The Pak-Lite is a LED light that simply clips on to the top of a 9V battery. They claim that in low power mode, it lasted for a year continuously on a lithium 9V battery. Pretty impressive. 9V batteries may be less convenient than the more standard AA size, but in addition to being able to give your tongue a good jolt, they are conveniently shaped to form a flashlight handle. They suggest using your old smoke detector batteries, which probably have some juice left in them.

Now I’m waiting for a good LED light for my home that charges via solar during the day, and gives off light like a candle at night. Nothing to plug in, no cables, no chargers…cool.

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MSNBC talks about RVers using Walmart parking lots instead of RV parks in order to save a few bucks. (Well, they claim it isn’t a money issue, but come on – why else would you go without electricity and water to save $25?) The article mentions the film This is Nowhere, which might get added to my movie list. The question is, is RVing minimalist or not? On the one hand, these things are gas guzzling, road-hogging monsters. On the other, living in one certainly forces you to pare down belongings. Thoughts?

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No, not fingernail-sized, but writing data on your actual fingernail. Flash drives have let us carry lots of data around easily, but now the problem is that they can easily be lost since they are the size of loose change. This is just about the lower limit of minimalism for carrying data around. The information is written to the fingernail, and can be read back off later. It sounds like it isn’t visible under normal light, so it won’t look like you have a barcode manicure. Data life is 6 months…unless it is the data at the tip of the fingernail, I guess, since 6 months is how long it takes for the nail to completely grow out. Probably doesn’t work too well if you wear nail polish.

Via Slashdot. (site was down yesterday, but seems ok now)

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Now this is minimalism. Obviously the big problem with the Segway is that it has too many wheels. Fortunately, Trevor Blackwell has solved this by creating a unicycle version. Whee!

Via LifeHacker.

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OK, this “car” is really small, and it may or may not handle hills. There is no cargo space – in fact, I don’t think you can carry anything in your pockets, and you have to be a 13 year-old or horse jockey to fit into it. But it apparently really does get 12,500 mpg. Wow.

Source: TreeHugger.

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I love small houses. We live in an apartment, and I don’t think I want anything bigger – we have enough trouble keeping this small space neat and uncluttered. I also love the cleverness of having to live in a small space – you are forced to consider what you own, since you don’t have a big garage, basement or spare rooms to stash stuff.

Apparently I’m not alone. The Small House Society has a bunch of good resources for small house living. Apartment Therapy had a contest for the smallest, coolest apartment, and the results were pretty amazing. Of course, space-constrained Japan is a hotspot for living small – I gotta visit sometime.

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Slate has a decent review of various VOIP services. They like AT&T CallVantage, but it sounds like you may want to wait a bit yet based on this opinion of VOIP as a whole:

Reliability also is not always up to land-line snuff. Sometimes there’s no dial tone, your outgoing calls don’t go through, or the other party can’t hear you. I also have a nagging suspicion that I am missing important calls, a fear stoked by scattered complaints like, “Your Internet phone sucks” and, “Why does your damned phone never pick up?”

Sounds like our cellphone now, so we’ll just stick with that.

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How many times have you been at a movie, in a lecture, or on the train and heard someone’s watch beeping? And have them not even notice? Grrrrr. This Casio GW-400J vibrating watch (covered at Watch Report) makes too much sense – you feel it vibrate, and nobody else knows. My wife’s analog/digital combo watch once started beeping and wouldn’t stop. I had to get out tools and pry the back off and remove the battery to get it to stop. I now have a watch that has no beeping capability at all, to make SURE that never happens to me.

Maybe if they make this thing smaller and less dorky, my next watch will vibrate.

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A Million Monkeys Typing has The Beginner’s Mind, a Zen riff on too much organization getting in the way of living an actual life:

Why did I need to have several versions of a contact list, in three different forms? One is enough. Did I really need two ways of tracking projects, and did I really need a web interface for them? Why did I need four different calendar-based ways of keeping time? Did I need to make all my project files text-searchable? Was it necessary to have my IM lists tied into my contact lists?

Phew. I’m feeling tired just thinking about it. Let this be a warning to all of you. Via 43 Folders.

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I like the idea, but haven’t done it yet – I get free long distance on my cellphone, and since I’m a social recluse, I just don’t talk that much anyway. Our landline has the ringer shut off since we only use it for DSL. But I know that eventually we’ll go with VOIP, if only to get rid of another annoying monthly bill. Lifehacker points us to this good FAQ on how to do it. Still too confusing, but it is getting better.

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