770 for $139

The Nokia 770 small wifi (and bluetooth) 800x480 8oz tablet is available from a few online retailers for the majorly reduced price from about $400 to the new price of $139.99 (with free shipping) see it on buy.com check froogle.google.com for others if your interested. at that price, its REAL tempting.....

*update: save additional $10 with google checkout

Whoops!

nothing like the head of IT hitting 'reply all' rather than reply. mistakes happen to the best (and the worst and the ignorant....).

Just in case....

Ever find yourself in an extremely still, undisturbed place with thousands of coins and nothing to do? You're in luck.

Tahoe Fire

Friends from work have houses in jeopardy. theres just not a safe place on this planet from natural disasters. its called the angora fire.

Links for MODIS
1) Large Incidents
2) by region
3) active fire map

Car vs Boat vs Bike

Car vs Boat vs Bike I heard about this from a friend at work. pretty cool!

CubeEngine

if your in the mood for some old school first person shooter, check out the Cube Engine its not only really good, but its FREE (and open source if you like playing with that kind of thing). the mod that turned into its own game, ActionCube, is very good weighing in at 19meg download and plays VERY GOOD on ancient hardware. full network support. you'll be up and running before you know what hit you.

The second generation, Cube 2, weighs in at 170+MB download, but still plays fine on my ancient geforce 2 MX graphics unaccelerater card. try it.. you'll like it.

one more thing, the game sports its own in game editor, so if you don't like something, hit 'E' and change it, or make your own level!

DTG

I found Dumb the Game for a certain special someone i know will love it.

Spiral Island

Spiral Island, built of recycled plastic bottles met its doom. in 2006.

Project of the Month

for those of you who aren't subscribed to sourceforge.net 's newsletter...
the project of the month is "Scorched 3D"
as i recall keith and i played some of this a while ago and it was pretty fun... though as usually for artillery games i stunk. in any case it is nice to see redevelopment of classic games that had some real thinking involved.

hot wheels radar

This looks like a fun little toy to play around with...

self taser

This is a very funny discussion from a first person point of view, when you shock yourself with a little taser gun.

copy

I have a national geographic picture of the day on my google homepage. its a nice way to get out and see the world without spending to much money.

on todays article, it mentioned that japan has been copying stuff since at least 1911. every one knows ski bindings are a good thing to start with! =)

4 flats

I have now had 4 flat tires in about a 1 week spam.

1) left rear on VW. mom and dad got it when they borrowed the car and did 2,000 miles to colorado and back in a few days. they let some friends borrow the car and the promptly went out and bought a brand new diesel jetta. VW: you owe me some advertising money. they made it back home and the tire had very slow leak. took it to less schwab and tread to low, for liability they won't touch it. I know its not legal, but how I drive its got 10,000 miles left in it and so dad helped me plug it with monkeygrip. really quick and easy to do, and you can do it without dismounting the tire. i was a little skeptical, but its holding fine.

2)drove motorcycles down from bend. front tire of a yamaha 225 had slow leak in it. put fix-a-flat in it (your not suppose to do that, but we didn't have alot of options. shops were closed, and we needed to keep moving). did over 200 miles on it, and its still got 32lbs of air in it. the fix-a-flat (tire in a can some call it) is nasty, terrible stuff, and tire shops hate it. this is a very much LAST RESORT solution. i would not use it again unless i had no other options.

3) screw in front right tire of VW. I was carpooling with a friend to work and he spotted it on friday afternoon when we left. luckily, i had checked the spair not to long ago and it was all aired up and ready to go. we did the tire change in 10 minutes flat (pun intended). my plan is to take this to walmart and see if they will repair it. it has legal tread depth on it, so they should (i bought the tires from them, and paid for roadhazaard)

4)a 2.5" twisty nail in the rear of the BMW motorcycle. I have at least 3,000 miles left on this tire and this was a very disappointing find today. motorcycles are dangerous enough without doing half-baked repairs to them, so i'm cautions of anything i do on this thing. first thought was to try fix-a-flat, but remember my advice from #2.. only as a last resort. so I opted for monkey grip. amazingly, the metzler tourances are steal belted, so not much different than a car tire, and i am running tubeless in the back. doing the repair it was obvious that the compound is much softer on these tires than it is on the VW's douglas touring tires. i'll keep a very close eye on this thing and see if I can finish the tires off. i'll have the front and rear change when I do the 18,000 mile service, probably at the end of july. since the tubless are so easy to 'temporarily fix' i'll ask the dealer and see if they'll let me run the metzler tourances tubeless in the front.

*updated: the twisty nail is 2.25". i know people are bad at estimating so I wanted to double check myself and see how i'm doing. I kept the nail and measured it with my crappy $15 harbor freight digital caliper (everyone should have these in the junk drawer). accounting for the bend in the nail and the fact I wore alot of the head off on the street, its a 2.25". heres a picture, except mines rusty.


conclusions:
* those cheap $5 kits work. may not be the best thing, but truley useful and quick to use to get out of any situation.
* there are mushroom tire plugs available for motorcycles. i will look into this for future use on the motorcycle. i would have preferred to use this style for this repair, and I probably still can if I so choose. i've read its not to hard to pull the monkey grip stuff out if you need to.
* I think a complete kit with CO2 filler is going to get installed under my motorcycle seat in the not to distant future.

links:
proper way to plug a tire

$4.49 monkey grip
$8 bell motorcycle kit
$30 kit tube/tubless (non plug) from BMW retailer
$45 kit, tubeless plug style from bmw retailer<---