Flecks of… Gray?

Wisegeek has made a nice page showing in pictures how much of a certain food you can eat to get 200 calories out of it. Who knew peppers were that calorie free?!

This is so exciting!! Me wants one.

If you’ve wanted to make the Indian Mulligatawny soup as cooked by the NY chef who was featured as the Soup Nazi in a Seinfeld episode you can get it and many more at TopSecretRecipes.

Some other ones that I thought were neat were the Soup Nazi’s Cream of Sweet Potato, Soup Nazi’s Mexican Chili Chicken, Orange Julius’ famous OJ, Kraft’s Thousand Island Dressing, Heinz Ketchup, Heinz 57 sauce and Bailey’s Irish Cream.

I spent a chunk of the holidays figuring out how to install portable apps onto my newly acquired USB stick and found PortableApps.com. This site has great free software to turn your USB stick into a traveling companion you won’t want to do without!

On my stick, I had installed Firefox, ThunderBird, VLC and the Sudoku to round things out. If you have a U3 stick from SanDisk, I’d recommend keeping that on so you can have Skype and a little bit of a friendlier interface.

So, if you have a portable USB stick (preferably USB 2.0) this can be a great use for it – I was checking my email and browsing with my favorites on my Dad’s computer – so sweet!

Consumer Reports has issued a warning to parents who use safety seats saying that most will fail in front or side collisions over 30 mph.

When we crash-tested infant car seats at the higher speeds vehicles routinely withstand, most failed disastrously. The car seats twisted violently or flew off their bases, in one case hurling a test dummy 30 feet across the lab.

One of my favorite sites, Freakonomics had a follow up to that reports saying that the regular lap belts were as safe as the child seats for kids older than 2.

But then the engineer whose job it was to strap in the dummies and run the tests nearly refused to participate. He told me that it was idiotic — that of course the car seat would perform well, and that if we put one of his expensive dummies in a crash with only a lap and shoulder belt, the dummy would literally be severed in the crash test.

He was wrong, it turned out. The dummy came out of the crash without serious injury. As did the dummy in the car seat. But as Consumer Reports showed, when you put a car seat through a more realistic crash scenario, the results can be horrific.

One thing I always thought would be a natural fit for an iPod would be to have lyrics pop up on your screen as the song you’re listening to plays. Seems like Gracenote was also thinking of this and has signed a deal with the major music labels to bring this to your MP3′s (Gracenote are the people who provide the CDDB data which imports all the names of your songs when you enter a CD into your tray). I’m excited for this to happen – karaoke parties galore!

Over this Christmas and New Years when I was away from home but still wanted access to all of my documents and stuff on my home computer I decided to give Hamachi a go.

The verdict? I love it!

I have seemlessly been connected to my home network for the entire holidays which enabled me access to all of my files, to stream all of my iTunes files and even to Remote Desktop into my home computer so it is like I am actually there. The setup for this application is super simple and the security seems to be pretty tight. So, if you have to be away from your home computer for a time and want access, check this app out.

Quote of the season from Trace: I wish my name was Thorfinn (Karlsefni)

I’ve always found this amusing that you can reload a gun in videogames by shooting offscreen and now there’s a comic to poke fun at this too. They also have a funny comic which pokes fun at Canada, Alec Baldwin and the Matrix all at once. xkcd seems to be a poor mans Penny Arcade.