Archive for June, 2007

A full-scale version of Speed Racer’s Mach 5. As seen on Crave: The Speed Racer car is real. That’s right. The “Mach 5″ has been brought to life in full glory from the ’60s animation version (at least the body, anyway) for the Warner Bros. movie scheduled for release next year, according to Gizmodo. Looks good:

Save energy – and money – at home with advice from Popular Mechanics.

Better than a Foleo? AMD has just unveiled a new reference design that puts Palm’s Foleo to shame. According to Engadget: The NanoBook runs on either Windows XP or Vista, weighs less than 850g (1.87 pounds), and sports a 1.2GHz VIA C7-M processor, up to 1GB of RAM, a 30GB hard drive, a 7-inch WVGA display, 802.11g WiFi, Bluetooth (they don’t specify which kind), DVI-out, a slot next to the screen where you can pop in a GPS, VoIP, or WWAN module (the module in the pic above is some world clock thing), and up to five hours of battery life. Pricing is supposed to be around $600, and [...]

For some reason, it’s hard to imagine dollar stores in New York. But apparently, they’re even better than the dollar stores I’ve seen out here in the Midwest: While half of Jack’s products inherently cost around $1 (frozen food, Hawaiian Punch), dollar stores are also quietly fed products manufacturers want to expose to a more down-market demographic. “Companies figure that customers aren’t going to overlap from department stores to dollar stores, so they sell the same product at both,” says one analyst. Of course, Jack’s vice-president, Ira Steinberg, [...]

Yahoo! Hot Jobs has a list of 8 careers that won’t necessarily require a specialized degree.   First up: 1. Information Technology Security. According to MATRIX Resources, one of the nation’s top IT staffing firms, managers are putting security and data recovery at the top of their priority lists. Though most IT fields saw a pay increase of 3.1 percent in 2006, those demanding the hottest skill sets — with security at the top of the list — saw increases of up to 4-5 percent. And a related article:  Five Tips for Switching Career Paths

Zen Habits offers up 50 ways to be romantic on the cheap.  Here’s a taste: Write a poem. Cook a romantic dinner. Give a full-body massage. Pack a sunset picnic. Pick wildflowers on the way home. Burn a CD with love songs. Give dark chocolates. Read poetry together. Prepare strawberries with fondue chocolate. Snuggle together on a rainy day. Hey, if the goal is to be romantic and cheap, I’m halfway there!

The 25 best movies you’ve never seen. Ok, the title’s a bit presumptuous, but there are definitely a few gems on this movies.com list. My personal choice: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai A 23-year-old cult cannot be wrong. Forget that the score to this 1984 sci-fi-something-or-other sounds like bad video-game music. Forget that star Peter Weller dresses suspiciously like Pee-Wee Herman. Forget that bad-guy John Lithgow deserves to go to acting jail on scenery-chewing charges. Just remember that people love this film, quote this film — and get Team Banzai references that you [...]

The WSJ looks at how some individuals are off-shoring personal tasks. Excerpt: Earlier this year, Dan Frey went in search of an artist to illustrate a children’s book his mother had written for the grandkids about her life growing up in New York City. He thought about finding a student from a local art school, but then it dawned on him that he could outsource it without leaving his house. The job didn’t necessarily require a face-to-face meeting — he could just email the draft. He logged on to Guru, which he’d learned about from computer programmer friends who had used [...]

Designed by neuroscientists, Lumosity claims to improve memory, attention and processing speed with “brain exercises.” A lot of research supports claims that mental exercise improves (or slows the decline of) cognitive abilities as people age. If nothing else, Luminosity is a fun time-waster that’s currently in free beta.

Popular Mechanics rounds up “23 Tips and Projects for Saving on Your Bills and Conservation at Home.”