Coffee Klatch

Thanks to WikiHow, I’ve got another cool thing to share–How to Make a Cloud in a Bottle. It’s very easy and only requires a clear plastic 2-liter bottle, some warm water, and a match!

1. Fill a bottle with just enough warm water to cover the bottom.
2. Light a match and let it burn for a few seconds.
3. Blow the match out and immediately place the head of the match into the bottle. Let the smoke from the match fill the bottle. After a few seconds, the smoke will seem to disappear.
4. Screw the cap onto the bottle. Try not to let any of the smoke or air escape.
5. Squeeze the sides of the bottle hard 6 or 7 times. Wait a few seconds, and squeeze the bottle again, but hold the squeeze for a few seconds and quickly release the squeeze.
6. Look at the formation of fog in the bottle and there’s your very own cloud!

That’s the process in a nutshell, but be sure to visit the site (http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Cloud-in-a-Bottle) so you can read how it works and tips on making it more successful.

Have you ever tried to turn a styrofoam inside out? It’s a very hard thing to do without cracking the cup. It’s especially hard when you get to the rim of the cup. It’s extra thick at the lip to make it more stable for drinking.

Anyway, today I finally got it! Granted, the final edge of the cup had some little cracks, but it was totally inside out!

Give it a try yourself. It’s not as easy as you think. And you’ll get almost all the way to the end, and then the edge will split and you’ll have to start all over.

Still, it’s something to do. Especially if you drink coffee during Sunday Morning Bible Class.

Are you into R/C? (Remote-controlled vehicles) Would you be interested in a flying R/C vehicle that is safe for indoors and is tough enough to endure most crashes?

Enter the Micro R/C Helicopter from ThinkGeek.com!

What a cool gift! (hint hint) It comes pre-assembled and can be flying in 5 minutes. It’s small and made for indoors. And there are two main rotors on top of the helicopter, revolving in opposite directions, so the torques cancel each other out and the helicopter is MUCH easier to control. What a great idea!

Plus, it comes with a wall-charger that gives the helicopter 15 minutes of flight per charge. I’m adding this helicopter to my wishlist. Sure it’s not exactly designed to be utilitarian or have a useful purpose, but that’s the way toys are! Like chocolate.

But, then, ThinkGeek is always coming out with great ideas. If you know anyone who’s into gadgets, technology stuff, computers, or just geekdom in general, this is a great place to shop for them.

Have you ever seen an egg inside a bottle? I found out how to do that, thanks to WikiHow. Here’s the quick and dirty version.

Peel a hard-boiled egg. Take a glass bottle and stand it up. Drop three lit matches into the bottle at the same time and immediately set the egg (big end down) on the bottle. The matches will consume the oxygen in the bottle, creating a vacuum and sucking the egg into the bottle.

Voila!

For more details and tips, visit WikiHow’s “How to Make an Egg Go Through a Bottle” page.

Google has a cool new Quest for you to solve. It’s based on the Da Vinci Code, accompanying the imminent premiere of the movie, which opens May 19. There are 24 puzzles for you to solve and if you solve them all you get entered for a chance to win a trip to New York, Paris, London, or Rome!

It runs from April 17 to May 11, so you’d better get going on it! They are adding one puzzle per day (four so far, as of today, April 20), and they’re using Google’s customized home page, so if you’re already using that, you’ll see the Quest section on your Google page every day.

Visit The Da Vinci Code Quest on Google to get started.

One of the oldest and largest distributed computing efforts today is SETI@home. Distributed computing means using the power of thousands of personal computers to process data for a specific project, usually when those computers are otherwise idle. SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), through the SETI Institute, attempts to “explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe.”

The SETI@home project, with the resources of the University of California at Berkeley, is “a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.” You can adjust your preferences so that the program uses your computer as much or as little as you want. The default setting is to run when your computer is idle, meaning when the computer isn’t really being used for anything else.

Why would you want to do this?

1. It helps further research by processing data.
2. Your computer’s not doing anything else anyway.
3. It allows you to be part of a gigantic group project.
4. And it makes a cool screensaver!

The initial file is only about 10MB and you’ll need about 20MB of disk space and 64MB of RAM, both of which are pretty minimal.

So give it a try! It’s free and fun (many of you readers may already have tried it at some point–it HAS been running since 1999). If you want to learn more about the project visit their About page. If you just want to get started, visit their Main page and follow the instructions in the bottom left. It’s not hard to set up, since there are only 2 steps, one of which is reading their rules and policies.

Oh, and if you try it out, be sure to Join My Team! They keep stats and kind of have a little competition between groups of people that are participating. To that end, I’ve set up a team for readers of my blog to join. It’s called Swashbucklers. Just visit the team page and click “Join” to be a part of our team and start racking up points. We can raise our team higher in the stats and even “compete” within the team. Just for pfun, of course!

While it’s been popular in Asia for quite a while, this game is just catching in the U.S. in the last year or so, even now beginning to appear in newspapers along with the other puzzles. It’s called Sudoku (or Soduku or Sodoku) and is a crossword-style puzzle that involves single-digit numbers. Basically you just have to put all the numbers in the right places. The trick is that the digits 1-9 appear only once in each little box, as well as each row and each column.

The difficulty level is based on how many numbers you’re given to start with and where they’re located. Most of the time, you don’t have to do too much second-guessing, like in chess, where you think, “If I put this number there, what will that affect?” That’s usually only in the most difficult puzzles. Instead, it’s mostly a matter of figuring out one number at a time, based upon other occurences of that digit in the neighboring rows and columns.

Example: if you look at the picture I’ve included, you’ll be able to figure out that, in the left middle box, a 3 could logically be placed in the bottom right corner. That’s about it. The rest is continuing on until the whole puzzle is solved.

And, yes, I do have a favorite website for doing these puzzles. It’s Soduku Online. The thing I like is that the interface is easy to work with and they track your score, so as you solve puzzles, you go up in the rankings. Easy puzzles are 1 pt, medium are 2, hard are 4 and “insane” are 8.

This is a good game for sharpening your critical thinking and logic skills without requiring an extensive vocabulary. If you like this kind of thing at all, visit Soduku Online and play their first Easy puzzle. You’ll see why it’s catching on all over the world. Then, once you’re hooked, keep solving your puzzles there and see how high you can get in the rankings! I currently have a score of 89, having solved a total of 47 puzzles. I’m ranked 395 out of 12,847 players. If you can get in the top 100, your name will show up on everyone else’s score pages, since they keep the Top 100 list visible.

So give it a try and look for me on the top 100 list soon!
Just watch your spelling, because, technically, in spite of the variety of spellings you’ll find online, Soduku is a bacterial disease related to “Rat Bite Fever.”
Current music: Durufle: Requiem & Motets on Gregorian Themes

Need to kill a few minutes? Looking for a new addiction? I’ve got just the thing: Yahoo! Games.

They have a TON of Java-based games. Some can be downloaded, some can be played online. Some are by yourself, some can be played against others. You can even play tournaments and have your games played added to your Yahoo! profile. Whatever kind of game you’re into, they’ve got that type: card games, board games, puzzle games, word games, arcade games, and ‘other’ games.

My favorite: Text Twist

It’s been around for quite a while, like Yahoo! Games has been, but it’s still one of my favorites. Quick to learn, fun to play, and rather addicting. You’ve got two minutes and six letters that you have to scramble to make words. The nice part is that they’ve boxes for each possible word, from 3 to 6 letters in length, so you know what to shoot for. And you have to figure out the 6-letter word if you want to continue to the next round. If you try it out, be sure to type your words rather than clicking on the individual letters. It’s much faster. If you like Scrabble-kinds of games, you’ll enjoy this one. Check it out!

I‘ve been rather quiet the last couple of days because I’ve been playing a new game that I just picked up: Civilization III. It’s very cool and very much expanded from the first couple of versions of this game.

One of the cool things is that there are over 30 civilizations to choose from now, including such unusual ones as Iroquois, Carthaginian, and Zulu. Each type has its own specializations and emphases, so there are all kinds of dynamics here.

Also, you can win by accomplishing one of many feats. It’s not just military domination. You can win the space race, win a diplomatic triumph by getting elected Secretary-General of the United Nations, win a cultural victory by building a culture that’s the envy of all the other civilizations, eliminating all the other “kings,” elimination (if you lose ANY city, you’re out), capture the princess (flag), and reverse capture the flag (where you have to take things someplace, like throwing an appeasing offering into a volcano). You can choose any or all of these options, along with other features, or you can have everything be random.

The Conquests are part of an expansion pack, which you can easily get when you buy the “Sid Meier’s Civilization III COMPLETE” set. These Conquests are historically based, like the Rise (or Fall) of Rome, cleaning up after Charlemagne’s death, or even a Mesoamerican game where you try to withstand the coming of the Conquistadores.

There are lots of little improvements that make this game better than the previous versions, but you’ll have to check it out for yourself if you’re new to this game.

Very fun, very addictive, lots of variety and replay value! Especially when you include the ability to play with others over the Internet. And with three discs (the original, Play The World, and Conquests), it’s a great deal. You can get Civilization III COMPLETE at Amazon, Best Buy, etc., for under $30. Read the reviews for more information on the game.

If you’ve read any of my posts about BlogThings, you’ll know that I like to take the same tests a couple of times, modifying my answers when it was a close call between two of them. Today it’s about what painter should do your portrait, and I came up with these two. (And it was really no surprise to me.)

Who Should Paint You: Alfred Gockel

All American yet funky, you inspire an artist’s imagination And while not everyone will understand your portrait, you will!

Who Should Paint You: Salvador Dali

You’re a complex, intense creature who displays many layers. There’s no way a traditional portrait could ever capture you!