來去宜蘭走走！ 夜晚魅力百分百

北宜高速公路全線通車，拉近了台北與宜蘭的距離，晚上下班後，不少上班族相約去宜蘭走走，看夜景，品嚐小吃，當起夜貓族。

賞夜景 情侶點名必到

入夜的蘭陽平原，萬家燈火閃耀，從南到北，有多處賞夜景的好地方，北從北宜公路石牌縣界公園、礁溪林美山區，從山底往下望，視野開闊，宜蘭夜間的美盡收眼底。

員山鄉枕頭山，也是知名的賞景處，這裡的「橘子庭園咖啡」、「靚綠簡餐民宿」頗富盛名，尤其假日人氣更旺。

冬山鄉中山村的丸山，有家以夜景氣氛聞名的「水火私坊」，很多台北情侶點名到這裡。

南方澳漁港白天擠滿遊客，入夜後華燈初上，車潮散去，又是另種風情，當地居民最愛赤腳到跨海大橋散步，吹海風，享受夜的清涼與愜意；橋的一邊是蘇澳港，一邊是南方澳漁港，大、小船隻一次看個夠。

內埤海邊，獅子公園，砲台山公園，都是看夜景的好去處，星光、漁火，浪漫加分。

望天丘 羅東「最高峰」

羅東這座魅力小城，隨著夜色降臨，愈來愈熱鬧。

「我們去攀登『羅東第一高峰』，觀星、賞月、吹夜風。」羅東第一高峰，就是羅東運動公園海拔23公尺的望天丘，火山口造型，躺在丘上仰望星空，成為「夜貓族」上半夜獨處或同歡的秘密花園。

夜貓族 愛泡湯逛夜市

除了賞夜景，夜貓族還能玩什麼？到礁溪泡湯或做SPA，礁溪鄉溫泉飯店和溫泉澡堂林立，知名的「春和日式浴池」及「川湯春天」SPA多數經營到半夜1時，24小時營業的，有「川湯春天的湯屋」，還有有3處免費的公共澡堂，讓玩累的夜貓族，洗去一身疲憊。

肚子餓了那裡去？順著羅東鎮興東路城市光廊前行，在羅東夜市，可以吃到知名的「羊鋪子」當歸羊肉湯；天氣熱，來碗羅東包心粉圓，或到冰雪冰店吃冰，或到建芳藥局前吃碗冰豆花，熱騰騰的烤肉及魯味，這裡也有。

想吃正餐，已有30多年歷史的「台灣沙茶」，炒牛肉麵或沙茶火鍋都很知名。羅東鎮中正路五福眼科旁的清粥店，也是數十年消夜老店。

看日出 配早點剛剛好

想看日出的人，可提前到海邊，從頭城到南方澳沿海，都可以觀賞日出。宜蘭的早餐也很有名，位於礁溪鄉中山路的礁溪早餐店，天亮就開店，常有遊覽車出發到縣 外，整車載到這裡吃早點。宜蘭市知名的傳統麵店，位於城隍廟前的小吃攤，粉腸很出名。宜蘭酒廠前的麵攤，陽春麵外加一盤魯大腸，神農路上的火生麵攤，餛飩 麵或乾麵都很出名，文昌路上有炸醬麵，量十足，叫大碗二人吃剛剛好。

宜蘭市健康路與神農路交叉口的包子店，還有復興路的「晨升肉包」、「永和豆漿大王」，都是知名的中式早餐店。羅東鎮知名的早餐，不外乎公園旁的「米苔目」，天天都客滿。

買伴手 招牌土產不少

想買土、特產，可去宜蘭市泰山路上「宜蘭燒餅」、「三合餅鋪」，每天現烤的燒餅，一大袋才50元。宜蘭市新民路的「鴨喜露」煙燻滷味，讓人口齒留香。礁溪鄉太子大飯店旁的「滷之鄉」，賣的是縣內第一家冰釀滷味，特別香Q，店裡的豬腸冬粉及牛肉麵、鴨腿麵都是招牌食品。

source [聯合報] 2006.08.05

How to take good nighttime photos

Nighttime photography can be tricky, but computing blogger Andrew Malek has some excellent digital photography tips to make it simpler.

Topics such as setting, preparation, and lighting are all covered in this two-part article, with language basic enough that even this point and click girl could understand.

Take Spectacular Nighttime Photos with your Digital Camera

source [lifehacker]

Find your cycling route at Bikely

Social cycling route bookmarking site Bikely’s a great place to find and share biking routes all over the world.

Pick your place and view submitted cycling routes nearby on a Google Map, annotated with cyclist notes. Routes are tagged (things like scenic, intermediate, etc.) and available for download as a .GPX file. Bikely’s still new and in need of more route submissions, so get your cycling group registered there.

Bikely
source [lifehacker]

Why We Need a Nap after Lunch?

A quick ten minute nap after lunch helps you keep fresh and energetic for rest of the day. But do you know why we don’t feel a similar urge after our breakfast ? Sleep researchers at University of Manchester have some answers:

It is the nerve cells in the brain that keep us alert when the body needs fuel [read food]. But once we eat and that hunger is sated, the nerve cells are also turned off. Glucose - the sugar found in foods - stops these cells from producing signals to keep people awake.

According to researchers, we do not get tired after eating breakfast because we are on the rising phase of our circadian rhythm.

Source: Why we snooze after Sunday lunch [digital inspiration]

Happy 15th birthday, WWW!

On August 6, 1991–15 years ago today–Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web with a message to the alt.hypertext newsgroup. In the message he says,” The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system,” and provides the source code for his prototype line-mode browser, a GUI hypertext editor for NeXT, and a skeleton server daemon. From those humble beginnings, all of this. Thanks, Tim, and Happy Birthday WWW!

source [kottke.org]

Exactly 15 years ago, on 6^th August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee posted details of www on the alt.hypertext discussion group so others could download it and play with it. On that day the web went world wide.

There are now 882 million people around the world online reading more than 100 million websites, and with each website offering potentially millions of pages of content.

BBC Internet Timeline takes us on a virtual tour to trace the explosion of the web from a tool for physicists to an indispensable part of everyday life.

The graph above shows growth for all websites (blue) compared to active sites (red) which are updated regularly.

Fifteen Years of the Web | How the web went world wide

source [digital inspiration]

Gizmo Project - The age of free phoning has arrived

As many have predicted for the last few years, free telephone service is here, today. You just can’t get it from your local phone company. You’ve got to use the Internet to connect to a service that can route your calls for free.

First to jump headfirst into the free phone action was Skype, offering free PC-to-phone calls for the rest of the year, and now Gizmo Project has joined Skype by creating their All Calls Free program. In case you’ve never heard of Gizmo Project, it’s a fantastic VoIP desktop communication tool for Mac, Windows, and Linux. As my VoIP industry buddy Andy Abramson points out here, this is probably a ploy aimed at acquisition of Gizmo’s parent company than it is an effort to build revenue, but only time will tell. Free calling is here, now, so don’t waste any time–get over to gizmoproject.com and download the newest version.

Three Steps to Free Calling in 60 Countries:

 

1. Download Gizmo. Sign-up; add all your phone numbers to your profile

2. Tell your friends and family to do the same

3. Call those contacts on Gizmo, their mobile phone or landline for free*

 

*More Details & List of Countries

 

source [download squad] 

Scuttle: Open source social bookmarking

Think you could do better than del.icio.us, Furl, and Yahoo! My Web? Well, now’s your chance: Scuttle is an open source social bookmarking engine that you can run on your own site. It’s based on PHP and supports most of the del.icio.us protocol, meaning developers who have made tools for del.icio.us can easily adapt them to Scuttle. Unfortunately there’s no unified feature list for Scuttle, but you can see it in action at Scuttle.org. If you want to get started on your own social bookmarking site right away, you can download Scuttle’s source code at SourceForge.

source [download squad]

Google Calendar on your desktop

Despite all the advantages of using a web-based calendar, some people still want to use Google Calendar as a stand-alone desktop app, and thanks to a pair of programs–one for Windows, one for Mac OS X–now they can. Gcal.Win and Gcal.app put Google Calendar in its own Window, free from distractions (and free of charge). Another potential solution for Windows users is to make Google Calendar your desktop. The maker of Gcal.Win has also released Googlr (currently in beta), a generalized version of the app that encapsulates many of Google’s web-based tools into one stand-alone program.

source [lifehacker]

Guide to useless Windows services

Speaking of Windows getting bogged down, you’re probably aware that Windows runs a lot of stuff in the background that takes up memory and processor cycles that could be better spent elsewhere, and you might even know how to access the Services control panel, but once you’re there it can be hard to know what to keep and what to kill. There is help to be found, however: Guide to Useless Services is an article on TechTree written back in December that identifies and describes 29 services that are probably running on your computer and probably don’t need to be. Shut ‘em down!

source [download squad]

Merriam Webster USB Dictionary and Thesaurus

As I came across this device, I was reminiscing about my school days when we kids would lug a thick, mean-looking Webster’s dictionary to our English classes. And the bigger the dictionary, the more respect the proud owner would command, which in turn would set off a fierce competition among kids to refresh their dictionary supplies with many different variants, all in order to get into the good books of the professors. Perhaps I would seem like a dinosaur if I were to share the memories with the digital generation of the present. To get to the point, the device that triggered these memories is the Merriam Webster’s USB-based Dictionary & Thesaurus.

The 256MB flash drive contains the Webster’s digital dictionary with 300,000 words and an accompanying thesaurus with 500,000 words. A portion of the drive is also allocated for other pre-loaded software programs such as phonetic spell correction, a grammar guide and confusable function alerts - a facility by which the software will alert the user if he might have mistaken similar sounding words (e.g bore and boar).The remaining memory can be used for normal data storage - the specification doesn’t say how much of the memory is left, though.

Available for $49.95 at Franklin.

source [Everything USB / popgadget]