Via Cameron comes the Fantasy Doctor Medi-Funkit :
Your child gains invaluable severe trauma experience, while your carpet goes right on delivering non-sticky underfoot pleasure.
Lloyd Wood's Jaundiced Eye thus far has interesting notes from talks by Eric Raymond and Don Norman, both worth reading. From the Don Norman one:
And, speaking of gear-shifting: when he talked about how easy a car was to drive, he contrasted the complex car with the simple unicycle, which is far more basic in construction but is much harder to master.
This comparison gave pause for thought. 'Easy to drive' may be true for US automatics, on wide, straight US roads, but here in the UK we have driving lessons, narrow roads, and gears. Oh, and roundabouts; you know, traffic circles. Nothing much happens if you fall off a unicycle, whereas cars do annoying things like explode if you steer them into concrete walls at speed.
metacontent is a collaborative web log , nothing leaping out at me yet, but I'll drop it on the list and see where it goes.
Via Cameron comes the Dictionary of Unusual Sexual Terms , a part of the World Sexual Records site.
DailyUpdate is an app to do content aggregation , I may have to rethink my own strategy and just write filters for this.
Yeah, I know, I browse with image loading, Java and JavaScript turned off. But just in case someone actually ever comes up with a reason other than advertising to deliver high quality video to my desktop, here's the Netscape plug-in SDK pages .
The comp.fonts FAQ glossary explains why a point isn't a point, and what they've got to do with inches.
Carl passed along a pointer to http://www.informationmag.com/ which is a web site with a smattering of articles and content as a teaser for a dead-trees subscription. Some interesting things here, somewhat techno-luddite. Their "designer" should be thrashed soundly and dumped in a canal somewhere (turn on your image loading and get used to bad frames), but I'm going to try to track down the paper version.
If you're trying to syndicate content, try http://www.isyndicate.com/ for assorted mainstream stuff.
Haven't tried it personally, but I've heard reports of people having lots of success running Windows in a virtual machine under Linux using the software available from http://www.vmware.com/
Always wanted to duplicate that restaurant's recipe? Try http://www.copykat.com/
Seems like a lot of goth links going up recently. If anybody catches me with black nail polish and a powdered face, put me out of my misery? With that in mind, a large page on Vlad III Tepes , aka Dracula.
The BOFHCam , including the adventures of the PFY .
This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text, while the remaining parts are likely unreadable without MIME-aware tools. Send mail to mime@docserver.cac.washington.edu for more info.
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Haven't looked, but just got this message:
This page shows how to disable the Registration Wizard in Windows 98, so that web sites cannot read or change your registration information through Active X.
http://www.winmag.com/web/regwizoff.htm
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Evil. Handcrafted with Love. The Pagan Publishing Plush Cthulhu Doll
In the post-modern existential world of today, evil is no longer personified. It's just an abstraction. Wouldn't some pure, unadulterated evil be refreshing? Wouldn't you like that? Sure! We all would.
But what if it was also cuddly soft and oh-so-huggable?
I'm thinking about the things I started Flutterby to do, and, for some bizarre reasons, looking at TV listings ties in. http://www.gist.com/ has TV listings (dog slow), http://www.onnow.com/ has some, and TV Guide listings seem to be the fastest to get to semi-useful information. I'm rather amazed that no one has done what I most want in a TV listing, that is sort by event rather than by time.
From The Daily Illuminator comes Gothic Martha Stewart . Not a parody, the reference is really more of a tribute: "If Martha Stewart were really gothic, color is the only thing she'd have to change." Lots of decorating ideas, despite my decidedly non-Goth tastes I'll have to spend some time...
From Linky Dinky comes The Waiter's Digest , from the perspective of those who choose to make waiting tables their career. Well said, perhaps a little snooty at time, but except for a few very rare chefs, a good waiter is a big part of a good dining experience.
http://www.bigbrotherinside.org/
An attempt to build an open index of CDs, artists and titles at http://www.freeamp.org/cdindex/
Cool idea, horrible execution: http://www.zinezone.com/
Sony builds a mall in San Francisco: http://www.metreon.com/
"What grows so far out of
a man's pajamas that he
can hang his hat upon it?"
Via Cameron , a link explaining the popularity of WordStar among SF Writers . The usual discussion about interfaces for touch typists, but also a good exposition on the manuscript versus the page, and how most modern word processors operate on the page.
Your midday is someone else's midnight, someone else's sundown and even someone else's sunup. Do you know that time is a simultaneous 4 corner square that rotates to a 4 day time cube within 1 - 24 hour rotation of Earth? You are educated stupid and unable to know nature's 4 day time cube.
Wes points me to a free MP3 library: http://www.freeamp.org/ , and continues:
I don't know of any DVD playback apps on Linux, let alone any libraries or Open Source apps. And any Open Source DVD app won't be able to play back encrypted DVDs, because the cipher is undocumented. My hopes for DVD hacking lie with HAVi and 1394... (if that combination ever arrives) http://www.havi.org/
Another microcontroller link: On-Line Journal of Computer Controlled Systems has a bunch of stuff on PC/104 systems (embedded Intel based boards) and a good set of supplier lists.
It sure seems like the most difficult part of microcontroller development is figuring out where to get the parts, 'cause there's cool sensors to do just about everything, tracking down a supplier who'll sell you less than ten thousand at a time is the hard part. National Semiconductor has lots of cool parts, gonna have to try building an I2C bus for the Atmel chips so I can interface to them.
In my search for better appliances, http://www.xaudio.com/ sells MP3 libraries for all sorts of platforms. Now if I can just find some way to play DVDs under Linux I can build a seriously kick-ass home entertainment device.
Cool hack of the day: A keyboard that hangs in two parts from your chair , allowing straight arms and wrists when you're typing.
A quick refresher on the levels of RAID: http://www.ridgecrest.ca.us/~markee/White%20Papers/HardLinks/part1.htm .
he 'net's pretty much over. It's been invaded by the suits and the lusers. Dave Winer is, with a straight face, comparing HTML with Broadband Mechanics software and declaring the latter the winner on the basis of (so far as I can tell) way overdone and useless graphics. Which is fine if your goal in life is helping all the people with the attention span of a gnat make your life more complex, but I aspire to more.
It's spring, when a young man's heart and fancy turn to thoughts of "the next big thing". Well, I've been playing with these little Atmel AT90S1200 chips, $1.50 quantity 10, a K of ROM, 32 byte sized registers, a bit of EEROM that stays around even when power's off, 15 I/O pins including an A/D converter, and there are other variants with the same instruction set that do different things, more EEROM, RAM, A/D converters, RS-232 line drivers, stuff like that. And I've been wondering what nails need to be pounded down with such a hammer. Well, I'm helping a coworker build a Pinewood Derby arbitrator that will, by way of blinking lights and such, stop the fistfights amongs the parents. But the market for Cub Scout accessories is limited. With that in mind, a couple of links for ideas and applications that might benefit from moderately smarter appliances that know a little bit about their environment:
One place to start is Dan Hoehnen's Home Automation Index
Home Automator magazine.
Circuit Cellar Ink is the offspring of the old Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar that was in Byte (back when it was a real magazine, in the '80s). They've got the HCSII line of modules which specifies an RS-485 based protocol.
MisterHouse: The Winter Family's (sometimes not-so) "smart" house among other things automatically closes and opens window blinds, manages the heating, venting and insulation systems that they're claiming a $200 annual heating bill (in Minnesota!), and has a web interface
So now the questions are:
And maybe it's time to build that MP3/DVD/CD player combination web surfer for my stereo rack that I've been threatening to do.
The definitive Theremin site.
A low level library for reading and writing Quicktime files in Linux. http://heroine.tampa.fl.us/quicktime/
Archives of neat sites posted to Flutterby , notes to webmaster@flutterby.com