Yummy Wakame

“While WiFi devices measure their range in feet, making them useful for homes, coffee shops, and bakeries, WiMAX measures its range in miles. Many miles. 30 or so, to be more precise. That makes WiMAX a potentially genuine competitor to cable and DSL.” – ArsTechnica.com

Read more about WiMAX.

Named one of the Best Inventions of 2005 according to TIME magazine, the Topsy Turvy Upside-down Tomato Planter is the easiest possible way to grow tomatoes (even chillis and strawberries). No weeding, caging, staking or pest control required. I’ve always wanted one and now they’re only 19 smackers!

This last snap was stolen shortly before he rode off into the sunset on his steely horse in search of the coldest water…

more…

Here’s the Belkin WiFi Skype Phone, which purportedly has the ability to connect to Skype independently of your PC being turned on and logged in. That means that this phone would be able to work anywhere you can find a WiFi connection. With more and more local cities and towns providing widespread WiFi access, this could soon be a major competitor for local-only cell providers like Cricket and maybe even a rival for the larger providers one day.

Psychology Today: “… Under the right conditions, the tiniest trigger can unleash a flood of sunny memories in even the least sentimental among us.

Such reminiscence can be healthier than you think. Despite nostalgia’s bittersweet rap and the oft-heard advice to live in the moment, recent studies suggest that the occasional detour down memory lane can give your spirits a significant lift.

Thinking of good memories for just 20 minutes a day can make people more cheerful than they were the week before, and happier than if they think of their current lives, report researchers from Loyola University.”
The full article…

Wired: “Monopoly is keeping step with changing technology. The new version of Parker’s classic board game dispenses with the colored currency and instead employs Visa mock debit cards. The card is inserted into an electronic machine where the banker records the players’ earnings and payments. For this updated game, Parker partnered with Visa, which made the card and banking machine. The game, dubbed Monopoly Here and Now Electronic Banking, retails for about $46.”

Check out this micro version of the iPod Shuffle (or so it appears to be – it’s not actually an Apple product.) It runs on MMC or SD chips, so theoretically you could pack up to 4GB onto the thing – about 8x what my Shuffle can hold. I can’t be sure of the sound quality or how awesome you’ll look wearing it, and the name is about as innovative as calling ham Canadian bacon, but you could probably store the thing in your belly button if your pockets were full…

Learn more about the SC-MP001W »

Direct access to mp3 files – no bittorrents or special software required, just your browser and a good search engine. Try the following search strings, modifying where appropriate:

To find directories

intitle:index.of + mp3 + "bandname/trackname" -html -htm -php -asp -txt -pls

"index of" + "mp3" + "bandname/trackname" -html -htm -php

You can use “index of” or “last modified” or even “parent of”. For different media try other file types instead of “mp3″.

To find individual mp3s

"ok_computer_live.mp3" -playlist -filetype:txt

To find random mp3s added by month

intitle:index.of + mp3 -html -htm -php -asp apache jul-2006

Low Morale is a series of animations portraying one man’s struggle to cope with the soul-sapping, will-to-live draining, life-force mugging, morale crushing experiences of work.

via limn

FIGHT!

Thanks Kat!

Sleep as well as this last night?

For those of you out there who love the idea of saving the world but just aren’t sure how, now you can download a Word Document (.rtf) with over 30 ways to reduce your contribution to the exponentially worsening problem of Global Warming. So now you can print it out and cross things off the list, instead of just forgetting about it by the time you get to the next post…

This is a compilation of the ideas presented on climatecrisis.net, the official website of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s amazingly insightful documentary.

There is a PHP + CSS image replacement technique you can use on your site to dynamically generate beautiful typographic headings that are also completely accessible. The best part is it is all server-side scripting so your viewers browser doesnt need to depend on having any special plugins to get it to work.

considerations:

• You need to have access to your web server so you can upload fonts etc
• It doesnt work when images are turned off in the browser

Now there is a new option: sIFR 2.0. sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. See it in action on Wales in Style:

considerations:

• Requires Flash and Javascript to be installed in the browser to work
• If Flash isn’t installed (or obviously if javascript is turned off), the (X)HTML page displays as normal and nothing further occurs. If Flash is installed, javascript traverses through the source of your page measuring each element you’ve designated as something you’d like “sIFRed”.

sIFRed is a great option for those who need to create large paragrahps of text, or those who are struggling with the old CSS + PHP method to get their fonts looking nice and crisp.

Well I did tell you we had something spectacular planned for Saturday night in Chicago and finally here are the photos!

Nykki’s mom spoilt us rotten and teated us to a spectacular cruize on the Odyssey at Navy Pier – a once in a lifetime experience I will never forget…

Photo by BitHead on Flickr

Taken just before we left. Wanna see the rest of the photos? more…

Congrats on finally becoming a UK citizen Pieter! Woohoo!!! Can’t wait to see your spanking new passport :@D

A highly addictive non-vegetarian game that’ll keep you entertained this weekend:

As seen on ClickNathan - the Secret Blog.

Lebanese is my new favourite food. Seriously. And I’m into food. Wow. Our table was groaning with tappas-style treats. The best stuffed vine leaves Ive ever tasted. I think the artichoke hearts in a tangy garlic soup was my favourite. You cant say you’ve really lived in Chicago until you’ve tried Fattoush. I couldnt believe how inexpensive it was too, even by Pittsburgh standards, but especially for Chicago.

On the way to Fattoush a guy jumped out of a shop when we walked past the door and passionately shouted, “Bonnitas! Bonnitas!” We had a hard time understanding what he was trying to communicate and figured he might just need help. We didn’t have time to stop and help him.

Of course we did the giant frozen margherita thing as it was in preparation for the karaoke bar… I howled and Nykki shouted Hotel California at the crowd. We even applauded ourselves afterwards, and I have to say it was the best applause I’ve ever received.

Herewith are the snaps from our cavortings…

Just arrived… tired but soooo happy. more…

Can’t see this video? Click here to watch it.

After weeks of buildup, excitement and just two scratchy hours sleep, I arrived in Chicago early this am to spend the weekend with Nykki (sans the rebel yell). My eyes, ears (not so much the nose) down to the toes have been stuffed full with spoiling and good times already…

Nykki’s apartment is in the heart of downtown Chicago, a highrise with unbelievable views of the city and it’s just 8 blocks away from the Sears Tower. I nervously left my only passport with the security guard at the entrance, and strangely the whole place looks and feels like a hotel and even requires those swiper access cards. Pretty snazz.

Tonight we’ll be dining Lebanese style; after that we’ll probably down tall glasses of deadly eyeball-screaming frozen margheritas till we get thrown out and are forced to stumble home.

I can’t wait to spend a night in China Town (it’ll be my first time). Ooh and tomorrow evening we have something really spectacular planned! I’ll post more soon with piccies!

Dr. Ravi is my doctor, which totally makes me a VIP. Check it out!

The BBC recently ran a competition to redesign their homepage. The winner’s design while not all that visually spectacular is full of great ideas. If you’re interested in this sort of thing check out the winners design, and the runners up.

All the following posts were all found by Pieter – yummywakame link hunter extraordinaire and editor of no less than 301 posts. Adulation and applause welcome in the comments.

Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites

“New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.

And it could harness advances in internet technology – specifically the forthcoming “semantic web” championed by the web standards organisation W3C – to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.”
Find out more…

Availabot

The ultimate USB gadget! Availabot stands up when your instant messaging buddy is available… and falls over when they go away! More info at availabot.com

Can’t see this video? Click here to watch it.

Brighton Wok – The Legend of Ganja Boxing

A Kung Fu movie set in Brighton. Awesome trailer!

Can’t see this video? Click here to watch it.

Star Trek vs. Star Wars

Can’t see this video? Click here to watch it.

Carlos do Amaral Freire, a Brazilian linguist, easily translates 60 languages, including Chinese, Portuguese and Sanskrit.

Is he a genius? A freak of nature? Surprisingly, Freire probably isn’t much different from your average bilingual. more…

While playing with little boats he’s made from various board games:

Captain: Take us to the Corner of Doom!
First Officer: No, take us to the other Corner of Doom!

So look who I found on the blogosphere today… Weirdly, the very first post starts off, “Well its been more than awhile since I posted in this blog….”

Im hoping new tracks will be posted from time to time ;@)