Sunday, October 28, 2007

California Police Seize 375 Pounds Of Bathtub Cheese [Cheese]

i hope no one has their yogurt ring broken up by the POlice.

 
 

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via Consumerist by Carey Greenberg-Berger on 10/27/07

I%20CAN%20HAS%20BATHTUB%20CHEESE.jpgMeet Floribel Hernandez Cuenca and Manuel Martin. California police arrested the pair on "felony cheese making charges" after they tried to sell 375 pounds of bathtub cheese at an open-air market in San Bernardino. Bathtub cheese, otherwise known as "illegal soft cheese," can cause a range of maladies including listeria, salmonella, and everybody's favorite gut goblin, E. coli.

The 375 pounds of seized illegal cheese included panela, queso fresco and queso oxaca varieties, the [California Department of Food and Agriculture] says. It was a significant find, the department says.

"Illegally produced is cheese is serious threat to public health," says CDFA Secretary A.G. Kawamura.We suggest that the pair be sentenced to eat their wares, preferably in public.

Arrests drain bathtub cheese sellers [Central Valley Business Times via BarfBlog]
(Photo: jthorvath)


 
 

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Don't Eat Jellybeans At Albertson's Or You Will Be Arrested [Shoplifting]

i'm glad to see justice served here. what's up with people eating in the grocery store?

 
 

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via Consumerist by Carey Greenberg-Berger on 10/28/07

Fellonious%20Jellybeans.jpgA Florida man was arrested and charged with petty theft after eating $2 worth of jellybeans at a local Albertson's. The man was caught by surveillance cameras reaching into a bin and putting "an unspecified number of jelly beans in his mouth."

The deputy told a manager that the suspect had taken about 10 of the "raspberry-flavored" candies. The man denied taking more than two. He added that he'd been shopping at Albertson's for 30 years and that he was just trying the candy to see if he wanted to buy it. The deputy "advised him that Albertson's did not have free samples of candy and he should have known that if he had been shopping at Albertson's for 30 years."

The man didn't buy any of the candy.

The store manager on duty told the deputy that he wanted charges brought against the suspect, who was also issued a trespass warning.Another horrid criminal removed from our streets. Just because candy is in a bin doesn't make it free. Unless it's a Buttered Popcorn jellybean - we would kill for those.

Man arrested for eating jelly beans in store [Northwest Florida Daily News]
(Photo: SMN)


 
 

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Thursday, October 25, 2007

Bloglines - Oakland Tribune’s “Body Burden” Test Reveals High Levels of Chemicals in Children

Bloglines user ncaut (nc_aut@yahoo.com) has sent this item to you.


Healthy Child Healthy World Blog
The Healthy Child Healthy World blog focuses on tips that will help you reduce exposure to chemicals, toxins, and pollutants - for the benefit of your children's health, the health of your home, and the environment.

Oakland Tribune's "Body Burden" Test Reveals High Levels of Chemicals in Children

By Natalie Cadranel

Check out the video that explores the shocking difference in chemical levels between parents and children, the latter had 2 to 7 times the amount of harmful chemicals in the blood in comparison to their parents.  Our own Scientific Advisory Board Member, Dr. Leonardo Trasande discusses with CNN's Anderson Cooper how rates of childhood diseases are reaching epidemic proportions.

Our goal is that with increased exposure of the issue, legislators will be encouraged to pass bills on the safe side of children's health as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently did with pressure and awareness campaigns set forth by the Breast Cancer Fund, Environment California and ourselves.


Wednesday, October 24, 2007

GMOs Perfected Down to the Chromosome Level

this is the company started by the guy in the UNC bio dept...

 
 

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via Slashdot by Zonk on 10/20/07

Roland Piquepaille writes "If don't like the concept of 'Frankenfoods,' I have bad news for you. U.S. researchers have developed an artificial chromosome for corn plants. The Chicago Tribune reports that researchers can now make chromosomes to order. These artificial chromosomes are accepted as natural by the plants and passed through generations. As the Monsanto Company bought rights to use this mini-chromosome stacking technology in corn, cotton, soybeans, and canola, I guess we'll soon eat food made from permanently genetically modified organisms (PGMOs?)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


 
 

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Friday, October 5, 2007

Shopping: Buy the Right Size TV to Fit Your Space

hint, hint...

 
 

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via LH -mac -news -roundup -sponsors by Adam Pash on 10/3/07

hdtv-size.png
If you're finally taking the plunge to the world of HDTV, it's tempting to go out and buy the biggest screen you can afford. But before you whip out your wallet and plop down for a 65-inch HDTV, make sure you take your practical viewing distance into account with CNET's simple TV-viewing distances chart. For example, if you want to buy that 65 incher, you'd better be able to veg out at least 8.1 feet away from the screen. Want some more HDTV buying tips? Check out our HDTV guide.


 
 

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Featured Palm OS Download: Store Passwords Securely on Your Palm OS PDA



 
 

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via LH -mac -news -roundup -sponsors by Tamar Weinberg on 10/5/07

cryptex2.jpg
Palm OS only: Take your passwords with you everywhere you go with Cryptex, a freeware Palm OS application that promises to keep your sensitive data secure with RC4 encryption. Add as many accounts as desired with as many fields as necessary. Easily distinguish your accounts with the many beautiful icons provided within the Cryptex application. The interface is extremely easy to set up and use. Best of all, this Palm OS application is absolutely free.


 
 

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Goog(le) 411



 
 

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via Cool Tools on 10/5/07

goog411_sm.jpg

Directory assistance has always wanted to be free. Since it launched six months ago, Google's foray into phone-based information has become the easiest, quickest, most efficient free 411 I've used. I'm amazed more people don't have it programmed into their phones. Best part: there are no pre-roll ads. Another well-known option is 1-800-FREE411, but it can take 20 seconds before the "What city and state?" finally arrives. With GOOG-411, the same prompt is delivered in 4 seconds. Time is precious, but even more so if you're on a conservative plan with limited minutes. For that same reason (read: frugality), I'm less inclined to use SMS-based 411 or Google SMS. GOOG-411 also connects your call to the business for free, so there's no need to jot down or memorize any digits. Dialing "411" and paying $2 is like flipping through one of Ma Bell's analog phone books when you've got a connected laptop right in front of you -- an easily-remedied symptom of a bygone era.

-- Steven Leckart

1-800-GOOG-411
Available from Google


Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:

zyb.jpg ZYB dual-usb.jpg Dual USB Charger cell_booster.jpg ARC Freedom Antenna

 
 

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Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Bloglines - The Sansa Shaker: A Truly Portable MP3 Player Designed For Kids

Bloglines user ncaut (nc_aut@yahoo.com) has sent this item to you.


Z Recommends

The Sansa Shaker: A Truly Portable MP3 Player Designed For Kids

By Jeremiah McNichols on music and audio

The Sansa Shaker is a small MP3 player from Sandisk that is designed for kids. By small, we mean very small - I didn't think to do a "player with penny" shot for this review, but at 2 3/4" tall and 1 1/2" across, two pennies would span the player's top. It's a little smaller than our salt shaker, and has a slight "waist" to give it a natural fit for little hands.

That shape is a bit of an advertisement for the Sansa Shaker's overall goal: To design an MP3 player for kids from the ground up. In our view, they have a great success on their hands, and virtually no competition for the features they're offering in this cute little player. It's labeled for ages 8 and up, but we were interested in an "off-label" use and let our three-year-old, Z, give it a trial run, and Sandisk was kid enough to send us one to review. Below, a rundown of the Shaker's key design features and performance.

The Shaker offers two options for play: dual headphone jacks (to encourage the sharing of music) and a 1" speaker. The speaker quality is better than you'd expect from such a small device, but of course it does best with the higher registers, so kids who demand a lot of bass in their mix might be frustrated. Of course, the older the kid, the more likely they are to just use headphones; the speaker was one of the key features that drew us to the Shaker for our three-year-old, as we have no interest in introducing her to headphones at this point. We might mention at this point that nobody should be selling earbud headphones to kids. If you buy this, throw them away and invest in some traditional headphones - it'll save on hearing aids later.

Press and hold the play/pause button, and the Shaker starts up with a funny little tuneful drum sound; press and hold it again and it shuts off with a similar vocalization.

The Shaker has no menu to navigate and no play options besides "next" and "previous," but uses an innovative style of ring buttons which are most akin to the kind of gearshifters you find on some mountain bikes - just twist to adjust. The top ring adjusts the volume, and the bottom one switches tracks and fast forwards and rewinds. The volume adjuster is continuous (hold it in the "twisted" position and it keeps changing) but the most relevant feature of the forward/back ring requires you twist and release; holding it in the twisted position fast-forwards or rewinds within a track.

For track switching, though, the Shaker has an additional standout feature that little Z has had no trouble figuring out, and it's the one that gives the product its name. Holding down the play button and giving the device a single shake switches to the next track. For the product's target age range, this is simply a cool feature; for very young children, this feature makes using the Shaker possible. Z still has a hard time with the ring buttons, but she has rapidly gained confidence in changing tracks herself. Like the on/off controls, the "shake" gives the user an auditory signal of success, this time with a sandy "shaker"-like sound. Combined with the physical movement, it's a satisfyingly kinesthetic ways to interact with circuits and electrical currents.

The feature does have a couple of wrinkles, however. Since the play/pause button is used with this track-switching method, depressing the button and accidentally releasing it while or prior to shaking the device results in pausing the music rather than switching tracks, and this is easy enough to do that I have done it myself on more than one occasion while trying to switch tracks for her. If this is done, the player stops playing without it being entirely clear why it has done so, and you must release and press down the button again to make it start playing again where you left off, then try your shake again. It isn't hard to get the hang of, but it does have a learning curve.

Music is stored in MP3 format on an SD (Sandisk) memory card, naturally, and the Shaker comes in 512K and 1G versions, which is just a matter of which card is included with the device. A gently locking twist-off cap on the bottom of the Shaker hides the battery compartment and SD slot, easy enough for an adult to open but impossible for a young child to get into. The MP3 format was a key feature for us, as we didn't want to be stuck using WMA files on the device. (Coverting from iTunes ACC [M4a] format to MP3 is a snap; see comment 3 on this Lifehacker post.)

Battery life when used with the speaker is fairly low (Sandisk states it should last up to 15 hours when using headphones), but it only uses a single AAA battery, so its overall consumption still seemed low. It's supposed to have an "uh-oh" warning when it's low on juice, but we use rechargeable batteries, and with those at least it seemed to lose volume before that ever kicked in. Z would start complaining that she couldn't hear her audio story over the air conditioner, and we'd find ourselves saying to each other, "Geez, is this thing really that quiet?" for a bit before figuring out it just needed a new battery. Again, non-rechargeable batteries might drain more "efficiently," but we prefer to recharge than buy and buy and buy.

A few improvements could be made to this device. It has no track position memory or volume memory, which means that stopping the Shaker and starting it again puts you back at the beginning of a track and at a base volume. Since Z spends a lot of time listening to audio stories on it (Story Nory and some original stuff we'll unveil here in coming months) this is kind of a pain, as volume typically needs to be adjusted up for speaking tracks, and she wants to pick up where she left off. For music, we could see this being a problem if a low volume was desired. We'd also love to see a "line in" jack on a device like this; the speaker is such a premium we'd love to be able to extend its functionality to other devices, like our video iPod, which lack speakers of their own.

The one thing we had to train Z not to do with the Sandisk Shaker was hold the speaker up to her ear. A could of quick reminders and she was good to go, but we could see other young children having the same impulse, and the maximum volume Sandisk established for this product is appropriate for projecting out from the device but not for listening to it at such a short range.

Overall, we are extremely pleased with the Sansa Shaker. Its design and basic features make it a great MP3 player for young children, and its price is quite reasonable - under $40 for the 1G version and under $30 for the 512K, with the included SD cards alone worth $15 to $20. Using an SD card also means its memory is compatible with other devices we use - cameras, Palm devices, etc. - so a significant chunk of the product's value is portable.

Z has carried this thing around off and on for weeks now, and listens to audio stories on it while eating breakfast almost every morning, an alternative to TV we're very comfortable with. She still finds manipulating some of the buttons a challenge, which is why we'd highly recommend this product for kids ages four and up, and for three-year-olds for adventurous techies who like to play with their kids' toys.

We will be giving away our Sansa Shaker in a couple of weeks - and we'll have an exciting reason for the delay. Look for a big announcement from ZRecs on or around Oct. 15!

The Sansa Shaker is available from Amazon.com in 512K and 1G versions for about $30-$40.