Originally submitted at LIttle Tikes

Toys Made in the USA with US and Imported Parts.

The excitement never ends with this innovative, multi-station fun factory!

• Gears and gadgets,…

Sand&Water Fun Factory

Looks much cooler on the box

Pros: Sturdy

Cons: Boring, doesn’t work

Best Uses: Individual Play

Describe Yourself: Parent Of Two Or More Children

The sandbox looks pretty cool, but obviously nobody ever tested it out before deciding to sell it.

Even on day 1 the sprockets / spinny things / whatever never worked. Water and sand just pour over them and they never spin.

As a sandbox it isn’t horrible.

Oh, I almost forgot about the water part. Yeah, that sucks too. It leaks and we’ve basically been using ours as a sandbox on both sides for about a year or so now.

(legalese)

We thought we had a little angel when she first came home with us. She hardly ever cried, and she was hardly ever awake. She was the kind of baby a first-time-parent would hate to be up all night worrying about, but that a seasoned parent would know better than to care.

Recently, she has discovered what Rhett also discovered at a young age: For babies, it seems, sometimes crying a lot is just plain fun. Maybe she enjoy seeing the absolutely crazy things that her mommy and daddy attempt in order to placate her, and maybe she enjoys making each trick work only once – or occasionally making daddy think mommy is crazy by silencing herself immediately after he takes her from mommy, or to make her mommy think daddy is the devil by waking up and screaming the second mommy hands her to him. I’m not quite sure what it is, but she definitely seems to be enjoying herself.

I have been sporting an HTC Dream (aka T-mobile G1) for a week or so now. Overall, it is a pretty decent OS and a decent phone. I really like the hardware keyboard, because it is really easy to type stuff (like this blog post, for instance)

The G1 is locked down a bit by default, and that is annoying – but it was pretty easy to bypass that in the first release because of a pretty big bug that was left in place. A group of us have been hacking away at the phone ever since then, and having one of these early release phones that is hacked to keep root access will likely pay some pretty big dividends in the future.

One of the cooler aspects of Android is that the developers are really easy to get ahold of. A lot of them hang out on IRC and answer questions and give advice on how to develop for the platform… etc.

So far, one of the coolest programs is one that you can use to edit pictures on the phone (it is actually better than any program I have on my desktop machine for what it does)

read more | digg story

Here’s where to get it: http://www.alittlebitofnothingleft.net/snowfall/ – Enjoy!

read more | digg story

The hike up here is strenuous. The last few miles are definitely the hardest part of the hike. My butt hurts worse than a drunken sailor in san Francisco (they have uncomfortable bar stools over there)

There is another peak to the north of here that is slightly higher – up until 1970 this south peak was listed as the highest peak, but by then the trails already went up to here. If we really wanted to prolong this trip by a few hours, we could head over there, but I will save that trip for when I am actually in shape.

I’ll post some pictures later.

It’s hard to find a good Elvis wig, especially if you are looking for a non-traditional color like pink or baby blue. Luckily, a man in England has taken the time to design an Elvis wig you can knit up on your own. According to his website, “Knitted Elvis wigs are appearing across the world – from Wakefield allotments to the ‘Day Of Dada’ parade in New York City!” Since I don’t know what either of those are, that might explain why I have yet to encounter someone wearing one of these fine creations. Still, you might want to knit one up for yourself so that when they do hit their stride in the mainstream culture, you can proudly say that you were one of the first in your area to have one.

They are made of Cherry-flavored white chocolate, and are packaged in a suprisingly-addictive mini-size. (You can just keep eating them because “one more” isn’t very much…)

Other KitKat varieties

In doing background research for this post, we discovered that there are lots of exotic KitKat flavors. A long list of them is hosted at the wikipedia. Some of them are rather strange (Apple? (Japan) Blood Orange? (UK) Yubari Melon? (Japan)). Of course, the large variety of choices (Except for maybe the Green Tea flavored ones) make me want to move to Japan.

Better stock up

They had them in bags at our local Albertsons in an aisle with all of the other Valentine’s day candy. When the Valentine’s day stuff goes on sale, it would be wise to buy a truckload of these things in case some kind of war wipes out the factory that makes them before next year.

read more | digg story

I know all of you out there have been dieing for a bullet-proof jacket that is both trendy and protective. Nobody wants to go out in public and look like you are a member of a SWAT team – yet you still want some serious bullet-stopping power in case you get into the rough part of town (or a rapper’s Oscar-party).

Well, finally it is here. You can now get a Jean jacket that is bullet proof. They must have been working on this for nearly 20 years, because the style is straight out of the 1980′s. Sure, denim is back – but not this color denim. In a few years, I’m sure they’ll come up with some bulletproof hammer-pants to go with this getup.

[Via Engadget]

I don’t know why anyone would want to sell this – but the guy must have come up on some hard times to want to sell his “one of a kind” Alien Spacecraft Detector.

What is he going to do now when aliens are within 8-10 miles of his house and he has no way to detect them?

Many alien spacecraft enter the earths atmosphere every year, but few are seen or detected.

Here’s how it works:

• When a spacecraft achieves intergalactic space travel and hovers for extended periods of time, it produces a very high frequency noise that can not be detected by human ears.
• This device can pick up the frequency through its antenna.
• Once it is picked up the antenna, the power of a small AA battery and a magnet push the signal through a curled spring which spreads out the rate of transmission.
• Then the signal is sent to a quarter which contains nickel which slows down the speed of the frequency.
• The signal then travels to a small speaker that will start to hum.
• The speaker hums and you can hear it because the original frequency is lowered to pitch that the human ear can detect.

Someone working on a PhD in electrical engineering want to explain to me how “the power of a small AA battery and a magnet push the signal through a curled spring”?

[Via Way Out Auctions]