Free Christmas Music MP3s!

Just in time! At http://garritan.com/Xmas.html you can download five full albums of free Christmas music! It sounds really good, too; perfect for playing during a Christmas party or on Christmas morning while you open presents.

From the website:
"Welcome to the 5th Annual Garritan Community Christmas Album, a unique musical project. A community of musicians from all over the world met on the Garritan community forum and agreed to submit their own recordings of holiday music, to be freely distributed. Each of these orchestral recordings were made not with large live orchestras in vast recording studios at huge expense, but rather were created by a single person working on their own desktop or laptop computer. What they have in common is the use of Garritan libraries representing software musical instruments based on samples of real instruments."

Enjoy!
I saw this on the Lifehacker blog at http://tinyurl.com/9e8tgk

$1 Eye Glasses

You may have heard of the "1 laptop per child" idea where someone is making laptops so cheap that even very poor countries can have one per child (http://laptop.org/en/). That's a very noble and worthy cause, certainly, but I'm more impressed with what I saw today, to say the least. A man has invented glasses that you can adjust the prescription on without needing an eye doctor, making glasses significantly more available for underdeveloped countries where having poor eye sight could mean you can't support yourself or your Family, not to mention degrading your quality of life.

"Silver has devised a pair of glasses which rely on the principle that the fatter a lens the more powerful it becomes. Inside the device's tough plastic lenses are two clear circular sacs filled with fluid, each of which is connected to a small syringe attached to either arm of the spectacles.

The wearer adjusts a dial on the syringe to add or reduce amount of fluid in the membrane, thus changing the power of the lens. When the wearer is happy with the strength of each lens the membrane is sealed by twisting a small screw, and the syringes removed. The principle is so simple, the team has discovered, that with very little guidance people are perfectly capable of creating glasses to their own prescription."

That's an awesome contribution to make to the world. How great is that?

The glasses aren't quite $1 each yet, but they are working on the model to reduce costs. Just having the idea to make something like this is huge. I can't wait to see this be successful.

I found the article on a blog here: http://tinyurl.com/ay8mmy
There is a link to the full article on that page.

12 Days of Christmas

This is just awesome. The video explains it very well in the intro. It's a very well done A Cappella. Merry Christmas.

Motivational video

Ok, I don't think I'm as hyped up as the guys who posted the video here: http://lifehacker.com/5108538/forty-inspirational-speeches-from-the-movies-in-two-minutes
. . . but I still think it's cool. Want a pick-me-up? Try this video. It might strike a chord for you. I nearly lost it when they included Peter Pan, personally.



FYI, the part with Fozzie Bear is the best IMHO!

Bentō - sushi art

Coolest. Food. Ever.

Bentō is described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bento

Bentō is seen in the pictures. Even I would eat sushi that looked this cool.

I found this on one of my RSS feeds from http://www.makezine.com/
The specific article is here: http://tinyurl.com/5tzxap
Makezine is pretty cool for neat pictures and ideas. I never thought I'd see sushi there, but I never thought I'd see it here either . . .

Balloon Culture

There's an entire balloon culture out there that I had no idea about. Frankly I'm scared. These two are the best, but you can see more, as well as a video of a man trying to get in a super strong balloon that deflates when he is half way in, nearly suffocating him here: http://www.urlesque.com/2008/12/05/balloons-of-the-web-we-salute-you/ He lives, but you really have to wonder if he learned to carry a knife in case of another balloon related near death experience. At least have a friend over to help . . . oh, right . . . either there aren't many friends to speak of, or you don't want to admit you're trying to crawl inside a giant balloon in your apartment.

Either way, Balloon Jesus and Balloon Tank are impressive.

Lego over-achiever

I tried to find some example patterns to load into the Lego Digital Designer that I could use to buy the kit without all the work, and I came across this. This guy has tons of things built out of Legos on his site.

Here's the story about this model, with several other pics linked at the bottom of it: http://www.ericharshbarger.org/lego/santa.html

Here's the main site: http://www.ericharshbarger.org/lego/
Make sure you check out the "portfolio."

To be fair to other blogs, this is where I found the story while searching: http://www.curbly.com/vhotho/posts/3326-Eric-Harshbarger-s-LEGO-Santa

Christmas Lego sets

Many of us remember getting Lego Santa sets not too long ago, but I haven't seen any now that I want to give them to my kids. Luckily, there is a cool alternative on the Lego web site.

If you go to their holiday page (http://shop.lego.com/HolidayShop/), and scroll to the bottom, you'll see the same picture as in this post with two links. One (http://cache.lego.com/2057/images/shop/shop06/LandingPages/HolidayGiftShop/PABBuildingInstr.pdf) will get you a nine page pdf file with instructions to build several really cool sets, including the snowman in the picture and the Santa I was looking for.

"But I don't have the bricks to build it!" No problem, they've got you covered at http://shop.lego.com/pab/?warning=false . You can buy the sets, brick-by-brick, based on the part numbers from the instructions.

Have fun building the Santa, and the entire Christmas village that most of you realized you could build after seeing the last link! If your creative juices are flowing, make sure you go back and read this post: http://noahsentme.blogspot.com/2008/06/lego-digital-designer.html . It should help with the model of Santa's workshop you're thinking about!

I can't believe I haven't seen this before! Go to http://www.hulu.com/ to see full episodes of tons of shows (like The Office, for example). It uses "minimal advertising" which meant 3 ads during the show I watched. The ads show up on the progress bar as dots just like the messages in you-tube videos, if you're familiar. You can even watch in HD. There is a ton to choose from if you're looking for something to watch. Now you just need an Xbox or Xbox 360 with Media Center to stream the show to your TV, and I just need an iPhone application that works with the site.

It does a body good

Drink Milk. (<-- click here)