Erator's Sandbox

What a great invention: He said: "Something had to be done. It took me a little while and some very frustrating prototypes but eventually I did it." Conventional filters can cut out bacteria measuring more than 200 nanometres but not viruses, which typically are 25 nanometres long. Mr Pritchard's bottle can clean up any water - including faecal matter - using a filter that cuts out anything longer than 15 nanometres, which means that viruses can be filtered out without the use of chemicals. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/12/nwater112.xml Now if only they could make something similar for adware infested software...

Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, wrote an open letter to the early adopters of the iPhone where he defends the recent price-drop but also says they will give these early adopters a $100 store credit "towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store." So if you bought the iPhone early-on, you only wasted $100 for that " I got it first " feeling and brag-rights (ouch). Read the letter: Apple - To all iPhone customers

I have come to realize that I'm a Google fanboy... but there's good reason why I enjoy most if not all of the services and products that Google offers, they're GOOD! Gmail is by far the best webmail service out there, and not that I've tried them all, but that's the point! It's a good sign that I'm not moved or interested in trying again Hotmail, Yahoo!Mail, etc, because I'm really happy with my Gmail account. The space and the features that I get are superb for being free, and why would I want to move? Ok, well without going down a rat hole, here is the final cut video Gmail users submitted to Google for the Gmail: Behind the Scenes collaborative movie .

In case you missed it, like I did, Merlin Mann has an excellent Google Tech Talk presentation about managing your emails: Inbox Zero . Watch his presentation and grab the slides in PDF format from the site. I'm personally going to try this, although it might be hard with my current Inbox count being 2,177 items.

Some days, it's easy to get into the work I have laid out in front of me. I think of it as interesting or worthwhile and I finish it as fast as I possibly can. Other days, I have a really hard time getting started. I know I have a pile of work to do, and that it's not going away, but unconsciously I find myself distracted away, looking for a new subject of interest online, or getting caught in the "Option Loop." The loop is simply thinking about all the options, but getting stuck not starting or finishing any of them. It's almost like a mental deadlock. Most of the times I am able to regain focus and productivity by: Getting a cup of coffee or a high-caffeine soda Turning on the lights Adjusting my chair Walking around a little bit Talking to someone else about my projects Unfortunately, there are times when none of the above works. The biggest problem is I know the best time to start is now , so I have no excuses. How do you get into your work when you'r...

Cheat in a good way! What if you could have a quick reference for some of the more obscure properties of CSS or a Regular Expression assertion? Yeah, sometimes you just can't remember what property you're supposed to use to show the text font with a hot-pink background. What if you could have a *gasp* Cheat Sheet!? You can! Dave Child has an excellent website where he has created cheat sheets for the most popular web programming languages, MicroFormats, and even World of Warcraft! Do yourself a favor and checkout ILoveJackDaniels.com's Cheat Sheets.

As a software engineer, I've had the pleasure of receiving bug reports that make no sense whatsoever, and asking for additional info leads to dead ends and frustration. I really like what Joel recommends should be on a good bug report: Steps to reproduce, What you expected to see, and What you saw instead. But I have a couple of points to add, since in my experience people skip the basics: First and foremost, test it again to make sure that it is a valid bug. Specify what is not working, and where I can find it in the program. Avoid non-standard abbreviations. Proofread the bug report before submitting it to the resolver for any ambiguous information. As I started to write this post I thought I was very clear on what I was going to write and what I wanted exactly to be in a bug report, but, as I kept typing I started to remember all those pesky bug reports that annoyed me because they take forever to research and solve (especially the ones that end up being no-bugs). If you think ...