“groovy mother...”

Entries for week beginning December 4, 2005

December 10, 2005

RightFields

MovableType plugin to reconfigure the “fields” for your blog entries. Might install this, just so that I can stop storing the “via” links for Groovy Links in the “Excerpt” field.

December 8, 2005

TIME Magazine Person of the Year 2005 | Billboard in Times Square NYC

Upload a photo of you (or someone or something else) and Time might flash it up on their “Person of the Year” billboard in Times Square. I uploaded a shot of Bacon, naturally.

December 7, 2005

fish: a user friendly command line shell

An interesting new Unix shell. Look at the screenshots for examples of it’s cool tab-completion fu.

MAKE: Laser etching Powerbooks

Wow. For Christmas, I want a powerbook and a big fuck-off laser!

ratDVD - the DVD movie download format

Compression/packaging format to rip *everything* from a DVD — Menus, special features, commentaries, etc. Also allows you to unpack and burn back to a DVD! Windows-only at the moment, sadly.

Deflexion

Real-world bounce-the-laser-off-mirrors boardgame. Looks like a lot of fun — I think I’ll head to the “World Championships” at MIT this weekend.

mozdev.org - nextplease

Ooh. This is just supersmart! A Firefox plugin which works out when you’re on a site with multiple pages to a story (or search results), and lets you flip through them with keyboard shortcuts. This makes TWoP much easier to read. Hurrah!

web.py: makes web apps

New minimalistic Python web framework from Aaron Swartz.

December 6, 2005

iTSM Gallery: rodbegbie

My “sound signature” according to the iTunes Signature Maker. Slightly busted in that it refused to deal with most of the tracks in my collection, but fun nonetheless.

iTunes Signature Maker

This brilliant little applet analyses your iTunes library and based on your listening behaviour, patches together a short “signature” of your music taste. I’ll upload mine in a moment.

Somerville Arts Council: Illuminations Tour

The marginally tongue-in-cheek Christmas trolley tour round Somerville’s insanely lit-up homes is Saturday 17th. I think we may have to get us some tickets.

~stevenf: What

Amazon have clearly realised that there’s money in the banana stand.

Colorize black and white photos - DevLobby.com

Cool little app to re-color black and white photos. Lots of fun!

December 5, 2005

Google: Ten Golden Rules

Some interesting notes on Google’s culture. “Nobody throws chairs at Google, unlike management practices used at some other well-known technology companies.” Snerk.

New Scientist: UK case for holding terror suspects ‘misleading’

Politicians’ claims that police need to hold terror suspects for 90 days because of the time taken to decrypt files. Ross Anderson refutes it, saying “You find the key lying around, or you give up.” Tsk, those pesky experts ruining Tony Blair’s day.

Why the current all-you-can-eat music service providers suck: An illustration

As a Rhapsody subscriber, I’m able to listen to only nine out of fourteen tracks from the Beck album ‘Midnite Vultures’ without forking out another $10. What idiot in charge of licensing decided that ‘Mixed Bizness” was fine for free download, but that the excellent “Debra” is blocked? Record companies: You’re morons, and this is why no-one uses your crappy “legal” alternatives to file-sharing.

Rhapsody

Real take their Windows-only all-you-can-eat music streaming app, dump the drmcrypto into a cross-platform Firefox plugin, and expose the catalog as a webapp.

December 4, 2005

Oxfam Unwrapped

A rather splendid fund-raising site from Oxfam. Pick out how you want your donation spent from a sizable catalogue. My family’s been “buying” loads of these “for” my grandmother.

saute-swinish