Writ of Mainprize

There is a neat little game at costlife.org called Ayit(*): The Cost of Life that is an interactive game in which you try to keep a family of 5 in Haiti healthy, wealthy and wise. The game teaches you a little about poverty and a little about survival in a a third world country. After playing it for several hours, I only managed to keep the family alive once, with only just enough money to send one person to school…
Definitely informative, and fun to play, but …

Yesterday, I turned on the TV to sort of watch the Ten Commandments — You know, the original with crazy NRA Charlton Heston? Anyways, it turned out that ABC was airing a new remake of the Ten Commandments. Tuning in part way through I wasn’t that interested in watching it, but I was confused enough to look up the ABC website to find out what this movie was.
Then I stumbled across a few websites about the variations in the Ten Commandments. There is a good entry in …

I’ve often wanted to try out solar power to offset electricity consumption, but prices and the power output of these systems makes it impractical. Recently, prices have dropped, solar panels have become more efficient and home “plug-and-play” kits are becoming available. For the most part, solar power is still in the realm of environmental enthusiasts and eco-hippies, but I think that it will become more and more mainstream in a few years. Here are a few interesting sites, some informative, some offering commecial products

Real Goods
“Products …

These days you need a password for just about everything. And for security each password should be different and hard to guess. This means that keeping track of website username password combinations is extremely difficult. One possibility is to use a substitution cipher that makes a simple easy to remember password, like “bank” and turn it into one that looks “hardened”. Nizo posted this some time ago at Slashdot for the entry Too Many Passwords
Two minor drawbacks: 1) Never lose the original cipher. 2) If …

I’ve been thinking about different ways of conveying reams of information in a more navigable manner, and I stumbled across an alternative search engine site, KartOO. Under the hood, the engine is a meta-search engine that uses other search engines. However, the neat thing about KartOO is the graphical display of information as a pseudo road-map with sites linked by categories. I probably won’t switch from Google just yet, but KartOO definitely has some cool ideas about how to convey information in a non-traditional fashion. …