"Lack of money is the root of all evil."
- George Bernard Shaw
I saw this short animation film a few months ago at the CU international film series, and stumbled upon it online today. The idea behind the movie, by Blur Studios, is pretty interesting. Oh yes, its about a gopher who’s trying to get the farmer’s market produce.
… in today’s Dilbert comic strip.
Google has released ctemplate, or a template form of the code that formats the pages returned in a Google web search. “The ctemplate package contains a library implementing a simple but powerful template language for C++. It emphasizes separating logic from presentation: it is impossible to embed application logic in this template language.” Skins for programs? Amazing concept, only Google could do this.
I need some candy for my wrappers.
Note: If gcc 4 does not compile happily, try gcc 3.3.
SourceForge link for source and RPMs
(From the Google Code Blog, Digg)
My brother Sankalp sent me this video of a home-made Mac Mini Portable, by Peter Green. A really impressive system with an 8″ TFT LCD screen, and a Li-ion battery that powers the setup for over 3 hours. Its also supposed to be lighter than a 15″ iBook. While the touchpad and tiny keyboard may not look too comfortable (I may be wrong), the design could most certainly be improved upon with a custom-built LCD panel.
The MMP: The Mac Mini Portable Project Video
Engadget had a post on the MMP on Feb 9, which I obviously missed.
I came across this 2001 video of Steve Jobs announcing the new iPod. Its interesting to see how Jobs’ presentations have evolved, but not changed; especially for me, since I’ve only been following His Stevieness’ keynote speeches since 2003. There’s one slip-up, however, with Jobs calling the MP3 format open. Its not. Give Ogg Vorbis a shot if you want to try a true open audio codec that hopefully some day, will give the MP3 format some tough competition. Why would you care? Well, it would bring down some of the costs of digital music licensing, and therefore content prices. More importantly, it would be a triumph for open source efforts.
(via Digg, the Cult of Mac blog)
There is no way mere words can do justice to this amazing effort. Run the following command using the command prompt (PC), or a terminal (Mac) window to check it out.
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
I just tried Pandora (thanks, Manish) and am already hooked.
Pandora is a fabulous (and intelligent) interface that works as the front-end to the Music Genome Project. Simply put, Pandora is a music discovery service and streaming radio service rolled into one brilliant online music application. The service allows you to create (upto 100) custom radio stations based on a particular artist or song, and then generates a stream by populating the ’station’ with songs that are musically similar to your choice, irrespective of artist popularity, etc. The service has an advertising-supported, free version, and is completely legal (unless you use the service to make personal copies of the streamed content).
In two words, highly recommended.
After hearing about Bubbles, a new app that attempts to bridge the great browser divide separating Web 2.0 from the desktop, on Om Malik’s blog, I thought I’d give it a try.
Bubbles is a nice and simple attempt (by Ohar Eder-Pressman and friends in Israel), and allows developers to customize their web applications via javascript APIs - therefore allowing the bridge to be crossed both ways. The AJAX engine can also be used to write tiny JS applications for the client side, which probably might be a lot more useful for me than the basic concept of Bubbles itself. Thanks to some quick tweaking via AutoPatcher XP, I can set individual browser windows to operate like standalone applications, with basic system tray functionality.
The Bubbles web site could use some quick spelling correction though.
I stumbled upon this ~13 minute video of Rube Goldberg machines designed as part of a contest for a Japanese game show. I’ve always been fascinated by these well-designed and accurately coordinated, yet highly counterproductive complex machines. For those who don’t know, a Rube Goldberg machine or device is any exceedingly complex pataphysical apparatus that performs a very simple task in a very indirect and convoluted way (via Wikipedia).
(Update) I was meaning to also add a link to the famous Honda commercial that uses Honda parts to create a nice Rube Goldberg machine (and the link to a parody as well), but forgot :P. Thanks Sean!
On a side note, watching this video sequence reminded me of a beautiful quote in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s 1972 movie Bawarchi.
“It is simple to be happy but so difficult to be simple…”
- Anon.
.. you need to use the Windows Task Manager to terminate a non-responding Windows Task Manager! I don’t know how I managed to pull something like this off at work, but I must’ve been doing something really bad. I’ll put this down as another symptom of the ‘Its a Friday evening and I’ve nothing interesting to do’ syndrome.
