A little soapbox for me to stand on and rant from.
I just sat down and watched the kutiman thru-you youtube mashups. They are fantastic.
What the guy has done, is find various youtube clips of people singing or playing instruments and edited them together to make full blown songs. It must have taken ages.
I’ve put together a play list of all the tracks but here are my favorites:
mPass for the iPhone is now available. If you are a lucky iPhone owner then you can download the application here or visit the AppStore and search for “mPass”
For those of you who are iPhone-impaired (like me), here are some screen shots:
I stumbled across a flash game called Auditorium last night. It is an awesome game, combining physics, particles and music to make an addictive puzzle game.
The graphics are fantastic, each completed level looks like a living bit of abstract art. The first few levels (called acts) are available for free. I’m really tempted to shell out the $10 to get access to all 15 acts (about 70 levels).
Click here to play or click here for more info on the game play
Oh so much prettier then the G1 and has a virtual keyboard to boot. Those who have played with it seem to love it.
I want one and it looks like I’ll be able to get one since Vodafone will be releasing them here in New Zealand!
Joy joy joy…
A very nice video explaining the origins of the Internet. Love the clean, simple (mostly) black and white animation.
History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.
The icons used are from the PICOL project which is the Pictorial Communication Language and is a project to find a standard and reduced sign system for electronic communication.
On Friday, whilst at my parent-in-laws, we chased a large bug out the lounge. After a couple of minutes it came back in and this time when we helped it out it dropped its payload (a giant spider) and revealed itself to be a wasp and disappeared out the window.
I didn’t think to much of it until I saw another wasp this morning hanging around the surround-sound speaker next to the TV. Guess what I found? Yep the wasp had been creating nests in the back of the speakers in the holes where the screws go. In fact there were two wasps hard at work.
They are both squished now but at least 4 holes have been sealed up. I’m not sure how we are going to dig out the nests.
Here are some pics:
For those of you who don’t know, wasps paralyze spiders, stick them in holes and then lay their eggs into the spiders. The young then hatch and feed on the spiders. Lovely…
Crashed Ice is a combination of downhill skiing, hockey, boardercross with a little bit of “roller ball” thrown in, awesome. I would love to try this, even though I would get broken into little, little pieces.
I came across this t-shirt site a few months ago called Threadless, not only do they have some very cool T-shirt designs but they are all user created.
The idea is that you design a T-shirt, upload the design and if it gets lots of votes then its gets printed! Better yet if you design gets chosen for printing then you get $2000 cash and $500 of vouchers.
So since it is a bit rainy today, I created my first t-shirt design and submitted it.
_[Updated]: alas my design got bounced back as needing some tweaking so it is now in critique mode. Check it out and let me know what you think: http://www.threadless.com/critique/34044/Hello_waveform_
I started building my first Firefox extension last night and as a result I had to dig into XUL (pronounced zool, al la Ghostbusters).
XUL is the “XML User Interface Language” and is technology of the cross-platform GUI used by Mozilla products such as Firefox and Thunderbird.
Now I have been aware of XUL for years but haven’t really thought about it much until I clicked on the XUL Periodic Table example that I suddenly realized that XUL makes for a pretty swanky RIA platform (not too mention it was around years before the others).
Not only does it use common technologies (XML, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX) but it “just works’ which I particularly love in a technology and as a bonus it is open source.
Of course if you clicked on that XUL Periodic table example above using Internet Explorer then of course it would not have worked since IE doesn’t support XUL which of course is a bit of a problem.
Having said that there is XULRunner which lets you run standalone XUL based applications (kinda like Adobe Air).
XUL use isn’t limited to Mozilla products check out Songbird (Media Player) , Miro (Internet TV) or Celtx (Script writing & preproduction tool), which all use XUL.
I wonder how hard it would be to get the XUL engine installed as an IE helper application for .xul files? Maybe something else for me to play with :)
Two interesting bits of news from Google today. The first is adsense for games which allows game developers to place Google ads inside games.
Only flash games are currently supported and there are some fairly hefty entry requirements for early adopters:
I’m having visions of playing Counterstrike and seeing dynamic ads on bullet-ridden billboards in the future…
The second bit of Google news is their first images from the new satellite GeoEye-1 which will be used to update Google maps and Google Earth imagery. Apparently GeoEye-1 is the world highest resolution commercial sattelite with a resolution of 50cm ! Google sightseeing should get really interesting now and those naked sunbathers better have satellite position timetable handy.