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April 27, 2008 - May 3, 2008 »

April 25, 2008

Weekend mp3s: Clapton/Beck '07; One-wheeled motorcyle; Redneck mansion; 'Free Rice'

Jeff Beck with Eric Clapton, Exhaust Note, 4CDs.

Live at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, London, England, November 29 & 30, 2007.

Also, Country Joe McDonald, War War War Live at Norwegian Church Cultural and Arts Centre, Butetown, Cardiff Wales UK, May 25, 2007. Excellent soundboard stereo.

Yup, "Fish" cheer included.

Uno, the one-wheeled motorcycle: From Canadian magazine Motorcycle Mojo,

The 2008 National Motorcycle Show in Toronto has always been heavily influenced by the American V-twin crowd and highlights some of the area's top custom builders who have on display a fine array of one-off custom machines.

This year's show, however, had one very unusual one-off custom, the Uno. The orange and grey coloured Uno made its first public appearance balanced on its two side-by-side wheels and its footpegs. Looking more like it should have been ridden by George Jetson as he pulled up to his space platform, it looked out of place amid the other custom creations in the building. Perhaps that's why it garnered so much attention. Since no one has ever seen a machine like this, the first question asked by on-lookers was:

"What is it?"

Many more pics at the bottom of that link.

Redneck Mansion:

Free Rice: In response to yesterday's link to Gaming for Charity suggested by reader Dub Not Dubya, reader Bill Marsland writes,

I caught a news piece on NBC's nightly news, I believe in the "Making a Difference" section concerning http://www.freerice.com/ . It's a site where you test and learn vocabulary while earning rice for the United Nations World Food Program. In their FAQ's section, here is how they describe how it works. If FreeRice has the rice to give, why not give it all away right now?

FreeRice is not sitting on a pile of rice―you are earning it 20 grains at a time. Here is how it works. When you play the game, advertisements appear on the bottom of your screen. The money generated by these advertisements is then used to buy the rice. So by playing, you generate the money that pays for the rice donated to hungry people.
Who pays for the donated rice?

The rice is paid for by the advertisers whose names you see on the bottom of your vocabulary screen. This is regular advertising for these companies, but it is also something more. Through their advertising at FreeRice, these companies support both learning (free vocabulary for everyone) and reducing hunger (free rice for the hungry). We commend these companies for their participation at FreeRice.
Does FreeRice make any money from this?

No, it does not. FreeRice runs the site at no profit.

The vocabulary itself is adjusted by how many you get correct, so if you start hard it will ease you back to easier words. When you do not give the correct answer, it goes to the next word but gives you the correct answer at the top of the page. It also repeats those words you have not correctly answered so you get a second chance.

Quite a novel idea; learning while donating. As of 4/24, participants had raised 29.2 billion grains of rice!!

Even if you have already mentioned this, might be a good time for a reminder.

I did mention this a while back, but it's worth a rerun. Since then, rice has become precious: Sam's Club, Costco limit rice purchases as prices rise.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:27 AM | Permalink

April 24, 2008

Firefox 3: Peeking at the new URL bar, and maybe grabbing the latest beta

Deb Richardson, a Mozilla employee, is writing about the upcoming and reportedly fast and snappy Firefox 3 on her personal blog, Dria.org. The official release is set for June, but some early adopters are downloading the latest release candidates. (This is for power users; if you don't think of yourself as one, wait for the actual release.)

I'm tempted, but I've got Firefox 2 tricked out with exactly the extensions I need, and not all of them have turned in FF 3 versions yet.

If you use Firefox, it's worth a peek at what's coming soon. If you don't use Firefox, please do. Its ability to open new sites in tabs, not windows, dozens of them, is alone worth the switch. But even better are the add-ons that let you select what would enhancements would be useful to you; you install each in a single click, and they work the next time you restart Firefox.

Deb does two posts about the new Firefox 3 URL bar, and illustrates them with lots more screenshots than I've shown below .

Here's are some snippets from Deb on Firefox 3:

Firefox 3 Bookmarks (My god, it’s full of stars…)

...Firefox 3 introduces a few new features to bookmarks that I think makes them much, much easier to use, more useful in general, and much more useful in particular for catastrophically disorganized folk like me. The three main features being introduced are: Bookmark Stars, Bookmark Tags, and Smart Bookmark Folders....

...Tags allow you to very quickly file a single bookmark in a bunch of different places, rather than having to create an exhaustive hierarchy of folders and file each bookmark carefully within that organizational structure....

Awesome bar:

...In Firefox 3, however, the staid and plain URL bar has been transformed into a much, much more powerful and useful tool. Dubbed the “AwesomeBar”, it lets you use the URL field of your browser to do a keyword search of your history and bookmarks. No longer do you have to know the domain of the page you’re looking for — the AwesomeBar will match what you’re typing (even multiple words!) against the URLs, page titles, and tags in your bookmarks and history, returning results sorted by “frecency” (an algorithm combining frequency + recency)

Not only that, but the drop-list results show you the page’s favicon, the full title, the URL, and whether you have bookmarked and/or tagged the page in a richly formatted two-line display....

...Not having to remember URLs or resort to global web searches to find pages I’ve visited before has made using the Web a whole lot easier and more efficient.

So, yeah. AwesomeBar? Awesome. If you’re willing to play with not-quite-fully-baked software (by which I mean “beta”), you can experience the awesome yourself by grabbing the Firefox 3 Beta 5 download and testing it out.

For the adventurous: In response to a question I asked in comments on Deb's first post, about whether it was time, Seeker wrote,

USE FF3? beta 4 was buggy, but beta 5 is nice, it is definitely time to download. the only drawback is many (about half?) of the extensions out there don’t yet support b5. A few of my most critical ones, (FEBE/CLEO, Tab Mix Plus, Better Gmail, Better Greader, and Tiny Menu) still don’t work in b5.

For my up to date list of ff3 extensions, check out http://www.twoorthree.net/2008/04/firefox-3-exten.html

If you go: I've been through many upgrades of many programs, and if I'm sniffing around a late beta I'm not far away from doing this. What tipped it for me:

Lifehacker's The Complete Field Guide to Testing Firefox 3. At the end, there's a "there be dragons here" section: "Make Your Extensions Work with the Firefox 3 Beta." Results may be unpredictable, but readers are following the "about:config" directions and reporting back with results.

Read all the comments. And try this on a rainy day -- you really don't want to do optional hacking on a sunny spring weekend. No, you don't.

You can always wait for the official release, when the install program will seamlessly roll out the whole shebang for you.

This post means to offer something to look forward to, not marching orders.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments 1

The 'Hillary movie poster' comes to life

A reader who seeks no credit for his graphic skills ran with my idea of the AP photo of Hillary in the rain looking like a movie poster:

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 5:22 PM | Permalink

Kosher Coke and an online game for charity

From reader Dub Not Dubya,

Hi Sheila, I'm enjoying your blog as usual, so thanks for a great site. You might want to remind interested readers that it is Passover, and thus the kosher (i.e., sweetened with sugar) Coke is available again. I found plenty at the Stop & Shop on Branch Avenue last night. You could just link back to your post about it from last year if you are so inclined.

Also, I know you often recommend online games, so I thought you might be interested in this site that just came online recently:

http://www.gamingforcharity.org/

It has many Flash games, and the proceeds from the site go to various charities. It's modeled on sites like the Hunger Site but the donations come from the ads that are on the page when people are playing the videogames. It has many of the typical favorites, and it's nice to be able to help good causes while playing.

All best,
Dub

Our kosher Coke exchange began in the comments on that 2007 Passover recipes post. Corn is not kosher for Passover, so Coca-Cola makes a special version this time of year with real sugar.

Kosher Coke has yellow cap printed with a Hebrew phrase and the OU-P symbol; its ingredients list sucrose rather than high-fructose corn syrup. (This is the Coke you may remember from childhood -- many people prefer it to today's Coke.)

Note that the Shaw's on North Main Street is no more, but other Shaws markets probably have it.

If you crave this year-round, the scuttlebutt is that Mexican Coke is also made with sugar.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:05 AM | Permalink

April 23, 2008

The Hillary movie-poster photo

After Hillary Clinton's 10-point win over Barack Obama, there are lots of traditional photos out of Pennsylvania tonight, but the one that caught my eye was from Saturday, in the rain, in McKeesport, Pa.

No matter whom you support, that's an amazing photo of a presidential candidate. It looks like a poster you'd see in the display case outside a movie theater. I want to put type on it.

(Update: A reader with graphic skills turned it into a poster just for fun, and emailed it to me -- see it here.)

AP photo / Charles Dharapak

Later: The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer's lead headline: Do not pass go, go straight to Leno.

The new p.a. system sounds like a nice prize for a campaigner, but is it worthy of the lead?

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments 4

April 22, 2008

Party balloons carry priest out to sea; Hacking CNN headline shirts; Not porcupines

Globo TV photos

Priest disappears on helium balloon flight:
A priest who floated into the sky under hundreds of helium-filled party balloons has gone missing off the southern coast of Brazil. (Telegraph U.K.)

There's video at Globo TV.

Even as I marvel at the divine folly of Rev Adelir Antonio de Carli's well-intended stunt -- "to raise money for a spiritual rest-stop for truckers in the Brazilian port of Paranagua" -- headline writers are chuckling about his celestial flight. Pieces of balloon have been found in the water, according to a New Zealand TV station, so it's not so funny. Not much more to say except I hope he's found safe.

Geek toy: CNN has launched, in beta, a T-Shirt shop that offers headlines as messages. Anybody with a little knowledge of html (for instance, a space is %20) can play the prankster and create alternative messages -- in the online versions of the shirts, anyway.

I wouldn't expect them to print it up special for you, but I'm not going to spend the $15+ on this science experiment. The official FAQ does suggest they print them on the fly.

How long are headlines available for? Headlines that can bought as shirts are only available as long as the headline stays in the latest news section.

Here's one I hacked using the name of a Providence music spot that has moved a bit.

Prickly correction: Alert commenter Nancy -- obviously not a city gardener like me -- noticed that yesterday's "baby porcupines" are actually hedgehogs.

Should you run across one or the other, telling them apart could be crucial. So courtesy of the National Zoo in Washington, a photo of a real prehensile-tailed baby porcupine born there in 2006:

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 1:39 AM | Permalink

April 21, 2008

He gave Solitaire to Windows ("no you can't have your time back")

B3TA : Interviews: Wes Cherry. Wes Cherry wrote the Solitaire program that comes with Windows while an intern at Microsoft in 1989.

...Sadly, a compensation or royalty package was never discussed, so he's never benefited financially.

We sent Wes a load of questions, and the best part of a year later he got back to us to reveal what it's like to be responsible for a global recession, as well as giving away the secret of Bill Gates' strategy for winning at Minesweeper.

Definitely one of the quirkier interviews you'll read.

Since solitaire has wasted so much of our time, want to waste some more: While a game is in progress, press ALT-Shift-2 to shift into the animation that ends the game, pictured above... (To start the game, Start-->Run-->sol.exe)

His latest work? Wes did it again. It's freeware.I checked out his mp3 jukebox:

Juke is a mp3 library manager and player, especially suited for large MP3 collections. It is released as freeware and is Copyrighted by Technosis.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 12:12 PM | Permalink