Check out this cool DIY that shows you how to make Asian-style Japanese Lamp from recycled materials.  I can personally say these Asian-style lamps can add some unique look to your home as these lamps have been used over centuries in Asia including China, Japan, and Korea.

A cheap but attractive paper “shoji” style lamp that uses mostly recycled parts and is easy to put together.

via craftzine, DIY Page

When I was growing up in Korea, it was pretty common to see people making their own soy sauce including my mom, who used to have 3 barrels of soy sauce that lasted us about 10 years.   I used to wonder why it took so long to make soy sauce but it lasts a lifetime once you make it.

Soy sauce can be created along with fermented soy bean paste, which is another by-product while making soy sauce.

Soy sauce has scientifically been proven to help prevent Cancer and other diseases(One of the Top 10 antioxidants on Earth today).

Now, Korean soy sauce is pretty much same as Japanese soy sauce or Chinese soy sauce as far as taste goes but if you make your own soy sauce, it will be much fresher and every barrel will have a unique taste you cannot buy at your grocery market.

Well, I have always been fond of how long it takes to make soy sauce, a long fermenting process that can be comparable to making fine red wine.

Anyways, here’s how you can make Korean style soy sauce, I’ve translated one of the HOWTO soy sauce pages to English:

1. Choose the Beans

You need to find the right beans from a good organic source and make sure they are all fresh and throw away any “bad” beans in the batch.

2. Soak and Saturate Beans

You need to soak the beans in water for about 12 hours.

3. Boil the Beans in How Water

Once the beans are well saturated, heat the water until it boils.  Keep boiling the beans until they turn to a yellowish color.  You should expect to boil around 3 hours and make sure the beans are so soft if you touch it, they will easily break into pieces.

4. Smash Beans

Once boiling is done and beans are soft, you can get rid of the hot water and put it in a big pot while it’s still hot.  You can smash it now.  Of course, all this helps if you use authentic Korean stoneware as shown in below pics:

(Step 2-4 in old style Korean cookware Image Credit)

5. Make a Shape

One they are all smashed up nicely, you can make a rectangular shape with it somewhat like this pic:

(Step 5-6 Image Credit)

6. Hang It!

Now you have them in rectangular pieces, you need to hang it somewhere where there’s a lot of sunlight.  These rectangular pieces might get some fungus pieces, if that happens, try to let some wind cool to keep it drier.  Fungus isn’t too big a problem, you can always cut that piece out when they dry.

Once the rectangular soy blocks are dry, put them in a box in the shade.

7. Making Soy Sauce

Once the rectangular soy blocks are completely dry (and clean off any fungus on the surface), put the blocks inside a big Stoneware jar (here’s an example of how big) and fill it with water and salt.  Also put about 5 red Korean chilli peppers,

For the first few days, leave the jar lid open to sunlight.

8. Making Soy Bean Paste.

After 1-2 months, take the soy bean blocks out and and put it in another jar.  (After 5 months or so, the soy bean blocks will become soy bean paste)

The leftover water now becomes soy sauce.

Usually, Koreans will start making soy sauce in the winter as fermentation is best during winter and will be ready to eat in Spring.  You will probably do best to make soy sauce in your home if where you live has 4 seasons.  But if you in sunny state California like me, you can always fake the fermentation in a Kimchee fridge.  Of course, Kimchee is also best when fermented in such “cold” manner during snowing winters.

Well, there you have it, that’s how you make Korean soy sauce (sorta, my translation isn’t world’s top notch but you probably get a good idea now).

Now everytime you buy soy sauce, you will appreciate the efforts into making it.  Better yet, try making your own!

Translated from Korean Soy Sauce Company

College students from Korea are working on their senior year project, that’s right, an interactive toilet that will make sounds and display different shapes of pictures on an LCD based on the size and shape of “poop”.

This is very interesting as I’ve always wanted to hear something else than my regular ol’ “poop”.

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

via youtube

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

This actually reminds me of Korea, where sometimes there are “fake” beggars on the street who have no legs but in reality they can jump up and run after people who steal those fake beggars’ money.

via declubz

Although still barely a concept, it might not be too hard to come up with your own BBQ table that embeds the grill as part of the table.  Actually, I’ve seen these concept grill tables in life over in Korea.  All the Korean BBQ restaurants there got these about 20 years ago.  Well, talk about a new concept when it’s been beat to death in another country more than a decade ago.

But yes, it never hurts to make one for us consumers.

via thedesignblog

Isn’t it great that Samsung has probably developed over couple hundred WiMAX devices in the last few years while we, in the U.S., don’t even get to see WiMAX yet?

But no worries, as soon as Sprint gets their stuff together, we should be able to take advantage of the numerous different WiMAX devices available already by Samsung.

The good news?

They just rolled out with WiMAX Wave2 products which is even faster than the standard WiMAX.

Whoo Hoo!  Do expect to be watching live streaming HD movies in the bus real soon with the new WiMAX.

The really good news?

The WiMAX technology has been tested abroad in Korea already with success.  It’s only matter of time before we get hands on one here.

Samsung Electronics announced today it has been awarded with the world’s first WiMAX Forum Wave2 certification for both ‘Base Station’ and ‘Mobile Station’ which support the 2.5GHz band, at the WiMAX Forum Global Congress 2008, in Amsterdam.

The Mobile WiMAX Certified products are commercial grade ‘Mobile WiMAX Wave2 Base Station’ and ‘Mobile Station,’ the Express card type device, using Samsung’s own Mobile WiMAX Wave2 modem chipset, which will be commercially used in the Sprint-Nextel Mobile WiMAX service later this year.

via aving

When it comes to cooking rice, there’s no substitute for Zojirushi rice cooker from Japan.  Even as a Korean American who has lived in Korea for almost 1/3 of his life, Zorirushi is widely accepted even by Koreans as the best rice cooker.

You see all those “other” American rice cookers and they are all junk.  Now you can say anything about other gadgets but this one, I am right.   (But then again, this VitaClay one looks awefully good with clay inserts…)

If you are serious about cooking rice, you need to get one of these Zojurushi rice cookers equipped with microcontrollers and all that great shbang to cook great rice for your dinner.

I have one in my kitchen too, it was worth my $120 investment.

I remember they had 3D fake bumpers in Korea about 20 years ago when I lived there.  Well, now Philadelphia is trying them but the bumpers look too fake and I don’t think they will work well…

A new program dubbed “Drive CarePhilly” is being rolled out in Philadelphia in an attempt to get drivers to follow speed limits. As part of the program, approximately 100 intersections will be fitted with high tech 3D decals that they believe will fake out drivers into thinking there is something in the intersection.

via gizmodo

Wow, Firefox has been steadily growing real fast… I remember about 2-3 years ago when Firefox use was at only about 5%.

Go Firefox! Kill IE for good.

Continue reading ‘18.41% of World Internet Users use Firefox!’