I was looking over the Joan Allen Metal Detectors website and I got to thinking about what sorts of interesting things people have found using metal detectors, so I started doing some searches on trusty ol’ Google News! Here’s are a few interesting stories I found.

Paul McEvoy found a 14th century gold ring studded with a ruby and an emerald using his metal detector in a field in South Yorkshire, England. He found the ring six inches beneath the surface. The ring hasn’t yet been valued, but it has been declared officially as a “treasure trove” under the Treasure Act and is now being held in the Retford Museum. McEvoy says he has found ancient coins before but nothing as interesting as the ring.

Terry Herbert came across one of the biggest Anglo-Saxon gold hoards ever, using his metal detector which he purchased at a yard sale for only a couple bucks more than 10 years ago. His find contained about 1,500 pieces, mostly elaborately decorated war gear, which included 11 lbs. of gold and 5.5 lbs. of silver and was valued at £3.285 million. Daaaaaayumm!

A team of metal detector enthusiasts paid £12 each to join a charity dig on a farmers land in Twinstead, a village in Essex county in England. They discovered an estimated 200 valuable coins, each coin valued at approximately £350. All findings were supposed to be handed over to the event organizer to be given to the British Museum for evaluation, but only two of the coins were turned in, while the rest were pocketed by the participants who swarmed the area. There are plans to prosecute anyone who hasn’t returned the coins after 14 days. Uh oh.

There are lots of other crazy things people have found using metal detectors as well, such as the discovery of Iron Age coins, and someone finding an Iron Age neckband, and one person found a 16th century sword. There are plenty more stories, but I didn’t want this article to run on too much longer. There’s one thing I’ve learned while doing this research. If I want to find a treasure, I need to move to a farm in England.

This is a post from Aimless Direction.

Should I Buy a Metal Detector and Move to England?

Pre-Packaged Recipes

People always say that it’s the thought that counts, right? It shows that you actually put some thought into your gift when you put it together yourself. One of the coolest presents I’ve ever received were pre-packaged recipes from my Aunt. Each recipe had the perfect amount of ingredients and a recipe card, so no measurements were required. Those are the actual recipes in the picture above – black bean soup and Mexican corn bread. The seasonings were also attached.

Wine and Dinner

Don’t just take her out for dinner. Do something special and make her dinner. Set the mood, put up candles, buy her favorite wine and serve a three course meal. This can be one of the most romantic things you’ve ever done and she gets to sit back and relax while you do all the work. You need to do the dishes too. If she has to clean up anything after this dinner, you’ve blown it.

Something That Won’t Go Into Storage

One of the biggest reasons Christmas is so wasteful is because most of us don’t know what to get friends and family as a gift. Sure, we know they want a new treadmill or an Xbox 360, but we can’t afford to give out things like that. So we walk around Kmart and hope that something in the $20 range will suffice. That wastes your money and those things end up in storage or at a yard sale come Summer.

Instead give a gift that can’t be stored. Get him tickets to a concert or a play. Get her a gift card. Or perhaps schedule something adventurous, such as a rafting trip or a sky diving outing.

Admission To a Marathon

Is the person you’re buying a gift for active or athletic? Buy her a ticket into a marathon or an upcoming cycling event. I really wish I would’ve known about the Tough Mudder before Christmas last year, because my fiance would’ve loved tickets to that. And I would’ve loved a paid admission to any cycling or running event that took place this past Summer.

Something For Every Month of the Year

As long as it’s something he’ll like, consider a gift that will keep giving all year long. For example, my brother would love a monthly comic book subscription. Just about any of my friends would love to be in a beer of the month club. I would love to be in a book of the month club. Give your girlfriend a wine of the month membership and every month when she gets her gift, she’ll be thinking of you!

Other Tips

If you just can’t think of the perfect gift, one of the best tips I can give you is to search her social networking profiles. Check her Twitter or Facebook profiles. Dig deep and search for things she talks about and places they’ve been. These can be clues to restaurants she likes or her hobbies.

One of the worst things you can do is to think of yourself. Don’t be selfish. I’m guilty of this one myself. My fiance wanted to take salsa dance classes with me a couple years ago. In hindsight, it would have made a perfect Christmas gift, but I just had no interest in it, even though she wanted it so badly. It turns out that I ended up taking classes with her later anyway. I wish I did get for her for Christmas instead of her having to beg me to do it. The smile on her face the whole time was a gift to me.

This is a post from Aimless Direction.

Awesome and Creative Christmas Gift Ideas

STIHL Brand Campaign from Whybin\ TBWA on Vimeo.

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Technology Is Turning Us Into an Atari Video Game

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Perfectly Choreographed Synchronized Indoor Skydiving

I get to enjoy my dogs shaking water all over my living room every morning when I let them out and the sprinklers are still on, but I’ve never been able to witness it frame-by-frame. Check out this great set of pictures titled “Shake” from Carli Davidson Photography, presumably taken using a hi-speed camera. Gross and cute at the same time

This is a post from Aimless Direction.

Hi-Res Photos of Dogs Shake-Drying

image courtesy of BruceTurner

I don’t have any kids, but many of my friends do and one of the biggest complaints I hear about is that their babies grow out of their clothes too fast. Well instead of dealing with the hassle of constantly purchasing new, larger sizes of baby clothing, consider renting baby clothes instead. That’s exactly what Plum is offering. They call themselves the Netflix of baby clothes.

There are three packages available right now – seven outfits for $49 per month, four outfits for $29 per month, and two outfits for $16 per month. They send all clothes freshly laundered using “green” laundry products and if you get stains on the clothes, they will donate the clothes or use the fabric to craft baby gifts at no charge to you.

This is one of those services that you can’t believe someone didn’t think of a long time ago. The prices seem a little high right now, but one great benefit is that you can switch out clothes every month if you want new styles. I think it’s a cool idea. I hope it takes off and prices drop in case I ever decide to have kids

This is a post from Aimless Direction.

New Parents – Rent Your Baby Clothes!

The creator, Kutiman, took the Youtube videos of more than 76 covers of the song and stitched them together to create one, mostly fluid, version of the song Black Dog from Led Zeppelin.

This is a post from Aimless Direction.

More Than 76 Covers of Led Zeppelin’s Black Dog Stitched Together

There are actually two things that I wanted to test out for this post. The first one is a Logitech ClearChat Pro USB Headset that I found on Deals.Woot.com for only 10 bucks. It was just delivered to my porch about 20 minutes ago. The second is the Voicepress.it plugin for WordPress which was just released not too long ago.

So far the Logitech headset works pretty good, it just doesn’t fit my head very well. I guess because my head is long and skinny and because I just shaved my head so I have no hair to fill in the gaps. :D The headphones are nice & big and cover my entire ear and the microphone seems to work pretty well too. I’ve only just opened them but I like them so far.

As for the VoicePress.it plugin, I’m still thinking about how I feel about it. This entire post was dictated using the plugin but you don’t get to see all of the errors that the plugin created because I cleaned them up by hand. I’ve used Dragon Dictate for the iPhone and for the PC and I’ve also used Macspeech Dictate for the Mac, so I’m not in unfamiliar territory when it comes to dictation software.

There are a couple things that this plugin need to fix. One of the most annoying things for me so far is that if you stop talking for what seems like just two seconds, it stops recording and you have to hit the button again to finish up your sentence. I would much rather there be a button to tell it to stop so that you have more time to think about what you’re going to say. Also, for some reason VoicePress.it doesn’t seem to work in the HTML section of the WordPress editor and only in the Visual editor.

As far as word recognition goes, I think the plugin is good, considering that it’s free right now. Just like with most most of these types of software you still have to speak a little slowly and very clearly for it to dictate properly.

I’ve recorded the next paragraph so you can see how it works and how you need to speak to it for it to dictate properly. You’ll noticed that VoicePress.it dictates very well, but also note that I had the final paragraph written down before recording it so that it wouldn’t shut off on me in case I stopped talking.

I’m happy with the Logitech headset, even though I’ve only used it for about 15 minutes so far, but I will update this post if I notice anything about it I don’t like.

As for the VoicePress.it WordPress plugin, I like where its heading but I probably won’t be using it much to dictate my posts since I can type around 40 words per minute anyway, without having to edit much. If you can’t type fast enough though, or just hate typing, this plugin is perfect for you. It’s also kind of a bummer that the plugin only works when editing WordPress in Google Chrome right now, but compatibility with other browsers is in the works.

This isn’t my final test for the plugin though, I’ll keep using it for a while to give it a proper test. I do have to admit that the plugin is working increasingly better as I’m reaching the end of this post and as I’m becoming more familiar with how the plugin works. I don’t have to talk as silly as I did in the video at least.

I also have a beta invite key so that you don’t have to wait to get accepted. Visit the Voicepress.it site, enter your email and use the key: VP-WWW-AIMLESSDIRECTION

This is a post from Aimless Direction.

Testing VoicePress.it, a New WordPress Dictation Plugin

BUCK 65 “Superstars Don’t Love” from Travis Hopkins on Vimeo.

Buck 65 is one of the most entertaining underground hip-hop artists I’ve had the pleasure of listening to. His flows are poetic, similar to Sage Francis, but the style is quite different. It took me a few listens to really appreciate his music when I first purchased one of his albums a couple of years ago, but he’s definitely one of my favorite hip-hop artists now.

Check out this awesome music video made by Travis Hopkins which displays the lyrics of the song “Superstars Don’t Love” from the new album “20 Odd Years” using more than 60 fictional movie title cards.

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Movie Title Music Video for The New Buck 65 Song, Superstars Don’t Love

The Question Box allows people of the town to ask questions directly while live operators can provide them with answers through a speaker. It’s like a “live” Internet.

Sounds like an awesome idea! Check out the site to watch a video showing how it works or donate to help support the project.

This is a post from Aimless Direction.

Question Box is Like a Live Internet