abstractplain

O’Reilly “Make” magazine - “Make brings the do-it-yourself mindset to all the technology in your life”.

The hi-tech project ingredients remind me of the billy connelly joke about the left-over venison. “This one’s great for any left-over GPS devices.” Or “here’s a kite rig for last week’s digital camera - why throw it when you can fly it…” But we’ll see. Bottlecap tripod is a good start, budget-wise.

readymade magazine doesn’t have the hi-tech slant.

That’s two for Dan G, then. Congrats on quitting that crappy, cushy job, finally. It’s just like the “why don’t you” theme tune was all about - “…something less boring instead”.

Boing Boing: Net art applet: Secret mating lives of robots (written using the java-based processing language.

cyrkam airtös - office basketball flashgame. nice

An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning

User Agent Switcher Extension changes the User Agent string your browser includes in HTTP requests. The most common use of a browser-”spoofing” hack like this to bypass a site-entry barrier which is using browser-detection. Of course, your browser stays being your browser, and may break on some of the browser-specific stuff it receives and can’t understand. However, many developers put such barriers up just to be on the safe side - to ensure the use of supported browsers.

Also, if you’re just using mozilla, there’s the prefbar.

Switch it off, afterwards!
Try to remember to only spoof another browser when you’re visiting sites that won’t otherwise work. Otherwise, the stats on browser usage will be wrong and designers can’t take your real preferred browser into account. I wonder if these plug-ins map your browser identity preferences to sites.

I’m searching out this stuff because a (non-public) site I am to work on is telling me “moz 1.5, 1.6 only”, and I’m on moz 1.7 and firefox. I don’t want to install an older ver of mozilla any more than i want autoillustrator to export a drawing as a regedit patch.

SourceForge.net Data Backup and Restoration Policy (and process).

On the topic of backups: rsync tutorial, and another rsync tutorial. vinod’s backup strategy (rsync/ssh).

Last project, we were doing remote deploys, with poor bandwidth, of builds with big seldom-changing libraries which should in hindsight have used an rsync step for those libraries. Lots safer than not including the jars as part of the deployment.

COMPARA english-portuguese parallel corpus

You can use COMPARA to find out how words and expressions have been translated from Portuguese into English and from English into Portuguese.

There are currently over 40 quality texts (evenly from English and Portuguese origin).

Here’s a summary of the content of the corpus. Just as you must take care not to trust an idiot computer translation, watch the source from which the corpus finds translations - the language might be unusual (edgar allan poe, oscar wilde).

Unfortunately, it won’t search for conjugations of a verb (it has no concept of part of speech) so if you want to see how people have translated, you may have to make several searches using some different tenses.

It is brilliant. Just a shame there is no intersection whatsoever between the set of moments in my life in which I need access to this, and the set of moments in my life in which I have access to this.

update: Later in Moz I took to printing out some lists of english passages and their translations to use as a guessing game with other learners in those rare moments in that country where you have to wait a long time on something.

Favourite searches for learning portuguese grammar:
• “would”: will give you plenty of practice with the conditional.
• “if”: lots of examples of the subjuntive / conjunctive, mixed with present indicative. Often the trick is guessing which way the translation will go

It’s also great for finding examples of how english phrasal verbs have been translated into portuguese.

ReadyMade: MacGyver Challenge - Altoids Tins + headphones = speakers

Color in Motion explanatory flash movie.

via this pretty css blog template creation tutorial part 2, part 3 (prettiest - mod a digital photo to make banner)

not that i would ever have time to plink about with that stuff.

example of using “Simple” a java embeddable http server .

(just one jar, no other dependencies.)

Making Light: Prophetable colors

FUH2.com Hummer 2 hatred. Interesting links page, including this funny video showing h2’s 4×4 “capabilities”.

Michael Moore.com : Fahrenheit 9/11 Notes and Sources

via kottke, via boingboing.net

Manageability - Nuggets of Wisdom from eBay’s Architecture

“The ITV News Channel will begin a season of weekly John Pilger documentaries on July 11, at 9pm. The first is Paying the Price, about the effects of economic sanctions on the children of Iraq.”

9pm! That’s a good hour, finally.

Documentaries - An Endangered Species?, by John Pilger.

George Monbiot - “War x 4″

Good Monbiot article yesterday about why the UK govt should ban or heavily tax 4×4s.

“the US could do without its oil imports from the Persian Gulf if the fuel efficiency of its cars was improved by an average of 2.7 miles per gallon.”

“the occupants of a vehicle hit by [a 4×4] are 27 times more likely to be killed (according to the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) than the occupants of a vehicle hit by a normal car.”

“one in eight 4×4 drivers has ever driven his car off-road, and only two out of five have even taken their cars out of town”

Things are a little different here in Maputo - I’ve seen saloon cars stranded on sand roads just 10-15 minutes drive out of the centre of town. However it seems it’s the only car for a lot of families, so it gets used for all journeys, a huge percentage of which still don’t require a 4×4, nevermind a star-destroyer like most people pick. The invoice for these things goes elsewhere, in more ways than one.

July, 2004 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic: | Metafilter.

also from boingboing.net:

“This is pretty stunning: it’s a stop-motion-animated short version of Spiderman 2 done entirely in Lego“

Lego animated Spiderman 2

I won’t watch this until i’ve seen the sam raimi version. It is scheduled for general release in Mozambique in 2008.

TheyWorkForYou.com: Is your MP working for you in the UK’s Parliament?

Everything MPs say in the House of Commons is recorded in a document called Hansard.

TheyWorkForYou.com helps make sense of this vital democratic resource and, crucially, allows you to add your own comments and links to the official transcripts of Parliament.

via this guardian article today, via boingboing.net

“Japanese policemen’s guns are small and sort of puny. Except when they are shooting at you. Right now, they are shooting at me and my companion and we are running scared.” - My Tokyo Death Cult by Marc Horne. Free under a Creative Commons License.

Not a fan of the title, but the excerpts are fun. and we don’t have many books here.