This year I decided, on a lark, to make hot sauce as an Xmas/Festivus/New Year’s gift for friends and family. It turned out so well I want to recommend this particular culinary adventure to anyone who hasn’t tried it before — even if you can’t cook worth a damn.

Trawling google for recipes taught me that just about anything involving mashing up hot peppers could very well be called “hot sauce” and would likely be palatable. I selected this recipe as a base because it, unusually, featured canned peaches and molasses. I substituted a peck of random peppers I had picked up from the farmer’s market last summer for the habaneros, skipped the mustard, added some minced onion and garlic, and substituted seasoned rice vinegar for white vinegar. In true “anything goes” style cooking most quantities were eyeballed and no timepiece was employed.

The end result was the tastiest hot sauce I’ve ever had. Not hot-beyond-reason, but packing plenty of both flavour and kick. Given how quick and painless it was to make, I think I may be hooked on homemade hot sauce for life.

Some Miscellaneous Pepper Pointers:

» To avoid getting pepper oil all up in your mucus membranes, wear gloves or a plastic bag on your hands while you prepare the peppers, do the prep in a well-designated area, and clean up carefully afterward.

» If you want to sear the peppers first (for flavour, I think?) watch out for that hot pepper smoke (my lungs!)

» If you’re afraid of producing something diabolically hot, start with just a few peppers then add more at the end to dial in heat you can eat.

» Read up on capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot sauce. Fascinating stuff, as any tarantula knows.

Here’s the thing:

• » I live in a cold climate
• » I have an outdoor cat
• » He’s a sissy

What this means is that there is a lot of opening and closing of exterior doors in my apartment. A cat door isn’t really an option since we’re renters (can’t cut holes) and have an open floorplan (no drafts from semi-open windows please!). So instead of bringing the cat inside to warm up I thought I’d install a “cat chalet” on my rear balcony. This would, in theory, allow the cat to spend more time outside, find shelter if he ends up outside for the night/several days, and cut down on plaintive meowing at the window.

For the design itself, I used a two-story re-purposed-election-sign construction (the cat enters at the base and then clambers up to the second floor) in order to trap warm air, igloo-style. I kept the “observation deck” compact (for coziness) by using curves instead of corners. The floor is insulated and (not seen in the photos) has some carpeting and a blanket for warmth.

Does it work? To be honest I haven’t followed through with this project (I still need to install the thing outside and weigh it down a bit) because I stumbled across a much cleverer design in a comment in a random forum once mine was done. Here’s the core of it: Attach an open-backed cat shelter to an exterior window. Heat that would be lost anyways goes instead to warm the cat shelter. Very elegant.

Now what could be quickly repurposed to serve as a window cat chalet…

In our twitterfied times, handwritten letters are both rarer and more appreciated than ever. They’re special because they represent a sincere and personalized effort — something like seeing a friend to the door as opposed to grunting at them from the couch as they let themselves out. And all it takes is a pen, a piece of paper, an envelope and a stamp!

Actually, at least for me, that’s a lot of things to keep handy. Which is why I was delighted to come across this elegant way of folding up one-to-three sheets of paper into their own envelope — no tape, glue, or wax required. If you keep a few stamps in your wallet, you can grab a piece of paper and have a letter ready for the mailbox in five minutes flat.

I don’t recall where I first stumbled upon this design, but you can find it here as one among many at Gerard Hughes’ Envelope and Letterfolding site. Go ahead and surprise someone with a 19th century status update — you’re almost guaranteed to make their day.

Was it the first knot you ever learned? Pretty sure it was mine. I have a hunch that learning to tie your shoes tends to be a traumatic experience. The parents are eager, the laces are mystifying, and if your handiwork comes undone alarms sound (”You’re going to trip, fall and die!”).

So it may come as a relief to learn that the classic shoelace knot really is fraught with peril. It can be tied wrongly very easily, and even when tied correctly it can’t be expected to stay put in rough conditions such as while hiking. Happily, there are many superior ways to tie your shoes. I favour one of the simpler ones. Here’s the trick:

Wrap twice instead of once before finishing the standard shoelace knot.

That’s it! That one extra wrap (see Ian’ shoelace site for a step-by-step guide) makes all the difference  and may eliminate days’ worth of retieing over your lifetime. And if it should fall upon you to teach a kid their first knot you’ll be able to show them a good one. Not bad for a manoeuver you can master in about 10 minutes.

Jay here – a recent yet confirmed admirer of Five Whys. Neale has encouraged me to write up some blog posts to entertain and inform while he’s holidaying. In the spirit of the season I’ve come up with a handful of projects that could (just barely) serve as New Year’s Resolutions. May they all pass muster.

Regret the error has an exhaustive rundown of what he considers to be the top errors and apologies from the world of journalism for 2008. This includes, along with the extremely regrettable typo pictured here, the following gems:

Michael Platt’s editorial on July 21, 2008 may have inadvertently left the impression that General Motors in some way supported neo-Nazis. That was not the intention of the line in question and the Sun greatly regrets not being more clear in the story.

In a story about Obama’s plans for a vice presidential pick, AP noted that McCain was considering Sen. Joe Lieberman, “the Democratic vice presidential prick in 2000 who now is an independent.”

There is no documented evidence to suggest dance poles sold at Condom Shack cannot bear the weight of a user. An unsubstantiated claim appeared in a Post Homes feature on Saturday.

Via Fagstein.

While looking for something wholly unrelated, I accidentally stumbled across some photos of this bizarre and frankly sort of creepy site in Lithuania, where 50,000+ crosses have been left over the years.

Check Flickr for many more photos.

I’m a little late to this party, but the similarities here are pretty uncanny. I had also forgotten what a great job Burgess Meredith did as the Penguin.

Here’s physicist Patricia Burchat with an enlightening look at dark matter from the TED conference. She’s a fantastic communicator, and makes one of the most compelling explanations of the subject I’ve ever heard.

The Rambling Lead-Up

I think everyone is pretty familiar with the Moleskine notebook at this point. These little notebooks are pretty high in quality, very portable, and extremely well designed. In particular, I’ve recently been turned onto their weekly planner, which I’ve switched to for keeping track of my tasks, appointments, and phone numbers. I made the move from a digital planner/organizer, and I couldn’t be happier - I can make drawings, jot things down more quickly, and usually find things faster than with a digital PDA.

If I need more space I just drop in an index card (I keep a few in the handy back pocket). The design also includes a separate removable phonebook which slides neatly into the back pocket. Lastly, it’s much more satisfying to cross an item off a list than to click a check box.

The total cost of ownership of an iPhone is somewhere in the range of $1000 a year if service contracts are included. My planner cost me $15, and I’d argue it does a better job at some of its core functions. That makes the iPhone over 66 times as expensive. I’m not going to claim that my little black book does even nearly as much, but it’s definitely more bang for the buck.

The Project

The Moleskine planner, like all Moleskines, uses a little ribbon-style bookmark which I use to keep track of the current date. That’s great, but I also want to often open up certain other pages quickly, like the conversion tables or the weekly schedule (which keeps track of recurring things like putting the garbage out).

I’ve seen people use tabs for this, but I was worried about them being damaged in my pocket. My alternate solution to this was to add on a couple of small coloured threads to the main bookmark. I should note that any more than two extra threads would probably make it a bit trickier to open, since fumbling to find the right thread isn’t super easy. Using one or two threads is easy and quick, which I’ll explain later.

The Instructions

You’ll need:

- A Sewing Needle

- 2 Colours of Thread

- Scissors

It’s really simple. You basically just need to attach the thread to the ribbon bookmark on the Moleskine, as close as possible to the book’s binding.

There might be a better way to do it, but I just did what I’d do if I were anchoring the thread to sew on a button. I put the thread through in one spot, then back through in another, looped it a few times and then tied it off with a few simple knots. That’s it.

Using It

The problem you’ll quickly notice is that both of the threads will often get entangled if your marked pages are close together. The threads are small enough that separating them is a bit of a pain, too. That’s ok though, there is a solution.

So long as there are only two threads, you can grab both threads at once to get to the page you want. You may need to do it in two motions - one to open the book, and then a pull in the opposite direction to get to your page. It wasn’t obvious to me at first, but after a few tries it worked extremely well, and is still much quicker than thumbing through the pages.