Portable air conditioners are good when you need to cool only a single room in your home, or when you live in a studio with a crummy wall unit and no central heating/ac, or when you go camping. They also free up the view out your window. On the downside, they recycle “inside air,” require a drainage tube or a bucket, can be noisy, and make it look like you have a dorm fridge in your living room. Slate reviews five mid-range portable units (between 9,000 and 12,000 BTUs, or enough to cool between 350 and 550 square feet).
RATINGS
Objective Movie Rating Site For Parents
By 2.8.07
Want to know if a movie is appropriate for kids but don’t trust the crappy, arbitrary, and useless censorship of the MPAA? You might want to check out kids-in-mind. The site seems relatively free of pesky moral judgments; it sticks to listing potentially inappropriate stuff so that you, the consumer, can decide if the movie is ok for your kid.
Safest Cars For 2007
By 11.22.06
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a non-prof car safety testing group funded by auto insurers, released their 2007 top safety picks yesterday.
What’s A Good Dealership Rating Site?
By 11.9.06
Reader Etinterrapax wants to know if there’s any trustworthy car dealer ranking sites.
MPAA Pirates Documentary In The Name Of The Children
By 1.25.06
In a delicious turn of events that could only be matched by Microsoft discovering it was using warezed copies of Windows on its office computers, the MPAA has been busted for pirating a film submitted to them for rating—called, appropriately enough, ‘This Film Is Not Yet Rated.’ The film’s a documentary currently debuting at Sundance, investigating the unaccountability of the MPAA’s rating board, the inscrutability of its unpublished ratings guidelines and the hypocrisy of Hollywood’s preference for sadistic violence over soft-core sex. Apparently, the film was worrying enough for the MPAA to secretly distribute unauthorized copies to many of its employees. The problem? By the MPAA’s own definition, “ALL forms of piracy are illegal and carry serious legal consequences.”
EcstasyData.org: Testing Pills Before You Ingest Them
By 12.16.05
Shopping for real ecstasy is such a chore—especially since so much of the stuff isn’t really MDMA, the magical methylenedioxymethamphetamine that makes the world go snuggly. Used to be, one could just pop over to EcstasyData.org and see if they’d run a test on a pill from your batch. If your pill had more random junk druggery than MDMA, you’d then know to take two. (We kid, unless it was also filled with ketamine, which is awesome.)
