See how far you can get down the tunner by just pressing the space bar in DOT5URBO.
Reading (Edit: and Watching) Material
- IBM’s Watson smacked around folks on Jeopardy, and here is a good Q&A with the development team.
- Looking for pinball in Portland? There’s a map for that.
- In case you didn’t know, programmers swear a lot.
- The question everybody needs answered: If I were an evil genius, how could I go about melting the ice caps?
- Man makes $50,000 goal, charities nearly get hosed because of a technicality.
- Why save PBS? Here are a pile of great reasons, but this one easily takes the cake.
- Speaking of cake: I Crashed Paris Hilton’s Birthday And Accidentally The Whole Cake.
- A bunch of Android links for you:
- Man makes an awesome carputer with a rooted NOOKColor and a DIY car mount (more photos and video here). Apparently MortPlayer has a “car” layout and a widget that makes this nice and easy.
- A great collection of Boot Animations.
- If you’re seeing screenshots of Android phones and wondering “What widget it that?” then this visual reference might help.
- Use your Wii controler with your Android phone.
- I’ve always been tempted to play with this more, but I just know I’d spend too much time with it: There are apps that will feed web audio streams of emergency radio frequencies. The frequencies are public record and some are fed over the Web which would make them work with those apps.
- I think I may have shared this before, but I can’t remember: ServerUp uses your phone’s network connection to monitor if your servers are still up and running.
- Samsung released the Froyo update for my phone a few days ago, but apparently the update is now on hold. It’s been working OK for me, but I haven’t pushed it too hard or tested it out much, so I’ll just keep my finger’s crossed.
- Ever wanted to know what the life of a gigolo is really like? Now you know.
- Ever wanted to know what happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator? Now you know.
- Every wanted to know what happens with you try to BBQ a fire-proof hard drive? Now you know (OK, enough of that “Ever wanted…”. Sorry…).
- Things you didn’t know about Futurama characters.
- FirewallBuilder looks like an interesting open-source solution to managing a variety of different firewall packages (it appears to support a ton). A handy write-up on a basic setup is here.
- A new AWS feature: Run your website from Amazon S3.
- If you try to game the system when it comes to SEO, somebody will always find out.
- Fun with Translation Party.
- For Google Docs to make inroads, it really needs to go offline.
- If you want your own personal cloud, Pogoplug looks like it might help.
Edit: Forgot about these — there are a couple videos after the jump…
The Legend Of Zelda Turns 25
Man, I feel old, as I remember squealing like a schoolgirl when I opened up a box on Christmas morning to find that gold cartridge. 1up.com has a great collection of articles celebrating the anniversary, with my favorite probably being the 25 things you didn’t know about Zelda.
Still Looking For Prize Donations
I’m still looking for prize donations for this year’s NCAA pick ’em. As an added bonus for folks that donate, I’ve partnered up with Josh over at Central Oregon Athlete for this year’s tournament, and your ad/link will go on his site as well (more details to come).
Use the contact form on the right-hand side of this page, comment here, or e-mail me at utterlyboring (at) gmail (dot) com.
Is MSIE 9 A Modern Browser?
Do you really need to ask? The answer is “no.”
Real-Life GTA4
An amazing graphics mod for Grand Theft Auto 4 that makes it look almost real:
Read the notes on another video here to see how it was done. It requires a powerful PC to pull it off (3.6GHz i7, 6GB RAM, GTX470), but it looks absolutely amazing.
About Dang Time — Epic 4G Finally Gets Froyo
My phone, the Samsung Epic, will finally have an official Froyo update in a couple days. The source is already available so hopefully ROMs out there will start using this as their base. I’ve been rocking Froyo for a while, but it’ll be nice to have an official version out there.
It’s Fun To Mess With Cats
The uploader says: “While i was practicing i noticed that my cat seemed very interested in the metronome, so i placed it on the floor and here’s the result!”
The metronome is really tweaking out this cat.
Time Killer For The Day
Vroom is one of those physics-based puzzle games that will kill off a bunch of your day, if you’re not careful. The premise, as usual with these types of games, is pretty simple: Get the truck to the finish line, collecting all the stars. Sounds simple, but gets pretty tough pretty quick.
A Foot Of Snow, Power Outages, and a Dead Router
What a day. A metric crapload of wet snow pummeled the area. All the Bend schools canceled classes, Redmond didn’t cancel their schools, realized their mistake and my power was out for a couple hours this morning. It’s a mess, and it took nearly two hours for me to get my driveway cleared because of all the moisture in the snow (worked on it during the power outage, since I couldn’t work from home, like I planned). I didn’t even attempt to make it out of my neighborhood, as my car is too low to the ground to even try with the thick snow (they don’t plow my street). The power came off and on a couple times this morning, which I think caused a surge to go up one of my lines, as my always bullet proof WRT54GL router (running DD-WRT, of course) is now dead. I had an old wired router that I’m running off now with a bunch of cables running all over the place, but you don’t realize how much you miss wireless on a laptop until it’s gone (I have ethernet running to other computers in the house already, so they’re fine). Looks like I need to get a new router ordered. I’m pretty sure I’ve had that WRT54GL since I had my back surgery, so it’s probably due to be replaced anyway — I can finally get myself an 802.11n router. (Edit, after looking through my records: I’ve had that Linksys router more recently than that. I had an old crappy D-Link prior to that.)
Everybody surviving the storm?