some solutions to the problem. What I came up with is an electronics mini-kit that senses the presence of water and sounds a horn alarm.
I recently came across the Botanicalls houseplant sensor, that posts twitter tweets when it senses the plant needs water and after the plant is watered, via an ethernet port on the sensor.
While surfing the web, I came across an article about setting up the same kind of notifier for a doorbell. If I had the know-how, I’d take that one step further and rig up a webcam to snap a picture when the doorbell event is triggered, so I could include a picture of the person(s) ringing the bell.
I’ve long wished that the house could inform me when there’s a problem. With a little learning and a little practice, I might just be able to enable it to do that!

Current Mood: Mischievous

Popularity: 28% [?]

I had to get a replacement BlackBerry, as my previous one bricked itself on Tuesday. I haven’t yet gone and restored my address book from the backup I keep on my computer, so my address book looks really sparse. I figure now is an excellent time for contact information verification. If you have your contact information maintained somewhere online where I can see it (ie Facebook or Plaxo), go verify that it’s all correct. If you have neither of those, you can always email your current information to me (click here to see my email address)

Popularity: 29% [?]

It just occurred to me…

If I use one of these Compact Flash / SD Adapters, and a MicroSD to SD adapter, I can use the MicroSD card from my Blackberry Pearl to take pictures using my Canon DSLR camera, and then upload them to Flickr using the Blackberry. That would be a heck of a lot of file transfer, though. Good thing I have an unlimited data plan…

Popularity: 46% [?]