Want to try something different on your Tassimo beverage system? Try making a mocha latte or mocha cappuccino. Here’s what to do:

You’ll need:

• An espresso T-Disc
• A hot chocolate T-Disc
• Either a latte or cappuccino creamer T-Disc

1. You’ll need a large mug for this - one of those coffee-house sized mugs will do, or a tall travel mug
2. Brew the espresso disc. When completed, remove the disc and carefully (the pod will be HOT) cut away the barcode.
3. Carefully place the barcode over the scanner window, then insert the chocolate T-disc. If you see all 4 lights flashing, the barcode isn’t properly aligned. Once you’ve got the “auto” light, brew the chocolate.
4. Learned a better way - just brew the chocolate pod normally, but watch the product coming out. When the water goes clear, press the button again to stop the water
5. Insert the creamer disc. While the water is heating, you may want to stir the espresso and chocolate together to make sure they mix well
6. Enjoy!

All this does is make the chocolate disc brew using less water, so you don’t dilute out the chocolate or the espresso.

I’ve been having a rather frustrating experience with Magellan GPS (Thales Navigation) as of late. Last Christmas, Marcie got me one of their SporTrak Color hand-held GPS units. I played around with it a little bit over the winter, took it on a couple of flights with me, etc, but I never really dug into the advanced features the unit is supposed to have in addition to GPS functionality (electronic 3-axis compass, temperature/barometric pressure logging, etc).

(more after jump)
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Not only from 34,000 feet…but currently over the southern tip of Greenland. I was able to come into a free pass to Lufthansa’s FlyNet service, so I’ve got high-speed internet access as I’m flying back home from Germany. It’s definitely a good way to make a 9:40 flight go a little faster.

Had a good two weeks in Germany. I think I got a few decent pictures which will be up on the gallery sometime soon, got to see some great sights, ate some good food, made some new friends, and even got a little work done.

The only problem with being online right now is that there’s really no one online to chat with at the moment - it’s just now getting to be Saturday morning back in Chicago. So, it’s just me and the friendly skies…

Just an interesting article on the development and the guts of the best-selling MP3 player in the world.

If you run your own blog, you’ve probably had to deal with comment spam. Even here on my own lightly-visited site (500 MB/month typical transfers), I’m getting 5-10 per day. Seriously, who are these people fooling? You’re putting ads up for absolute crap on the sites of people who are least likely to visit your site and buy counterfeit Viagra (V!@g.a.r.a), play texas hold-em, or buy the Paris Hilton video. Heck, I’ve even made fun of the spammers publicly for trying to do dumb things. Too bad credit card companies don’t provide a list of fake credit card numbers you can use on spammers that will process through the credit card system, but they don’t get their money. I’d love to screw a few of them out of a few grand. Merry Christmas!

Fortunately, WordPress does have a pretty good system for moderating comments. If you put a link in the comment, it automatically goes to moderation. Then, if it has a banned word, IP address, etc., it gets automatically /dev/null’d.

This is just a test of if I can post to the weblog via my PocketPC. I’m actually connected to the net via my mobile phone. Cool, huh?

After watching that cheesy “10.5″ mini-series on NBC this weekend, I came across this website dedicated to the physics of movies:

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics

Movie physics are of course not to be confused with the cartoon rules of physics I’ve blogged about previously.

Movies that get “good physics” reviews? Road to Perdition, Seven Years in Tibet. Movies that suck? Well, Star Wars Episode 1, Armageddon (I know Marcie, you still like it ). I’m adding 10.5 to the list.

Came across this interesting article about mastering DVDs over at the NY Times. It’s about a company that’s doing even higher-quality remasters of classic movies (including a bunch of the 007 movies!). Basically, the resolution they’re scanning in fil negatives at is 4x higher than what current DVD mastering uses, and ever 4x higher than the resolution of 1080i HDTV sets.

When I was a kid, I’d play video games at a friend’s, since my parents wouldn’t get me a Nintendo. When we’d play for hours, our thumbs would get sore, a condition we called “Mario-itis” (yep, I was a geek back then, too).

Turns out that maybe Mom and Dad should’ve gotten me one:

Video Games Enhance Surgical Skills

All those years on the couch playing Nintendo and PlayStation appear to be paying off for surgeons. Researchers found that doctors who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made about 37 percent fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery and performed the task 27 percent faster than their counterparts who did not play video games.

Buy your kids a video game, and they might become doctors one day. If you don’t, they go on to do despicable things like food engineering

I came across this collection of bits and pieces while browsing over lunch today:

Blog Tips Archives

Part of tip 15 - “get involved in other forums” is how I get something like 80% of my traffic, looking at my logs (the rest is friends and family). Between iPod-related stuff, Wordpress (the software behind this blog) and a few others, I get a lot of inbound traffic, just from a simple link like this: Ben’s Weblog

The other important one to me is having good content (in tip #11) and design. I don’t claim that every post has deep analysis or anything - sometimes I just see a funny article and want to pass it on. I’ve had over 1000 visitors to my iPod car install article, which is a pretty good example of how having good content will attract traffic.

Here’s the files to allow the use of BTControl with MC9:

mediacenter.ini
mcratings.ini

Enjoy!

I added a new feature to the blog so that recent Google queries that led to this site are shown over on the right-hand bar. Click on more… for the gory details.

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Hey, check it out - I’m #1 on a Google search!

Google search for “Honda Civic iPod Install”

Hey, someone realized that a decent GPS navigation system doesn’t need to cost you $1000…

The iQue (nytimes.com free registration required)

Just take a PalmOS device, load it up with GPS maps (and provide detailed ones you can load into memory with gas stations, restaurants, etc), and you’re set.

I don’t travel enough to unfamiliar places to even come close to justifying dropping $500-600 on this (especially considering I’ve got MS Pocket Streets on my iPAQ), but still, it’s a pretty darn clever idea.

I have a wonderful girlfriend - she bought me an iPod this past week! So, I’ve been loading it up with a whole bunch of my CDs. If I’ve listened to any track on the disc or even thought about it in the past year, it’s going in there. I’ve got 893 songs (~4.8GB) loaded up so far, with more to come.

Oh, and my thumbs-down of the week goes to Train for loading Kazaa up with fake versions of your songs. I’ve got the CD, and I wanted to download the tracks instead of rip and encode them to MP3. Fortunately, I figured out the way around it.

And, a friendly reminder from the RIAA…

My response…let’s all be Commies, then!

Ok…now the permalinks are a little more friendly to your neighborhood search engine. Enjoy!

Just had to do a little surgery to my blog - something somewhere got hosed, and the post author name was never showing up. Not that it’s a huge deal (since I’m the only one ever posting to this thing), but whatever got hosed was in the guts of WordPress - because I couldn’t edit my profile, either.

I subscribe to the Windows credo of software repair - “When in doubt, reinstall”. Fortunately, WordPress is easier to re-do than say…WinXP.

Would it be too much to make it into the index after a month? Pretty please?

Hey, looks like some people besides my dad and Marcie are viewing the site now. So, if you’re poking around here, I’ve got a favor - if anything on the page looks weird (ie, overlapping), please leave a comment on this post. Be sure to throw in your browser (netscape, mozilla, IE 4/5/6, opera, etc.) as well as screen resolution.

If you see the content section (which you’re looking at right now) overlapping that menu off to your right, just make your window wider - it’s supposed to do that if you’ve got your screen too narrow.