When you’re looking for a protein-packed breakfast, eggs and meat seem like the most obvious choice. But if you go for the most obvious choice every single morning, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut. So on those mornings when meat and eggs aren’t what you’re craving and you wake up feeling less like a hunter and more like a gatherer, try Mark’s Daily Apple reader Doug Descant’s ingenious recipe for No-atmeal.

Pronounced “note-meal” (as in, no oatmeal) Doug’s recipe, that he submitted for the Primal Cookbook Challenge, is for all you ex-cereal lovers out there and for anyone who needs a warm bowl of comforting goodness on a cold winter morning. As Doug says, “it’s a hot meal full of essential proteins and fats, not to mention the necessary vitamins and minerals, in order to stay energized for the cold weeks ahead.”

In Doug’s recipe a blend of pecans, walnuts and a dash of flaxseed is warmed up with almond milk custard, mashed banana and almond butter to create a wholly satisfying hot cereal. The texture is rich and so is the flavor, especially when you add warming spices like cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger and a topping of fresh berries and almond milk. Just thinking about eating No-atmeal for breakfast is guaranteed to coax you out of bed in the morning.

Ingredients:

• 1 small handful of walnuts
• 1 small handful of pecans
• 2 tablespoons ground flax seed
• 1/2 – 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 pinch of ground nutmeg
• 1 pinch ground ginger
• 1 tablespoon almond butter
• 1 banana, mashed
• 3 eggs
• 1/4 cup unsweetened almond milk (add more if you prefer it a little runny)
• 2 teaspoons pumpkin seeds
• 1 handful of goji berries or fresh berries

Directions:

Add walnuts, pecans, flax seed and spices to a food processor and pulse it down to a course grain, making sure to stop before it’s totally ground into a powder. Set aside.

Whisk together eggs and almond milk (Doug uses a Blender Bottle) until the consistency thickens a little bit into a loose custard. Thoroughly blend together the mashed banana and almond butter and add it to the custard, mixing well.

Stir in the nut mixture. Microwave or gently warm on the stove until the “no-atmeal” reaches your desired consistency; this should only take a few minutes. In both cases, stir the mixture frequently as it cooks.

Sprinkle pumpkin seeds and berries on top. Add more almond milk if you want. Lick the bowl clean!

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Related posts:

1. Almond Banana Pancakes
2. Frozen Primal Custard
3. Top 10 Ways to “Go Nuts”

China’s top leadership said it will keep policies to support growth in place through 2010, despite concerns about the effects of more powerful stimulus on the world’s fastest-growing major economy.

The ruling Politburo of China’s Communist Party met Friday to discuss economic policy for next year, and decided it will “maintain the continuity and stability of economic policies, and continue to implement the proactive fiscal policy and loose monetary policy,” according to a statement carried by China Central Television, the state broadcaster.

Continue reading at WSJ »

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• China Entering Winter With A Severe Natural Gas Shortage (UNG)
• How China’s Bank Regulator Could Slam The Markets
• China Begs Banks To Cut Back On Lending

Filed under: GM, Saab, Earnings/Financials, Rumormill

When Koenigsegg pulled out of its agreement with General Motors to purchase Saab, many thought that General Motors would dump the Swedish automaker much like it did the Saturn brand. But it appears that The General is still willing to look for another interested party, and speculation is that two perspective buyers are at the front of the line. The Swedish press is reporting that China’s Beijing Automotive (BAIC) and Wyoming-based merchant bank Merbanco have shown renewed interest in perennially cash-poor Saab.

Saab spokeswoman Gunilla Gustavs reportedly told Automotive News that there were 27 suitors interested in the Swedish automaker prior to Koenigsegg becoming the preferred bidder and confirmed that there are now other bidders interested. “We have a close dialog and close contact with several who have expressed interest in buying Saab Automobile,” Gustavs says.

if another bidder does win the opportunity to purchase Saab, they’ll inherit an automaker that expects to lose $427 million in 2009 and a similar amount of cash in 2010. That buyer will also run into plenty of resistance when trying to get its hands on GM’s technology assets. One issue that reportedly derailed the Koenigsegg bid was GM’s reluctance to share its tech for new products like the new Saab 9-5. On the upside, the aforementioned 9-5 sedan has just begun serial production, the 9-3X allweatherwagon is ready to go, and the 9-4X looks to be just around the bend, too.

Earlier in the week, GM released a statement stating that it would “take the next several days to assess the situation and will advise on the next steps next week.” Thanks for the tips, everyone!

[Sources: Autocar; Automotive News; Auto Motor und Sport]

REPORT: Saab still has at least two interested parties – BAIC and Merbanco originally appeared on Autoblog on Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It may be its mortal enemy, but Facebook doesn’t mind borrowing a couple of tricks from Google’s playbook once in a while. Google is well known for the tests it rolls out for even the smallest features before integrating them with the proper product. It’s not the only company doing this, but Google has taken the practice to the extreme. Apparently, Facebook thinks that it’s a good idea and has adopted the practice to test out new design features and tweaks which we’ve been seeing a lot of lately.

The latest test to roll out for a handful of people involves a couple of changes mostly previewed about a month back. TechCrunch has managed to get its hands on several screenshots of the new design and, for the most part, they confirm the direction Facebook has said it would take. There are a couple new things, though, like the bigger search bar which now takes a more central position.

This time around the changes are pretty insignificant, nothing like the news feed / live feed thing which got most people all worked up. Undoubtedly, a lot of people will still hate them but they’ll get over it like they always do. The top bar gets all the attention and things get shuffled around hopefully for the better. The ‘Home,” “Profile,” and all the other sections, which are now on the left side, get pushed to the other corner, while the things that requir… (read more)

I’m on the road this weekend, so just a quick post: A few death penalty stories from the week I didn’t get a chance to share:

• Russia essentially abolished the death penalty last week. (I posted a bit of background here)
• Vietnam’s  legislature is considering adding lethal injection as a method of execution to the current firing squad. (Vietnam executed 25 people in 2007)
• Kentucky’s Supreme Court suspended executions in the state Wednesday in another lethal injection case
• Ohio got the ok to begin using its one-drug injection to kill people and a doctor is facing questions over her role in the failed attempt to execute Romell Broom on September 15.

Last week HP Loaned me their Elite e9250 Pavilion desktop which features a Intel Core i5-750 processor, 6 Gigs of memory, NVIDIA GeForce GT 2200 1GB, and of course Windows 7 64-bit.

I only had about a week with the system and since that normally isn’t enough time to fully gauge how well a system can perform, I decided to make it my main machine for the time I had it so that I could spend as much time on it as I could.

The e9250 has a similar design to previous HP Pavilion desktops with minor differences. For example it has the 15 in 1 memory card reader at the top of the system like previous Pavilions. But now it has an HDD and Wi-Fi indicator to the right of the memory card slots and to the left of the slots are also two USB ports.

While HP Pavilions in the past have had two USB ports on the front of the case, they typically were hidden behind a door. This was cool but if you owned a flip camera or any bulky device, that door got in the way when connecting to the USB ports. This made the USB ports unusable unless you used some sort of USB cable extender. So moving the USB ports up top is a big plus for me.

There is also an expansion bay for an HP Pocket Media drive. Which will come in Handy when using the Easy Backup button. But any external or internal HDD will work with the HP Easy Backup.

The first thing I did was uninstall all the preloaded software with the exception of Norton 2010 which I like. I then installed the day to day software I typically use. For those curious I use AIM, Live Messenger, FileZilla, Office 2007, Adobe Air (FedEx Desktop and Twitterific), and Dropbox.

After all that was installed, the system handled itself as if there was nothing installed. In the past I would recommend reformatting the drive and do a clean install of the OS but HP and other OEMS have cut back on the crapware they install on their systems and I no longer think that is necessary.

Excel, Power Point, Outlook and Word all loaded quickly. I was able to multi task without any noticeable system slowdown, which is crucial if you are a heavy multi-tasker.
The system handled all of my day to day apps easily. I wouldn’t have expected anything less than what I got. But what I really wanted to test was how well it was to game on the system.

So I installed the four games I tend to play the most. Crysis, Flight Simulator X, The Sims 3 and WoW. Out of those four games the most resource intensive one is Crysis followed by Flight Simulator.

It handled Cysis beautifully and a lot of credit for that goes to the GeForce GT 2200. The graphics were amazing and while I am not a huge NVIDIA Fan I have to give them props because the GT2200 satisfied my craving for amazing gaming! (Yes I was trying to rhyme)

Playing Crysis with all its settings high is no easy feat. The system also handled Flight Simulator, the Sims 3 and WoW beautifully.

If you are a huge Sims fan, when playing the Sims 3 on this system I noticed no lag. If you played the sims you may have noticed when moving your character around a room with a lot of items in it, the system can begin to lag. I never experienced that with the e9250.

I wanted to run some PC Mark and 3D Mark test on the system but both kept giving me scores that did not seem accurate, so I didn’t want to post them. I suspect that I have some driver issue on the system that was causing the odd results. If I am able to fix the problem before I send the system back to HP I will update this post with the results.

Overall HP has given us a great desktop, but I for one would like one without the expansion bay for the Pocket Media Drive.

But if you are on the market for a new system the e9250 is one I think you should definitely look into as I think it is perfect for the gamer in all of us. The e9259 has a medium form factor which would make it a great system for someone in a small apartment or a college student in a dorm. It would also make a great day to day family computer as well.

The HP Pavilion e9250 has a starting price of $799 the system I tested will cost you $964.99.

For more information visit http://www.hp.com

Source

Just received my latest copy of Infectious Disease News, that large glossy review magazine* that arrives approximately monthly in my mailbox.

As usual, I turned right to Dr. Theodore C. Eickhoff’s always-thoughtful editorial, this month entitled “Reflections on the 47th IDSA Meeting.”  He writes:

It was a much more “user-friendly” number of attendees, in contrast to the almost 15,000 people that attended the joint meeting last year. I heard absolutely no one express a desire to have another joint IDSA-ICAAC meeting.

I can see his point — the combined meeting in Washington last year drew over 15,000 participants, and at times was just too gargantuan to manage.

But if I could for a moment be the lone voice arguing for a joint meeting, here’s my pitch:  Last year, tons of people  in ID went to ICAAC-IDSA, even people who rarely go to either meeting.  This year, not so much — which might explain the “somewhat muted and subdued” tone Eickhoff found at IDSA this year in Philadelphia.

Either that or what the Yankees were doing against the Phillies.

(*Don’t call it a “throwaway!”)

Online illegal file-sharing is always a hot topic and the big media companies are doing their best to keep it in the spotlight. But for all their talk of protecting their business and the artists’ rights, their anti-piracy fight boils down to what can only be described as a form of extortion. And after the practice proved rather profitable in the US, if not actually making a noticeable dent in illegal file-sharing, it was time to conquer new markets so they’re moving to the UK.

Some 15,000 ‘pirates’ are about to be sent letters informing them of the legal consequences of their alleged wrong-doing. Hard times await the recipients of these letters with lengthy lawsuits and hefty fines. Fortunately the media companies have a softer side and are offering a simple solution to all of the problems, just pay a few hundred pounds and the whole issue is resolved. Unsurprisingly, most people choose to settle rather than go through the whole painful process.

The BBC has a lengthy piece on the subject and does a good job at explaining how the whole system works. In this particular case two German companies DigiProtect and MediaCat, which represent various copyright holders including adult content publishers, hired ACS: Law to make sure illegal file sharers get what’s coming to them. The law firm won a major victory rec… (read more)

Porro made this cool yarn swift from a Rationell Variera pot lid organizer and Snudda Lazy Susan. It’s pretty easy to achieve too. Just mark the spots where you want to place the lid organizers. Drill holes and screw them in.

Visit her blog for her yarn swift instructions.

Spam is one of the biggest problems with the web at the moment and, despite countless efforts and measures, it’s unlikely to go away any time soon. Google has several way of countering spam, be it in Gmail or in the web at large, which it claims are pretty good at making these methods pretty useless, though, this doesn’t seem to faze most spammers. In a recent blog post, it’s focusing on comment spam, specifically on what it does to tackle the problem and what webmasters can do to prevent them. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but there are a couple of useful tips in there.

Google starts off by appealing to the spammer’s conscience with things like: “abusing comment fields of innocent sites is a bad and risky way of getting links to your site.” There’s nothing wrong with that sentence, in fact, it’s entirely true. But the morality of the thing insn’t likely to stop anyone from doing it. Google also tries to make the case that original content is the way to go and that a little patience and a lot of hard work will pay off with nice, clean and natural ranking.

This is all great if you’re talking to a five-year old, but the “do the right thing” and “work hard and one day …” arguments are perhaps lost on the people Google is trying to reach. Fortunately, Googl… (read more)

Philip Robinson writes on various subjects and one of his health related websites is about Portable Oxygen Machines. For more information on supplemental oxygen resources visit http://www.portableoxygenmachines.net.

Google got most of the attention this week for its recently unveiled Chrome OS so the Wave team figured it was time for a little update as well. They’re not actually announcing anything but they are revealing the results of a survey they’ve carried out to find out what people liked or disliked about Google Wave. And with most of the tech world unimpressed with Google’s efforts, it would be interesting to know what the actual users think.

“Since we can’t talk to all of our users individually (no matter how hard we try!), we’ve been running an online survey to get some feedback on the Google Wave experience. We distributed the survey through email (to a random sample of those that volunteered to help), a link in our help center and a tweet. While this may not be a completely representative sample of all Google Wave users, the results have been interesting to us, and we’d like to share them,” Aaron Cheang, User Experience researcher for Google Wave, wrote.

The results aren’t as useful as they could have been, but there are a couple of interesting nuggets in there. When asked what they liked the most about Google Wave, the majority of users said they liked the idea of the wave as the center of all their communications. The interesting thing is that they didn’t say they liked they way Google had implemented it but rather the concept itself. This is v… (read more)

It’s no secret that fans all over are clamoring for a remake of Ocarina of Time. Some would want to see it on the Wii, others on the DS. Let’s see wh…

Office Depot is selling the HP Pavilion dv6-1351nr for $599 through Black Friday after a $100 discount. The HP Pavilion dv6 is a mainstream notebook with a 15.6″ display. It’s a good general computing PC and has enough horsepower to edit home movies, play video games and multi-task.

Those of you who remember the G60-519WM will be delighted to know that the great deal starts really soon and you’ll have the opportunity to buy this laptop for just $298, as part of Walmart’s Black Friday offer lineup. However, quantities are very limited so you’ll have to be quick if you want to get yourself one of those super-cheap Windows 7 laptops.

It has quite the specifications for this price – a 2.2 GHz Celeron 900 processor, 3GB of DDR2 RAM, and a 250 GB hard drive. You’ll also get a 15.6″ BrightView screen which can display in a resolution up to 1366 x 768. For rendering 3D graphics, the laptop has an Intel GMA 4500M with 1309MB of shared memory. It has a DVD recorder with the LightScribe function, which allows you to print images on the non-data sides of your discs. There are other goodies as well, and included is a copy of Windows 7 Home 64-Bit.

The laptop comes for just $298 and it will have pre-installed copies of various paid software, including Symantec Norton Internet Security, Microsoft Office, and other similar applications. Get more information about the laptop here: Walmart

Enough with the teaser trailers. Square Enix is out to get going on spreading the word even faster and wider about Final Fantasy XIII (Xbox 360, PS3)….

How Well Do You Know Green It?

The Wall Street Journal – Monday, November 16, 2009

Technology has transformed the office, made it possible to communicate instantly around the globe and put the world’s art, music and books at our fingertips. Can it now help improve the environment? Technologists say yes, as they use computing power to save energy, reduce waste and produce power more efficiently. Try our quiz to see how well you know green IT.

1) Which of these roles for information and communications technology has the potential to yield the biggest reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030?
A. Retrofitting existing buildings
B. Designing new buildings for reduced emissions
C. Telecommuting and virtual meetings
D. E-commerce and replacing paper
Answer: D. According to a study by the World Wildlife Fund, a big increase in online shopping and in the use of electronic transactions and documents to replace paper bills and publications could eliminate nearly a billion tons of greenhouse gases a year from the environment. That’s about twice the reduction estimated to result from either making existing buildings more efficient or designing new buildings that constantly monitor and adjust air conditioning and heating to minimize waste. More telecommuting and virtual meetings would save about 160 million tons of emissions a year, it estimated.

2) Toyota Motor Sales cut energy use in its Torrance, Calif., data center by 10%. How did it manage that?
A. It stopped keeping track of dealer sales, shutting down four blade servers.
B. It moved all storage to an Amazon.com cloud-computing center.
C. It redirected air flow from air conditioners and separated intake and outflow ducts.
D. It planted heat-absorbing vegetation on the roof.
Answer: C. The Toyota Motor Corp. unit hired International Business Machines Corp. to analyze air flows in the building and their effect on temperature. Air flows can create uneven temperatures in a facility, which results in inefficient temperature control&mdash for instance, bringing hot spots down to the desired temperature takes more cooling than is necessary for the rest of the space. By changing the air-flow patterns, Toyota was able to cut its air-conditioning use.
3) Lithium-ion batteries are the most popular technology for laptops and cellphones, because they are light and long lasting. They also can be disposed of with little environmental impact. What country produces the most lithium?
A. Argentina
B. Bolivia
C. Chile
D. Denmark
Answer: C. Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile SA is the world’s largest lithium miner, with mines in Chile and in Argentina, the No. 2 producing country. Bolivia is considered a promising prospect for future development.

4) Match the product, service or initiative with the company that dreamed it up.
A. Dell 1. ecoMeter
B. CA 2. Plant a Tree
C. Lexmark 3. Eco Ultra Small
D. Lenovo 4. Eco-simulator
Answer: A-2. Dell Inc. will plant a tree for each corporate laptop sold under some sales plans. It says each tree will soak up enough carbon dioxide over its projected 70-year life to offset the carbon used in making and powering a computer.
B-1. CA Inc.’s ecoMeter is software that helps chief information officers visualize, monitor and manage the use of energy in data centers and other facilities.
C-4. Eco-simulator is Lexmark International Inc.’s online service that measures the environmental impact of a user’s printing.
D-3. Lenovo Group says its M58p Eco Ultra Small desktop contains 10% recycled plastic.

5) What is a zombie server?
A. One that causes so much trouble it is said to scare IT managers out of their wits.
B. One that is running but isn’t connected to any live data.
C. One that keeps running even though it has nothing to do.
D. A special server at Amazon.com that serves hit novels to teenage girls.
Answer: C. IT managers trying to understand why their data centers use so much electricity sometimes find that they have a number of servers that produce hardly any useful work. These servers sometimes were authorized for an ambitious sales campaign or other project that never achieved its goals but never was completely shut down. Such servers are good candidates for elimination, with their jobs to be taken up by other servers with computing power to spare. A study of four unidentified data centers by McKinsey and Co. discovered that 146 of 458 servers were running at less than 3% of capacity.

6) What is the fastest-growing source of energy consumption in data centers?
A. High-end servers
B. Midrange servers
C. Networking devices
D. Storage devices
Answer: D. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, storage devices’ consumption of electricity grew 191% between 2000 and 2006. Over that period, storage devices rose from consuming the least power in the four categories to the most, at 32.3% of energy usage.

7) What area of green technology is likely to offer IT veterans the most new job opportunities?
A. Smart grids
B. Solar-cell development
C. Engineering projects designed to fight global warming
D. Lithium battery development
Answer: A. A January 2009 report by Kema Inc., an energy consulting firm, estimated that in the U.S. alone, smart-grid development efforts could create up to 280,000 jobs directly by 2012. Jobs include installing smart meters in homes and designing software to manage the energy use of networks of homes and businesses more efficiently.
IT-networking skills match up neatly with smart-grid work, according to CleanEdge.com, a jobs Web site.

8) Match the high-tech company with the organization that ranked it No. 1 in some aspect of environmental responsibility.
A. Hewlett-Packard 1. Greenpeace
B. IBM 2. Newsweek
C. Intel 3. Environmental
Protection Agency
Answer: A-2. Hewlett-Packard Co. took the top spot in Newsweek’s 2009 Green Rankings of the 500 largest companies in the U.S.
B-1. IBM was atop the &quot leaderboard&quot of Greenpeace’s CoolIT Challenge, due to &quot an extensive range of climate solutions and action to reduce its own emissions.&quot
C-3. The EPA said Intel Corp. was the biggest purchaser of renewable energy last year, accounting for 48% of its power.

9) What percentage of corporate PC users leave their computers on nights and weekends when they aren’t in use?
A. About half
B. Hardly anyone
C. About 25%
D. Almost everyone
Answer: A. According to the nonprofit Alliance to Save Energy, less than half of corporate PC users shut their computers down overnight, even though they aren’t using them. Turning them off would save an estimated 20 million tons of carbon-dioxide emissions a year&mdash roughly equivalent to the impact of four million cars.

10) What makes Windows 7 greener than Vista and other older Windows operating systems?
A. Microsoft prints the product manual on recycled paper.
B. It won’t run on high-energy microprocessors.
C. It reduces processor activity while the computer is idle.
D. It adjusts for intermittent power from wind turbines and solar panels.
Answer: C. It reduces background activity by electronically checking all connected devices at once and then going to sleep, rather than checking them at random times, which requires a central processor to be in operation almost constantly. It also reduces power consumption in other ways: It can be configured to stop searching for a network connection when a network cable isn’t plugged in. It suspends Bluetooth radio connectivity when it senses the Bluetooth device is in low-power mode. And it dims displays after shorter periods of inactivity than previous models.

Diet and exercise can reduce the risk of becoming diabetic by more than a third, says a new study by the Nat’l Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Overweight study participants who cut calorie and fat intake and exercised at least 30 minutes 5 days a week cut their risk of getting diabetes by 34% vs. people who didn’t change their lifestyle. People over 60 got even more dramatic results, cutting their risk of diabetes during the study period by about half.