Joe Levi presents Greener Living through Technology

If you had any question left about whether blogging and site syndication were going to take off, Yahoo! has just added a feature to it’s MyYahoo! service. Currenty in Beta testing, it allows you to search for and add custom RSS feeds (in virtually any format) .

As part of making it easy to find and add RSS headlines to My Yahoo!, we are creating an RSS directory. To date, this directory includes thousands of the most popular blogs and web sites that publish RSS feeds, but it is by no means exhaustive. This is where we need your help during this public beta stage.

If you publish a blog or web site and syndicate in RSS, the best way to make sure people can find it is to add the feed to your own My Yahoo! page. Each time you add a feed to My Yahoo!, the RSS directory is automatically updated. Once the feed in the directory anyone can discover it via the RSS search function.

If you’ve wanted to get into RSS aggrigation, here’s a really simple way, and it’s almost as friendly to use as regular Yahoo! (They’ll get better, no doubt.)

And if anyone’s interested, my feed is http://www.JoeLevi.com/news.xml.

Remember the old (old!) catch-phrase “now you’re cooking with gas”? Sure, natural gas (and propane) are (arguably) slightly more efficient and cheaper than cooking with electricity… and solar cookers just aren’t fast enough for today’s microwave generation. Is there a better way?

Levi’s Blog (no not me, just a guy with a cool name), has a post about cooking via magnetic induction that’s really worth a read. Here’s a snippet to whet your whistle:

The magic behind … [the] instant heat is the principle of magnetic induction. The coils within the cooktop create a magnetic field, and when a piece of magnetic metal passes into the field, energy is transferred directly to the metal. The energy directly excites the molecules in the metal, thereby heating it up.

The process of heating a pan via magnetic induction is 85-90% efficient, compared to 43% for gas and 44% for electricity. The cooktop does not need to transmit heat, and so it can be made of an insulating material and remain completely cool throughout the cooking process. The pan stops heating immediately when the field is turned off, so there is no cool-down period like that of an electric element…

I’ve always had a very high ranking on Google for the keywords “Joe Levi” (thanks Google!). But over time, more Joe Levi’s have popped up, including one Mister Joe Levi Maez, who just so happens to be a sex offender at large, wanted in Alaska.

Great. Here I am making a good name for myself and my family, and some freak-o in Alaska with a similar sounding name goes and gets himself listed as the number 3 result on Google!! So I am working my fanny off to get a couple more “Joe Levi” pages listed in the Google results so that the freak-o is listed well below the “good Joe Levi” pages. If anyone would like to link to my pages to assist in the endeavor I’d be much obliged.