-<( TechSteward )>-

Liam and I are hiking the Appalachian Trail (AT) during during the first week of March, and for 10+ weeks the next two summers (see our trail journal). We’ll be sporting a SPOT satellite messenger. Watch our progress here. We’ll be NOBO from Delaware Water Gap to start, then SOBO from same next summer to finish. Waypoint details and distances are available here (you might find Garmin Communicator handy to push waypoints to your Garmin GPS or convert here). Yea, its really 2178 miles!

My two favorite raw drinks are my green smoothie recipe, and a simple carrot + apple juice.

Creating green smoothies is easy using my Blendtec blender. I usually make two 24oz Ball/Mason jars full (one for me and one for Momma). I start with a giant handfull of blueberries, (1) Honeycrisp apple, (2) banana,s 5-7 strawberries, 1/2 cup mango, (2) giant handfulls of grapes, some superfruits ((3/4T) maca, (1+T) acai, (2T) goji berries, (2T) flaxseed) and 12-14oz filtered water. Then I green it up with green (red too if I can find it) kale, dino kale, rainbow chard, spinach, and collards. Blend and snarf!

I juice with my trusty Green Star GS-2000 juicer. The recipe is trivial — 2.5lbs of carrots without tips and tops, and a Honeycrisp apple. I end up with about 24oz.

Want a faster, lighter, more scalable stack for deploying Django? Take a look at magnum-py to leverage epoll. Here’s all you need to do to reposture your Django site:

1. download and untar magnum-py and django into /usr/src
2. create a test django project, path everything up, and playdjango-admin.py startproject spike
   export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=spike.settings
   export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/usr/src:/usr/src/spike
   start|stop magnum-py: cd /usr/src/magnum; ./serve.py start|stop

SchweeeeeeEEEEEEEEtttttttttttt!

Watch this…

Buy this… Better still, buy 10 and share!

One of the down sides (and I mean that literally) of living in South Orange, NJ is the beastly hills. To add insult to injury, I actually live near the top of the hill, so that means easy trip downhill to pretty much anywhere, but sweatin’ time on the way home. With all the “stuff” I’ve been hauling on my Big Dummy lately, I’m starting to consider a it of assistance — not a hub of course.

Cleverchimp’s Stokemonkey is on v2.0 these days. Cool huh, but support is sorta limited to the Big Dummy and Xtracycle conversions.

Ecospeed has been providing killer assist solutions for recumbents with their EMD (Electric Mid-Drive) for a long time. They finally startied supporting the rest of us “uprights” with their EMtnD (Electric Mountain Drive), and it actually works on most all bikes. Better still, they’ve got a 1000W motor in the works (Stokemonkey is 500W)!

These guys really know how to make bikes fly!

The recycle load grew a bit taller than usual this week… Big Dummy to the rescue!

Olympus finally shared the scoop on its Micro Four Thirds camera called the (like you didn’t already know) E-P1 — it’ll definitely give pause to Sigma DP2 fans. Its too early to tell how IQ will really compare, but other feature wize, the E-P1 is a killer camera! Check the early scoop at DPR, ImagingResource, and FourThirdsPhoto too…

Check out the kit lens options — prime or zoom. Price will be in the $800-1000USD range depending on your lens choice.

You gotta see this packing system — Aarn FlowMo Bodypack implements an alternative strategy for load distribution… They’ve got a reasonable range of systems, including ultralight options.

Check out the video on the home page as well as these videos. Lots of good discussion here. If you’re ready to buy, contact Kerry at Stoney Creek Shop (yea, that’s in NZ — tell ‘em Steve aka’ “Mule” sent you and you’ll be taken care of).

Wishing you had your favorite DSLR or rangefinder for that ad-hoc shot at that whatever event? You gotta see the updated Sigma DP2 (reminder, FOVEON)… Only a few more weeks to wait on this dream pocketable! Yak it up here.