The mission of this $400 device is to eliminate trips to the grocery store. The hardware component is a bulbous bar code scanner, dressed up in Any-Décor White and mounted on a countertop stand, an undercabinet bracket or a wall mount. It offers a color screen on the front, a laser scanner underneath and a Wi-Fi antenna inside that connects to your home wireless network.

Each time you’re about to throw away an empty container — for ketchup, cereal, pickles, milk, macaroni, paper towels, dog food or whatever — you just pass its bar code under the scanner. With amazing speed and accuracy, the Ikan beeps, consults its online database of one million products, and displays the full name and description.

[ State of the Art - Grocery Shopping Made Easy - NYTimes.com ]

Apparently I am the only one who enjoys grocery shopping? So $400 for the device ($99 if you act quickly and get it through a delivery company like Pea Pod) and then Pea Pod is charging around $10 for delivery, plus you are allowed to tip the delivery guy (thus you should tip) and we're closer to $20 just to avoid doing something that I enjoy?

And for my Indonesian friends, isn't it ironic that you can't scan a fish and buy it with this "Ikan"?

The Day of the Triffids is a post-apocalyptic novel written in 1951 by the English science fiction author John Wyndham. Although Wyndham had already written other novels, this was the first that he had written under this name and it appeared to be by a new author. It was this novel which established him as an important writer, and remains his best known.

Deepest Sender is a client that will allow you to post to blogs from directly within Firefox. It is primarily a LiveJournal client, although it supports Blogger (GData) and WordPress (metaWeblog) too.

This is the fourth add-on I am trying. Deepest Sender has one thing on it's toolbar that I kind of thought was important, the "increase indent" and "decrease indent" buttons. ScribeFire only had a "quote" button which is essentially the "increase indent", to take something out of a "quote block" you have to edit the source. Weak. Deepest Sender also supports categories, so here's hoping that the "Post" button actually does something.

Update: Not only did the post button work, but the above portion of the post remains unchanged from what Deepest Sender posted. I think we have a winner!

As I mentioned, I previously used an IE extension to select text and "blog it". It would pull me right up into a new entry (though only if I logged in first) but it certainly helps me get entries up quickly that relate to a webpage. Now that I'm of the FireFox 3 set, I need a replacement for my old quick-blog system, and the third add-on I am trying is ScribeFire:

ScribeFire is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser that integrates with your browser to let you easily post to your blog: you can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog.

[ Getting started with ScribeFire - ScribeFire: Fire up your blogging ]

Third? Yes, third. First I tried "DashBlog", I think it was called but that appeared to not do much of anything. Then I tried "ClipMarks", got much further but it doesn't appear to like the dasBlog Publishing API.

Why, oh why, Netflix?

We will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account.

When? Profiles will be eliminated on September 1, 2008.

Why? While it may be disappointing to see this feature go away, this change will help us to continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.

[ Netflix FAQ ]

Granted, I haven't used this function in a while. With Iman at her mother's during the week, Yaty focused on the baby, and us down to just 2 movies at one time there isn't much need for multiple queues, but when we did use it, it was awesome. Unless this is followed by something amazing, I'm afraid that Netflix is making a bad move.

Update: They're here to stay! Props to Bull for the URL.

I was behind on my dasBlog version. I had been running v1.8, now I'm up to v2.1. Not sure what they've changed, but it's been quite a while and there were known issues with the old code base. In addition I've removed my tweaks to the code and I'm running an "out of the box" version. What's this mean?

The following is gone:

• Integration with my IE right-click extension to make blogging a tiny bit easier (I use FireFox 3 now anyway)
• BBCode for comments (new code allows some HTML)
• My "Power Toys" page (no developers use IE anymore)
• My "What I'm playing" page (no one ever looked at it anyway)
• My "redirect my comment in response to other comment code", you want an answer to your comment? Subscribe to have all comments emailed to you.
• My theme. Now you can select a theme if you want, and I'm only using themes I remotely like
  

What is gone, but may come back:

• Amazon.com "link up a bunch of crap" code
• Google stats code
• MyBlogLog code

So far I like what they've done. Some new bells and whistles here and there. Bunch of stuff fixed. If there is something I've forgotten and you desperately want it, let me know.

Tomatoes tainted with salmonella have sickened dozens of people in nine states, the CDC and FDA warn.

[ Web MD ]

Update: The menace grows:

Now, the CDC reports that at least 167 people in 17 states have been infected with Salmonella Saintpaul, the salmonella strain involved in the current outbreak. Those 17 states are Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.

[ Web MD ]

You remember that fire we had? Most all traces are gone now. For over a month we had no stove, it just takes a while to communicate and order and install, etc. Today, we are able to cook a full range of items once again. No longer are we stuck with just deep fryer, rice cooker, crock pot, microwave, indoor grill, outdoor gril, toaster, and bread machine. Oddly only the crock pot was purchased during the "stove outage" and even during the stove outage the bread machine didn't surface.

What does this mean? we're back where we were a month ago, and moving forward from this point to get the house ready for "company". Now that we have the space we hope to eventually get some entertaining done, but we're still lacking a bit of furniture in order to finish off the unpacking.

What does this mean more immediately? Fried foods are back! Fried rice, fried eggs, sauteed anything, etc. And we sure did miss it.

Also the new hood is much nicer than the old one. Quieter, safer, better all around. If I had known that this particular "economy" model was so cheap I probably would have just bought it anyway, it's that much better.

If you click through to Flickr I'll make some more specific comments like the placement of the replacement salt cellar that was purchased, and perhaps some other bits that I'm sure people are curious about.

This is apparently the month for games announcements made just for me. Not only is Ubi delivering the goods, but look what Konami has in store:

I do love portable Castlevania games

So you just read that Ubi is coming out with Beyond Good and Evil two and said to yourself, what is that? I'm guessing you are one of the many who never played the first game. If you like Zelda or Okami type games, you'll love this one.

PS2	PC	XBox

Apparently the GameCube version is super rare, there isn't even a listing on Amazon for it. If you haven't played this one, do yourself a treat and pick up a copy of what could possibly be my favorite game of all time (or at least until the sequel arrives).

Ubisoft's Ubidays 2008 just rapped up and they have some eye candy for us:

Prince of Persia

Beyond Good & Evil 2

Props to Kooshmoose

If you follow me on-line in various places, you may have noticed the Café Chimp has faded to be replaced by Oriental Bento Colonel Sanders (Kombo 5 on the menu), I love this for so many reasons:

1. This is an actual product sold at KFC in Indonesia
2. Apparently the word "Oriental" isn't offensive to Indonesians. Not sure what it means to them, perhaps just East Asia (China, Korea, and Japan)
3. The Colonel is clearly wearing a Chinese outfit, but "Bento" is a Japanese word
4. It says "Bento" but it is clearly a bowl

What this isn't is Dragon Ball Z's Master Roshi drinking tea (good guess Koosh), but such a wonderful mix of confusion, and I'm glad to see that it isn't just Americans who get mixed up with east Asians and can't tell them apart.

I'm sure I'll get bored of this at some point, but the more people I let in on the fun, the longer I think Oriental Colonel will be around, so enjoy!

I wasn't expecting much, and perhaps that helped. Iman dragged me to this, and I agreed since I didn't figure anyone else would take her, who would have thought that I would like it even more than she did. If you ever enjoyed the old Anime series, you will like this. The Wachowski Bros must either be the biggest Speed Racer fans ever, or they watched the entire series 1/2 dozen times in preparation for this movie. This is not a case of someone taking IP and stripping away what the fans are looking for only to replace it with something that barely has the name of the original and nothing left with any redeeming qualities. This is THE Speed Racer movie, and if you are a fan you will not be disappointed. However if you are over 13 and have never seen the original Anime series? Skip this one, you certainly won't appreciate anything except the pretty colors, fast action, and surprisingly good acting.