I got this today as a replacement for my smashed Canon SD870 IS. It's a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS1 (also DMC-FT1 outside the US) ruggedized point-and-shoot camera. It's got a wide lens (28mm equivalent if shooting on 35mm film), the usual mess of features, and an entirely internal lens mechanism. Oh,...
As you may have, uhh, noticed, we've got a load of lawn in our front yard. Typical American suburban all-I-like-to-do-is-mow lawn. Time to change that. Details forthcoming....
We went to the local Strawberry Festival yesterday. It's a big annual event and has practically nothing to do with strawberries at this point. As far as I can tell, the only part strawberries play is being served up at a single booth in either raw form or as part...
We went to the Bellevue Arts Museum today (...for the first time). One of the exhibits was a show of Michael Petersen's work called Evolution | Revolution, which is all amazing stuff. After achieving mastery of lathe-turned woodwork (evolution), he decided to start over by carving holes into wood using...
Hot damn, the Cessna 195 is a good-looking aircraft. How did I not find out about this until now?...
This is a Daihatsu Charade body mounted on a full-size 4x4 frame. Washington. It's like New Mexico but with irony....
Amen for all the amateur (and in this case, definitely not-so-amateur) reviews of consumer electronics spotting YouTube. It helps make up for the paucity of quality written reviews, and fills the gaps that even good text reviews can't cover, such as the all-important timed power-on test1. 1 Alas, it seems...
Every once in a while I spot a pickup truck which has had its cab chopped and replaced with a folding soft top. Weird....
I'm, uhh, looking for a new camera and have to write off all Olympus and Sony models up front since those manufacturers are still attached to their goofy one-off flash card formats. It's too bad, since those seem to be the two largest makers of point-and-shoot cameras with internal lens...
I enjoy blooper answers from The Newlywed Game because unlike many modern game shows—whereby contestants self-select based on their (sometimes misguided) hope they're cerebral enough to be successful—the Newlywed Game cut across an entire different selection factor (being recently married) which, in my opinion, gave them a much more amusing...
The record string of rain-free days I mentioned earlier this week ended as a non-event Thursday night as rain came down at 11:49pm, 11 minutes short of the end of the day. It's a little bogus anyway though since the end of the period is measured with down-to-the-minute timing but...
I think I busted the lens on my camera last weekend. It refuses to retract fully and focuses entirely wrong. Here's begins anew the search for another point-and-shoot....
I got turned on to Dan Savage's work after his appearance in This American Life Live which I watched back in April, and which featured a section by Dan (with a plug by Ira Glass). Particularly, I'm hooked on the Lovecast, Dan's weekly out-loud ~40 minute podcast version of his...
Today tied 2009 for the record in longest spring dry spell in the puget sound region, as measured at Seatac airport. No rain tomorrow means we'll have a new record. I originally came here, in part, for the rain. But I'm sticking around for the days without....
Who Wants to Be A Millionaire's phone a friend thing should be renamed phone a friend's computer. Tap tap tap tap. "Spell it again?" Silence. "... uhh ... wait just a second. ... it's ... how did you spell that again?"...
...is any one that features turbine-powered modified Lola T70s as cop cars. Really though, THX 1138 was quite enjoyable....
Despite living less than 20 miles away for nearly a decade, I had no idea that Española was home to the largest community of mixed-race Sikhs in the entire world. This story by NPR describes them and Akal Security, a decently large security company they run. Up until now I...
ZOMG apocalypse tomorrow. I wish they did this back in February....
This is a great article about a super repo man who lifts jumbo jets and fleets of helicopters from deatbeat fat cats....
Layla just finished her MBA and graduated last night. She's spent the last eighteen months dedicated to endless hours of hard work, and I'm incredibly proud of her....
"But I don't want to be in the goddamned friend zone." Oh Seattle, you amuse me so....
Apparently Mythbusters and Extreme Engineering are highly correlated in the world of Netflix recommendations....
I sat in traffic for a few minutes today at a broken stop light—you know, the sort of broken where it flashes red in all four directions. I noticed that jackasses running through the light when it's not their turn don't actually screw things up all that much. At most,...
I don't believe I've ever posted about Colani here before, but he's long been one of my favorite obscure independent industrial designers. Colani's incredible history of work includes a bunch of interesting household stuff and furniture that eccentric industrial designers seem to like to spend an awful lot of time...
You may remember it from my super-blurry shots at the 2008 North American International AutoStravaganza, but it looks like the Geely China Dragon (also known as the Coupe or the CD) is finally going on sale. The (prototype?) China Dragon was one of the most haphazardly styled and assembled cars...
Actually, not at all stumped. It only took me about 30 minutes to remove 80% of this tree stump, and the rest is coming out pretty easily with a bit of digging and a pick axe. But I'll let the trash guys empty my compost bin before I fill it...
You may have seen this (autostarting video) already from the MTV awards this weekend. Maybe not....
I was playing with the Image Composite Editor earlier throwing together a panorama of my back yard when I accidentally ran across ... some un-composited images of my back yard from nearly two years ago. There's no singular landscaping or construction event between these shots so they're not really "before"...
