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The Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser is a product of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. The Guide has this to say on the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser:
When the ‘Drink’ button is pressed it makes an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject’s brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no-one knows quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
And that is how I feel about Pappy’s.
I’m working on my first (useful) iPhone app. It’s a push mechanism for Twitter updates and functions similarly to the Polar Bear Farm Tweet Push updater app ($0.99/30 days). Their app pushes all friend updates, which is quite a bit too much. Instead, mine is set to only push those tweets with users marked for notifications. That’s an option not available in any of the push notification Twitter apps that I’ve seen so far. This is to save on the outrageous SMS costs on which I still refuse to subscribe to any more than the base plan on. Twitter can eat that like candy if I want alerts. I may opt to allow ad-hoc distribution to friends’ iPhones, we’ll see. Until then, my server’s hard drive seems to have crashed so service quality is a bit low!
As far as thoughts about my experience with developing the app, I followed a recipe that I had seen in an article on Ars Technica before the 3.0 SDK was public. Overall it was very easy to write the skeleton push app and have it launch Twitterific once it loads, but the notifications certificates and other required handshakes were fairly hard to navigate. After all that’s done, all I had to do was make a daemon to check Twitter and push it over Apple’s network. For this, I used Python Twitter Tools to great success.
I did run into one fairly odd problem. It turns out that Twitter’s API doesn’t actually match up to what I’m fairly sure it’s supposed to be at the moment. Requesting a user’s friends status list (statuses/friends, max 100 at a time) seems to correctly report which users are set with device notification turned on. However, the friends timeline (statuses/friends_timeline) function that returns the last X number of tweets has a user tag in it for each update. This user tag doesn’t show the same value for notifications that the friend list does. That’s a problem since my app is suited to using the friends_timeline to get the last few updates to push out, but can’t use the notifications without spending another API call per 100 friends a user has. A bug report has been submitted to the API folks. For now, I can manually filter the users out without using Twitter’s data, but if I were to let anybody else use the app, I’d really prefer it to work correctly.
Long Kow’s Crystal Noodle Soup (Spicy Tofu)
I found this soup at the Meijer and thought that it might be good. The packaging was amazing at least. After getting in my car and looking through the food, it occurred to me that I ought to see the nutrition information just for laughs.
I may have had a heart attack.
Instant noodles almost always have more sodium content than you really should intake, and many are double serving sized packages to begin with. This stuff is worse. 85% of your 2,000 calorie diet’s DV is contained in this one cup. That, for those wondering, is 2.04 grams. I use the gram measurement for emphasis. Grams.
So with all that salt inside, it must be delicious, right? Eh. I’m glad I tried this stuff at home instead of at work because I would have been making an emergency lunch break to get real food. It’s not that the flavour is bad, but more that the texture of slimy crystal noodles isn’t really palatable to me. I’ve had plenty of dishes with these sorts of noodles in them, but most of them aren’t slimy. Gross. The flavour itself isn’t really bad. Having blocks of tofu is a terribly good idea for instant soup, and I wish more would do it. Maybe I should start buying dried tofu to go with regular noodle bowls instead.
By golly, I think I’ve learned something from this experiment!
This is a horn melon or kiwano. I got it from Jungle Jim’s last weekend in an effort to find some exotic fruits. It’s a rather interesting dessert I must say. They grow (naturally) in the Kalahari Desert and are grown in California in the states. I assume they’re probably common in the west, but I’ve never seen one around these parts.
It tastes like sweet cucumber Jello with a bit of sourness to it. I say Jello in the sense that it really has that consistency. That description may not sound appealing to all, but it’s actually quite delicious. I’ll definitely buy a kiwano whenever I come across one.