Links for 8th January 2009

It's been over a month since I did one of these. As I had some good news today and am feeling in a particularly good mood, here's three fun links:

• Dave Barry's Year in Review

  Probably the only person around who can make me laugh at our bleak economy. And everything else. For example:

  "In noneconomic news, a Las Vegas jury convicts O.J. Simpson on 12 counts of being an unbelievable idiot. He faces more than 60 years in jail, which could end his relentless quest to find the killer of the people he stabbed to death in 1994."

  (Thanks Connie).

• Snow Dog!

  As I mentioned to three other dog lovers earlier today, as I was watching this, I was waiting for the dog to do one of the following:

  1. hit a large rock.

  2. jump into a lake or other large body of water.

  3. fall off a cliff.

  I guess he's very familiar with his neighborhood and knew where he was going.

  (Thanks Rebecca).

• Obento!

  Ravin' Rabbids is my favorite.

  And if you want to try it for yourself, here is her instructive web site.

  My wife has threatened to make me a Bento lunch like this, so it'll be interesting to see what she comes up with. I'm not sure I want to eat anything that's looking back at you. It reminds me too much of meeting the meat at the restaurant at the end of the universe.

  (Via Make Blog. Thanks Lynea).

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( Jan 08 2009, 06:48:28 PM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]

Links for 5th December 2008

• Science can be fun!

  Newton's First Law of Motion:

  "A body continues to maintain its state of rest or of uniform motion unless acted upon by an external unbalanced force."

  Unfortunately there's not too many physicists driving trunks for Target.

  (via MAKE).

• Guitar Hero Turned Into a Bike Ride

  Awesome. The mind boggles at the amount of effort and team cooperation that that must have taken.

  Which then reminded me of that classic short story by J. G. Ballard: The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race.

  (via MAKE).

• Jasper and the Unbaked Yeast Rolls

  Dog lovers with get a chuckle out of this story (if you haven't already seen it). It seems to be everywhere. So much so, that I'm wondering if it's true or just another urban legend.

  (Thanks Connie).

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( Dec 05 2008, 08:34:17 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink

Links for 19th November 2008

• Honeycomp Tire Won't Go Flat

  (via HackADay)

• God Trumps

  "Struggling to choose the top religion? Can't decide between Bible-thumping evangelism or benign, gentle Buddhism? Make the process fun and easy with God Trumps, our cut-out-and-keep metaphysical card game for all the family."

  I've now broken my rule about not blogging anything of a religious nature.

• 50 Beautiful Examples of Tilt-Shift Photography

  "Tilt-shift photography is a creative and unique type of photography in which the camera is manipulated so that a life-sized location or subject looks like a miniature-scale model."

• Let Me Google That For You

  Use this the next time somebody asks a really dumb question in your favorite email forum.

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( Nov 19 2008, 11:35:31 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]

Links for 7th November 2008

• Hummingbird Hawk Moth

  Yesterday afternoon, I went over to the Sun Labs building and listened to a talk by John McCarthy on Convergent Evolution and how it might be applicable to us communicating with aliens in the future.

  John's prime example of convergent evolution was the Hummingbird Hawk-moth which has evolved to have many of the same biological traits as the hummingbird, even though it's an entirely different type of animal.

  The other thing I found fascinating was Lincos, a language that has been specifically created for cosmic intercourse. This was written by Dr. Hans Freudenthal in 1960, and his book is long out of print (and is expensive to get hold of). I did find a critique from 16 years ago, that helps explain some of the concepts.

• Blueberry Scones from Cook's Illustrated

  A couple weeks ago all the folks from the group I'm in, were in town from various parts of the world for the week. One of them had a copy of a Cook's Illustrated magazine with her. It had an interesting recipe for the best blueberry scones. This week I borrowed a copy of that magazine from our local library, and last night we made the scones. I'm not sure they are the best blueberry scones I've ever tasted, but they are the best ones we've ever made.

• WhiteBoard PONG

  What to do if your meeting gets really boring. The only way one of those players is going to lose is if they suddenly have a narcoleptic fit (maybe induced by playing this game).

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( Nov 07 2008, 08:50:00 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink

Links for 31st October 2008

• Hexapodmeisterschaft

  Robotic music interpretation at it's very best. Perfect for Halloween.

  (via Hack A Day).

• Paper Engineering KAMIKARA

  And in particular check out the second half of the movie of the heart. Another one of those how-to-make-a-ten-year-old-boy-go-wow! moments.

  (also via Hack A Day).

• Vocal Mouse Control

  Say “ahh” and the cursor zips toward the northeast corner of the computer screen. “Ooo” sends it shooting straight south. Want it to head southeast? Say “ohh.” To make the cursor do a circle or figure 8, let vowel sounds bleed into one another, like eee into ahh into aww and so on. You can make it hurry or slow by regulating the volume of your voice. To open a link, make a soft clicking sound.

  If I started using this at work, I can just see fellow office workers sending off urgent emails to my manager, to get me drug tested. It does look like it has great potential for people with disabilities though.

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( Oct 31 2008, 02:30:48 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]

Links for 29th October 2008

• Amazon Windowshop beta

  Nirvana for the impulse purchaser. Ridiculously simple interface. Potential time sink. Very impressive.

• 12 Volt Battery Hack! You'll be Surprised...

  As somebody who has bought one of those little batteries to keep an old digital watch going, I'll be doing it this way the next time I need one. I now have a self-winding watch, so it won't be for that though.

• Tetris, the "hard" way

  It does seem overkill. I suppose it was done for the same reason that some people climb mountains. I'd hate to have been the poor bugger who had to solder all those LEDs.

• 35 Greatest Works of Reverse Graffiti

  Perhaps I can get Scott Wade to come around and do our mini-van. We have a huge redwood tree at the front of our house, and the mini-van is usually parked under that. It doesn't take long for it to get coated in fine red dust.

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( Oct 29 2008, 07:55:57 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]

Links for 17th October 2008

• Earth From Above (With Google Maps)
  I think what most impressed me here, was the Google maps for each location. Okay the boat is not plowing through the ice any more, and that worker is not slacking off on the bales of cotton, and the African images don't have enough Google resolution, but you can sure see the shanty town in Thailand.

• More Cheat Sheets
  The Common Ports one was useful to me.

• Wiimote Guitar Effects Control
  Bending multiple notes at once is impressively easy (assuming you know how to set up the Wii remote and can play a guitar).

• How to play the Pink Panther Theme Song on the Keyboard

  This one started out with Duncan asking me how could he learn to play the Pink Panther theme song. I googled and found the link above which was just what he was looking for. I then added a bit of peer pressure by going to YouTube and finding it being played by somebody who looks to be about Duncan's age.

  And of course when you're there, you are dragged into looking at other related videos and we ended up watching a couple of videos where the two performers unfortunately only had one guitar [link 1] [link 2].

  And that led to this.

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( Oct 17 2008, 09:10:29 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

Links for 10th October 2008

• Text Processing Python

  This is an online copy of the book by David Mertz, published by Addison Wesley in 2003. I stumbled over it when I was looking for a comprehensive algorithm for handling continuation lines in text files.

• Python Performance Tips

• 22 of the World's Most Creative Alphabets
  I don't think we've got 26 toilet rolls in our house.

• 20 Insane Comic-book Style Photoshop Effects

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( Oct 10 2008, 08:47:07 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]

Links for 26th September 2008

• Ferrari Motorcycle Concept
  Doesn't look too comfortable on the old nads though. And yes it reminds me of Tron too.

• Building a Custom Lifestream Website with Sweetcron
  Here's one I've added to my "must checkout sometime" pile.

  "Sweetcron is "The Automated Lifestream Blog Software". It is still in public beta, but is already a very nice blog software package. The beauty of Sweetcron is that new posts are created automatically from your activity elsewhere on the web. New photos on Flickr? Tweets on Twitter? Thumbs up on StumbleUpon? Blog posts on Tumblr? Add them all to your Sweetcron-powered site and they will appear on your site in minutes."

  And Sweetcron is 100% Free and Open Source. Too early to tell if it's the NextBigThing™ but it's got potential.

I've also been hanging out on Popurls in the evenings. I've noticed that one way to get your item to become one of the top posts at one of the sites featured there, is to construct lists of <n> things. So here are a few of the ones I've bookmarked, and will hopefully get back to some time.

• 10 Invaluable CSS Resources

• 13 Amazing Firefox Add-Ons To Make Designers Lives Easier

• 24 Killer Portable Apps For Your USB Flash Drive

• 13 Useful Math Cheat Sheets

• 35 Greatest Works of Reverse Graffiti

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( Sep 26 2008, 04:00:55 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

Links for 23rd September 2008

• No Photoshop Here (Funny Pics)

• Stairway to Heaven live (Rodrigo y Gabriela)
  This is happening to me a lot nowadays. I'll be listening to Radio Paradise and hear something I really like by somebody I'd never heard of before. I'll then go to YouTube and search for video's by the artist(s), get blown away, and then end up wanting the album.

  I also highly recommend Diablo Rojo.

• Spore on Linux Howto
  If it won't work in VirtualBox, then use Wine. Don't forget to read the disclaimer.

  (Thanks Joanie).

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( Sep 23 2008, 06:00:50 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]

Links for 12th September 2008

I haven't done one of these for a while. but it's Friday, and these are interesting.

• Truffle Hunting in Tuscany
  See also the other video links in the Related Videos section on this web page.

  This goes out to Connie and the other folks who take their dogs over to the big playing field behind Duncan's school each evening for a doggie social. We got to talking about growing truffles and using dogs to hunt them. I mentioned it was big in France. Well it's not France in this video, but it's just around the corner.

  As this article shows, there's money to me made in growing truffles; black truffles sell for $350-$500 a pound! We also weren't sure exactly where they grow but that's answered by the article too.

• Simpsons Intro in LEGO
  It's a pity LEGO don't do baby-size and kid-size people for perfect authenticity.

  (Via the MAKE blog who got it from BoingBoing).

• The Most Alien Place on Earth
  This is on Socotra Island.i Yes, I admit I had to google to find out where it was. Isolation does seem to do its own thing on islands. See Madagascar and the Galápagos Islands for other examples.

• Optical Illusions in Art - Part 1
  Optical Illusions in Art - Part 2
  Optical Illusions in Art - Part 3
  If you can't get enough of the PhotoShop'ed ones, then there is a whole web site where you can fritter the hours away.

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( Sep 12 2008, 09:08:42 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

Links for 9th July 2008

Three Sun related ones.

• Beyond LAMP

  My personal preference is:

  SPAM: Solaris / PHP or Perl / Apache / MySQL

  (That was a joke b.t.w. for the humor impaired).

• New Web Developer Center for Python/Jython

  "Here's your connection for downloads, community, libraries, documents, and frameworks for developing web applications with Python and Jython."

• New Open Storage Product Line

  "Sun is excited to introduce the new Sun Storage J4000 product line, a family of low-cost storage building blocks that are ideal for creating a flexible, Open Storage infrastructure when combined with Sun's industry leading servers and OpenSolaris."

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( Jul 09 2008, 01:19:47 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

Links for 7th July 2008

• Top 10 TED Talks

  I haven't watched them all yet, but I can highly recommend the ones by David Gallo, Johnny Lee and Blaise Aguera y Arca. The last one didn't quite make my mandible transverse a vertical direction but navigating around the David Hockney style Flickr photo montage is definitely a wow moment.

• Simply Noise

  Now the summer holidays are here, one of the disadvantages of working from home is when Duncan has one of his friends over and they are playing some kind of exciting video game. Even when they are on the other side of the house, I can still hear all the "Oh yeah!"'s and other loud utterances. If I need to concentrate on something, this is when I just plug in my head phones, visit this web site and set the slider to blank out their noise.

• The Pencil Project

  "The Pencil Project's unique mission is to build a free and open source tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use.

  Top features:

  • Built-in stencils for diagraming and prototyping
  • Multi-page document with background page
  • On-screen text editing with rich-text supports
  • PNG rasterizing
  • Undo/redo supports
  • Installing user-defined stencils
  • Standard drawing operations: aligning, z-ordering, scaling, rotating...
  • Cross-platforms
  • Adding external objects
  • And much more...

  Gtk+ on Linux huh. I wonder just how much thought they've given to accessibility.

• 30 Most Incredible Abstract Satellite Images of Earth

  These are great. I should price out how much it would cost to have these printed out and framed by an online photo service.

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( Jul 07 2008, 12:37:16 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]

Links for 30th June 2008

• How We Read Online

  Lots of good observations. The ones that make me wonder about the usefulness of a web page to me are:

  • Does it initially come up with readable text, or do I have to press Control-and-Plus a couple of times? Ironically this Slate.com page fails that test with Firefox on my Ubuntu system.

  • How many annoying flashy ads does the page contain? You know the type. "YOU ARE A WINNER!!!!!!" strobing away, no doubt causing epileptic fits in a very small percentage of the population.

  • How many of those stupid double underlined links does the page have, that pop up a mini window right over the text I was trying to read?

• Alexey Titarenko's "City of Shadows"

  I found some of the smoky ones quite chilling. Better increase my Prozac dosage.

  (via Makezine).

• ZZ Top - Crossroads Guitar Festival

  I know, I'm showing my age, but if you do like their music (and for me that's before they went commercial in the 80's), then you might like to know that there is a new ZZ Top Live DVD out.

  A couple observations from this YouTube video. (Notice how I use another bulleted list to get you to keep reading):

  • Dusty Hill has large feet (or he likes wearing clown shoes).

  • You can get whiplash from your beard. Perhaps they should have tied those suckers down or at least weighted them, although I suspect you could take an eye out with the latter.

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( Jun 30 2008, 09:03:08 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

Links for 25th June 2008

• Tribute To George Carlin

  There are a lot of similar link out there. Yeah, I'm a couple day late. As I've mentioned before, I didn't enjoy everything he did, but you can't get away from the fact that he changed the face of comedy. Whether always for good or bad is hard to tell.

• Virgin's Data Visualization web page

  Personally I'm not sure how particularly useful (or easy) their site is, to actually understand their data.

  Representing large data sets in a visually easy-to-use intuitive manner is hard. There are probably a few PhD dissertations on this still to be written.

• Algorithm Geeks

  Need a particular algorithm and can't work out how to do it, or find it when you go a-googling? Well here's your chance to elicit the help of lots of alpha-geeks.

  I wonder how long it'll be before somebody comes up with the idea to take the "best of" from this group, and put it all together in a book...

  (via Hackszine).

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( Jun 25 2008, 08:38:47 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink