Valentine’s Day is less than 24 hours away! What are you doing to celebrate? For me, it’s my birthday, so I have an odd relationship with the holiday, but that doesn’t mean I can’t engage in a little Valentine’s Day celebration.
Over the next 12 hours I be posting info to help make your Valentine’s Day extra special. Join me and share the love with those who need a little bit more!
As the shipping window begins to close on this holiday season, and after 115 different items, our 2012 Gift Guide comes to an end. I hope you have found my suggestions useful, practical and enjoyable and hope you have found gifts for your friends, family and yourself. Some of these items might be available locally or can be downloaded, so you still have some gifting time left.
You can find a complete list of all the gift guide items at the end of this message.
Books by Douglas E. Welch
My ebooks, can be “gifted” directly from Amazon.com and/or immediately downloaded to a eReader you might also be giving. I hope you’ll consider these book as a gift to your garden/careerbuilder/social media friends and family.
Cookbooks
All the recipes for my Annual Christmas Cookie Party are now available in these FREE cookbooks – available on your iPad or computer!
Video from Douglas
My video work has been growing over the last year and you can find all of my videos on my blogs and YouTube Channel. Subscribe to that channel, or the podcasts, to see each new video automatically.
I am transitioning away from my computer consulting work and focusing more the blogs and podcasts, so you should be seeing more great content, on a more regular schedule, than ever before. I hope you will join me in the coming year. I would love to hear what you think about anything you see here.
My son got me started with Minescraft about a year ago and I am definitely hooked! I am NOT a big gamer in any way, but the sandbox metaphor of Minecraft — doing whatever interests you most — building whatever you like — keeps me going and always provides something new to do. I even went so far as to set up a multiplayer server here at the house where my son and I, and some select friends can play in our own little world.
You can download the client software and play in single player mode to try things out, but at just a little over $26, Minecraft is an inexpensive way to have a lot of fun with your computer — in your own little world!
Taking a walk on the geekier side of tech today. The Arduino is a small, some are even tiny, computer that you can use to build and operate fun, geeky and sometimes even useful creations. The simple board has tons of inputs and outputs which you can connect to a variety of other devices and then write programs to read data in and send controls out. It is hard to describe an Arduino except to say that it is possibility in the form of a small computer. You can check out loads of cool projects people are doing with the Arduino on the web.
A friend of mine with a bit of an obsessive streak…although we all benefit from it! (LAUGH). Ric outdoes himself every year with his Halloween and Christmas light shows.
“Light Show is controlled by the action on the pinball machine. Microcontroller detects Start, Ball Launch, different modes, multiball, game over etc. and triggers custom light shows in a 160 channel Light-o-rama system featuring a giant flying Saucer and 6 martians on the house. Visitors on Halloween night had such a good time that some of them forgot to ask for treats! Pinball is a 1999 Williams Revenge From Mars with game video that was projected on the garage door. Audio was also broadcast on 99.1 FM for viewers in cars.”
Jenna over at the Cold Antler Farm blog writes about all sorts of homesteading projects, like hauling wood with her draft horse, raising sheep and other animals and teaching others about all these things with her Antlerstock Homesteading Conferences (my term) held a the farm itself.
Today, she gives us a run down on how she make hard cider. This is a bit more complicated than my version, but I just might give it a try.
Every year my friends and I gather to hand press gallons of fresh apple cider at our good friend Dave’s home in Vermont. Sadly, this year a late spring frost ruined our apple harvest and few if any local apples were around in the wild or at orchards to forage or pick. Which meant no hard cider, the real reason we all get together to crush and press.
But today I decided no late frost was ruining my favorite Yuletide drink. I decided to just buy some fresh-pressed cider at Saratoga Apple, get a small fifty-cent package of champagne yeast at my local Zymurgist, and make my own small batch.
Here are a couple examples of how to make your own dry eraser message board using and old picture or poster frame and any sort of light colored backing. I especially like this one with its use of muslin as a background. I would guess you could substitute any sort of fabric or paper background, as long as it contrasted with the color of dry-erase marker you planned to use.
A post on Pinterest earlier today lead me to OpenLibrary.org and this book, Home-made Toys for Boys and Girls. The lovely collection of instructions and diagrams was first published in 1915 and harkens back to an earlier age when parents and kids would make toys at home instead of buying everything at the store.
I can imagine a farmer sitting around on a rainy day or night putting something together for his son or daughter or even building something more complex for a Christmas gift. There are projects here that can be assembled by a handy boy or girl themselves, too.
You can read the entire book, including illustrations for FREE in a number of different format including an online reader, PDF, ePub, plain text, MOBI and even have the book sent automatically to your Kindle over WiFi.
“One web page for every book ever published. It’s a lofty but achievable goal. To build Open Library, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a wiki interface, and lots of people who are willing to contribute their time and effort to building the site.
[…]
Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and has been funded in part by a grant from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation.”
I came across this amazingly geeky idea in my RSS feeds recently. I love it when people take something to its apotheosis, such as using this small piece of aging barrel to “age” your own cocktails. I suppose you could also use it to age and season some of your own liquor if you distilled it yourself. $10 is a fairly cheap price to give it a try.
The trend of barrel-aging whole cocktails has emerged among mixologists (likely attributed to expert Jeffrey Morganthaler), and in the absence of your own tiny casks, you can aged your own “white” cocktails for a mere $10 investment. The trick is a jar and a tiny piece of stave from an aging barrel. Available at Tuthill Town Spirits for $10.
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