The Gadgets Page

I have received so many comments about my Bell Spinfit Calorie Speedometer asking me if I could email them the instructions because they lost their manual and their battery died. The Bell company’s website is worthless for instruction manuals, so I have scanned mine in. The most important page is below:

These are the secret codes that you have to program into the speedometer to tell it what size wheels you have. If you get the wrong code, you end up with the wrong mileage.

The rest of the important pages are here:

I hope these help you and you are able to reset your speedometer accurately. Good luck!!

(Thanks to those who posted helpful comments on the previous post.)

Update 06-27-06: A most grateful thank you to Ken Miller who emailed me this .pdf of the ENTIRE instruction manual.

• Bell Spinfit Calorie Speedometer Instruction Manual in .pdf

Along with the 25 Worst Tech Products I previously mentioned, PC World’s July 2006 issue also includes a list of 100 best products of the past year:

• PC World: 100 Best Products of the Year

As with the “worst” list, it’s a random assortment of hardware, software, and services. The top 10 include Intel’s Core Duo processor, AMD’s Athlon 64 Dual Core, Craigslist, the iPod Nano, Seagate’s 160GB Portable Hard Drive, Google Earth, Adobe Premiere Elements 2, the Canon EOS 30D, YouTube, and Apple’s Boot Camp.

Other highlights include Firefox, WordPress, Blogger, Google, and the iPod. Apparently the phrase “of the year” in the headline is far more flexible than I had imagined. Here’s the entire list of 100.

PC World has compiled a list of the 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time. Like all “25 this” or “100 that” lists, it’s highly subjective, and the selections are somewhat random, but it’s still amusing. They boldly gave the #1 position to AOL, but many of the other selections are products that are now just unpleasant memories. Here’s a sampling of my favorites:

• #4, Windows Millenium, is called “the worst version of Windows ever released.” Come on, it wasn’t half as bad as Windows 3.1.
• #7, Microsoft Bob. What was Microsoft thinking.
• #12, PointCast Network. This seems a bit unfair. PointCast was an application that let me quickly access a wide variety of news sources, updated whenever there was news. It bears a striking similarity to what I now use BlogLines for. Released in 1996, PointCast was just ahead of its time… and a bit ahead of the technology of the day.
• #15, Iomega Zip Drive. This device singlehandedly destroyed more of my valuable data than any other. I curse its vile memory.
• #20, CueCat. “Typing URLs in from magazines is so hard! If only people could hook a bulky device up to their serial port, install some drivers, and then scan a barcode instead! That would save so much time.”

[Read the entire list at PC World]

I am always searching for other methods for providing electrical power. It has nothing to do with conservation or saving the universe and everything to do with the fact that I grew up Jehovah’s Witness. With the constant threat of Armageddon, I felt like I needed to know how to provide my own necessities after the rest of the world was wiped out. I felt like it was my job to create “paradise on Earth.” It was not really the religion’s fault. I was a worrisome sort of kid.

Here are a couple of websites that tell you how to build your own wind turbine to provide power to your home sans electric company.

• DIY 1000 watt wind turbine

• Welcome to OTHERPOWER.COM

Considering that many cities’ power is provided by burning coal or natural gas, adding wind power to the equation just might be your way to conserve energy and our resources. Suddenly, the idea of being able to create a paradise on Earth is that much closer to reality.

Via: MAKE: Blog: DIY 1000 watt wind turbine

This is mounted on top of my house. It looks homemade, but the previous owner has no idea what it is. It looks like it’s trying to be a sattelite dish of some sort, but I can’t tell.

Do any of you know how I could test this thing to see what it is and if it works? It looks like a totally cool hack, but since I don’t know what it is, it’s going to end up being put in the garbage next time we go up on the roof.

William McKeen brags about his luddite ways and threatens that the Internet is going to ruin serendipity.

• Perspective: The endangered joy of serendipity

I realized half-way through reading his article that this fellow doesn’t use the Internet. Sure, he has logged on to CNN.com and probably gets his stock quotes online, but other than that, he hasn’t spent much time online.

He has never known the seredipitous joy of reading a weblog and finding a link to something totally weird and useful. He hasn’t even listened to the boring overplaylists that the radio has been cranking out lately. He hasn’t searched for interesting music online or known the joy of finding a good band via Pandora or iTunes. I was about to smack this luddite down until I realized that Steven Berlin Johnson had done it for me.

• stevenberlinjohnson.com: Can We Please Kill This Meme Now

Every time I see someone waxing poetic about how much better reading a newspaper was, or going to a library was, or listening to the radio was, I KNOW for a fact that said person has not learned how to use the Internet properly. Get past the “I Suck At This” phase before you go reminiscing about how much better the past was.

We’ve just come back from a wonderful trip to San Diego. While we’re there, we always visit the IKEA store. I cannot describe the wonderfulness that is IKEA, and apparently, their web designers can’t either.

• IKEA | home | IKEA, furniture, kitchens, beds, chairs, sofas, decorations

We saw an excellent kitchen table that can easily seat six people when opened and folds into a small, two-person table. It is the perfect table for a small apartment where you might want to the flexibility of entertaining, but most of the time, you just need to eat breakfast.

Unfortunately, I can’t find this table on their website. They have many “folding” tables, but the descriptions are minimalist and the pictures make all the tables look the same.

Sadly, I’ll have to wait until IKEA opens a store in SLC (Spring 2007) or until we visit San Diego again and are willing to haul it back home across three states.

For people with limited space, this bed changes your bedroom into an office. It’s a full bed with a simplistic mattress, so if you have trouble sleeping, this might not be for you. If you can sleep anywhere, however, this desk is perfect for small living areas. Euro Flying Beds has a whole selection of hidden beds at their website.

• Euro FlyingBeds – Euro Desk Bed

I am always looking for ways to maximize the utilization of our space. I find it hard to justify an entire room when I’m mostly unconscious in it. The price is over three thousand dollars for this bed, so you’re paying for design more than materials. If you’re handy, however, they have conveniently included the specifications. You would probably receive it in a box and have to put it together yourself anyway, so you might as well use this as a blue-print to hack your own Euro Desk Bed.

Via: The Computer Bed @ Alice Hill’s Real Tech News – Independent Tech

When Mike and I participated in our church’s Clean Up day, we were shocked to find that the dry erase boards were damaged and unusable and had been for years.

We were able to get them clean, but they are so scratched that they will stain again when written on. Here is an option that we can use to fix them.

• DIYDryEraseBoard – ElephantStaircase

Our church put a low priority on the dry erase boards, but they have haunted me since the church clean up day. I’m glad to know that we could fix them up for only a few dollars in white paint and acrylic plastic.

This guy may appear to be a little portly, but in actuality, he’s just sneaking twelve dollars worth of soda into the movie with the aid of The Beer Belly.

• The Beerbelly

This gadget seems completely useless to me. If you really want to sneak beer or soda into a movie or football game, there are the CamelBak products that do the same thing without making you look like you’ve “let yourself go.” It’s much easier to sneak in under a jacket and it’s half the price.

Via: PixMedial — Design & Geek » Porta Cerveza