It’s always amusing when your cats remind you that they are, in fact, smarter than you. We’d noticed on several occasions that Zed gets all excited when he hears the sound of the little safety strip being removed from the neck of a new gallon of milk. (It’s a plastic strip attached to the base of the cap with a number of small tabs. It makes a distintive zipping sort of noise when you pull it off.) He’ll actually get up from a nap and run to the kitchen when he hears it. We had always figured that this interest was because Zed had been fed milk in his previous residence and associated the sound with milk. Zed doesn’t get milk in this residence, however. Tracie would explain this to him every time we opened a new gallon of milk and eventually he’d wander off with a faint air of disappointment. read more

It was 10 years ago today that I registered the domain name studionebula.com. 10 years ago the web wasn’t as widely used or as sophisticated as it is today but it still seemed useful to have my own domain name. The main motivation at the time was being able to give myself a permanent email address that I could retain when switching ISPs. Apparently that was fairly smart of me; I’ve switched ISPs four times in the last ten years, I think.

Completely by coincidence, yesterday was the 40th birthday of the Internet itself. read more

Yes, you read that correctly: Jelly Coffee. Apparently the gooey Fanta that I described previously was at least somewhat successful because now there’s gooey coffee.

Georgia is one of the brands commonly found in vending machines in Japan, so I was already somewhat familiar with their products. Canned coffee is sold either hot or cold–sometimes both in the same machine–but I imagine that Jelly Coffee is only sold cold. (Georgia is also owned by Coca-Cola, oddly enough. Why don’t we have vending machines with small cans of good coffee all over the place?) read more

Thanks to the combined efforts of Richard and Rafael, I have several limited-edition Japanese beverages in the fridge. I’ll write a brief review of each as I consume them.

First up is Coca-Cola flavored with green tea:

This is kind of weird by American standards but makes some amount of sense in Japan. Green tea is both the national beverage of choice and seemingly the flavor of choice. Green tea ice cream is famous and not particularly uncommon in the US, but while in Japan I’ve had things like green tea donuts and green tea Kit-kats. Combining green tea and Coke is thus fairly obvious and it wouldn’t surprise me if this isn’t the first such product. read more

Bummer. Les Paul died today, at the ripe old age of 94. CNN’s obituary describes him as “one of the most important figures in recorded music” and I’d say that they’re right about that.

There’s a ramen shop in Japan (Nagoya, more specifically) where the ramen is dished up by robots:

How cool is that? More info here.

[Found on the Makezine site.]

The other day I inadvertently deleted some photos from an SD card before transferring them to the computer. (So I thought, anyway. More about that point later.) Since I knew that there is a plethora of utilities available for dealing with exactly this situation, I did a quick bit of googling and settled on a freebie called Restoration. It’s not terribly pretty to look at but it did the job. Not only did it recover the photos in question, it recovered a bunch of older photos–not that I needed them, but it was still interesting to see them retrieved. Restoration also works on regular hard drives and files; there’s nothing special about how it treats camera cards and photos. read more

Maddy and Eddie are growing like weeds and are still as rambunctious as ever. Last time we weighed them they were both over five pounds. Maddy tends to look larger than her brother because her fur is so much longer, but they weigh almost exactly the same. I just posted a dozen photos taken over the last couple of months here.

I’m going to make one of these before my next soldering session. It looks terribly handy and is obviously easy to build. I think one could make the same thing with a chunk of coat-hanger wire, the washers, and some bending.

[Found via the Makezine site]