OhCripes.com

What? Why tomatoes of course. Last year my Dad told me about how he pulled the tomato plants out of the ground right before frost hits and hung them upside down from the basement ceiling. I tried it, sure enough I was harvesting vine ripened tomatoes from my basement until Christmas. The “Weather Forecasters” are calling for frost tonight so my plants are happily hanging from the basement ceiling.

A few quick tips:

Pull the whole plant, roots and all.
Carefully shake or knock loose any dirt from the roots.
Hang in a dry bright area.
You will get leaves that fall off as the tomatoes absorb nutrients.
Pick the tomatoes before they are really ripe so you can avoid them falling to the floor.

So I was perusing Make and noticed they had a write up and link to a morse code site. Not just any morse code site but one which has a text to mp3 morse generator. Sweet. I feel series of repetitive beeps are underappreciated in this age of cussing on tv and deserve a little more attention. Have a listen to the one I made. If you’d like to give it a go click here.

I’m sure others out there in webland have tried this before me, however after mentioning it to a few coworkers a week or two back none of them had ever done it this way. I love bacon. Who doesn’t? I hate getting burned by airborn bacon grease. So after much grilling this summer I thought hey. Why not grill bacon. Now I have a gas grill so this may work better or worse with the whole flame based type. That’s your call. Basically I just spread out each strip of bacon directly on the grill grates. When the top side starts to bubble or the edges appear to be getting crisp I give them a flip. The beauty is that you end up with nice crispy bacon that is flat and not in bacon knots. As seen here:

Patience….

Not yet…

Almost..

Ok, B.L.T time.

Welcome back. As I mentioned in my previous post; I have removed my stock factory radio from my Jetta and had it replaced with an aftermarket one as a birthday gift from my beautiful wife. It had to be removed because I had pulled the radio fuse in error while attempting to locate and replace the fuse for the cigarrette lighter socket as last posted. This, of course activated the security system where I had to punch in a code in order to enable the radio again. I did this using the pin that was in my owners manual which didn’t work. It caused the radio security to completely lock the thing up. I even went to the extent of pulling the fuse on the back of the radio and a whole mess of other possible solutions courtesy of other owners on various support forums. So I pulled it. The stereo that was installed appeared to have been a second factory model put in by the previous car owner. I say this because the pins which secure the stereo were in such a condition that using two different sets of radio removal keys didn’t do the job. I had to carefully pry the face off and push the pins with a needle nose pliers to get the silly thing out. Well now that I have experienced that fiasco and have the new stero installed I decided it would be a splendid time to use the old stereo as an outlet for my weeks or 2500+ miles of driving without music.
Initially I was just going to smash the thing with a sledghammer. I received suggestions from Erik on what I should use to blow the thing up with some mild explosives. Since I didn’t have any leftover fireworks from the 4th I decided to use the hammer. But first I thought I would see how it would survive a landing from my over 20 foot high rooftop.

Source of frustration.

Yep, it’s going up there.

That is where it should land.

Yeees, just a little higher.

View from above. Click this picture to see the stereo take flight from my roof. The video is fuzzy mainly because it was taken from my digital camera and I don’t have a real steady hand.

Point of impact.

Not bad, but the hammer can do better.

Here we go. What? You were expecting a framing hammer? Again, fuzzy video of the stereo. Don’t adjust your screen, it is sideways. I neglected to change the video portrait/landscape mode setting before placing the camera on a tripod. {websitetitle!}

Satisfaction at last!