DIY Festive & Colorful Holiday Lights Made With Candy

Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or Festivus this time of year, one thing remains the same – ‘Tis the season of lights. Driving at nighttime is especially nice in December since there are bright lights everywhere. I can’t ever decide which I like better between the colored lights and the white lights. This year I’m decorating with colored lights, and I’m referring to the edible kind. If you are on a tight budget, or if you just want a super quick way to create something clever this season, these holiday lights made with candy might do the trick.

What you are looking at in the first picture below is a white plate or serving platter with a very fine line of green icing swirled around. Then the lights made from candy are placed strategically on the icing to look as if it’s a long string of brightly lit holiday lights.

Aside from green icing, all you’ll need to complete this project is a bag of almond M&Ms (you need the almond ones because of their shape, but in a pinch you can substitute peanut ones), a box of Mike and Ike original fruits candy and about ten minutes of time. This super cute idea was conceived by the blogger at Hungry Happenings. You can click over to her blog for the exact instructions.

You can display your new edible holiday lights made with candy in a dish, on a plate with the green icing like we already talked about, or even on top of some chocolate or vanilla cupcakes. Too bad these don’t really light up though. I suppose it wouldn’t be very healthy to stuff an LED in there, right? I’m sure us geeks can figure out a way to hack this little design so that it lights up brightly even though it’s made with candy, although that might make them not taste as good and the chocolate in the M&Ms might melt. Hmm, on second thought, these are perfect just as they are.

Festive Lights Made With Candy

Innovative iPhone Case Will Find Your Lost Items In A Jiffy

How many times have you found yourself scrambling to find your keys before leaving home? How many times have you wanted to shout profanities just because you couldn’t find the remote right when your favorite show was starting? I bet a lot of you know what I mean when I ask these questions, and we have all been wishing for a simple solution that would render these moments gone. We can all be thankful that the world is filled with innovators and people who like to solve problems because recently the BiKN iPhone case was announced. It’s an innovative case that will find your lost items in a jiffy. It’s one of those iPhone cases that none of us can live without, especially when you start thinking about all the time you can save with it.

The BiKN was conceptualized and developed by BiKN Design, LLC and has some rather unique technology incorporated, at least if you compare it to your usual iPhone case. In collaboration with an iPhone app, the case transmits low-power radio waves to locate your lost items. The tags that accompany the case are low-weight and easy to attach to whatever you like. This solution will make sure you never again get annoyed by not being able to find your lost items.

It’s a great solution, there’s no doubt about that, but what does it cost? The standard and basic kit which contains the app, case and two tags sells for $129.99 over at Treehouse Labs. There are a lot of different color combinations you can choose from, and you can even design your very own. What thrills me most about this iPhone case is that it’s such a time optimizer. Unfortunately, the case is just for the iPhone 4/S right now. I am sure that BiKN Design, LLC is working on an iPhone 5 case, but for now you will have to wait a while for it. For all you iPhone 4/S users though, there couldn’t be a more useful iPhone case than the BiKN.

Wiki-Donations: Will You Donate To The New Encyclopedia?

While I was poking around online for stuff to write a post about, I searched the web for current social media topics to discuss as I usually do. When I come up with something interesting, I tend to reference Wikipedia to cite any clever quip I tend to come up with. When I made my way to the Wikipedia page, a large yellow banner hovered on the top of my screen. This banner read:

“Dear Wikipedia readers: We are the small non-profit that runs the #5 website in the world. We have only 150 staff but serve 450 million users, and have costs like any other top site: servers, power, rent, programs, staff and legal help. Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think and learn. To protect our independence, we’ll never run ads. We take no government funds. We run on donations averaging about $30. If everyone reading this gave the price of a cup of coffee, our fundraiser would be done within an hour. If Wikipedia is useful to you, take one minute to keep it online another year. Please help us forget fundraising and get back to Wikipedia. Thank you.”

With Encyclopedia Britannica closing production now that the Internet is a vast vortex of information, having a credible source of information can be difficult to come by. While some of us will take a trip to the library, most of us want the library as an extension of our palms. Have we been duped into believing that Wikipedia is the only source of information out there? Should we make donations to a site that everyone and their mother can make a contribution to, which leads to information that is somewhat disputable?

Though every college professor in the world will probably tell you never to cite Wikipedia and that the information provided there is not considered source material, the site is still a source of information. When you think of the most social sites in the world, you probably think of Facebook and Twitter. Wikipedia is a site that countless people visit and contribute to. Most historians will tell you that the history of mankind is the collaboration of average people sorted out by the greatest minds in the world. There’s no doubt that Wikipedia is a social site. The question is, should people make donations to Wikipedia? Like the quote above says, Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others.

“When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but I decided to do something different. Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn’t belong here. Not in Wikipedia.” — Wikipedia Founder, Jimmy Wales

I am a lover of books, and I do frequent Wikipedia, which is why I say yes, I will probably donate. If donations are not made to a site like this, it is only a matter of time before a big fish like Google or Facebook will gobble it up and start waving banner ads and suffocate us with social media marketing. What do you think? Do you think you will donate? An education is not hard to come by nowadays, and to let a site like Wikipedia fall to the wayside is just plain ignorant. However. I do propose that stronger contribution regulations be incorporated into the site’s database. Though we are a race of beings that desire to leave our epitaph for our future children and galactic beings, we should definitely act on keeping the facts as straightforward and accurate as possible.

4 Unorthodox Timepieces Designed To WOW Your Wrist

Watches are timeless treasures and classic timepieces. They have taken us through many decades, kept us on schedule, and let us know when we are running late. Living hectic lifestyles like we do, we need to constantly check the time, even when it seems like the day is at a standstill. If you are the type who has to check the time every 5 minutes, you probably have the convenience to simply look at your wrist without searching for a clock. Watches have stood the test of time and evolved from the 15th century spring powered clocks. The 1920s are when timepieces became popular, and in the 1970s the first digital electronic watch was born. Watches have evolved along with us, even as smartphones and other electronic gadgets have been introduced into our lives.

It is hard to believe that at one point in time, a wristlet (the original reference to a wristwatch in the 1900s) was worn only by women and considered a passing fad. This changed during World War I when pocket watches, the only timepiece men wore at that time, became inconvenient so they began wearing watches on their wrists. This historical piece has seen us through the best and worst of times, literally.

Today we wear watches simply to tell time, and they have become a well-known unisex timepiece that has clearly proven to not be a fad. Whether you wear one for work, when you’re out running errands, or all the time, we have journeyed throughout our years with various types of watches that have embellished our wrists. From analog to digital, we have seen a lot of advancement within the technology of wrist watches including their designs and their ability to be multifunctional. Wrist watches have further advanced beyond our imaginations, allowing us to truly express ourselves and display watches as art pieces which goes beyond them merely telling us the time.

Those who find watches to be collectible choose their timepieces carefully, inspecting the craftsmanship down to the minute detail. Although the majority of us are not collectors, we still value the workmanship that goes into not only their ability to tell time, but their aesthetic appeal as well, especially when a timepiece can wow us.

The Push-Button Pop-Up Elegant House Inside A Shipping Crate

I never knew a shipping crate could be used so creatively. Over the past few years, the trend in living spaces has gotten much smaller, more optimized and eco-friendly. Sometimes minimal living spaces are like minimal LEGO builds – the smaller they are, the more inspiring they are, and we’ve written about many of them including a remodeled dumpster home and an 84-square foot home (7.8 square meters).

My favorite one though has to be the man who created an award-winning apartment design with 24 rooms which is only a total of 344 square feet (31.9 square meters). You can read about that on Could You Live In This Space?. Today I’d like to share another inspiring architectural design which involves an elegant home that opens up with the touch of a button. As if being a “push button” home wasn’t interesting enough, this house was built inside a shipping container.

This is how it works…when someone pushes the button; it uses hydraulic power to open the shipping crate completely up. The process takes about 90 seconds (and I bet it’s loud). Once it’s unfolded, the person living in it will enjoy a cozy bed, a couch, a dining table, a bathroom, a library and all the fixins’ that go along with these things like light fixtures, a rug and rich colors which give it all an elegant look. To make it even better, everything inside the home was created from recycled or recyclable materials.

This shipping crate home is part of Adam Kalkin‘s project called Push Button House. He is now working on his shipping crate 2.0 in a new project called Push Button House 2. Unfortunately, these houses aren’t for sale, they are just an expression of design, creativity, sustainability and innovation. This all kind of reminds me of that Starbucks Location Built From Recycled Shipping Crates.