Product Review: Nippon Kodo Incense
Nippon Kodo is a company run with environmental awareness, from reducing CO2 emissions, to planting trees, reducing packaging and using more organic and natural ingredients. The corporation takes pride in “reducing the environmental burden caused by material procurement.” In addition the company participates in cultural activities around the globe to share Japan’s fragrance culture and history.
Nappon Kodo Incense
These are a few of Nappon Kodo’s incense lines. I’ve quoted Nappon Kodo on each. You can find others on their website.
Traditional Incense
Ka-fuh “leads you to imagine sunlight filtering through the branches and leaves of a cool forest after a rain shower, as the mild scent of blossoms wafts softly in the air. [ka-fuh] is made from selected natural organic ingredients”
Eiju ”Contemplate the distant eternal flow of the times, and pray for consolation and comfort. The name “Eiju” was chosen with these thoughts in mind.”
Modern Incense
Herb and Earth ”The Herb & Earth collection is a less smoke bamboo incense. Enjoy all twelve scents from refreshing herbs to scented woods and spices.”
Florense ”Florence, a fragrance alive with gentle sunlight and smiling faces.”
Natural Incense
NK Pure ”Now, more than ever, we are using selected plant-based fragrances to make our incense more naturally appealing.”
Laundry Products Give Away Contest
Happy Monday, We Be Sharin’ readers! With all the talk of going green with my laundry this summer, I thought it was high time for a product give away. Read on to find out how you can enter to win some cool great laundry products (including infrastructure like a portable line and clothes basket) this week! Read more
Product Review: Michael Angelo’s Eggplant Cutlets
Processed food products aren’t high on my list of grocery items to buy. I can find just as much convenience in a shrimp and snow pea stir fry as I can a frozen pasta bake. Every once in a while however, I run across something that actually catches my attention. Read more
Kusmi Tea Give Away Contest
Beat the summer sizzle with freshly-flavored iced tea from Kusmi. I’ve personally had the chance to test drive several of the teas in this particular product line before, and can attest that these are some fun teas to try out. Read on to find out how you can enter to win. Read more
Seventh Generation Cleaning Supplies Give Away and a Chance to Win a Green Home Makeover
Would you love to extend Earth month in your home the whole year round? I’m giving away a Seventh Generation cleaning supplies kit this week on our home living and lifestyle blog. Leave a comment to enter the contest, and find out how to enter to win a $5,000 green home makeover from Seventh Generation. Cool, huh? Read more
Treepad Lite – Personal Information Manager
There are more and more reasons to save data digitally with every day that passes. A belt-and-suspenders approach to traditional note-taking is a good idea. A solid option for saving items traditionally relegated to a notebook is Treepad. There is a more sophisticated paid version and there is a free pared down plain-text version called Treepad Lite. While not necessarily the best place to store passwords (no security), it is a great place to store phone numbers, url’s, emails, etc.
Treepad Lite takes no space at all; it can be run from a thumb drive. All versions run on several releases of Windows and on Linux/Wine.
doPDF – Free PDF Converter
Anyone who uses a computer as a part of his or her day-to-day life — business or personal — will eventually need to send a printed document to someone via email. The options are to attach the original document (not advised, usually), a scan of the document (acceptable, but tedious to the sender), or a pdf (portable document format) of the document. Whenever possible and practicle, the latter is the way to go.
PDF converters are listed as printer. There are many, many options for software to create a pdf. My personal choice is doPDF. It’s free, installs easily, and creates the pdf quickly and accurately from your Windows word processor of choice.
Color Cop – A free color picker
This is a tool that is meant for Windows web designers and programmers, but these days, bloggers who support their own blogs in WordPress, for example, are doing a lot of their own site modifications. Color Cop stays on top and includes an eyedropper to grab a color of interest off any web page. It lists the colors in RGB and hexadecimal. Another cool thing Color Cop includes is a complimentary color palette for any chosen option. Nice for experienced users and rookies, as well.
Also, a quick demo and user forums offer a little more than meets the eye regarding use of this program.
Photo Credit: Color Cop
Zip Genius – a file compression option
ZipGenius is a file compression tool that is a perfect companion to anyone’s PC tool box. Sending 10 full sized images and your email client is grousing? Compress the images into one file that’s smaller than the sum of it’s parts, and email will be better able to handle those images. Need to offload some old scanned paperwork? Compress with ZipGenius and get more bang for your buck with off-pc storage.
And ZipGenius handles more than traditional .zip files! In fact, ZipGenius can compress and decompress 20+ file types. It’s easy to use, it’s been around for awhile, and it’s free.
FileZilla – Simple, Secure, Free FTP Protocol
This open source, file transfer protocol (FTP) is my preferred software for this function. It is available in client and server versions, and it is free. It runs on several platforms (including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) and is available in many languages.
One of my favorite things, beyond ease of use, is the Site Manager tool. For those of us who access many servers via FTP, FileZilla allows the saving of domain name/login/password for easy communication to those servers. . . a BIG time saver.
FileZilla displays a folder/file view on both the client and the server, making navigation more intuitive. File transfer is a snap with drag-and-drop. You bloggers out there will love this tool for picking up or dropping off images from the blog host!
