If you’re looking for free apps to take on a project, this list of 61 Free Apps We’re Most Thankful For – Thanksgiving – Lifehacker is a great place to start. It amazes me all the things I can get done without spending anything.
Archive for November, 2009
I thought this looked like an interesting project: Build a Geodesic Dome Solar Greenhouse to Grow Your Own Food : TreeHugger. Then I looked at the costs: minimum $5,000 setup. I’m going to see if I enjoy regular gardening first and save this for my retirement. 
As we look forward to building our house, I’m thinking of something like this: Use a 20-Year Plan to Build a Stable of Quality Furniture – Home – Lifehacker. The trouble is that the furniture we use the most is our computer chairs. I don’t know of any 20-year computer chairs – though I was eying some Herman Miller chairs to see if they’d last.
Done Grinding
Nov 27
photo by kerryvaughan
About a week or so ago, I acquired enough champion’s seals to buy the last of my leveling alts the bonus XP chest and shoulders. My playstyle has changed a fair amount since then. Rather than logging on regularly every night and doing the daily quest circuit, I log on, do a quick auction house scan, and play whatever character I feel like playing for as long as I feel like playing. I quit raiding back in late spring since I got tired of having to be around morally questionable people “because we need to make up a full raid”, so that’s another stress dealt with.
There is no end to WoW. You have to decide when enough is enough. For me, the game now ends a bit after level cap – a few dungeon runs, making and buying gear to get raid ready, and I’m done with this character and ready to start another alt.
I level toons and have been running through the vanilla WoW instances at level with a static group and it’s a lot of fun. There’s no longer that sense of having to log in, or having to get certain tasks done. I play for fun and stop when it’s not fun.
This is a really useful idea: when your child puts on a piece of clothing that’s outgrown (and they refuse to take it off for disposal), mark outgrown clothes with a safety pin | Parent Hacks. Next time that item goes through the wash, you know that it’s outgrown and it can quietly disappear rather than discovering again that it is outgrown the next time they wear it. The comments are worth reading too for additional ideas.
Canadian Thanksgiving is long over, but this is still a great list of 10 Geeky Things to Be Thankful For | GeekDad | Wired.com. I’m most thankful for broadband Internet – for me it brings most of the rest with it.
Looking Back at Games
Nov 24
I wonder if this is how I’ll look back at my life someday?
These are some horrible, horrible jokes: Science Jokes to Brighten Your Monday Morning – Boing Boing. Given that these jokes amuse me, it’s not surprising that my kids’ sense of humor can get so very annoying so quickly. Nothing like a massive overdose of your own medicine.
Pilgrim’s Bounty Cooking
Nov 22
If you have a toon that you haven’t leveled cooking on, the Pilgrim’s Bounty event is a great way to level cooking. Start off at Undercity and make spice bread and spice bread stuffing. Then make pumpkin pie till that’s green. Move on to Orgrimmar and make cranberry chutney. Off to Thunder Bluff for candied sweet potatoes. Finish off back in Trisfal glades killing wild turkeys and roasting them for slow-roasted turkey and you should hit 300 cooking. If you know a friendly high level mage or warlock, you can jump to Dalaran and train up cooking to make it well past 300. It’s cheap and easy and can give you a number of achievements.
Merry Wives of Windsor
Nov 21
I ran across Merry Wives of Windsor on Mark Gunn’s Irish & Celtic Music Podcast. I really enjoyed the song I heard there, Mad Jenny. It turns out that song isn’t typical of their music, but I really enjoy the mildly bawdy humor of most of their songs. Here’s a video made to Letters from Sea which is much more typical of most of their music.
Big Bear Butt Blogger has a nostalgic look back at Attunements – your mileage may vary. I could live with some attunements, but I’d strongly prefer that they be account-wide. The Karazhan attunement was long and painful, but as a raid leader it was a good way of evaluating other raiders’ skills in a pre-raid environment.
I Hate Homework
Nov 19
Photo by jin.thai
My kids aren’t in any kind of special scholastic program. They go to a good-quality public school. Despite the name changes, it’s the same school I attended.
On a normal night, my kids do more homework than I did over the entirety of high school.
Some of that is because I did my homework very quickly in class while the teacher explained things. I suspect that I was there when the trend was for less homework while my kids are there at the other end of the pendulum swing. I didn’t do a very good job on my homework – my focus was on acceptable quality at maximum speed.
Still, this is a brutal way to force me to make up for all the homework time I skipped in high school.
This post on Top 10 Bad Messages From Good Movies | GeekDad | Wired.com brought up some messages from movies that have troubled me. Usually my response to these kinds of messages is to mock them thoroughly – silly songs are great for this, especially if I can attach them to a catchy tune.
This is a really good idea: Reflective Roadway Tape Lights Your Bike Day or Night for Cheap – Bicycles – Lifehacker. I could probably get some from my local municipal office, but I think I’ll just spring for a roll of tape instead. At this time of year I’m biking home in dark or twilight so anything that increases my visibility is great!
Playing Just One Character
Nov 16
I was running around on my shaman trying to get the last little bit of Argent Crusade rep I need to actually be able to buy items with those Champion’s Seals I’ve been saving up. As I blasted my way through a quest I’ve done at least twice before, I wondered what it would be like to play just one character
It’s been a long time since I only seriously played one character. My priest Flint back in the middle days of vanilla WoW would have been my last toon to have that distinction. My altoholism started out from wanting to experience the different playstyles offered in WoW. I rolled some alts to keep myself amused when the people I played with regularly weren’t on at the same time as I was. Other alts were created in a “gotta catch em all” mindset. Currently rogue is the only class I haven’t played past 40, and I have a heirloomed rogue just waiting for me to make time to level him up.
Clone troopers by adactio
What if I dropped all that with Cataclysm and did something radical – started over on a new server with just one toon? I could do each of the rep grinds once, and only once. I could spend my time and gold maxing out a single toon rather than messing around with an army of characters. It would take a lot less time.
Is this likely to happen? Not really. If nothing else, I’m going to have an auction house alt, so that’s two right there (even if one of them never leaves a capital). I like having some idea of what every class in WoW can do. It comes down to me having more fun dabbling with every class rather than mastering one.
Planning Shelterbelts
Nov 15
Unfortunately our lot is a little too small to get trees from PFRA, but they still have a lot of useful information for Planning Farm Shelterbelts.
The front of my parents’ riverlot was pretty much as bare as our lot currently is and now their lot looks like a forest. I need to make sure my kids are out there regularly with a hoe and that the ground is kept black.
Tech Support Cheat Sheet
Nov 14
xkcd’s tech_support_cheat_sheet will doubtless not be used by those who need it most. Nevertheless, it’s still a nice description of how to be a computer expert.
Ranking scientists
Nov 13
This is an interesting take: Physics – Ranking scientists. Essentially it takes scientists’ publications and ranks scientists according to how often their publications are referenced by other scientists. The more often others refer to your work, the more influential you are, with weighting given to links from those with more influence.
I’ve often considered trying to draw up a social graph of the town I live in. I wonder how you could quantify influence in a small-town setting?
Speccy Gives You Detailed Information About Your Hardware – System Monitoring – Lifehacker. This looks like the kind of tool I can use. Usually I know what went into a box when it’s new, but a few months down the road and I’ve forgotten small (but vital) details. I’ll have to check out the export functions – it would be handy to have this information as a text file or PDF to be stored offsite.
DIY Bike Trailer
Nov 11
This DIY Bike Trailer: Woodworker at Work | BikeHacks looks great. I’d love to have a trailer for my bike, but I suspect I wouldn’t actually use it a lot. Since my office is in my parent’s yard, I’m over there pretty often hauling the kids over anyway so I haul any bigger items on one of those trips. I’ll chalk this one up to yet another project I’d like to do in the abstract but will never actually get around to doing.
(found via Lifehacker)