Datatoy is a service to turn your tweets into charts and tables and such.

I sketched out the idea on Tuesday while waiting for a meeting to kick off. I wanted a way to track how many starbucks I’d eaten without adding another app to my phone. Shooting a note at twitter should do it.

It is now pretty much working thanks to a couple of longish evenings of coding with twitter and google apis (it’s currently the friday of the same week).

Hurrah - get things done!

http://blog.datatoy.net and @datatoy

My drinks intake over the past couple of days as tweeted @datatoy:

But what to do when you eat an orange at your desk? You throw the peel in the bin don’t you. What a waste!

But keeping a separate compost bin would be impractical - there is so little organic waste at the desk (unless you count all the paper) that you’d only empty it once a month. That’s going to get a bit pew!

Introducing the compostable recycled paper magic instant mini-bin!

Take one of those return envelopes that companies keep sending you with their bills, you know - the ones you throw straight in the bin.

Fold in the corners like so - to produce a little bin. Simple huh! Tiny invention indeed.

Then when you flip it over - as if by magic - a mini bin appears!

Now just fill it with compostable by products of your desk bound activites:

This has multiple advantages:

• Paper composts pretty well, so you just throw the whole thing in the composter at the end of the day
• Keeps desk tidy by gathering unwanted orange peel
• Recycles envelopes that you would otherwise throw away
• Fully compostable (as long as the envelope doesn’t have a plastic window)
• Shortlived as can be remade every time you get a new envelope - which is every day in my house
• Easy to carry - even for those unfortunate not to work at home, this can tuck nicely into your bag to come home to your compost bin
• No need to wash - unlike plastic bins of a similar dimension
• Different look every day - some envelopes are brown, some white, some have checked innards
• Oh - and it’s free
• Oh - and it’s fun to make them

I can’t think of any disadvantages. Apart from maybe pear cores can make them a bit soggy. But that’s nothing that an extra bit of paper wouldn’t handle. Save the planet people!

I was clearing junk out of the garage (again) and found my big metal bench vice. So obviously I started trying to emboss the front of a moleskine with 3 dimensional objects. Dice worked best. Look!

I left them in the vice overnight - an earlier test of an hour looked a bit wishy washy. Apologies to whoever did this a year ago who I can’t link to because I can’t find them - I’m sure they did a bat symbol from one of those old plastic toy batsign flipper toys.

Common advice from the scientists, the witches, and the ‘wise elders’ seems to be to vary the first proper food as much as possible. Carrot yesterday? Rice today and sweet potato tomorrow! Thereby supposedly ensuring an eclectic and sophisticated palate in later life, and less sulky plate pushing in his early years.

But - how to remember what he ate? I can’t trust my sleep deprived brain with this information. He could be eating nothing but carrot until he’s 12!

So - lunch-time Inventoid time - the weaning fridge magnet kit! Presenting draft 1:

A nice flexible system - no oppressive boxes - just loose associations. If he’s having 2 solids a day he gets two little magnets next to each day marker - or 3 or 1 or whatever. The set would include all the ‘good’ baby foods - so if you couldn’t find the magnet you shouldn’t feed it to the baby.

Manufacturers of baby jars could give little magnets with them to use with this system as stupid little collectible freebies.

The delux set could include light up day magnets which tell you what day of the week it is - and which repel any other magnets within 2 inches every 7 days - thereby self reseting that day at midnight. Now you won’t forget what day it is because it’ll be empty when you get up!

weanmagnets.com is available - amazingly enough.

And just to make sure I get less hate mail about this inventoid than I STILL get about the one from last year about mutilating moleskine notebooks - I do know that you don’t give starbucks to babies. The roast is WAY too dark for their tiny little tummies.

Install it, change a few simple thinks like the ‘from’ email address, and suddenly any post that you write with ‘news’ as a tag will be emailed to all registered users of your blog. Nothing else is emailed to anyone ever.

You can change the tag which triggers the mail out to be whatever you like. You can also change the to and from addresses, but that’s it. Options for recipients are non existent, this assumes a closed, friendly, willing subscriber list on your blog. Make sure your T/C document keeps you safe.

Download: dd_mailapost.zip

Installation is the usual case of unzipping in the plugins folder. Make sure you attack the config file before activating anything. Very early version, but fulfills this simple task. If you need more flexibility look at something like

But! You need to keep sitting up / tilting your head / straining your neck to sip the coffee. This ruins the whole affair and you’d be just as well sitting up. What a waste of a recline opportunity.

Introducing reclaffeine - the reclining caffeine system

An insulated coffee straw for laying and drinking on a sofa. Two models. One is simply an insulated straw with a clever valve to minimise effort for sipping, you dip it in your coffee cup using a small clip.

The second is more ingenious. It comes with a coffee puck to insert into the straw - so you pull hot water through the straw to brew as you drink. How fresh is that coffee? Well it brewed 12mm from my tongue!

Not available as a baseball cap mounted version!

Although I don’t knit myself. My good lady wife does. Not in a manic ‘15 projects ongoing at any one time’ way. Just the occasional pair of booties, scarf, or floppy eared bunny for relatives. Or, rather delightfully, for us!

Anyway, the only downside of any knitting project is the need to continually keep quite while she counts rows, stitches and whatever else knitters count. The temptation to shout FIVE ELEVEN THREE isn’t always resistible.

Introducing KNITNAV, your knitting pattern assistant.

Gone are chunky books, notepads and spreadsheets. Just pick the pattern, and knitnav talks you through the process. Multiple modes for beginners, or experts. Beginners get told what moss stitch is, experts get cryptic code shouted at them.

A tomtom style unit would be great, or some kind of ipod / nintendo ds program would do it. Actually, a hyper ironic swarovski encrusted ds would be great. You could knit little charms to dangle from it. It would need headphones.

For any entrepreneurs out there - ALL the domains are available. Knitnav.com… etc. Hurrah.

The world needs more red knitted bears roaming around gardens. The knitnav could make that dream a reality.

CC pic of the garmin, and the wool.

Less of an inventoid, more of a recipoid. Introducing - the muffocaccia. Half muffin. Half focaccia. This fits well with a vegiterranean diet.

The recipe couldn’t be simpler.

2 Lbs of Flour. Make this up from a mixture of Strong White Flour, Strong Wholemeal Flour, and Semolina / Semolina flour. Proportions depending on your taste. I prefer roughly equal parts, although you could remove any one of them I’d keep the semolina at least 25% for texture.

Just over a pint of warm water (more if you use a lot of wholemeal)

About a tablespoon of Salt

About a teaspoon of dried yeast

Combine these in a big bowl. Knead for 5 minutes. It should be soft and springy and look something like this:

Leave for a couple of hours in a cool room. The warm room to rise bread thing is a myth. A cool room lets the flavour improve for longer. Leave it until it looks like this:

Now bash it down and leave it to do that step again. You don’t have to do this step - but I find it makes the finished bread much softer and tastier.

Now find some herbs. Rosemary and Thyme were all my garden could offer. Plus a little basil from the window sill. Chop these. chop in some sundried tomato, leek, and garlic. Oh and some olives. You want to end up with a couple of handfuls of tasty ’stuff’. A bit of sea salt doesn’t hurt either - depending how salty your olives are.

Fry this lot up in a pan for 5 minutes - just to soften the herbs really. Use lots of olive oil. In some ways you’re just flavouring the oil anyway. Use too much olive oil. Then add some more. Then some more. Trust me. You need a lot of olive oil. No one said these were healthy!

Now smooth that into your dough. Get your hands dirty. Squish that dough. Work the oil into the dough and the ‘bits’ evenly throughout.

Warning. Depending on the warmth of your monitor the following pics will look tasty or horrendous. Trust me - they looked tasty in real life. Stupid Sigma lenses under artificial light!

Now scoop this into a couple of muffin trays. This is enough to fill your freezer with 24 of these things! Fill the cups to about 3/4 or 4/5 - we want these to look muffiny!

Perfect. Now leave them to rise for anything up to an hour - until they are doubled in size with nice muffin tops.

Now slap them in a 200′C oven for about 20 minutes. 25 minutes to be certain they’re cooked. They should look something like this. If you have any good olive oil, now is the time to drizzle a little over the top. Not too much, just wee glug.