I reviewed Zombie Dice by Steve Jackson Games last September, and it remains a household favorite when we’re short on time and/or everyone’s brains have shut down.

Steve Jackson Games put out another die game at about the same time called Cthulhu Dice. I didn’t think it would be possible, but Cthulhu Dice is even more casual and speedy than Zombie Dice. This is the game for when you’ve drooled so much overgaming that Zombie Dice seems complicated.

It’s pretty fun, with one possible drawback.

Here’s my review.
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Overall I really like my new Galaxy Nexus phone by Samsung. Despite Sedagive?’s initial handset problem, I find that the phone is very, very fast and performs very well.

However, in my battery life write-up, I discovered that most of my battery usage comes from the screen being on. The Galaxy Nexus has a large, beautiful screen, but it uses a lot of juice.

My phone’s LED flashes whenever I have a notification. I have my Nexus set up to notify me for about ten different events, including emails from three different accounts, text messages, low battery life, etc. I wanted to find a way to cut down on turning the screen on every time I checked a notification.

My secondary desire was to customize the LED color so that I could determine what the notification was without turning on the screen. For example, I wanted to read a text message from Sedagive? right away, but I am usually not in a hurry to check voice mail. My HTC Droid Incredible had a single color LED for notifications, and I was turning the screen on and off again to read notification about events that weren’t immediately important to me.

I found Light Flow on the Android Market, and hoped that the app would allow me to customize my alerts and notification.

Holy crap, does it ever. Here’s my review.
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Owning a firearm sometimes puts in a Catch-22 situation, particularly with training. We need to handle and manipulate our firearms to be safe, but the handling and manipulation of loaded firearms can be dangerous.

Everything man made can fail. Knowing how to identify — and recover from — firearm failures is key skill for anyone who takes shooting seriously. Perceiving the difference between running out of ammunition and a jam is also important, and reloading under pressure is something few firearms owners practice.

Safe loading and unloading of firearms is something that a lot of gun owners need to practice. Holstering and reholstering is also important, and if you have a SmartCarry holster or carry appendix inside the waistband you may feel uncomfortable carrying a loaded pistol that way at first.

We owe it to ourselves and the people around us to practice on a regular basis, so what do we do?

At some point I am going to write about using airsoft firearms as a training tool, but for now I want to talk about plastic dummy ammunition made by Saf-T.
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The year was 1983. I was either still seven or just turned eight. Due to the age difference between myself and my siblings, it was rare for us to really interact. Before my sister passed away, I was eleven years younger than my next closest sibling. My half-brother RealDoc and his sisters came to visit us during the summer and during some holidays, so the last thing they wanted to do in the middle of the Midwest was hang out with a little kid.

But sometimes they did.

RealDoc asked me if I wanted to play a game. Up until this point our playtime together was usually transforming a cardbox box into a spaceship control panel. He was impossibly grownup to me at the time, although now that I’m typing this out he couldn’t have been more than 20 years old. But it was a huge deal when he wanted to hang out with me.

“I’d like to play a game,” I replied, wondering if we were going to play Soldiers or maybe a card game like War. Maybe even Atari. Hell yeah. Digdug.

Instead he pulled a flat red box from his bag. There was a huge red dragon on the front. A single man stood in front of it. He was armed only with a sword and a shield, half clad in armor, and a large horned helmet.

“What kind of game is this?” I asked.

He lifted the lid, and it was like a light went on in my mind.

I was equipped with a rusty longsword, a family heirloom long neglected. I think I had a sack. No armor, no mount, hell I think my total net worth starting out was less than a gold piece. Armed with a crappy weapon and a handful of oddly shaped dice, I set out for the Keep on the Borderlands.

The rest is history.
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You know I love coffee. Like, I’d marry it if it were legal in the South kind of love it.

I’m also a big stickler for brewing coffee at the right temperatures, and I prefer to drink my coffee on the “hot” side, usually at around 160°F.

This usually puts me in a game of chicken with my favorite beverage. Coffee is usually 190°F when I first pour it into a ceramic mug. I have to wait at least 90 seconds to two minutes to start sipping, but then I only have about ten minutes total before my coffee is colder than I like. At fifteen minutes I make a gas face and hand the mug over to Sedagive?.

When I received the Coffee Joulies™ beans as a gift this Christmas I was hopeful that they would keep my coffee warm and extend my drinking time.

I discovered that the Joulies just speed you towards that “barely hot enough” zone before plummeting the temperature off a cliff. Here’s my review.
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I love grilling — we cook the majority of our meals this way, from salmon to pork chops to burgers. We use propane to power our grill and our turkey fryer, and we use a lot of it.

The one thing I hated about grilling was dealing with the toolboxes who sold replacement tanks. I would usually go to a grocery store, Wal-Mart, Lowes, The Home Depot, or Costco for tanks, and it was always the same:

• The cashiers wouldn’t know how to ring up a tank. About a third of the time they’d try to charge me for a new tank as opposed to a refill. This can be up to a $30 difference.
• I’d have to wait around for them to find the key to the propane storage cage. “Does Joe Bob have the key today? Shee-it.”
• I’d have to wait for Joe Bob to finish whatever he was doing and come up to the register, only to remember he lent his key to Sue Ellen, who was on break.
• I must now decide if I should start punching everyone in the groin, or wait for my tank.

Things were even worse when I moved to Minnesota. Apparently people either don’t grill from October to March, and so almost everyone forgets how to run the register, or they can’t find the key, or whatever. It took me over a half hour to get a tank in February.

Then there’s the issue of the cage being covered in snow. I had to trudge in foot-deep snow last year with a full tank after buying one at Wal-Mart.

I knew there had to be an easier way to get my tanks refilled, and I found it.
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I received two emails from shoe e-tailers 6pm.com and Zappos.com yesterday concerning a security breach on their Web sites. Certain bits of user information were compromised, including:

• Your name
• E-mail address
• Billing and shipping addresses
• Phone number
• The last four digits of your credit card number
• Your scrambled password

Credit card and billing information was supposedly not compromised as of this writing (January 16, 2012).

One thing not mentioned — and I wished that this was communicated — was when the breach was identified, how long it was allowed to remain open before patching, and for how long it had been going on.

So, what are you supposed to do?

Zappos and 6pm want you to change your password, and I have an additional suggestion.
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We’re pretty crafty folks — Sedagive? does a fair amount of knitting, sewing, and crochet. She also does “repurposing,” where she takes an old item and then incorporates it into something new. She’s sort of like a Horadic cube. I recently started making handmade 1″ pinback buttons. There is a fair amount of paper / fabric cutting in the latter two endeavors.

I also attempt to reduce paper use by cutting scraps into note pads. The house has several strategic stockpiles of 3″ x 4″ note pads around the house in case we need to write our final words during the zombie apocalypse. You never know, we might get trapped in the downstairs bathroom and need to tell our tale.

Anyway, regular hand scissors will do a good job at these tasks. At some point I realized my cuts weren’t straight, and after using the guillotine-style paper cutter I remembered how awesome it was to use a paper cutter at the library back in school.

I started doing research on paper cutters (also called bypass trimmers), and I wanted to buy the best one possible for $50 delivered or less.

Here’s my review of the Fiskars 12-inch guillotine paper cutter.
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I’ve wanted to write about this since August of last year, but I’ve been self-conscious about it. That’s saying a lot for me, since I’ve taken several series of before-and-after pictures of me during workouts and I’ve discussed some other intimate stuff here.

However, this post involves my teeth, and for some reason I’m really sensitive about my mouth.

But here goes.
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Sedagive? and I both have Samsung Galaxy Nexus Android phones. Despite a problem with her first phone, Sedagive? and I have liked them. The hardware is really nice, and the LTE 4G network speeds are very fast. While there are some things I really dislike about the Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) operating system, the overall user experience is improved over my already nice HTC Droid Incredible.

Some people were complaining about the short battery life on their Nexus. I decided to do some data collection and see if there was any truth to the matter.

I’ve decided that the battery life on the Galaxy Nexus is really good for an Android smartphone, and is quite capable of carrying you through a typical period between charging. However, it also depends on how you use your phone, and what your expectations are for a smartphone.
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