Crave

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As the holiday season approaches, get-togethers have a tendency to grow...merry. After slurping up a couple spirited mugs full of glogg or 'nog, will you know when you're fit to drive home?

You might if you've tracked your drink intake with Buzz Buddy for iPhone and iPod Touch ($0.99). It can't guarantee you'd pass a breathalyzer test, but this blood alcohol calculator gets close.

After entering your gender, weight, and whether you've already consumed alcohol, you'll tap the drink type you're about to imbibe--standard measures of beer, wine, cocktail, and shots. That means if you're sipping a strong Belgian ale or Long Island iced tea, you had better 'fess up.

Using your weight and gender, Buzz Buddy will graph your calculated blood alcohol level over the hours, helping you predict when your levels will get back into the safety range. If you spill over from sassy to sloppy, the colored indicator will supposedly shift from green to yellow to red and you'll be warned that your blood alcohol level is far too high to drive. A small bug in version 1.0 kept the indicator green even as we "chugged" enough booze to fell a mule.

We have some other ideas for expanding Buzz Buddy's possibilities. What about calling an emergency contact from within the app? Or viewing an in-app map detailing late-night munching spots nearby? Entering submissions to the graph retroactively, to account for the drinks you may have forgotten to add as you got swept into your evening, however, is a more urgent request.

With a button you can tap to call a cab and arguably helpful tips to instill a sensibility for responsible drinking, Buzz Buddy is a good idea--as long as you have the the presence of mind to use it.

This customized Iron Man figure sure doesn't have an iron stomach.

(Credit: Jin Saotome)

Just in time for next month's Iron Man action and CGI cinematic extravaganza comes this one-of-a-kind, custom-modded Iron Man action figure from Jin Saotome. Painted to resemble Tony Stark's gadget-obsessed hero after a serious bender, and based on a Marvel Movie Legends Iron Man figure, the alcohol-poisoned hero doesn't come with a Great White Telephone from which he can call Ralph.

It does, however, come with several miniature beer cans and a mini bottle of Bacardi that dear, dear Tony Stark probably swiped from a Paris Hilton Barbie. Painted in all the hues of the contents of your stomach after trying to prove you're a drinking superhero, the green, yellow, and orange figure is up for auction on eBay and was commanding more than $100 at the time of writing.

Besides a wicked hangover and dribbles of stomach acid leaking from his mouth, the figure features 28 points of articulation. He probably needs all of them to keep himself upright, too. The auction also comes with an 8.5-inch-by-11-inch drawing of the inebriated Iron Man in flight from Web comic writer and artist David Willis.

Hopefully, this figure will be popular and Saotome will do a Wayne Family Meets Joe Chill box set for July's Batman movie.

Say it ain't so! Climate change could make even PBR get more expensive!

(Credit: Pabst)

We all know already that climate change will affect everything from food prices to cute baby polar bears.

But now it's really hitting home, folks. A report from a researcher at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand suggests that rising temperatures may threaten beer.

An Associated Press report details the findings from climate scientist Jim Salinger, who presented his research at the Institute of Brewing and Distilling's annual convention in Wellington, New Zealand. The grim results? Climate change may affect the production of malting barley, an ingredient crucial to the tasty beers we all know and love.

If we aren't careful, the regions in Australia and New Zealand in which malting barley can grow could experience some tragic shrinkage. Salinger's study didn't extend beyond those two countries, but he did warn that "similar effects could be expected" across the globe.

"It will mean either there will be pubs without beer or the cost of beer will go up," the Associated Press article quoted Salinger as saying.

One word: Noooooooooooo!

Making champagne is by no means carbon neutral, as tree-hugging teetotalers might like to note. Carbon dioxide causes the bubbles, after all.

To be exact, champagne makers have determined that making each bottle of bubbly causes the release of 200 grams of carbon dioxide.

Cheers to carbon dioxide. More is involved in every bottle of bubbly than in other wines.

(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CNET)

Some champagne makers want to shrink emissions by 25 percent within 12 years and up to 75 percent by 2050. They announced the goals Tuesday at the Bordeaux Carbon Initiative, one of many recent events by vintners seeking to green their craft.

The figures do not include all sparkling wine, such as Spanish cava, made outside the Champagne region of France. The methode champenoise was born in Champagne, and only its sparkling wine can claim on the label to be true champagne.

The largest portion of that local industry's carbon emissions--39 percent--comes from bottling and packaging, with another 24 percent released in the process of making the wine, according to the champagne industry. And transportation of wine and workers makes up 13 percent, use of equipment comprise 11 percent, and products used in cellars and vines contribute another 8 percent of emissions.

The Champagne region of France releases 197,000 tons of CO2 each year--about the same as an average British city, according to Decanter Magazine.

Winemakers in Bordeaux, France, meanwhile are trying to tally the greenhouse gas emissions of grape growing, cultivating, packing, and shipping every type of wine. One Bordeaux winemaking family is harvesting sunflowers to make biofuel to power its tractors, according to the AFP.

In sunny California, winemakers are also pushing to reduce their carbon emissions. Last year Shafer Vineyards became the first to switch fully to solar power in Napa and Sonoma counties, where organic and biodynamic wine cultivation have been popular for decades. However, many oenephiles might point out that viticulture and viniculture around the world have been clean, green, and organic for centuries, if not millennia.

Sadly, my colleagues in Barcelona for the GSMA Mobile World Congress last week didn't learn more on the subject by catching the International Climate Change and Wine conference, where Al Gore keynoted.

Winemakers received access to their first tailor-made carbon footprint calculator in December.

Next-generation Web technologies are also enabling wine lovers to assemble virtual cellars and establish new communities. Web 2.0 tools for wine consumers include Snooth, Vinfolio, Bottletalk and Cork'd.

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Just about every computer available these days comes with a CD/DVD burner as part of the package. Whether your primary use for this drive is to make mix CDs for the car, backup data, or burn DVD backups for your movies, you need a good program with the right type of features for the job. Though Windows offers some burning features, you're not going to get the options you'll find in a stand alone app.

There are many paid CD and DVD burning apps to choose from and some of the most popular in this category--like Nero and Alcohol 120%--are probably recognizable by most Download.com users. The only prohibitive trait about these apps (besides cost) is usually they take up too many system resources and offer superfluous features that you may not need for simple burning. I happen to like these apps and some of the extra features are quite useful, but what if you just want something quick and dirty for burning on the cheap?

I did a little research and picked out some top free CD/DVD burning apps that you can download and use for free if you need to get started right away.

The four-paned interface makes moving your media around a snap.

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CDBurnerXP is a quick and easy solution for burning audio CDs, creating data disks, and has extra features for ripping your audio CDs and finding track info on the Web. A four-paned interface makes it easy to find and then drag-and-drop files to your chosen media and an included audio player helps you make sure you get the tracks you want. A handy dropbox window lets you browse your files using Windows Explorer and quickly drag-and-drop files to your burn list on the fly. Judging from the user reviews, some users had trouble with CDBurnerXP when burning data DVDs, but I was able to use this function without problems. The developer site offers a list of compatible drives if you have any issues.

Sometimes an easy way to burn media is all the feature set you need.

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JetBee is another free app for burning CDs, DVDs, BlueRay, and HD-DVDs and offers the option to include these burning commands to your right-click contextual menus in Windows. The two-paned interface is simpler than CDBurnerXP, but good enough for most simple burning projects. This is probably the most bare-bones of the bunch as far as extra features, but if you want a quick-burning program to make backups or audio CDs for free, JetBee does the job nicely. As someone who burns primarily audio CDs, I was a little annoyed I had to drill all the way down from the top level for music files, but this might not be a problem for other users.

The launch page takes all the guess work out of your burning project.

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BurnAware Free Edition is probably the prettiest in the interface department for this collection and offers a step-by-step procedure for your burning projects. A launch window lets you choose the type of project you want and leads you through the process to completion. Navigating your directories is easy with BurnAware's file management system and adding files is as simple as highlighting them and hitting a button. Though you don't have the option of a floating window like CDBurnerXP, BurnAware offers enough features for most burning projects.

Sometimes you just need a simple program for your burning needs and don't need all the extra features of a paid app. For a quick and easy free solution, try one of the apps above. As always, if you have a favorite that is not listed here, let me know in the comments!

This guy could probably have used some help from Whiskipedia to learn just how much that J.D. would knock him out. (I took this photo in college.)

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/Long Before CNET News.com)

Confession: I don't know a whole lot about alcoholic beverages. I'm that girl who pours blue Curacao into stuff simply because it turns your drink a cool color. I don't actually know what it is. That's probably not a good thing.

My cluelessness is starting to give my friends headaches--literally. I read in The New York Times that rose champagne was going to be really trendy this season, so I got some for a New Year's Eve party, only to learn that the stuff tastes even worse than regular (cheap) champagne and makes you feel even worse the next day. (And it's pink, so guys won't touch it.)

So I'm keeping my fingers crossed that 2008 will shape up to be the year of the booze industry's full-out digital debut. We're off to a good start. On New Year's Day, as many of us were still whimpering about hangovers, Whiskipedia launched. It's exactly what you think it is--a wiki about whiskey, or whisky, or however you spell it. Like its namesake Wikipedia, user contributions will keep the site's content flowing, but the site has expert oversight from administrator Ian Buxton (of The Whisky Channel) and the preliminary content was derived from the book Whisky: A Book of Words.

Of course, it's just about whiskey, so it couldn't help me learn how to avoid crappy champagne. But maybe it's a start. Here's to hoping that Whiskipedia sets a fine new precedent for online booze information dissemination. Because, really, I can't be the only clueless person out there.

(And ideally, perhaps better education will lead to more responsible drinking.)

Can't believe I managed to miss this one, considering one of my favorite activities in college was to watch Jeopardy with a dozen people and see which of us could be the most obnoxious by yelling out all the answers. On Monday night, snarky news forum Fark.com sponsored a category on the timeless game show, in which the three contestants had to complete corny, pun-ridden headlines that had been plucked off the site.

Naturally, two of the questions dealt with "potent potables." The first was "Noodle shop accused of aiding drunk driving; that's because nobody left this place (this buckwheat noodle)." ("Soba!" Ha, ha!) And the second, "After one of these 'feral' birds was released into a park, alcoholics...hunt it down and try to drink it," had the obvious answer of "wild turkey." Guess the "feral" keyword steered the contestants away from Grey Goose.

This tasty beverage can spell doom for some people.

(Credit: André Karwath via Wikipedia)

Red wine is a drink with a dark side. We praise it for its full body, long legs, and exquisite nose, but the bacchanalian beverage has long been accused of being particularly prone to giving people headaches. Some people have such a sensitivity to red wine that they can't drink it at all.

Now, the Associated Press has good news for all you wine lovers. Scientists have speculated that the chemical culprit in red wine might be biogenic amines, like histamines. And although that hasn't been proved for certain yet, a group of UC Berkeley researchers working on that hunch have created a device that can detect the level of those amines appearing in a glass of wine.

With a single drop, the device can determine how much of the nasties are in a glass of wine and, therefore, how likely an amine-sensitive person is to get a headache after a few drinks. Right now the device is the size of a briefcase, but the lead researcher and the start-up he co-founded are working to get that down to the size of a PDA.

Interestingly, the technology it's based on was developed by NASA to help detect life on Mars. Who says investing in NASA is a waste?

Does this look like a booze cruise on wheels to you?

(Credit: Amtrak)

Riding on a sleeper train for several thousand miles seems a bit silly sometimes when you can just hop a plane for a couple of hours and get to the same destination in a fraction of the time, especially when it's often cheaper to fly anyway. Amtrak, however, is attempting to counter that image by promoting its train service as the landlubber's equivalent of a luxury cruise--a booze cruise, that is. According to an Associated Press article, the passenger rail service is trying to "gin up new business" (Ha, ha! You slay me, AP!) by offering a complimentary $100 worth of alcoholic beverages to passengers who cough up the cash for first-class seating.

Kind of. If you're a member of Amtrak's guest rewards program and you book a ticket that's part of its GrandLuxe offerings (be prepared to pay somewhere between $800 and $1600) between November and January, you'll be given a hundred bucks' worth of credit toward libations en route. Considering a glass of house wine costs $6 and a fine scotch costs about $7, it'll be enough to keep your cheeks nice and pink for the entire journey.

The AP article quotes an Amtrak representative as saying that it's a test move as part of a greater plan to revive rail travel's vintage image as a classy way to get from coast to coast. It could equally, however, turn Amtrak into a hot destination for traveling bachelor parties or fraternity spring break trips. ("Cancun? No way, dude, we're doing the Amtrak thing!")

Unfortunately, the Amtrak party-train service won't extend beyond a few overnight routes: the California Zephyr between Chicago and San Francisco, the Southwest Chief between Chicago and L.A., and the Silver Meteor between the District of Columbia and several Florida cities. That means it won't be valid on my beloved Acela Express that runs from D.C. to Boston, but then again, I don't think the BlackBerry-and-business-casual crowd that rides the Acela needs to be given any top-shelf scotch anyway.

Some advocacy groups have already voiced concern that people will get a little too sloshed on board and then stagger right behind the drivers' seats of their cars upon reaching their final destination. Makes you wonder whether Amtrak will have to breathalyze its passengers when they debark...