Category: Miscellaneous

It’s the summer solstice today, the first day of summer, and the longest day of the year (for those of us living in Earth’s Northern Hemisphere). The actual solstice is the moment the Earth’s tilt faces directly toward or away from the Sun.

I used to really dig the idea that the druids, or whoever it was that built Stonehenge, did it in such a way that certain shadows hit certain places on specific times of the year. I also liked books that used the changing of the seasons as magical days where mysteries were revealed or secret doors could be opened.

I once went into a church on top of Mt. Taber in Israel that when the solstice sun’s light hit the stained glass, it would paint a gorgeous image of Jesus’s transfiguration across the chapel floor matching up with the mosaic tiling. Of course I wasn’t there to actually see it, but the stain glass itself was nice and it sounded interesting all the same.

There are a lot of superstitions around the solstice, but maybe if you feel something special in the air tonight, perhaps it’s the cosmos trying to communicate with you, perhaps there is some mysterious force that you are on the verge of channeling, or perhaps you’ve just gotten too much sun.

Yay for summer! It’s all down hill from here.

The Make Blog has a link to the nice step-by-step instructions on how to upgrade the value of your router by 10 times! I’ll have to try this when I get back from my sister’s place.

Some of the features available after the upgrade include boosting your wireless signal and throttling your bandwidth by program.

Update: I just hopped downstairs and found that the particular model of Linksys router that I have isn’t on the list of supported routers. Too bad, I would have liked to try this.

In the spirit of “actual doing it”, instead of just saying “wouldn’t it be cool if” some guy took his Roomba vacuum cleaner and hooked it up to his computer where, with a bit of coding know-how he hacked it into a musical instrument. (It’s a vacuum—an instrument that sucks… get it?)

For all the technical stuff see roombahacking.com.

All I want to say is, it’s the year 2006; it’s high time all our appliances were capable of playing lowbrow video game music from the 80’s.

(via Waxy)

There are very few things in this world that I would go so far as to say that I hate. Having said that, I HATE Yellow Jackets. I haven’t been stung for a long time (I was stung by a wasp within the first couple weeks of moving to Lethbridge over 3 years ago) but my hatred for this pest runs deep.

Here is a brilliant, cheap, and non-toxic way to deal with wasps and their cousin the yellow-jacket from the AOJ Outdoors Tip Site: Grandpa Kipp’s Sure-Fire Yellow Jacket Trap.

How It Works:

The yellow jackets love fish and will begin to cut off small pieces to take back to the nest. In their “excitement” of buzzing around the bait a few will occasionally hit the water. The soap in the water breaks the surface tension of the waterproof coating on the yellow jacket and it instantly sinks in the water and drowns in a few seconds. Some yellow jackets will successfully haul a piece of meat back to the nest and tell all the other gatherers in the nest where this great food source is. Soon all the wasps from the nest will be working on this fish and over a period of time, all will eventually make mistakes and either fall off the fish and into the water or bump other wasps flying around and knock themselves in the drink, then its curtains for them too. It only takes a day or two to wipe out nearly every yellow jacket in your area.

I’m going camping for the long weekend, and I’ll keep this little contraption in mind should any wasps try and disturb our Victoria Day celebrations.

Steve Rubel’s post, 25 Things I Learned on Google Trends is a fun look into world search trends using the new Google Trends.

What I enjoy is not only what search trends are developing, but how one search item compares with another. Seeing where the less politically correct searches are popular is also extremely interesting.

Sex is obviously a lot more popular than drugs for searches, but it’s mentioned just about as often in the media—rock and roll almost doesn’t even register. Cairo, Egypt gets the award for searching for “sex” most often with most of those searches being done in Arabic. Prostitution, however, is most searched for in Montreal.

Backmasking is most searched for in Melbourne, Australia, and it’s hard to say for sure, but it looks like it had a spike in January when the Wall Street Journal did that story about it, and again lots of other spikes as other big organizations and networks picked up the story.

Pepsi appears more popular than either term—Coke or Coca-cola, and Yahoo is still more popular than Google but they’re closing the gap.

Back in 1982 a group of three kids from Mississippi began a project to recreate, shot-for-shot, Stephen Spielberg’s classic, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. They were 12 years old when they started. It took them a little over six years to finish it, and while that alone is noteworthy, their story is now being considered to be turned into amovie with a screenplay by Dan Clowes of “Ghost World” fame. He talks about it near the end of a recent Wired News article.

The picture itself has become somewhat of an underground hit, garnering a lot of attention lately from the mainstream media. The three creators, known as the Indy guys, are now taking their show on the road. There isn’t a whole lot of the remake footage in it, but if you feel compelled, check out the trailer.

(via Pete’s Linklog)