TeaBass.com

Teabass Upgrades

Check it out, a new re-aligned look for TeaBass, cleaned up and made clearer and easier on the eyes whilst still keeping a familiar feel to it.

Let me know what you think.

I’m a noob.

Just got it this morning in the post, so awesome!

I’ve had a number of people ask me what a noob is, since when was it not common knowledge?!

Get yourself one at The Big Noob

DiggFeedr - The Ultimate Digg Feed

Introducing DiggFeedr, a tiny little web app I built using the Digg API and Ruby on Rails. It’s sole purpose is to improve the RSS feed of Digg.

The main features include:

• 100 Items long - I often found the standard Digg RSS feed to be too short (40 items) which often caused me to miss lots of stories if more than 40 were published over night. The main aim of the site is to fix this problem, now I never miss any stories on Digg.

• Direct links - Another issue with the Digg feed is that to get to the actual story you have to go through digg.com via their comments page, which is fine for less frequent users but if your a power user like me opening 10 or more tabs with digg in often causes web browsers to slow right down due to the large amounts of javascript on digg, So DiggFeedr has a direct link to the story in each item.

• Extra meta data - With the feed link going directly to the story page, I add some meta data to each feed item including the number of diggs and comments, the category it is in and who submitted it, each which all link back to the relevant sections of Digg.

• Cached by Feedburner - When I first put out DiggFeedr it brought my server to a complete standstill, each request was doing way too much work and so now I’m serving the feed via Feedburner which caches the feed making it much quicker, often it shows stories up faster than the feed from digg.com!

Just a note, DiggFeedr was made to scratch my own itch, I’m not trying to make money with it so it will remain 100% free, forever!

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Results of my Healthy Week Experiment

A couple weeks ago I started my “Healthy Week Experiment” to see if I could eat better, cutting out all of the rubbish food in my diet. I did it for a number of reasons:

1. To see if I could live without sugar, caffeine, burgers and pizzas
2. To find out how easy it is to buy healthy food
3. To test my own willpower

How it went

It was an interesting week, going without caffeine and any thing I deemed to be unhealthy. Thankfully London has such a wide choice of shops and places to eat, I didn’t have too much trouble finding stuff to eat and drink including lots of sushi, soups and fruit and to drink I stuck with fruit juice, water and herbal teas.

Towards the end of the week I was feeling pretty ill, I was struggling to keep up the 2500 calorie intake per day and due to my high metabolism it was having quite an effect on me, I was not trying to loose weight this week since I’m already thin (6′3 tall and 11.5 stone) and the main problem was that i just didn’t get as much energy from eating the same amount of healthy food as unhealthy foods.

What I learnt

To summarize, here are some of the things I’ve learnt about healthy eating:

• Salads from pubs are rubbish - I went to eat out a couple of times in the week and decided to have salads, but they are just nasty.

• Everyone has an opinion on what is healthy eating - Everyone has been telling me what they think is the best way to be healthy, what to eat and what not to eat, someone even told me to go vegan!

• Moderation is the key (but it’s boring) - you can eat what ever you like as long as you have everything in moderation, don’t go crazy and have a wide variety of things, but I found that really boring so I went a bit more extreme to spice things up.

• Healthy food has less energy in it - for the same amount of unhealthy food there is less energy you can get out of healthy food so I have to eat more of it to get enough to keep going.

• Eating healthier either costs more or takes longer - preparation of healthy food is either going to take longer that grabbing some fast food or cost more if its prepared and way if your really busy then it’s going to cost you more to eat well unless you spend more time preparing food.

• Healthy foods didn’t make me feel hungry - Usually I get hungry when I’m running low on energy, my tummy rumbles or sometimes even hurts when I need to eat, but I didn’t get that when I was eating healthily, my body didn’t remind me that i need to eat anywhere near as often so I tended to forget to eat throughout the day.

The Result

So after my super healthy week, I did go on a bit of a binge, with pizza and burgers and tea but I’ve settled back down now to a happy medium between the two, eating more fruit and less burgers, and I’ve only been having 2 or 3 cups of tea per day instead of the 5 - 10 I would have had before.

My photo used on iPod Nano Wikipedia Page

My hand is on wikipedia!

This photo (http://flickr.com/photos/nez/1346068786/) has been used on wikipedia in a number of places thanks to the creative commons license i put on it.

Check it out here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_nano