Spy Gear, for the Ladies

Gents can appreciate a lot of this stuff too.


Store your secret stash:

• Platform shoes with a hidden compartment pictured below
  
• A water bottle safe that actually has water in it

Scale walls:

• Ninja grappling hook or foot and hand claws

Multi-tool:

• Girly Miss Army Knife Kit
• Or the more useful Victorinox SwissChamp

Surveillance and data capture / storage gadgets:

• World's Smallest Global Positioning (16 Satellite Real-Time) Tracking System
• "Ripple" Bluetooth Headset Earrings
• A reverse peep hole viewer
• Stainless steel / crystal Heartwear necklace that's actually a really fancy USB drive
• An over-the-top patriotic Lighter Spy Cam that records sound and video
• Camcorders hidden in packs of gum and pens
• Pens that are really scanners
• A watch that's really a Digital Recorder/MP3Player

Sneaky weapons:

• Kubatons keychain
• A cell phone stun gun
• Folding knuckle knife
• Lipstick that is really a knife or pepper spray
• A pepper spray ring
• An easily concealable tiny Swiss Mini Gun
• 2.5" long Ruger LCP-380 Pocket Pistol
• A cell phone gun

If you want to MacGyver your own weapons, you could (but probably shouldn't) make one of these 5 Deadly Sci-Fi Gadgets You Can Build At Home.

Bind / detain someone without lugging around hand-cuffs via these thumb cuffs that could probably easily be stashed down a bra.

For counter surveillance, this Auto Detective pen detects wireless and RF signals within a certain range and alerts you via a light that starts blinking - the faster the blinking the closer you are to the device you're detecting. It also supposedly has some sort of feature that helps detect counterfeit bills.

Finally, if captured by the enemy, be sure you know how to:

• Unlock police-issue and plastic handcuffs
• Beat a lie detector

Urban Gardening - Feed the Grid

As I've mentioned before, I think the "parallel world" of metropolitan rooftops is fascinating, especially when it comes to the range of creative uses of space. For example, rooftop gardening is one way city-dwellers reclaim their space and create their own urban oases (and maybe even relieve stress, save money, eat more healthily, and help the environment) by incorporating a little nature. If you're interested in doing some urban gardening of your own, here are some resources.




CONTAINER GARDENING

Urban Gardening Help - A pretty extensive site that aims to make urban gardening easy with simple instructions.

Container Gardening Tips - a good overview of container gardening. It includes a list of plants well suited to container gardening, which includes varieties of herbs, vegetables, fruits, flowers, shrubs and trees, and "odds and ends" (i.e. aloe, dwarf pomegranate, black bamboo).

AZ: Master Garden Manual: Container Garden - Starts out with an overview and ends with a chart of information on growing a variety of vegetables which includes:

• light requirements
  
• minimum container size
• inches required between plants in containers
• number of days from planting seed to harvest
  
• tips for a variety of vegetables

Herb Container Gardens (Utah State University Cooperative Extension) - A PDF specific to herbs that covers the following:

• container-friendly types
  
• container sizes
  
• potting media
  
• planting procedures
• care and harvest methods
• as well as a chart with information on herb: type (annual, perennial), height of growth, maintenance, and harvest / uses.
  

Home Fruit, Vegetable, and Nut Gardening (Aggie Horticulture, Texas A & M) has a series of Gardening Fact Sheets and Guides which cover:

• varieties
• soil preparation
• fertilizing
• planting
• watering
• care during the season
• insects and diseases
• harvesting
• fertilizing
  
• storing
  

Watch Your Garden Grow (University of Illinois Extension) has a directory of many popular fruits and vegetables that provides information on:

• varieties
• when to plant
• spacing & depth
• care
• harvesting
• common problems
• growing
• selection and storage
• nutrition and health
• preparing and serving
• home preservation
• recipes

A post on Raised Garden Beds from Twenty Square Feet: Life as a Container Gardener (A Crash Course on Gardening in a Ridiculously Small Space)


POTTING SOIL RECIPES

Homemade Potting Soil Recipes for Container Gardens (The Artistic Garden) - Potting soil recipes specific to type of plant (Basic, Acid-Loving, Bulbs, Cacti and Succulents, Alpines, Orchids and Bromeliads).


COMPANION PLANTING

Companion Planting is the placement of various crops in close physical proximity to another so as to symbiotically compliment the progress of each other. Benefits can include flavor enhancement, hedged investment, level interaction, nitrogen fixation, pest suppression, positive hosting, protective shelter, and trap cropping.

• Has a chart that covers "good neighbors", "bad neighbors", and miscellaneous notes for a wide variety of plants.

INSTRUCTABLES (Build it Yourself)

Urban Homestead Garden - an adaption on Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening practices (build up, don't dig down and organize in sq. ft.).

How to make high powered led grow lights

Instructions for building a Zero-Power Self-Watering Self-Regulating Container Garden

If you prefer to have a lot of the work done for you, purchasing an Earth Box is one way to go. You could also use this or this plan for building one yourself.


Don't have adequate space or not ready to take up gardening on your own? Visit "Just Food" to locate NYC farms nearest to you.

Get some Quamut ("how to")

In case you missed it, about a year ago Barnes and Noble launched the how-to website, Quamut.com. From Reuters Business Wire: "In an age where people can go online and look up how to do just about anything, authored by just about anyone, consumers are often faced with inaccurate, poorly presented information surrounded by ads virtually indistinguishable from content and from sources they are not sure they can trust. But now, Quamut.com (www.quamut.com) introduces how-to guides that offer credible information in a concise, user-friendly format."

The website, offers this definition for Quamut (pronounced kwah-mutt):
1. Latin for "how to",
2. Authoritative guides published by Barnes and Noble


There are 3 formats:

• Quamut Online - the guides in their "entirity, free online ... hyperlinked throughout"
• Quamut to Go - the complete and fully searchable PDF that you can download for $2.95. Most are 2-8 pages long. Print at will.
• Quamut Chart - many are also available as laminated durable foldouts for $5.95.

Worth checking out?
Lessee, do I like ... Concise, accurate, easily referenced guides? Check. Being able to find information on the web that can be trusted? Check. Tangible "manna-from-heaven"-like laminated foldouts? Check. The ability to just download a PDF when tree-murder-guilt or impulse control are an issue? Check. That it's brought to you by Barnes and Nobel, Inc., the world's largest bookseller? .... eh ....


Be sure to take advantage of:

• The weekly featured PDF for free download: this week it is "Starting Your Own Business".
• The Q-Wiki if you're looking for something a little more participatory. Currently popular there is how to "Find a Job in a Recession".