Awesome.

(via jeniopia)

I have to say I usually am pretty skeptical about advice I get from spammy mass emails, but owing to how much I HATE cleaning the bathroom, I decided to give take heed of this one email, which extolled the many virtues and uses of good old hydrogen peroxide - which you can still get at the pharmacy or grocery store for about a buck a bottle.

So I just cleaned the bathroom from top to bottom, using nothing but a 50-50 mixture of hydrogen peroxide and water (I bought a generic refillable spray bottle for $2.99), and it was pretty great!  It lifted the bath-tub ring about as well as Vim (etc.), and I was left with a clean bathroom, no fume-related headache, and no post-Earth-Day guilt about rinsing a cocktail of Vim, Mr Clean and Comet down the tubes.  Plus I’ll save significant $$ over the long haul.  Awesome!

Here for your edification is text from the (rather effusive) email that inspired the change (and no, I have not tried ALL of these applications…):

~~~~~~~

I would like to tell you of the benefits of that plain little old bottle of 3% peroxide you can get for under $1.00 at any drug store. What does bleach cost?

My husband has been in the medical field for over 36 years, and most doctors don’t tell you about peroxide.

Have you ever smelled bleach in a doctor’s office?    NO!!!

Why?    Because it smells, and it is not healthy!    Ask the nurses who work in the doctor’s offices, and ask them if they use bleach at home.    They are wiser and know better!

Did you also know bleach was invented in the late 40’s?

It’s chlorine, folks!    And it was used to kill our troops.

Peroxide was invented during WWI in the 20’s.    It was used to save and help cleanse the needs of our troops and hospitals. Please think about this:

1. Take one capful (the little white cap that comes with the bottle) and hold in your mouth for 10 seconds daily, then spit it out. (I do it when I bathe.) No more canker sores, and your teeth will be whiter without expensive pastes. Use it instead of mouthwash.

2. Let your toothbrushes soak in a cup of peroxide to keep them free of germs.

3 Clean your counters and table tops with peroxide to kill germs and leave a fresh smell. Simply put a little on your dishrag when you wipe, or spray it on the counters.

4. After rinsing off your wooden cutting board, pour peroxide on it to kill salmonella and other bacteria.

5. I had fungus on my feet for years until I sprayed a 50/50 mixture of peroxide and water on them (especially the toes) every night and let dry.

6. Soak any infections or cuts in 3% peroxide for five to ten minutes several times a day. My husband has seen gangrene that would not heal with any medicine but was healed by soaking in peroxide.

7. Fill a spray bottle with a 50/50 mixture of peroxide and water and keep it in every bathroom to disinfect without harming your septic system like bleach or most other disinfectants will.

8. Tilt your head back and spray into nostrils with your 50/50 mixture whenever you have a cold, plugged sinus. It will bubble and help to kill the bacteria. Hold for a few seconds, and then blow your nose into a tissue.

9. If you have a terrible toothache and cannot get to a dentist right away, put a capful of 3% peroxide into your mouth and hold it for ten seconds several times a day. The pain will lessen greatly.

10. And of course, if you like a natural look to your hair, spray the 50/50 solution on your wet hair after a shower and comb it through. You will not have the peroxide-burnt blonde hair like the hair dye packages but more natural highlights if your hair is a light brown, faddish, or dirty blonde. It also lightens gradually, so it’s not a drastic change.

11. Put half a bottle of peroxide in your bath to help rid boils, fungus, or other skin infections.

12. You can also add a cup of peroxide instead of bleach to a load of whites in your laundry to whiten them. If there is blood on clothing, pour it directly on the soiled spot. Let it sit for a minute, then rub it and rinse with cold water. Repeat if necessary.

13. I use peroxide to clean my mirrors. There is no smearing, which is why I love it so much for this.

14. Another place it’s great is in the bathroom, if someone has been careless & has peed on the floor around the toilet and it’s begun to smell of urine.  Just put some peroxide in a spray bottle and spray.  In the blink of any eye, all the smell will be gone and the bacteria eliminated!
 
I could go on and on.  It is a little brown bottle no home should be without!
With prices of most necessities rising, I’m glad there’s a way to save tons of money in such a simple, healthy manner! ’
This information really woke me up.   
I hope you gain something from it, too.
 

Pass it on!   

We don’t need ever more products from the “Industry” for their trumped up “War on Scary Germs”.

Simple Oxygen in the form of bridgeable Hydrogen Peroxide does it all -  Effectively and SAFELY

- GM Irving Chernev

jeniopia:

First person Tetris! I found this via boingboing. Praise Jebus for boingboing. Apparently it has a night mode, too, but the day mode is oodles of fun for the whole family.

http://www.firstpersontetris.com/

Macgritte.  Brilliant!

Orig. from http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/29/the-magritte-laser-etched-apple/

I just downloaded the new version - available now in the App Store.  Here’s what’s new:

- New “Database” feature: download and view PGN files!!

- Replaced the computer’s difficulty levels with ratings:  play against any Elo rating from 500 to 2500

- Replaced the Statistics feature with new “Profile” feature: play against the computer for rating points, and track your progress with the rating history feature

The new stuff looks fantastic (although I guess I’ll never achieve my goal of beating Level 8 now…).

Most vital I guess is the database feature, adding a capability that until now was exclusive to Chess Genius (which hasn’t seen an update in some time now).  You can upload PGN from an entered Internet address, and the game includes a small Bobby Fischer database file for you to try out.  You can view the PGN before loading it into the game screen as well.  If you want to look at other games, there are already bookmarks to a “Gary Kasparov collection” and a “World Championship 2008” file (hosted on tchess.com) as well.  Nice!

I like the new ratings and profile-related features too!

The one drawback I can see so far:  the Resign and Offer Draw options (which were formerly very well hidden in the Statistics section of all places) now seem to have disappeared entirely.  Maybe they’ll make a come-back sometime soon.  All in all, this seems like a small price to pay for all the new goodies.  :-)  [Update:  Offer Draw and Resign are still there (and easier to find actually), but they are exclusive to rated games.  (Unrated games don’t affect your profile statistics at all.)  I guess that works.  :)]

See the complete feature list here.

tChess Pro has long been one of my preferred chess apps—which maybe isn’t such a big deal because I have five or six that I truly love.  But still, it’s a good one.  It’s slick looking and obviously comes from an author/developer who cares about chess and wants to help people improve their game.

It’s got a unique system for showing main-line options from book openings as you play, and you can even pick your desired opening before you start.  It’s also the only app on the market that allows you to play blindfold chess.  The UI is deceptively simple but benefits from several zones that respond to taps or swipes and provide access to some cool and useful features.  The analysis view is nicely implemented.

As of today, there’s a new version out that adds the following:

- Captured Pieces display

Always a plus!

- Added “Copy & Paste Game” feature

This is pretty cool.  Opens a text window that includes the PGN for the current game (if any), so you can copy it to your clipboard.  You can also paste PGN into this window to load a game direct from text.

- Added “Flip Top Pieces” feature

A bit of a strange one.  Flips the top pieces upside down.  I guess the idea is that you can play a two-(human) player game without having to pass the phone or flip the board every time:  Two players just sit on opposite sides of the phone and learn to deal with the fact that the ‘bad guys’ are always upside down from your point of view.  It’s creative, anyway.  :)

This shot highlights the flip feature and the new display of captured pieces:

- Corrected toolbar icon size in OS 3.x

- Improved engine strength by 30 Elo

Lean & mean, and $7.99..  Very much in active development, this one’s a keeper.

Cheers!

Read more:  tChess Pro features

I was in the book store the other day and I wandered over to see if there were any interesting new chess books in the Games section.  There weren’t, but they had a shiny new set of manuals for D&D (4th edition, I think it was), and I spent about twenty minutes thumbing through the Dungeon Master’s Guide, the Player’s Handbook, and my old favourite:  the Monster Manual.

Back in the day (read “the early 80s”), I was nuts about AD&D (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, as it was called).  I went to a handful of SF/fantasy conventions—pretty much exclusively to play in and host single-session adventures, and among my own regular group, I was the Dungeon Master.  Gosh, I spent hours and days constructing maps on graph paper in school, which worked out really well because, hey, I looked like I was working—and that was better than the usual dead-eyed stare of a chronic day-dreamer.

The game was a great creative outlet and a powerful venue for escapism; for four or five of us, D&D had the power to collapse entire weekends in ways that not even video game consoles have managed since.

Then I went to university, got in with a different crowd, and eventually started to cultivate a healthy obsession with chess.  Even as my interest in D&D started to wane back then, a contributing factor was the appearance of some game materials that seemed to me to be… “unpure” somehow.  Character classes started multiplying.  Monster-Manual-type books kept coming out that defined an ever larger and increasingly strange menagerie of nasties. (“What the hell is an aurumvorax!?  Should we retreat or throw rocks at it??”, etc.)

Ultimately, there was even a book that gave stats for the gods & goddesses of different pantheons—in case, I suppose, your 87th level Paladin-Ranger-Druid decided to go kick Thor’s butt because a thunder-clap woke him from a really excellent dream one stormy night…

Whatever.  For me, there is nothing better than when a modest party of adventurous mortals stumbles into a forgotten graveyard, concealed by swamp, and then gets attacked by a gang of mossy zombies.  Good times!

Anyway, as I poured over the newer guide-books the other day, I found that my nostalgia for the goofy artwork and simple fantasy genres of the 70s and 80s version (back when the brand was owned by TSR) waxing pretty large.  In those innocent times, people were happy to rip off Tolkien and Lewis very directly and without a trace of irony.  The zine-like artwork seemed somehow to illustrate that the ability to create worlds was open to all—and more dependent on imagination than talent.

By contrast, the new edition actually left me a bit cold.  I don’t even know why, fully—but I think it’s got to do with the spirit of the game.  The artwork’s too glossy, maybe—and perhaps with too much emphasis on urban intrigue.  The monsters?… well, you can still find most of the classics, but for me, the extra-dimensional cyborg aliens are not really a welcome touch.  The whole thing seems like an attempt to retro-fit a dark, ironic version of World of Warcraft into a game you can play with dice.

Maybe it’s simply that the current offering marks such a dramatic departure from the game I fell in love with, waaaay back when there were probably still a few real dragons lurking about.  ;-)

Anyway, there’s no saving throw against time and progress, and I don’t really mean to criticize the current version.  (With my total lack of real experience of the new game, I’ve certainly got no right.)  But the new books certainly gave me a great excuse to pause and reflect (for the first time in a long time) on one of the most important—even formative—pastimes of my late childhood.

I only wish I’d held on to all that stuff.  Nowadays, I don’t have a 20-sided die to my name—and with current commitments (to chess, for one), I don’t think I’ve got the time (or the cash!) to start over with the new version.  Maybe my son can introduce me to 6th or 7th edition in a decade or so…

Anybody out there old enough and faithful enough to have transitioned from the AD&D of yesteryear to the D&D of today?  I’d love you hear your thoughts.

Cheers!