Star Wars Boba Fett For Real Hoodie, despite the price and the fact that it would look terrible on me, I want

Nike Mary Jane NM Shoes at Outblush, kinda nice

How does Dr Bronner soap work? What are the 18 uses that they claim on the bottle? at Ask Metafilter

Why do Crest, Colgate, etc. no longer display the ADA seal of approval? at Ask Metafilter

What can I do now, as a young woman, to ensure I have beautiful skin when I'm older? at Ask Metafilter

Halloween Gaming, Part I: Zombies at Defective Yeti

Have flu. Need game. at Ask Metafilter

Blindfold Chess at Kottke. Well, there is one thing that is already so well done I don't even have to bother thinking about trying.

California Academy of Sciences Reopens in an Orgy of Ecotechture at io9

procrastination visualized at Swiss Miss

Creepy children's book question at Ask Metafilter

What other consumer goods have "premium" versions that are identical to the budget version? at Ask Metafilter

northwest native plant landscape guide: did you know this existed? I did not! Thank you! At Straight From The Container.

Columbia Center Observation Deck at Yelp. I must get to this someday very soon.

The Salvage Studio in Edmonds, story in The Seattle Times.

Are there some specific CFL models that will light just like my old soft incandescent light bulbs? at Ask Metafilter

Ah! Spider Plates! at Home By Sunset

Tidy little bedside table at Mighty Goods

How can I get this awful, musty smell out of my towels? at Ask Metafilter

The truth about thread count. at Kottke. The sheets you're looking for are percale, good ones are harder to find that you might expect.

How do I stop at futon mattress from slipping? at Ask Metafilter. The answer, those grippy things you put under rugs. It works!

Yellow Cake to end all Yellow Cakes at Bake and Shake

What's a Good Fall Drink? at Seattlest

What are some tricks from moving from teflon/non-stick to stainless steel on a gas range? at Ask Metafilter

Pork Princess Tiara OH MY GOSH have you seen this yet? Amazing. She made it using Activa TG-RM which bonds proteins an you need to be very careful so you don't glue the insides of your lungs together.

beef, leek and barley soup at Smitten Kitchen

The Plush You! show at Schmancy is going to be Friday, Oct. 10th from 5 - 8 p.m. Past shows have been fantastic and I'm really looking forward to this one, and maybe a little dinner at one of the nearby Tom Douglas restaurants.

I've written a post for Kristen on crafty shopping destinations in Seattle for those who are here from out of town. If you've got places to add please let me know, I must have left off something really obvious.

I bought a camera! An actual DSLR camera, like a grown up might have. I decided on the Canon Rebel XSi (known to the rest of the world as the Canon EOS 450D). I had been wanting a new camera for a while but couldn't really justify the purchase until last week, when my point and shoot camera just stopped working. Poor little thing.

Previously I'd been looking at the recently released Canon XS, which is their entry level DSLR. Despite getting good expert reviews it doesn't seem to have generated much excitement, as you can see from the very few user reviews at Amazon. Many places suggesting the XSi (which is the slightly older brother than the XS and came out in January of 2008) is worth the money for the few slightly better features. So I took a look and discovered that Amazon was selling the XSi for only slightly more than the XS.

update: from the time I started writing this the XS price has gone from $640 to $600, and the XSi price dropped from $660 to $655. A lot of the research I did suggested the price for the XS would drop even further in coming months, and if I didn't need a camera now I would have waited it out to see how low the XS price might get.



I did a lot of research and what I turned up is that the XS is very much the same camera as the XSi but with a few features that aren't quite as good. I can say with some confidence that in moving up from a point and shoot I never would have noticed the difference in the features except for one thing, the LCD screen in the XSi is 3 inches whereas it's 2.5 inches in the XS. I don't even consider that a deal breaker but while the price difference was so small I went for the XSi. I found two articles that compare the models in a helpfully concise way: Gizmodo and Digicamhelp. The other thing my reading turn up is that when compared to the older entry level model XTi it appears both the XS and the XSi are well-worth-it steps up.

Annoyingly specific notes and a few of my first pictures follow. (more...)

Folksy is a new online shop of handmade goods, like Etsy for the UK.

bicycle frame lunch bag at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

Porom hat by Brooklyntweed

filzfelt, a new shop selling beautiful felt and felt objects, is up on Etsy and Supermarket

DIY vinyl shade decorations at How About Orange

candy cane sugar scrub at Craftzine

Shelterrific gets a whole lot of suggestions on where to buy upholstery fabric online.

I recently got the set of Clean & Green Twist Clean-Up biodegradeable sponges from Delight.com and I'm really happy with them. The scrubby side of the scrubby sponges is a layer of loofah. The Bamboo dusting cloths work well and might get me to kick my shameful Swiffer Duster habit. The Euro sponges are nice and big but I'm really in love with the European Sponge Cloth because it acts like a paper towel and I finally have something that can get into that narrow area behind the faucet in my bathroom sink.

Also, this is adorable, there are birdhouse and birdfeeder templates printed on the insides of the cardboard packaging bands:



Also take a look at the Better Life eco friendly and plant based cleansers that smell only very faintly of soap and work really nicely.

The other week Scott and I had an Oreo/Hydrox/Newman O's taste off for no reason at all other than to celebrate having Hydrox around again, at least for a while. We broke the tasting into Overall Cookie, Just the Biscuit Part, and The Creme, with a side consideration for dunking in milk.



For Overall I liked Oreos while Scott preferred the less sweet Hydrox. I preferred the extra crunch that the Oreos had and found that the flavors were the most balanced. The Newman O's had the crunchiest cookie and I found it had the most pronounced cocoa flavor, but I thought the cookies tasted slightly off, something which came through most when we compared the creme fillings.



Oreo had the sweetest and grittiest filling. I though the Hydrox filling had too many hints of powdered sugar/cornstarch, though Scott liked that it tasted like cake frosting from a can. I really disliked the Newman O's filling, it had a strong taste of raw grain to me, but it was Scott's favorite for being not too sweet.



When dunked in milk for two seconds the Newman O's held their crunch the best of all, with Hydrox showing signs of getting soggy fast, and Oreo's going "straight to mush!". A friend of mine uses Newman O's to mix into her homemade cookies and cream ice cream because they hold up against getting too soggy.

I have gone on and on before about the fact that I cannot (no matter how often I try) wear shoes with straps that go between my toes. This leads to some serious summer flip flop envy. But I'm saved! Teva makes a flip flop like shoe called the Kena that is the answer to all my whining.

The Kena shoe is like a flip flop in all the ways it counts, the soles are light weight foam, the straps are able to get wet or sandy and you can just step into them and kick them off. The straps form two Xs that go across the tops of your feet and they really just look like a flip flop rather than a strange alternashoe. I wore these new for a significant amount of walking and they were just comfortable from the start, there was no rubbing at all. They also never feel like they will fall off, which is a common problem with me and my narrow feet. There is a little bit of arch support, but these are not sport sandals by any means. Here is one positive thing about my broken camera: you've been spared a picture of my feet with their freakishly long toes.

The Kena shoes are perfection. Now I just have to buy as many as I can sanely get away with before they discontinue them. You can find them on the Teva site as well as at Endless. Thanks go out to Mandy who pointed me towards these!

I had a chance to try out Baggu reusable shopping bags and I like them a lot. They are made strong, lightweight ripstop nylon and come in lots of fantastic colors. Each bag folds into a small square and goes into it's own tidy pouch so they are good for throwing into your bag or keeping in a glove compartment or desk drawer. Though, I do worry that I will misplace the pouch. The handles are nice and wide and are comfortable on your shoulder if you are bringing home a lot of produce, or beer.



The bags are just slightly shallower than Envirosax (also) and RuMe bags, but the bottoms have gussets so they hold a whole lot. The handles are a bit shorter than the other bags, making it harder to sling a bag up on your shoulder using only one arm. (This is a detail I am, admittedly, overly fixated on.) But, the overall shorter bag means it definitely won't drag on the ground when you hold it like a tote, something that is a problem for shorter people with the Envirosax and Rume sized bags.