Author: Serkadis

The BonJour Primo Latte milk frother is one of my favorite Christmas gifts ever. With this frother, I really don’t need Starbucks anymore. As a latte lover, I have no idea why I waited so long to get one of these. It beats any latte foam I’ve had from Starbucks.

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I’ve used the milk frother to make both lattes and cappuccinos. I first tried the frother with 2% milk, but since BonJour recommended using nonfat milk, I gave that a whirl. I found that the nonfat milk does make hardier foam. I didn’t miss the fat.

I love the sleek little wire stand that comes with the frother. The unit and stand doesn’t take up much space, and using the stand is good for allowing the coil to air dry. You’ll need to rinse the coil immediately after use to avoid deposit buildup. I’d also recommend keeping the stand in a location where it can’t get knocked to the floor easily.

The frother requires two AA batteries that aren’t included. The only thing I dislike about this product is that I found battery installation to be a bit awkward.

To get the most out of your frother, make sure your batteries are completely charged. At first, I put in rechargeable batteries that needed a bit more power. After charging the batteries, the frother worked much more quickly.

If you have no idea how to make lattes and cappuccinos, no worries. The frother comes with several recipes. Making the froth is simple. You just fill a glass 1/3 full with cold milk and froth for around a minute, making sure to stop pushing the button before lifting the frother out of the glass. To make a cappuccino, I used the frother with a Bialetti Casa Italia Moka Express, a stovetop espresso maker. The frother retails for $20.

Have you tried the BonJour Primo Latte milk frother?

(Image via amazon)

Post from: Blisstree

Review: Primo Latte Milk Frother

Here is an in depth video of the new Documents tab in the latest Manila packages from the 2.01 Leo ROM. For those of you with an HD2, you know what your missing if you’re using the 1.61 ROM or earlier. For everyone else, you know what you’re missing by not having an HD2! :p

What tabs would you like to see in the future?

Around 1:00 PM Pacific time on Sunday, Apple’s MobileMe suite of cloud applications stopped working for me. According to one Twitter post, it’s been down for some users for three hours now.

The volume of Twitter updates in multiple languages in the past hour suggests this isn’t a small outage.

Apple’s PR hotline sent me an auto-response, “Our offices are closed for the holidays.” But if I hear back, I’ll update this post with any info Apple provides.

MobileMe, for which Apple charges $99 per year, grew from the company’s .Mac (pronounced “dot-mac”) services. Usually it works — I use it daily — but MobileMe got off to a bad start last year with frequent outages. So much so that even Apple fan Walt Mossberg declared it “too flawed to be reliable.”

MobileMe beats Google Apps in some ways, most notably its browser-based replications of the familiar mail, calendar and contact apps built into Apple computers. But for a hundred bucks a year in 2010, shouldn’t it be bulletproof?

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China Mobile’s Vice Chairman Zhang Chunjiang is being investigated by officials for alleged breach of conduct related to personal reasons, which historically has meant that he is suspected for corruption.

China Mobile didn’t elaborate on the probe, but a company spokeswoman said Saturday that the probe would have no impact on the company’s operations, reports the WSJ. Corruption in China has been a problem in its state corporations, which typically dominate large parts of the telecom, financial, and energy sectors.

Zhang joined China Mobile, which is the largest carrier in the world by subscribers, in June after working for more than 25 years in the state telecom sector. Previously, he was chairman of state-owned fixed-line carrier China Netcom Group and helped engineer an corporate governance overhaul aimed at giving outside board members greater say. Zhang is also head of the powerful Communist Party committee at China Mobile’s state-owned parent, China Mobile Communications.

Filed under: Opel, Russia

It not only takes money to close a deal, it takes money to get close to closing a deal. Sberbank, which was Magna’s Russian partner in the bid for Opel, said it assembled 9,000 contract pages during the negotiations. Unless Russian corporate lawyers are that much cheaper than their American counterparts, the associated legal fees could probably be described by the word “heinous.”

Sberbank says GM walked away from the deal 48 hours before contracts were due to be signed, and did so without reasonable explanation. In that case, Sberbank believes it is owed for the money it spent in preparation. Company CEO Stefan Gref said “In reality we spent an awful sum, because we had to address complex tasks,” and “I hope that we shall be able to settle all issues out of court, but we shall be prepared to defend our position in courts of law.”

Unless there was a provision restricting GM’s ability to walk away from the deal, it is unclear what kind of chances Sberbank will have in court. By comparison, Magna CEO Frank Stronach said his company’s bills from the transaction “weren’t material,” which could be his way of saying, “water under the bridge.” With the other issues on GM’s mind right now — like, oh, Opel and the German government, among others — Sberbank should probably just grab a place in line.

[Source: Auto News, sub req’d | Image: AFP/Getty]

Russia’s Sberbank wants GM to pay for dropping the Opel deal originally appeared on Autoblog on Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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INDIANAPOLIS — Legislation that could bring more wind turbines and solar power projects to Indiana has a good chance of passing in the upcoming legislative session after failing in the last session’s closing hours, two state lawmakers say. While …

Filed under: Opel, Russia

It not only takes money to close a deal, it takes money to get close to closing a deal. Sberbank, which was Magna’s Russian partner in the bid for Opel, said it assembled 9,000 contract pages during the negotiations. Unless Russian corporate lawyers are that much cheaper than their American counterparts, the associated legal fees could probably be described by the word “heinous.”

Sberbank says GM walked away from the deal 48 hours before contracts were due to be signed, and did so without reasonable explanation. In that case, Sberbank believes it is owed for the money it spent in preparation. Company CEO Stefan Gref said “In reality we spent an awful sum, because we had to address complex tasks,” and “I hope that we shall be able to settle all issues out of court, but we shall be prepared to defend our position in courts of law.”

Unless there was a provision restricting GM’s ability to walk away from the deal, it is unclear what kind of chances Sberbank will have in court. By comparison, Magna CEO Frank Stronach said his company’s bills from the transaction “weren’t material,” which could be his way of saying, “water under the bridge.” With the other issues on GM’s mind right now — like, oh, Opel and the German government, among others — Sberbank should probably just grab a place in line.

[Source: Auto News, sub req’d | Image: AFP/Getty]

Russia’s Sberbank wants GM to pay for dropping the Opel deal originally appeared on Autoblog on Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Around 1:00 PM Pacific time on Sunday, Apple’s MobileMe suite of cloud applications went offline. Apple hasn’t responded yet to a request for details, but the volume of Twitter updates in different languages suggests this isn’t a small outage. MobileMe, for which Apple charges $99 per year, grew from the company’s .Mac (pronounced “dot-mac”) services. Usually it works — I use it daily — but MobileMe got off to a bad start last year with frequent outages. So much so that even Apple fan Walt Mossberg declared it “too flawed to be reliable.” MobileMe beats Google Apps in some ways, most notably its browser-based replications of the mail, calendar and contact apps built into Apple computers. But for a hundred bucks a year in 2010, shouldn’t it be bulletproof?

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According to startup nowPlaying.fm, Twitter users post 650,000 tweets per day that contain the hashtag #nowplaying, followed by the name of a song to which the user is currently listening. There’s only one problem: These tags rarely contain a link to the song, so other Twiiter users can go listen to it themselves.

NowPlaying.fm is a music search-and-play service in the style of GrooveShark or the late imeem, which was absorbed into MySpace Music earlier this month. But it connects to Twitter to share the music you’re listening to with the entire Twittersphere — not just as a title, but as a playable song link.

It works like this: You sign up for a nowPlaying membership. You login to nowPlaying’s website and search the site’s database of music. NowPlaying displays ten search matches, and lets you ding any which arent the right song match for your search, in order to improve the system’s accuracy over time. You can play these songs, or add them to playlists.

Whenever you play a song on nowPlaying, it sends a tweet through your Twitter account that includes not only the song title, but a #NowPlaying hashtag (Twitter hashtags don’t care if letters are capitalized or not), followed by a link to the song on nowPlaying.fm. If another Twitter user clicks the link, their song plays.

NowPlaying is currently in an invite-only beta period. The company emailed me a press release about its service this morning, but left a lot of info I’ve asked them for. How do they make money? Can’t Pandora, Grooveshark, MySpace, iTunes, etc., add this feature themselves? I’ll update this post with their answers.

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In a lengthy interview with Xinhua, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao made it pretty clear to the Chinese press that he wouldn’t yield to international pressure for a yuan revaluation.

China’s doing fine as is, and is actually helping pull the world economy out of its slump. Thus China will simply adjust the yuan when its ready.

FT: ”We will not yield to any pressure of any form forcing us to appreciate. As I have told my foreign friends, on one hand, you are asking for the renminbi to appreciate, and on the other hand, you are taking all kinds of protectionist measures,” he said.

…

By keeping the Chinese renminbi stable against the US dollar, China was contributing to the recovery in the global economy, he said. ”The purpose [of these calls for appreciation] is to hold back China’s development,” he added.

Xinhua: “A stable Chinese currency is good for the international community,” Wen told Xinhua News Agency in an exclusive interview.

Keep in mind that Mr. Jiabao will probably be talking a little tougher against the international community when directly addressing the local press, just like any U.S. president would do. Read more about the Xinhua interview here.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• How China Might Buy More Gold Than America Owns
• China’s Multi-Decade Worker Shortage Starts Next Year
• I Was In The Room When China Purposely Ruined Copenhagen To Humiliate Obama

AT&T’s LG eXpo has made a quick jump from launch announcement to price reduction. Originally debuting for $199 after a $100 mail in rebate and a two year contract, the eXpo is now available for the rock bottom price of $99 from Amazon with free activation. Throw in a $50 Amazon gift card and the LG eXpo will cost you a mere $49 with a two year contract. Better get while the getting is good, though, as both the $50 gift card and the free activation are limited time offers which end December 28th.

[Via wmpoweruser]

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It’s definitely shaping up to be the year of e-book readers: the Amazon Kindle is flying off (virtual) shelves, and we’d expect the Barnes & Noble Nook to start moving at a decent clip once the kinks get worked out. But any device with an always-on 3G connection to a central server raises some privacy questions, especially when it can broadcast granular, specific data about what you’re reading — data that’s subject to a wide spectrum of privacy laws and regulations when it comes to real books and libraries, but much less so in the digital realm. We’d say it’s going to take a while for all the privacy implications of e-books to be dealt with by formal policy, but in the meantime the best solution is to be informed — which is where this handy chart from our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation comes in. As you’d expect, the more reading you do online, the more you can be tracked — and Google Books, the Kindle, and the Nook all log a ton of data that can be shared with law enforcement and various other third parties if required. Of course, we doubt the cops are too interested in your Twilight reading habits, but honestly, we’d rather users weren’t tracked at all. Check the full chart and more at the read link.

[Thanks, Tom]

E-reader privacy policies compared: Big Kindle is watching you originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Dec 2009 16:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Explosive penises and the anatomical prevention of duck rape: You may not have known this (most of the Ars staff didn’t), but most birds copulate without the benefit of a penis. One of the primary exceptions to this are, of all creatures, ducks. As it turns out, male and female ducks have elaborate and rapidly evolving genitalia. There appears to be a behavioral habit driving this evolution: duck rape or, more properly, forced copulation. It seems that males tend to force themselves on females, and females have been evolving convoluted reproductive passages in order to thwart them.

The paper in question here actually capture video of the male erection process, which normally takes place inside the female: “Eversion of the 20 cm muscovy duck penis is explosive, taking an average of 0.36 s, and achieving a maximum velocity of 1.6 m s⁻¹.” But the female reproductive tract contains awkward bends and blind alleys that can apparently stop the process cold, allowing the female a degree of control over the father of her offspring, regardless of how aggressive he may be.

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Duke Nukem Forever may not have made a record-setting 12th appearance on Wired’s vaporware list this year due to the rather ugly legal disputes that surrounded it, 3D Realms is still saying it isn’t dead. As far as

The Age (Helena Smith)

THEY were one of the world’s most famous couples, who lived lives of power and glory but who spent their last hours in despair and confusion. Now, more than 2000 years since Antony and Cleopatra walked the earth, historians believe they may finally have solved the riddle of their last hours together.

A team of Greek marine archaeologists, who have spent years conducting underwater excavations off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt, have unearthed a giant granite threshold of a door they believe was once the entrance to a magnificent mausoleum that Cleopatra VII, queen of the Egyptians, had built for herself shortly before her death.

They believe the 15-tonne antiquity would have held a seven-metre-high door so heavy that it would have prevented the queen from consoling her Roman lover before he died, reputedly in 30BC.

”As soon as I saw it, I thought we are in the presence of a very special piece of a very special door,” said Harry Tzalas, the historian who leads the Greek team. ”There was no way that such a heavy piece, with fittings for double hinges and double doors, could have moved with the waves, so there was no doubt in my mind that it belonged to the mausoleum. Like Macedonian tomb doors, when it closed, it closed for good.”

Mr Tzalas believes the discovery of the threshold sheds new light on an element of the couple’s dying hours which has long eluded historians.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

scribd.com

The Art of Ancient Egypt: A Resource for Educators.
Metropolitan Museum

Available for download free of charge in PDF format.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes