Fairly Useless…

Ha, just a day after I posted my excuse for missing a day of blogging. Boingboing posts this list of excuses. Much more creative than my lame excuse.

Two video posts on two days! I was searching for a demo of quake 4 to download, and found this video. I have tried rocket jumping in Unreal on a training map, I am not even close to this level of skill. What is even more impressive, is the editing and music.

I use a plug-in module to display YouTube videos, like the one above, but here is a link to the full length movie here.

MAKE magazine posted a video of a Pitagora Suicchi machine made by some kids. Looks like that had a problem at the end and “improvised”. Here is the first one that I saw, didn’t know what it was at first. I found it while I was watching the top videos through a XBMC plug-in on my xbox.

Lore Sjöberg, over at wired.com has just written the “The Ultimate Blog Post“. I have finally found the blogging guide I have been looking for. I was wondering today if someone could create a site to create blog ideas for article starved bloggers to blog about.

This first thing I did when I got my bluetooth phone was to start uploading ringtones and images.

Here is the Kill Bill wallpaper for my Motorola V551 that I use with my ringtones that I made from the soundtrack. I used Audacity to convert the CD track to an mp3 for the phone. Here are the two audio files that I use.

• Ironside.mp3
• Banister.mp3

Is this considered fair-use?

Happy Birthday everyone!

Virgos — “They combine mental ingenuity with the ability to produce a clear analysis of the most complicated problems. They have an excellent eye for detail but they may be so meticulous that they neglect larger issues. Also, although they are realists, they may slow down projects by being too exact.”

Just like instant coffee and instant messenger, there is “instant dislike”. You meet someone for the first time and you just know you do not like them or don’t trust them. There is no reasonable explanation, you just don’t like them. There have been a few people in my past that I have made instant enemies with. Which later turned out to be justified or may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I have a theory why people do this. It comes from our early ancestors on the savanna, popping their head up from the grass and quickly looking around to see if that saber-tooth tiger was prey or predator. Or the person coming towards you at the waterhole was friend or foe. In order to survive you had a split second to size up the threat and categorize them.

From News@Princeton (via: Boing Boing: Snap character judgements)

“The link between facial features and character may be tenuous at best, but that doesn’t stop our minds from sizing other people up at a glance,” said Todorov, an assistant professor of psychology. “We decide very quickly whether a person possesses many of the traits we feel are important, such as likeability and competence, even though we have not exchanged a single word with them. It appears that we are hard-wired to draw these inferences in a fast, unreflective way…”

I read CRACKED magazine when I was a kid. But, I always seemed to pick underdog:

• I read CRACKED, my friends read MAD
• I read DC comics, my friends read Marvel
• used Macintosh, everyone else used Windows

They are launching a new version of the magazine with the obligatory website. It looks like it is aimed at the Maxim crowd, definitely not for children. Here is a sample of the articles.

8 Important Lessons Learned from ’80s Cartoons

Just found out about this site that gives away unlimited sharing of videos, pictures, audio and other files.

http://www.twango.com/

Use your cellphone to upload images. Flash widgets for video and photos. API coming soon.

I have my MediaBox (linux box running KnoppMyth) serving up all our music using MT-DAAPD or NFS automounts depending on the device for three years now. I have converted all of our CD’s to mp3’s which by far is the most universal format. One of the problems we had at first was constantly getting up and adjusting the volume. Until I found MacMP3Gain and converted/normalized all of our music to the same volume.

MacMP3Gain is an AppleScript Studio application which brings an Aqua GUI to the command line version of mp3gain, a utility that performs statistical analysis to determine how loud the MP3 file actually sounds to the human ear and performs lossless volume adjustments. MacMP3Gain is free and open source. You may download either the application itself or the entire project including the source code.