Next Best Thing

Coffee has been many things - stimulant, medicine and social drink. Discover some of the lesser-known facts about coffee and its long and tumultuous history. Coffee, a drink a good proportion of the world couldn't do without, has had a long and colourful history. It has played a key role in civilisations from the Middle East to South America – as stimulant, medicine and indicator of overall coolness - and has won a devoted following. Here are ten lesser-known facts about coffee: 10 Facts About Coffee Caffeine, the ingredient in coffee that gives it that stimulating kick, was first discovered by German chemist Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge in 1819, after an encounter with the great Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe, a keen amateur scientist in addition to his many other accomplishments, gave the young Runge a handful of Arabian mocha coffee beans, and urged him to analyse them. Coffee first enters the historical record with the Sufis of the Yemen, who, according to the...

Your health is your life.  Make it a priority. There are a zillion nutrition tips floating around out there.  Here are a few simple ones that have worked well for me over the years. Limit junk food or don’t eat it at all. – Whatever junk food you have in your kitchen, throw it out and replace it with healthy foods and snacks.  Look into other ways to comfort yourself and think of food as nutrition, not entertainment or emotional fodder. Go on a healthy food shopping spree. – Don’t look at prices.  Buy items that are healthy and appealing.  Fill your cupboards, pantry and fridge with healthy foods so you will not feel like your kitchen is empty. Limit eating out. – Most restaurant food has high amounts of sodium, sugar and fat.  There are few exceptions.  Spend more time with family or friends cooking together, or enjoy cooking for yourself. Visit a farmer’s market. – Because farmers markets make buying healthy food fun and intere...

You don’t always have to work hard to be productive.  Productivity can simply be the side effect of doing the right things. So here’s a list of 29 semi-productive things I do online when my mind is set on avoiding ‘real work.’ Check delicious popular tags like ‘ useful ,’ ‘ tutorials ,’ ‘ tips ,’ ‘howto ,’ ‘ advice ,’ ‘ entrepreneurship ,’ etc. for interesting, educational articles to read. Watch one of the thousands of educational videos streaming at TED.com , Academic Earth and Teacher Tube . Read an online book list and find a new book to grab next time I’m at the library.  Here’s another list .  And another .  And another . Read a classic book online for free at Project Gutenberg , Planet eBook , or the E-books Directory . Research a new Do It Yourself project at DIY Network , Instructables , eHow , or WikiHow . Add to, delete from, or just generally sort my ongoing to-do list at Remember The Milk . Create a cool graphical mind map of some of my recent ...

The latest fad today is to have a stylish handset that has some special features to take care of all day to day business along with entertainment requirements and Samsung B7320 Omnia Pro handsets are such phones.Samsung B7320 Omnia Pro has got some outstanding features and a classy body which is all the present generation wants in a phone and that is the reason why this phone will stay here in the market for quite some time. Features at a glance: The dimensions of the mobile phone are 11.7cm by 6.1 cm by 1.27cm and it has weight of only 102 grams along with fitted batteries.The TFT type screen measures 2.4" and looks awesome along with the QWERTY type keyboard. It gives a high screen resolution and that is the reason why the picture quality is so amazing in the mobile phone. The handset is in possession of 256 MB of RAM and ROM each and if the need be, one can expand the existing memory using the microSD memory card slot as much as required. Some really good connectivity f...

Would you like to try to make your own beer at home, now you can. Home beer making is not as hard as people make out. Its actually quite easy to make great tasting beer that you can be proud of and enjoy drinking, once you know how. There are many different brewing kits that you can buy from the store that will help you with the process. Though sometimes the brewing instructions arent that great so I would advise purchasing a book on the subject to ensure you dont waste your money or get disheartened and give up. When you're ready to try home beer making, you will need the following, together with the equipment in your brewing kit: A malt extract, water, and brewers yeast. Liquid extracts are usually in the form of syrup where as dry extracts are dry and can be stored longer than the liquid form. Eventually you will discover there are many different extracts to choose from all of which will make your brew taste different. Once you have successfully made your first batch yo...

For those of you swoon over garlic twisty bread but can't bring yourself to order whole pizza to make the delivery worthwhile, this one's for you! They are scrumptious!  Dip some in marinara or serve them with a salad and pasta! You could also eat them alone, directly from your kitchen counter. No one will know. Promise. To push them over the edge of deliciousness, I am going to tuck a little bit of Parmesan cheese in the middle of each roll before I form them into little dough balls next time!  This was a request from my husband who is a certified twisty bread lover. He wanted them cheesy with more of a garlic presence; so I will appease him next round! I suggest using a little cooking spray in the muffin tin because I had 3 of them stick! You'd better believe I chiseled them out with a knife and ate them! Wouldn't want to let any dough go to waste now would we? I used Trader Joe's  plain pizza dough for this batch! So convenient! Start by minc...

A trip to an atmospheric Bavarian beer garden or a Cologne beer hall is a Germany must but with well over 1200 breweries in the country, it’s hard to know where to start. Famed for location, age, popularity, atmosphere or sheer number of beer-related sights, here are our top six beer destinations in Germany (with bonus beer glossary!): 1.  MUNICH Of course, Munich. No visit to Munich would be complete without a visit to a raucous beer hall or family beer garden and there are plenty of places  to choose from. The  Hofbräuhaus  is Bavaria’s (and possibly the world’s) most celebrated beer hall. Bury your head in an enormous stein before checking out the medieval vaults and pretzel-shaped postcards. Pour over old brewing vats, historic photos and some of the earliest Oktoberfest regalia at the  Bier & Oktoberfestmuseum , Housed in a 14th-century timber-framed house this museum provides a potted history of Germany’s national tipple. Talk...

2004 Google Chief Engineer Craig Neville-Manning insisted that Google maintained a strict separation between the search index part of Google and the paid advertising part. Sometimes this separation was referred to as a "Chinese Wall" between organic search engine results and paid search engine results, but this terminology fell out of favor once Google started trying to gain suction in the harshly competitive market in China, and the recent Google in China drama has definitely kept the term buried, but that's another whole story. The question is, does Google still live up to this separation between paid and organic results? They insist that Adwords is totally separated from organic search engine placement, that the two are in parallel channels and as such will never meet. What exactly does this mean in practice? Rumors that Google offers tech help in achieving better organic search results placement to those who drop big money on paid search results have long circulat...

Like many of you I listen to music while I design. These are some of the top tracks that really get my creative juices flowing. I’d like to know your thoughts on listening to music while you create. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Does it help inspire you or is it just an annoyance or distraction? If you like to rock out to music while designing like I do, let me know what music inspires you in the comments. This is just a little taste of my music library and I may post a few more in the future, who knows. Enjoy! Scorpians – Rock you like a hurricaine Tangerine Dream – Love On A Real Train Like A Dog Chasing Cars from “OST Dark Knight” The Bloody Beetroots – Butter Viva La Vida – Coldplay Dont Stop Believing – Journey All The Wine – The National Ride The Lightening – Metallica Yellow Submarine – The Beatles Walking on a Dream – Empire of the Sun Last Man Standing – People in Planes A Perfect Lie – NipTuck Stronger – Kanye West Window Licker – Aphex Tw...

Adobe Flash is arguably the most popular multimedia platform today. Users can watch videos, chat, and play games thanks to the capabilities of the Flash player. Content creators are afforded almost unlimited power due to ActionScript 3′s powerful features. Flash wasn’t always the rich and advanced platform it is today, however. It started as a vector animation package named FutureSplash Animator in 1996 and 14 years later, it’s going strong, with a desktop, mobile, and server-side presence. FutureSplash Animator – 1996 The first version of Flash, called FutureSplash Animator, was created by Jon Gay and Charlie Jackson, co-founders of FutureWave software. It was the animation extension of FutureWave’s SmartSketch, a vector drawing application. The first version of FutureSplash Animator was shipped in 1996 and a mere 7 months later, Macromedia bought FutureWave and renamed FutureSplash to simply Flash. Flash 2 – 1997 Flash 2 wasn’t marked by many new features, but it was th...