This fellow from SlappingTurtle.com developed a piece of software called iAlertU, which is a very clever use of the hard drive motion sensors built into late model PowerBooks and MacBooks. iAlertU will sound a screeching alarm if the laptop is picked up. Click the video to see it in action. The remote is used to arm/disarm it. This is cool stuff! 🙂
Yearly Archives: 2006
"Monster rabbit" targets vegetable patch
In a turn of events eerily similar to the latest Wallace and Gromit movie, a ‘monster’ rabbit has been rampaging through vegetable patches in a small village in northern England. Local gardeners are out for revenge, and have hired two local fellows with guns to guard their precious veggies. The creature is described as a cross between a hare and a rabbit, about the size of a dog. “It’s huge!” they say. 🙂 See link for more details.
Let's buy some music
TechCrunch has a review of music services currently available, and their side-by-side comparison is pretty good, but they forgot to include eMusic.
My wife and I use eMusic, and we think it’s pretty darn good! I wish they’d included it in their list of reviewed services.
They mentioned AllofMP3 among the services they reviewed, but it is a quasi-legal site – I can’t imagine the artists are getting properly paid for their music at $0.09/song, and I don’t know if they even signed deals with the site. While the price may be tempting, I have a feeling that site will get turned off or made to charge more at some point in the future.
eMusic at least has deals with each of the artists on the site, and they’re completely legitimate. The downloads are fast, the selection is growing, and the music is not hamstrung by silly DRM schemes. Along with the iTunes service, it is what Ligia and I use regularly.
Real world force field
Real World Force Field: Check out this video from Fox News. It depicts a force field which causes rockets and other attacking weapons to explode before they reach its target. It seems that it’s all done with computers. Something like a laser beam shoots onto the tip of an incoming projectile, causing it to explode.
It’s very interesting technology, but I think “force field” is a misnomer when used to describe it. There isn’t really any force field that is passively destroying incoming projectiles. This involves active technology which targets projectiles with laser beams.
Creating a module for Google's home page
Just spent the entire afternoon getting acquainted with a fun little document called the Google API Developer Guide. I think it’s cool because Google will let me create a module that I can submit to them for inclusion in their directory of modules. These modules can then be added to a user’s personalized home page, sort of like MSN or Yahoo do it.
I say I spent the entire afternoon because it may be fairly easy to write a basic XML file, it’s hard to write it in such a way that it pulls data correctly from an existing feed. In my case, I wanted to pull the latest blog entries from this blog. There was some fancy codework involved, and the directions just weren’t very clear. They showed me how to pull the text from the feed, including the entry title and content, but I just couldn’t figure out how to make my module look like the others in the directory. I guess one either has to be a good JavaScript programmer (which I’m not) or have access to some secret directions that Google isn’t sharing with everyone… I don’t know…
At any rate, FeedBurner once again saved me from coding hell. Because the only other alternative for me would have been to update a static XML file by hand every time I had a new blog entry, and I wasn’t going to do that! Well, FeedBurner has this nifty Headline Animator service, that will create a simple animated GIF which rolls through the latest blog entries very nicely. I used that to create the XML file, and bingo, I got my module done and submitted it. Now I’m curious to see if Google will accept it!
Oh, one more thing. I’d like to see if Google will expand the module directory categories. They’re fairly limited. I would like to see categories like Blogs, Personal, Culture, Travel, Photography, etc.
Raoul Pop 