Starfall.com started out as a free educational resource for teaching children reading through phonetics, but has since grown to add a paid math section, "Starfall Math". The Starfall math section is made up of several...

While staying in San Ignacio, Belize, we took a guided tour of the Actun Tunichil Muknal (ATM) cave, named the #1 Sacred Cave to Visit in the World by National Geographic. It was expensive at US$95 per person...

What are the best performing colors, layouts, etc, for you website? When starting out with website design, it can be difficult to know for sure. Of course, you can split test given enough time, traffic and patience. ...

I've been using my HP Pavillon DM1 laptop for almost a year now and it has proven to be the perfect laptop for working while travelling the world. It's both lightweight and powerful. But it has had one flaw...

Today we learned… Sentarse (to sit) Present: Yo me siento = I sit Tú te sientas = you sit El se sienta = he sits Nosotros nos sentamos = we sit Ustedes se sientan = you (all) sit Past:...

In today’s Spanish class we learned some vocab: Random Vocab predicir = to predict sequía = drought bomberos = firemen las fincas = farmers sombria / parabas = umbrella nieve = snow la...

In my ongoing quest to make this a slightly better blog, I've updated the theme: Here are some of the changes: Easier to read - I've made the fonts bigger and given things a bit more space.  Fewer...

I've just set up a Math Questions and Answers section on Calcatraz. The Math Q&A site serves several purposes. First and foremost it is there to let you ask and get answers to math questions / problems that aren't...

Recently I've been tidying up the stylesheets I use to control the design of the Calcatraz website. This has taken me down a path of trying to minify stylesheets made using the "Less" language. While not difficult,...

When you buy a pizza, the various cost / size options can be hard to digest. If a 9 inch pizza costs x and a 12 inch pizza costs y, how much better value is the 12 inch pizza? if at all? The answer is to compare...

Prime factorization is a common mathematical technique. But just what is prime factorization? Before we define prime factorization, we will first give a definition of the two components of that phrase separately:...

The average weight for women can be measured by height or by age (among other things). Here are the average weights for women both by age and by height: Average weight for women aged... 15-16 = 53.7kg 17-19...

In redesigning the theme for this blog, I changed the homepage such that it no longer makes sense to have pagination on this page. So I wanted to disable this Wordpress homepage pagination. Navigating to a pagination...

I wrote before about how the Breadcrumb NavXT Wordpress plugin is awesome for adding breadcrumb navigation to Wordpress sites. However, nothing is perfect, so I found myself having to make a couple of minor modifications...

When developing a Wordpress theme, it is common to show a list of the categories to which a given post is assigned. By default, Wordpress generates links which show the child category, (e.g. 'mexico'), but not the...

While learning Spanish in Guatemala, I’m use the very awesome Anki to assist with vocabulary building. As well as making vocabulary acquisition a breeze, Anki also provides some interesting statistics, which are...

As part of an attempt to get serious with my software development practices, I've started tracking software bugs and feature requests for my various projects in a bug tracking app. But how do you combine bug tracking...

I've been doing some re-organisation of my Getting Things Done (GTD) project list. The flat-list structure The project list, as described by David Allen, is simply one long list of projects. This may be fine for...

This morning we went out for a half-day snorkelling tour of Caye Caulker in Belize. We booked with Mario's, one of the few places we found that did half-day tours. The tour cost BZ$70 (about US$35) per person,...

One way to save money while backpacking is to cook your own meals. But access to kitchen facilities and supplies can vary wildly. Creating a kitchen kit is a way to save money while improving your ability to cook...

When travelling the world, two things are always in short supply: money and safe drinking water. But one awesome little device helps with both. The SteriPEN Freedom Water Purifier is a little handheld "pen" which...

In our Antiguan Chocolate Workshop we were taught the following recipe for hot chocolate, a Spanish adaptation on the traditional Mayan drink. We made it with milk, which wasn’t the traditional Spanish way,...

Here is the recipe for the spicy Mayan hot chocolate that we made in our chocolate workshop in Antigua. While the Mayans used to add blood when offering this to their Gods, we used Aztec trick of adding the...

Here is a recipe for a heady, theobromine-rich Mayan chocolate tea that I learned during our chocolate workshop in Antigua. The measurements are my guesses as to how much went in. The tea doesn’t seem to be...