daniel bigham.ca

Having fun with food
August 30, 2009

Over the last couple of months I've implemented some more features for my Grace project. These features are focused around food, which was the original dream for the project, so it has been nice to finally get around to that.

At first, I focused on expanding my database of foods and adding their nutritional information to the program. Next, I added the ability to tell the computer what you have eaten and have it draw a nice graph showing you what essential nutrients you are missing for the current day. Using the nutrition tracking has been an interesting exercise, and has confirmed my suspicion that I consume upwards of 5000 mg of sodium each day, twice the recommended amount. It has also been very helpful when certain other members of the family want to keep track of what they're eating without always having to look up points values.

With a good food database in place, I was able to move on to more interesting things. The first step was to use the food database to create a recipe database, and thus to be able to calculate the nutritional information for any of our recipes. The second step was to allow the program to keep an inventory of all of the foods in our kitchen by saying, for example, "add milk to the fridge", or "add frozen strawberries to the freezer".

The immediate reason for keeping an inventory was that we have so many cans in the cupboard (and things in our freezer) that it becomes very frustrating if you want to figure out whether you have a certain ingredient -- you end up pulling half the cans out of the cupboard searching. Now, you can simply ask "do we have any refried beans?", and if you need to narrow down the location, you could ask "where are the refried beans?".

Although the inventory is helpful, the real money is being able to answer the question "what can recipes can I make?". For example, we were on our way back from church today, and as is usually the case, both of us were famished and didn't have much energy to figure out what we could cobble together for lunch. We figured we'd just grab some food on our way home, but instead I typed "what recipes can we make?" into my BlackBerry and a list of several options came back, such as Rotini and Fresh Tomato, Basil, and Parmesan. That sounded pretty good, so we drove home instead and had a nice home-cooked meal.

That's comforting, sort of
August 29, 2009

How many nukes will it really take to instantly annihilate humanity?

Lifesaver Bottle
August 27, 2009

I recently watched this video about Michael Pritchard's Lifesaver bottle. Wow, wow, wow.

I checked out the company's website, but there was no reference at all to using the bottle for humanitarian uses. Confused, I sent an email to info@lifesaversystems.com:

Hi there,

I just watched Michael Pritchard's TED talk about the Lifesaver bottle, and to say I'm excited is an understatement. I resonate with Michael that this bottle could make a mind-blowingly significant difference to people living in third-world countries.

I visited the Lifesaver website hoping that there would be more information about things like:

Lobbying governments to support an initiative of distributing bottles to third world countries.

Ways that individuals can raise money to donate bottles to third world countries (ex. A charity that is able to give tax receipts, etc.)

Discounts for the bottles when used for humanitarian reasons.

News about people's efforts using the bottle for humanitarian causes.

Forums to help connect people on this cause.

etc.

... but all I found were pictures of military people using the bottle, which was a little depressing.

So what's the deal?

Thanks,
Daniel

We'll see what they have to say.

UPDATE: It has been a couple of weeks and I haven't gotten a response... oh well.

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