A Story Before Bed lets you read to your children when you're not there

The folks from A Story Before Bed contacted us and have offered a coupon code that allows users to try the site including sharing a story for free. The code is good until the end of November. Just enter MT9C-WN6Y-TF6J at the point of checkout, when you’re asked to pay for the story you recorded.

Having to be away from your young children at bedtime is probably the absolute worst part of having a job that requires travel. Worse, sometimes it’s not practical to call and talk to them before bed. A Story Before Bed is a site that is looking to solve this problem for traveling parents.

The idea behind A Story Before Bed is that you choose one of the stories in their library, then you record yourself reading it using a webcam. You can then send a link to your child’s caregiver, who can then open the book on their computer, and watch as you read the story to them. They see the full pages of the book with your face inset, and the experience even includes animated page turns. To make sure that what you are reading relates to the page being displayed, the video of you reading is actually split up on a page-by-page basis, so you can only ever be listening to the correct voiceover for a given page.

A Story Before Bed is not a free service, but recording a story is free. The service charges $6.95US if you want to keep your recording so that you can pass it along to the young people in your life.

(Source: Download Squad)

Transforming Sofa Turns Into a Bunk Bed

More than just a sofa bed, the Mobelform Doc transforms into a bunk bed, complete with two mattresses and a set of pillows. Unfortunately, pricing and availability have not yet been announced.

(Source: TechEBlog)

Top 10 Homemade Remedies for What Ails You

Feeling under the weather? Thinking—as you look around your office—that you might be soon? Hone your home remedy skill set with a look at 10 of our favorite DIY cures for illnesses and your body’s annoyances.
10. Honey for rough coughs
When you’ve got a bad cough, it feels like your own body is fighting against you—your throat dries out, your lungs spasm beyond your control, and it all makes a bad illness experience feel even worse. Before reaching for the over-the-counter stuff, consider a spoonful of honey. It did better in studies of children’s coughs than any of the expensive elixirs, and it very likely elicits fewer taste complaints. Even better? An Ayurvedic-style honey-lemon-ginger infusion drink, or our readers’ cold and cough remedies from their grandparents
9. Toothpaste for bee stings
late’s William Brantley tried out all the pharmaceutical and home remedies he could find for bee stings, including the well-regarded sliced onion. Brantley said the onion made his sting feel worse, actually, and pulls for the acid-neutralizing, itch-reducing properties of toothpaste. If that doesn’t seem to work for you, Caladryl with an analgesic is the preferred store-bought solution.
8. Olive oil for children’s earaches
When a tyke has an earache, everybody knows about it. To soothe the pain until you can get to the doctor, a Columbia University Medical Center pediatrician recommends using a syringe or something similar to put 2 to 4 drops of warm oil in a small child’s ear, age 2 and older, or 5 to 10 drops in your own if you’re the one with the aches
7. Vick’s VapoRub or thyme oil for toenail fungus
It’s not the most pleasant of afflictions to discuss, but nobody wants to keep dealing with yellowed, brittle toenails if they don’t have to. Vick’s VapoRub has thymol in it, a derivative of the herb that reasearchers have found effective in combating fungus, and it’s much cheaper than the prescription treatments. eHow explains the step by step of applying Vick’s to infected feet, and the Times suggests adding essential oil of thyme, found at health and natural food stores, to a bath is a strong supplement.
6. Vinegar, oatmeal, and others for sunburns
Ever get the feeling that the makers of sunburn treatments kind of have you in a painful price position? If your bottle of the green goopy stuff doesn’t seem to work, or you don’t have any, the Wise Bread blog’s natural recommendations might do the trick: vinegar, crushed-up aspirin, tea, milk, and straight-up aloe vera. We’ve also heard that an oatmeal paste can do the trick.
5. DIY elixirs for colds and flu

KniQuil from Hot Knivez on Vimeo.

The Hot Knives blogger loves an excuse to hit the grocery store, and when stricken with a cold (or maybe the flu), he found his muse: a DIY, Southern-Comfort-based elixir to make sleeping, resting, and feeling better much easier. If SoCo’s not your poison of choice, the comments thread is full of formulas that won the day for many formerly ill readers.
4. Duct tape for warts
There’s not a lot we can add to this amazing little mash-up of modern life, other than to say that, while a double-blind, placebo-matched study isn’t available to assuage the uncertainty, many Lifehacker readers swear by the gray stuff’s wart-healing powers.
3. Clear nail polish or hot water for bug bites
Gil Grissom on CSI claims its true, but the crime scene scientist has a lot of fellow believers in the air-blocking, itch-reducing power of a small drop of clear nail polish on especially bad bites. Using Ben Gay can also work, and some commenters suggest close-but-not-direct contact with heat to draw off the need to scratch.
2. Baby or talcum powder for greasy hair
When you’re traveling, pressed for time, or otherwise unable to shower on your regular schedule, your hair can end up looking a bit, well, greasy and unwieldy. The simplest solution we’ve found is running baby powder through it. That link comes from eHow, but the testing is, sadly, rigorously vetted by a certain Lifehacker editor whose morning blogging sometimes leaves him little time to get presentable in a rush. If your baby powder leaves you smelling like a changing station, consider talcum powder, or a little cover-up scent
1. Bacon sandwich for hangovers
The morning after a long night out, your brain is depleted of neurotransmitters, and your stomach is in need of something calm and steady. A bacon sandwich, according to British researchers, is just what the hangover doctor ordered. The bread has the carbohydrates you’re hungry for, while the bacon’s protein (made more appealing by tasty fat) breaks down into amino acids, which your brain has been starving for ever since happy hour started.

(Source: LifeHacker)

Stormpulse

Hurricane season has lots of people glued to the Weather Channel to catch the latest updates on developing storms. But why wait for the weatherman to tell you what is going on when you can check for yourself online? One of the best places to do that is Stormpulse.

You can turn on layers to show projected paths and historical tracks. The severity of the storm is color coded from Tropical Depression to Category 5 Hurricane. You can see all active hurricanes at once, drag the map around, or click on a specific storm.

(Source: Presurfer)

Anti-violence site urges you to 'hit the bitch'

There are subtle ways to raise awareness about relationship violence. And then there’s “Hit the Bitch,” a Web campaign by a Danish advocacy group. Setting up an interface where you’re encouraged to slap and punch a woman seems pretty extreme. It’s almost like an advergame, except you’re delivering an adverbeating! (You can use the mouse, or connect with your Webcam and swing at the girl with your hand.) Getting called a “100% idiot” at the end doesn’t feel like much of a rebuke. Perhaps you’re supposed to feel guilty, like a real-life abuser might, for continuing to hit the woman just to see what happens next? Who knows. Maybe something’s getting lost in translation from the Danish.

(Source: AdFreak)

USB TV Card Player

This USB TV Card Player might be a super easy way to play photos, music or downloaded videos on your big-screen TV, but don’t expect greatness from it. On the plus side it has a built-in card reader for non CF-sized flash card formats as well as a USB port for connecting flash drives or even external card readers, which is the only way it will read an SDHC card. It supports the most common media formats like DIVX, MP3, WMA, JPGs etc. and even comes with a compact IR remote for “long distance operation abilities.” However, on the negative side the fact that it only has a composite video connection means no hi-def for you, which then also makes the $53.99 price tag seem a bit unreasonable.

(Source: Oh Gizmo!!)

Windows 7 already bigger than Snow Leopard and Linux combined

It’s only been a couple of weeks since Windows 7 was released, but Microsoft’s new OS has already captured a larger percentage of the market than Apple’s OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Linux (yes, all of Linux). This doesn’t come as a huge surprise, considering how many Windows users were clamoring for Win7 after the flop that is Vista. Microsoft says Windows 7’s launch outdid Vista’s by 234%. Those brisk sales have already netted Windows a 2% share of the world’s OS business, compared to just over 1% for Snow Leopard, and just under 1% for Linux.

Despite the strong sales of Win7, Windows as a whole dropped a quarter of a percentage point in October, with Mac and Linux both making small gains. That quarter of a point hardly matters when you’ve got 90% of the OS market and your new operating system is being adopted quickly, though.

I expect to see Windows swing back up after Windows 7’s been available for a while. I mean, we’re talking about an operating system that outsold Harry Potter in the UK. Right now, it’s only got a 2% share, compared to 19% for Vista and 70% for XP, but that’s after only two weeks. Expect that number to zoom upward by the end of November.

(Source: Download Squad)

Top 3: iPhone Killers

Palm Pre

The critics say that the Pal Pre can easily compete with the iPhone, at least everyone has very high expectations. It was a little bit silent surrounding Palm, but since the transfer of a couple of Apple hotshots they are back in business!
The Palm pre resembles the iPhone quite a bit. The first thing you notice is that it has a clear and crisp screen. The Palm Pre has a keyboard which is handy, but not when you use it in landscape mode. The Palm Pre is equipped with less apps than the iPhone. Apple has won this match due to the fact that it has millions of apps, but still the Palm Pre is a good competitor.

Nokia 97

Nokia is back in the game with the new Nokia 97. The battle of the smart phones and the battle against the iPhone can begin again. We have nothing but respect for the design of the Nokia 97. The Nokia 79 is available in white and black and is very easy to use with its handy slide screen.
With Nokia’s Ovi Suite you can easily start up social network application like Facebook and Flickr. The Nokia 79 has an 32GB internal memory and you can even extend that with a MicroSD card. The Nokia 97 is equipped with a good 5 mega pixel camera. Thanks to the GPS function you will always know where you took a specific photo

HTC Hero

Overall the appearance is sleek and modern; we’re just not sure why they made it with a little chin. Next to the 3.2 inch touch-sensitive screen there are hardware buttons on the base of the phone, including a home, menu, back, send, end, and dedicated search key. The device also sports a trackball in this area. On the back is a 5 mega pixel camera. The Hero is the first HTC that uses Sense. An intuitive skin on top of Android that is based on three principles: The first one: Make it mine: You can personalize 7 home pages with al your favorite widgets. So you don’t have to browse through layers of menus. The second one: Stay close: Staying in touch by managing a variety of communication channels and applications ranging from phone calls and emails to Facebook updates and Twitter. And the last one: Discover the unexpected. You can look at things through different perspectives. Your inbox is not just a list of emails, but a catalog of conversations, a collection of notes flagged as important, and a document library of all your emails with attachments. Your Album is not just the photos saved on your phone. It is also a gateway to online collections of you and your friends on Facebook or Flickr. The dedicated Search button combs through tweets in Twitter™, locates people in your contact list, finds emails in your inbox, searches through appointments in the calendar and very nearly finds needles in haystacks.

(Source: Wanahaves)

Over 1 mn Mexicans involved in drug trade

Over one million Mexican people are involved in the illegal drug trade including “about 200,000″ women, according to Mexico police estimates.

The president of an umbrella organisation of peasants, Jose Jacobo Femat, said Friday that the situation is “an alarming phenomenon” and, in the case of women, is the result of “gender inequality and the lack of opportunities to find legal employment”.

“It shows how mistaken the federal government’s public policies are for easing poverty in rural areas with its assistance programmes, since the female sector has seen the alternative to be taking part in growing drug crops and in drug production and distribution,” Femat said.

He said this at the inauguration of the 2nd National Meeting of Women COCyP Leaders and his statements were based on the number of women arrested and prosecuted for such crimes in Mexico.

The states where women are most active in drug-trafficking are Chihuahua, Sonora and Durango in the northern part of the country, and in the southern state of Guerrero, where “there are entire towns living off this (illegal) economy”, added Femat.

On an average, people from rural Mexico involved in the drug trade earn between “5,000 and 10,000 pesos (between $384 and $770) per week”, the umbrella organisation said.

The head of the National Farm Workers’ Union (UNTA) said Friday that some 600,000 daily-wage labourers have been lured by the drug cartels to grow Marijuana and poppy plants.

UNTA leader Alvaro Lopez announced this information at an event in Saltillo, the capital city of the northern state of Coahuila, the Mexican daily Reforma said Friday.

Mexico has been plagued in recent years by drug-related violence with powerful cartels battering each other and the security forces amid a scramble for the control over smuggling and distribution of drugs.

The annual toll has risen from 1,500 people in 2006 to more than 6,000 in 2008. More than 5,600 people have died so far in 2009.

Since assuming his charge in December 2006, President Felipe Calderon has deployed more than 50,000 soldiers and 20,000 federal police officials across Mexico in a bid to finish the cartels off, yet there has been no decrease in the number of gang wars so far.

(Source: 420butts)