When your winter bills start to raise look to your heating source for respite from more than just the cold, consider the following. By changing your filter once a month you will significantly cut down the energy it takes to push warm air through a dirty filter. That in turn will cost less in your monthly energy bills.
If you don’t have central heat and have a window heating unit, clean your filter at least once a week to help prevent the same expense. Filters cost $1.00 to $5.00 on average and will save you much more in energy cost over the winter months.
You can also buy plastic to cover your windows and doors that will prevent cool air from intruding your living spaces. The directions are easy to follow and the kits can be purchased at any hardware store. You can also roll up an old towel and place it at the base of your entry doors to further prevent cool air from entering. Replace weather stripping (or install) as needed to finish off the efforts to stay warm and reduce your potentially hefty utility bills.
With central air/heat units, don’t set your thermostat to “on”, keep it on “auto” so that it doesn’t run all the time, just when you need it. It is a good idea to keep your temperature in the 60-70 degree range. If you want 80 degree weather move to the desert, otherwise you will pay a premium to bring the temperature to you living spaces

Since 1917, Skuttle has been a company devoted to making homes healthier and more comfortable by producing the best whole-house indoor air quality products.  In all parts of the country, a Skuttle Humidifier or air cleaner can be a true asset to the home.  As more people realize the value of good air quality within their homes, these products are gaining nation-wide popularity and demand.

There are many regions in the country in which dry air sucks moisture from wherever it can.  Your skin, plants, and even wood products are included  The Skuttle model 2000 can easily make your life easier by saving you money, time, and frustration.  The Skuttle 2000 is a Bypass Flow-Thru Humidifier that helps maintain indoor relative humidity at a balanced, healthier, more comfortable 30-to-45 percent level.  The final result that starts with the motor for a Skuttle humidifier is an increased luxurious home with less requirement for heating in chilling winter season.

IF you use humidifiers like the Skuttle 2000 or the Skuttle 90, you will have to replace some of its parts over time, such as pads and filters.  It only takes a few minutes online to locate parts for the Skuttle 190 humidifier and the Skuttle 2000 humidifier.
Filters for humidifiers capture undesired elements from the air such as calcium, lime, iron and bacteria, and then release clean evaporated water into the home.  By effectively removing small particles from the air while adding necessary moisture, a home humidifier creates overall healthier air that is good for both home and human.  The filtering unit of a humidifier needs to be serviced or replaced at constant intervals.
Humidifier filter’s and part’s are typically found by searching part number’s such as a04-1725-034 or a04-1725-051.   To ensure optimal performance, it is necessary to replace filters and other parts for the Skuttle 2001 home humidifier at least once a year.  Another product that Skuttle is exceptional at creating is the air cleaner.  Air cleaner filters work to remove pollutants and contaminants from air.  To ensure circulation of pure air for a healthy home, replace the filter of your air cleaner in a routine manner.
Finding Skuttle air cleaner parts like the Skuttle air cleaner filter can be done much the same way as finding parts for a humidifier.   Air cleaner filters and parts are items that homeowners can change on their own with a little elbow grease and help from the products owner’s manual.  Though certain replaceable components can be easily changed at home, people still call in experts to do it.

Did you know that you can lose significant amounts of power and fuel economy your truck once had just because you may have neglected your intake filter? A simple cleaning and re-oiling of your intake filter can make a world of difference. Let OCDiesel.com explain why this happens…

Your engine needs airflow. It’s one of the most important things that an engine needs. This is especially true in a Diesel engine. It needs oxygen rich, cool, clean air to run at peak performance. If you have an intake filter you have not looked at in 3 years then chances are you have been robbing your engine of this. Because better combustion from better airflow directly reflects how much power and fuel economy your engine will be getting. It should be important to make sure you have a clean filter.

OCDiesel.com carries aFe’s whole line of filter restoration products. This is one of the simplest and most inexpensive ways to bring more airflow to your engine.

Not all oil is created equal. Highly refined oil from aFe will not harm MAF sensors and cause engine light warnings. It works great with aFe filters and is a great way to upgrade competitors oiled filters. The cleaner is specially formulated to release dirt without harming the microfibers critical to efficient filtration and airflow

Be sure to check out our Black Friday – Cyber Monday Weekend Long Sale!

Let is a set. A filter (on ) is a non-empty set of subsets of such that . Note that unlike some other authors I do not require .

I will call the set of filter objects the set of filters ordered reverse to set theoretic inclusion of filters, with principal filters equated to the corresponding sets. See here for the formal definition of filter objects. I will denote the filter corresponding to a filter object . I will denote the set of filter objects (on ) as .

I will denote the set of atomic lattice elements under a given lattice element . If is a filter object, then is essentially the set of ultrafilters over .

Problem Which of the following expressions are pairwise equal for all for each set ? (If some are not equal, provide counter-examples.)

1. ;
2. ;
3. ;
4. .

Pivot is a new project from Microsoft Live Labs that looks very promising. It’s a system and interface for displaying and filtering large sets of information. From the Pivot website:

“Pivot makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun. We tried to step back and design an interaction model that accommodates the complexity and scale of information rather than the traditional structure of the Web.

When we use the Web today we treat the most fundamental scenarios as separate activities. Search takes us from many things to one, browsing moves us from one thing to another, and recommendations expose affinities that enable us to explore related topics. Can we do better by combining these scenarios into a more unified experience?

Pivot focuses on this intersection, enabling us to learn key lessons while attempting to broadly apply this philosophy to the Web. We hope that Pivot will inspire and fuel transformative experiences across the Web.”

That last bit is particularly interesting –the intersection of browse and search in particular. Of course, I wrote an entire chapter in Designing Web Navigation on integrating browse and search (see Chapter 11). There, I focused on more microscopic UI elements and techniques that web designers could readily implement. But at the heart of my argument is the fact that fundamentally, from an information seeking standpoint of the user, there really is not difference between browsing and search: people just want to find information.

Facetted search takes up a big chunk of Chapter 11 in DWN. And a good part of Pivot is an extension of faceted navigation. It’s really a big filter system using different facets–but a way more powerful way to do it, in what appears to be a much more direct and satisfying experience.

Notice also that the creators of Pivot talk about emotional connections and information experience in the trailer video. This is also something that distinquishes Pivot from other such inventions, I believe.

So, Pivot doesn’t appear to be a niche, scientific experiment with limited practical use. I think there are some quite valuable aspects to Pivot that hint at things to come. I’ll be interested to see where it goes.

Here at Kicknote we’ve been hard at work to keep the site steadily evolving. A ton of stuff is currently being worked on behind the scenes (and it’s almost ready), but we’re trying to release little updates as often as possible to keep improving the user experience for you guys. Our latest update was adding categories & filters to the artist sites box (check out the screenshot). Now you can select one of seven categories (artist updates, videos/pics, streaming music, tix/concerts, get music/merch, bio/info, & social networks), and Kicknote will show you which of the artist’s sites have what you’re looking for. This is especially helpful if you’re not exactly sure what some of the sites “do,” or you’ve never heard of them before.

A full artist profile redesign is on the way, which will include a more robust version of categories/filters, a new layout, and an artist-specific newsfeed of real-time updates, among other things.

Lots of great new features will be out soon, so be sure to check back often!

Comments/suggestions are always welcome: comments@kicknote.com

So I woke up today, had my morning coffee while enjoying an episode of The Office with Maddi.

Once I finished that I decided it was time to be productive, so I headed onwards to my office and hunkered down in front of my editing station and spent a few minutes trying to decide what I was going to work on.

I have so many things on my plate it was a difficult decision to make. I mean I could have spent time cutting a living video together for the band Big Game Hunt, or I could have spent a few hours editing  my zombie movie “The Withered Dead. I could have even spent my time working on the million and a half screenplays that I have started and since left hanging in limbo.

But NO I tell you! None of that peaked my interested this fine morning, what I decided I want to do was in fact a million times cooler than any of that.

I decided I would spend my morning searching, downloaded and installing free filter plugins for my Final Cut Studio. Oh and did I ever have a blast doing it too!

I found filters that did cool colour correcting effects and other filters that would do smoother slow-motion and even filters that allow me to turn any of my videos to be actual widescreen images!

I know some of you out there will think this is cool, most of you will be happy for me but think I am a big fucking nerd and then some of you will just not understand what in the world I’m talking about and have stopped reading 2 paragraphs up the page. But I just felt like I had to share because I am so damn excited!!

Take care guys and until next time,

Keep your eyes peeled for those flesh eating bastards.

Colin

I’m not an expert at Farmtown yet, but, there are some cheats or just things that I’ve learned about it since I’ve been playing.

1. When you get your first farm and you have the little plots that Farmtown gives you go ahead and get rid of them and start fresh. Click on each plot and a menu will come up. Select delete, and then you will end up with a nice grassy field. Then proceed to plow your field with the plow button and plant whatever you like. Grapes are an excellent choice if you can work harvesting them promptly back into your schedule. Your crops will die if they are not harvested within the same time it took them to grow.

2. When it’s time to harvest head to the market and hire someone to harvest your crops. You will get more points. When they are put into storage you get extra points versus selling them right away. When they have been harvested if you have 8 neighbors you can get that same farmer or another farmer to plow for you. This relieves your clicking finger from some extra work. The big seeder is very helpful for seeding your fields. Especially after they get bigger.

Cheat: I have noticed that if someone hires you twice to plow the red plow symbol will disapear and this really helps me to plow faster. I love it when it goes poof!

3. Farmtown isn’t a game that gets played over night. It’s kind of a challenge with yourself…Nobody else is really going to care if your farm is bigger or you’re at level 60. It’s just your own achievement. It takes time. I find it really fun to challenge myself. I can’t wait until I can buy the new Manor that Farmtown just added. That’s a long way off though. I have loved talking to the people from around the world. There are way less filters than Club Penguin and talking is made easy. I’ve already made friends with several people in different countries. Farmtown does have some filters though. Don’t think that you can say anything you want. Most curse words are forbidden and people can still report you.

Well, that’s just a few things. Hope you get a chance to play and have fun!

It all starts with airflow. The more air that your engine breathes, the more oxygen it receives. More oxygen results in a better combustion. Better combustion translates into more power and better fuel economy. This is why your vehicle runs better on cool mornings than on hot afternoons as cool air is denser and contains more oxygen. You can feed your engine more oxygen by reducing the restriction of the airflow.

OCDiesel.com has the full line of S&B Filter Restoration Products to breathe new life into your performance filters.

Three easy steps to bring you filter back to life:

Step 1: Go to OCDiesel.com

Step 2: Check out S&B Precision Cleaning and Oiling Kits

Step 3: Buy an S&B Precision Cleaning and Oiling Kit

Questions about anything Diesel? Let us know…

I was searching for an oil/air separator that I will use on my new project and was surprised to find that there are over 300 different models of air/oil separator elements are available to choose from utilizing a cylindrical or pleated design of micro-glass. Some has capacities of up to 3000 CFM/element with a filtration power of 0.3-10 micron aerosol selectivity and 99.9% removal efficiency are available. These elements are limited, however to a temperature of 225 degree Fahrenheit, operating temperature at 50 PSIDP max.

I see a variety of this at Fluitek’s. They have air/oil separator elements are the Mist Eliminator Elements which are used for the elimination of oil smoke and mist from mechanical and rotary vacuum pumps. I am also doing a reseach on air separator that will be used in my next project.

We took our kids to the movies to watch a kid film. Occasionally they don’t enjoy kid films, feeling they are too old for the story at times. “Finding Nemo” has become one of these. I watch it from time to time and they ultimately end up on the couch with me, but they insist that it is too little for them.
But this trip to the cinema proved just the opposite, with my wife and I enjoying the film better than our daughters. It wasn’t too young but rather too intense. I’m not bashing the film. The depths of the emotions (anger, fear, loneliness, sadness) was greater than they were ready to experience in one one hundred minute dose. They even enjoyed it for the most part; it was more of a cumulative effect.
The film was “Where the Wild Things Are”. When I first heard this film was being made, I didn’t want to see it. I enjoyed the book more as an adult than as a kid, but I felt certain the movie would suck. Recent history supports this. Most attempts to stretch a children’s picture book into a feature length film results in horrendous bastardizations of the original story. I changed my mind when I heard that Spike Jonze was directing. I love his films. It was a hard to picture him doing something for kids, but I knew it would be good. Then the trailers made it obvious that they had captured the look Maurice’s Sendak’s art. It was worth the gamble.
The story of a child being overwhelmed by his life and losing control of his emotions resulting in his running away caught my attention. For one thing, the film, like the original story, has the power to magically transform me into a kid Max’s age. I think this stems from an understanding for and strong remembrance of childhood expressed by the director, writers and actors, returning themselves to what it feels like to be that age too. Then they took the story deeper without adding much to it. Then the filmmakers let this all become real, to mimic life and kids without attempts to pretty up everything for a nice Hollywood experience.
The true beauty of this film wasn’t just a journey into the imagination but also a journey inward. Max, when facing the wild things, is actually facing his emotions. These are big, scary things he can barely control, even as their supposed king. The feeling that they will destroy him and consume him sounds all too familiar. The reality is that even as adults feel this way, so too do kids. They are humans and have the full human array of emotions even though they don’t have the language to articulate it; they also the ability to experience them more deeply because they haven’t always built up defenses and filters like adults. Too often, because children don’t have these complexities we forget that they can still experience the full complexity of feelings.
That reminder is the power of this film.

Well welcome to Monday folks. And since it’s been awhile since I’ve thrown the best of the best links around – let’s do that for an introduction to the week.

§ It’s been around the Internet for a few days now, but the interesting site from last week to me is the new dpBestflow web site. The idea behind dpBestflow is an effort from the American Society of Media Photographers and the Library of Congress to come up with a “best practices” for digital photography. John Harrington has a nice summary written up on his blog – one of many from the last few days. Here’s a quote from Harrington on how useful something like this can be – to any of us:

“I’ll… tell you that you that everything you ever wanted to know about every aspect of workflow, in simple and easy to understand visuals and videos, is ALL THERE. FOR FREE.”

Umm, yeah – you had me at workflow – but then it got better. And if you’re a lazy bum (unlike me – I was only kidding last week), you should at least read this Quick Reference.

§ We’ve been starting to toy with the idea of light painting in the No-Light/Low-Light class at the Peoria Art Guild. Take a look at this page of lightpainters if you want to be inspired by this craft – it looks easy – and yet – it’s not (hat tip to Joy Miller).

§ We sometimes walk around here talking about Photoshop, Lightroom, Bridge, and Elements like everyone already knows. If you’re interested in starting from scratch as a photographer in the world of post-processing, I can not suggest a better place to start then Lightroom from Adobe. It – to me – is the best of everything else specifically for Photography. Check out this Digital Photography School article on “Lightroom: What is it and When you Should Consider it?” And if you get far enough, just like we did with Scott Bourne and Rob Sylvan a few weeks ago, we now present Scott Kelby’s “10 Things I Would Tell New Lightroom Users.” It’s a nice way to cut through the chatter.

§ Nevertheless, if you’re comfortable in all things Photoshop/Lightroom/etc., then check out this advanced cloning technique in Photoshop. Cloning is one of the easiest tools to use in Photoshop – and one of the easiest things to do badly. Anytime I can improve my technique with this valuable tool – I jump at it. Nicole Young shows you how over on Photo Focus.

§ To my friends with Nikon’s massive 14-24 f/2.8 lens, who wish they could put some split ND grad filters on the front, I say - problem solved – courtesy of the Brits.

§ Feeling a bit amateur. Well stop it. Thanks to Mr. Vision – David duChemin.

§ And another slightly more advanced topic: light meters. Want the 411 on all the ways an EXTERNAL light meter can help you. Check out the wisdom dispensed from the gang at Lighting Essentials. A light meter outside of the camera is the next step up if you want to really, really nail your exposures.

§ And I’ll leave you with this crossover gem. And by crossover I mean combining a few of the things I’m coming to love all in one place. Check out these timelapse videos of all things nature and send yourself over to Vimeo after the fact to see the behind-the-scenes work on how it was done.

It’s coming up on that time of year – if you’re like us, you’ll be sending out a slew of Christmas cards in the next two or three weeks and getting just as many in return in your mailbox.  But to complicate things, you know that some people on your list don’t bother sending you cards and you think, “Forget those losers!”  You’re also pretty sure that you’re getting cards from people that you forgot to send a card to and would like to return the greetings.  So, as with many of life’s little problems, you can build a simple spreadsheet to help you get things organized and under control.

We’re going to start this blog with a pretty simple example that can be executed with a table and some filters.  Let’s start with the basics:  a simple table with a handful of useful fields:  NAME, STREET, CITY, STATE, ZIP, SENT and RECEIVED.  The first 5 fields are formatted as text and the last two as dates.  I’ve dropped in dates for cards sent and received and left a few blank for some unsent / unreceived.

If your lists extends beyond the shores of the U.S., you can go ahead and add a COUNTRY field.

I think that it’s a good practice to “table-ize” most of your datasets.  This helps to keep your data organized and formatted consistently as you add or delete fields, automatically adds filters (which we’ll be using shortly) and has the added benefit of making things a bit easier should you ever decide to build, say, a pivot table, off of this data.  To convert this dataset to a table, click the “Table” button on the Insert tab.  On the “create table” dialog box that pops up, you can usually just click “OK” – just make sure that Excel has selected the correct rows and columns and that the “my table has headers” box is checked.  When you do this, your data should now look like this:

Once you’ve made it this far, the rest is simple…

To get a list of people that have sent you a Christmas card that have not gotten one from you:  click on the filter button in column G – that the downward pointing arrow – and make sure that “(Blanks)” – the last item on the list, is NOT checked.  Then in column F, make sure that “(Blanks)” is the only item checked.  This will bring up the following list:

You need to get cards to Maria White and Susan Harris!

Alright, once you’ve taken care of dropping those two cards in the mail, it’s time to see who you should consider dropping from next year’s list.  Who hasn’t sent you a card yet this year? Starting with your original list, you just reverse the selections in the respective columns used above.  Select everything except “(Blanks)” in column F and “(Blanks)” in column G.

These 5 people listed above haven’t sent you a Christmas card this year.  Maybe it’s time to send a quick email or to give them a call, making sure that everything’s ok.  If they’re just Christmas card deadbeats, you might want to consider saving yourself the postage next year.

You can now build your own simple Christmas card tracker or just download the template (in the blue box title “downloadable” and drop in your data.  Happy tracking!

I came across an article Robert Scoble wrote yesterday about the new method he’s going to use to organize his Twitter accounts. He’s been getting really excited lately as he figures out how to efficiently use Twitter to access good information that’s important to him. I’m going to write about the importance of media scanning as part of a “metathinking” framework in an upcoming post, so I’ll leave the commentary about what he figured out about Twitter lists for later.

Basically, Scoble decided to create multiple Twitter accounts to organize the different types of information he produces:

The value to this is much deeper than it may appear at first. Twitter is an amazing experimental grounds in figuring out how to leverage the power of the real-time web. Besides being an incredible platform that essentially operates as an “idea exchange”, where we can chew on ideas and news together collectively, it’s an amazing source of information acquisition.

As Scoble figured out in organizing his Lists, by creating different lenses and filters in Twitter, we can control the types of information we want to access. By separating his information into different accounts, he’s giving his readers the opportunity to also get filtered information.

It makes total sense, because not everything @scobleizer says is going to bring you value. If you’re not a personal contact of his, then you’d probably be satisfied with just seeing the original content he produces. Everything else is basically just noise. For instance, I just pulled this one out of his feed:

Obviously, unless you’re that person or know the context of the conversation, that comment means absolutely nothing to you.

Another example that comes to mind is Beth Kanter’s feed. If you’re a nonprofit who cares anything about how to use social media for social change, you should probably be reading her blog. I keep wanting to add @kanter to my “social change strategy” List, but she has so many individual exchanges with people that I have a hard time extracting the value from her stream. For instance, here’s a screenshot of her feed from just now:

There’s just a lot of excess noise that I don’t have the time to deal with. From a business perspective, that could mean the potential loss of a client for her, because they’re not able to filter the stream and see how valuable her knowledge would be for their organization.

So, why create a separate Twitter account?

* It will allow your audience to hone in on the content you create that matters most to them.

* It improves your information search strategies, because you can create Lists that only include original content.

It’s a great way for organizing a better system of thinking.

I hope that every serious blogger follows this lead and creates a separate Twitter account that just pulls the RSS from their blog into Twitter. (use Twitterfeed for this). We’ll all get more value from the network.

date:

Date Modified:

Date Created:

size:

Kind:

type:=.doc

name:

tag:

author:

Date taken:

Length:

If you find any broken Tweets or Links, please report them in the comment section.

If you like what you see, may I recommend you start following me on Twitter to enjoy the benefits of real-time content as it materializes.

If you choose to follow @rlavigne42, please leave me a comment. I will make sure to check out your Tweets in return.

If you see a Tweet you appreciate, please Pay it Forward by ReTweeting it.

If you find an blogger you like, please Join Me in following Them.

My Thoughts Enclosed…Rb

If you’ve been having a go at some of the new features of Ubuntu Karmic, and one of the programs you take advantage of is Inkscape. You’ll notice there are a whole host of filters that are now available.

To help understand some of these effects, c-quel who helped on the Ubunchu project with translations, organisation and editing, has put together a wonderful guide that shows each of the filter effects in action. Check it out:

AVX Upgrades SQCA Series Of RF MLCCs

AVX has extended the working voltage range of its RF multilayer ceramic capacitor (MLCC) from 100 to 250V DC. Designated the SQCA Series, the high-performance MLCC provides low ESR, high Q, high self-resonance and a capacitance range of 0.1 to 100pF in a 0605 case size. Providing superior stability under the stresses of changing voltage, frequency, and temperature, the SQCA Series MLCC is ideal for use in microwave RF/IF amplifier, low-noise amplifier, mixer, oscillator, filter network and MRI-system applications.

Larry Eisenberger, AVX product manager, said: ‘The SQ Series MLCC chips feature a porcelain and ceramic dielectric material that provides high reliability, low ESR and up to 40 per cent lower equivalent series resistance than previous versions. ‘This makes the SQCA Series ideal for applications with high current-carrying capabilities and high-quality factors. The SQCA series is RoHS compliant due to 100 per cent tin terminations. Tin/lead terminations are also available.

When I used to take photos for a living my camera gear became second nature to me. Using something everyday garners a familiarity that the occasional user doesn’t see.

Visit a photography website, either a hobbyist or read a photography magazine and most of what you will read is about equipment. It’s not that equipment isn’t important but it’s the smallest part of the equation in getting a fine image.

Believe it or not, advertiser play a huge role in determining how large a publication will be. Editorial space is always determined by the number of ads.. Incur the wrath of a major advertiser and revenue drops. The publication shrinks.

Do you want to see a really critical review of a product? Go to Consumer Reports or an independent website that is NOT ad driven.

So it was today when I read on a product blog that a photographer could not get natural and inherently pleasing results with HDR and as a result was using some very expensive filters to get her the results she wanted, I took that with a GIANT grain of salt.

I have nothing to sell. I have a set of graduated ND filters and I have Photomatix a program which is used in creating HDR images. I think I am unbiased when I say, that the above mentioned photographer doesn’t know how to properly process images to get “natural and inherently pleasing” results.

The winter shot at the top of this blog is a blend of three exposures. SHOCKER!!!! What you say? Why doesn’t it look like a cartoon or have a black sky with halos around the edges of the trees and fence post? HDRs can look like cartoons if you pull the sliders to the extreme limits. I was as guilty as anyone when I first started using the program. After six months of over-processing, I got tired of the novel look and it started looking really bad to my eye.

A well done HDR should NOT look like an HDR whatever that means. It should look like a well lit, well exposed scene.

There is a tool for everything. This scene definitely did not call for a graduated ND filter. Under some conditions they work extremely well but not here. Why? The graduated ND filter would have darkened the sky and sun, we want that. The same filter would have also made the top of the fence post almost black. We don’t want that.

HDR is great at capturing extremes of light. What it is not good at is handling motion. Between three exposure or how ever many you use, whatever motion there is between exposures of the subject matter has can ruin the shot. HDR is not good when there are strong winds or if something in the foreground is moving in a breeze. Photomatix tries to fix it but does a poor job of judging how to handle the movement.

Don’t be misled by blogs whose intent is only to sell a product. What is the endorser getting out of writing for a product blog? Well, how about recognition? Free advertising?

Filters are just another tool in your camera bag. They won’t make a quantum difference in how your photos look. They’ll polish them up a little bit.

Learn to be a good photographer by paying attention to light and composition. Realize that not every time of the day is the right time to take photos.

A great set of paint brushes won’t create a masterpiece for you and so it also goes for photo equipment.

Happy shooting,

Dan