Wow, O’Reilly’s Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks looks like super fun! Also, it’s got the first Internet-enabled kitchen appliances that actually make sense- a toaster that tells you about the weather, on your toast!

Okay, confession time: I’m dipping into self-help books again. The last foray was into the works of Albert Ellis, especially A Guide to Rational Living. This time it’s FlyLady‘s Sink Reflections. Interestingly enough (not really) they both touch on the same bad habits of thought that can keep a person in a non-productive cycle in life. Next up, Richard Wiseman‘s* The Luck Factor: changing your luck, changing your life, the four essential principles.

*Hey, it looks like the other work he’s done has more than once been featured in FP. He also did a show with science superstar Simon Singh performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival!

Religious political extremists the American Family Association are running another poll, possibly just to find out how badly tainted their mailing list got from that gay marriage poll a while back. Based on the fact that Kerry had something like 93% of the votes in the poll, I’m guessing they are mailing to a lot of folks who don’t agree with much of their agenda.

Gizmodo gets Cory Doctorow to empty his pockets and now I have gadget envy. I went purse shopping this morning to find something big, sturdy and butch to put all my toys in but was unable to find what I needed. I may have to grow my own…

Why read Shakespeare’s words when you can get a better idea of what’s happening in the play by reading updated language? If I even begin to enumerate the ways in which this misses the point, I’ll be here all day.

Knitter’s Review has recommended assorted ways to stash your yarn that sound alarmingly like ways to disguise another problem. On the plus side, yarn hoarding does not cause blackouts. As far as we know.

Los Angeles at Night, from space.

If you’re building your own threat-condition monitor, the folks in charge of making sure you don’t feel secure in your homeland have provided a couple of handy hooks: http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryCondition returns an XML element with an attribute describing the current level, and http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryImage provides an image for putting on your page, thus: <img src=”http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryImage”/> yields

The image defaults to large, but you can ask for it to be smaller, thus http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryImage?size=small:

A lovely analysis and opinion of US jobs ending up overseas, but days late for my snappy comeback to that guy I didn’t really feel like debating. The article also makes the unpopular points that
a. in a healthy economy there will still be unemployed people, usually around 5% and
b. the new jobs created as the labor market shifts will require people able to use and analyze information which requires some education and inclination, quite a lot more than was needed on the ole widget factory line.

As always, unpopular points lose out to shiny promises that can’t be met, especially in an election year.

In that blog-feedback loop that we all thrive on, Ursula’s post has caused me to find this on-line word checker. Sadly, since they make money on SMS interactions with the phone, they’re unlikely to WAP-enable the checker.