Author Archives: admin

Euphemism for bug

2006/09/14 – 10:56

Listening to a NASA briefing, I heard a great phrase for ‘bug’: “a software feature that we hadn’t intended to utilize”. I’ll admit that the bug in question was not big, but I’d still call it a bug.

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The joy of del.icio.us

2006/09/13 – 12:55

By popular demand, and yeah, ‘popular demand’ can indeed mean ‘a single request’ if the population from which the request(s) came is only about three people anyway, I’ll add a bit more to my previous post about using del.icio.us as a browsing tool. And that bit is, that even if you don’t have an account or contribute links yourself, they offer different ways (more than I knew about, actually, until I just looked, because they’ve added some new tools) to see what’s hot with other users. All I do, usually, is use the recent additions (del.icio.us/recent). As you might notice from the link, I set the minimum number of linkers to 1 in order to get everything, because I personally find it most interesting to see what’s not popular (yet) but is still link-worthy.

It’s actually pretty amazing how often there’s something of interest to me in the recent links. I should mess around with their other discovery tools, but, ya know, randomness is good. That’s also why I visit LinkSwarm, although that’s more hit-or-miss (but also more ‘egdy’, so don’t let your mothers or employers see you lookin’ at it).

And, ya know, if my writing seems, as it may well be, especially disjointed or runny-onny, and jumps around a lot, it’s proabably because I’ve been watching Stella, which you should also, if it’s the sort of thing you should watch.

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Infra Recorder

2006/09/11 – 20:12

Because this was a bit harder to find that I figure it should be, I’ll help Infra Recorder shoot up the search-engine charts. It’s an open-source CD and DVD writing/burning solution for Windows. It’s a GUI that appears to be a front-end for the various CLI-oriented tools ported over from Unix-land (like cdrecord, cdda2wav, mkisofs, etc.)

I bought a laptop with a DVD-writer, but the burning software that came bundled is pretty abysmal. So of course I went off in search of an (why not?) open source solution. I didn’t find Infra Recorder (though I did find burnatonce, which ain’t too bad). But it found me on del.icio.us yesterday. I am getting a little freaked out about how del.icio.us can read my mind, but I guess I’ll live with that…

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Bars of soap slipping?

2006/09/07 – 01:26

I was going to lament the slow demise of the basic bar-of-soap cell phone design, but it’s not really as bad as I thought. Surveying three top wireless providers’ phone selection, I see that 10 of 59 are in this category. So I don’t have to worry yet that by the next time I want to get a new phone, I’ll be forced to live in flip-phone hell.

Actually, that survey showed me that there are still some cool things going on in phone design. This thing from Nokia will be really interesting two generations or so forward.

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Iced Nutter Butters

2006/09/04 – 12:23

Well, that came out about as well as I expected, which is to say, not great, but pretty good: I dipped some Nutter Butters in milk, then froze them.

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Hair sketching

2006/08/23 – 12:23

I wonder if Shahzad Malik has ever played with Barbie Magic Hairstyler:

Shahzad Malik’s Web Page – Projects (see ‘Hair Sketching’ project)

(I already explained how I know about Barbie Magic Hairstyler.)

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“Price Tag for Lost Productivity”

2006/08/22 – 00:18

Ya know, I was going to construct a list of all the ways in which this sort of study is wrongheaded, but then I thought, you have to get it to get it, and if you don’t, my arguments won’t help… So, I guess there’s no point to this post, but still:

Price Tag for Lost Productivity: $544 Billion

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DVD mystique

2006/08/07 – 13:47

It’s interesting to me that when I buy a DVD of episodes of a TV show, they’re quite a bit better than they were on TV. There are a number of possible explanations for this, and no doubt they add up, but I think the biggest difference is that there are no commercial interruptions. Not only does this let the content flow properly, but I’m also more likely to allow myself to invest my attention when I know that nobody is going to try to hijack it to hawk garbage.

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“Make Your Own Fun/Rules”

2006/07/26 – 16:07

These are some pretty great suggestions about modifying gameplay by conventions to get some more life out of your video games:

game girl advance: Make Your Own Fun/Rules.

I try this sort of thing on occasion, but I haven’t yet reached the heights of creativity demonstrated here. Part of it is that I mostly play games by myself, so I don’t really have the social component that is key to those rule sets, nor do I have other people checking me on whether I’m sticking to the rules.

This reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about lately with regard to video games (well, it’s true of all games), which is that the structure of a game, its rules, scoring, criteria for winning, etc., imply a certain value system. To play the game ‘by the rules’ is to agree to enter or pretend to enter into that value system for a while. That can be fun and that can be annoying/frustrating/disgusting. I forsee video games getting more and more direct support for regular gamers (i.e. not modders or programmers) to modify the rules of the game to tailor it to their own value choices.

For example, in Need for Speed Underground 2, I like to play drift races, but I don’t quite like how the game scores them (wagging your ass all over the place willy-nilly gets you lots of points, for example). If I had some nice little control panel where I could modify the scoring algorithm, then I could have more fun with the game and still have the computer track my ‘performance’ for me. Of course, I can always just ignore the scores, but why not have a nice middle ground?

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Frozen annoyance

2006/07/25 – 20:19

I don’t love it when a frozen dinner requires you to remove the film from two different portions prior to cooking. One’s OK, but two is somewhat difficult to do without disturbing the other(s).

But lemme tell ya, that’s nothing compared to those stupid ones with the, I think, Betty Crocker brownies. Last time I checked, you were supposed to cook the dish for a while, _remove and set aside_ the gooey brownie, then cook it some more. I refuse to buy those, which unfortunately restricts my choices quite a bit these days, because they’re all the rage right now. Hopefully they’ll get over those or figure out a better way to balance the microwave energy or something…

In case you were wondering, my refusal to buy the latter category of dinners is probably the reason you’ve been hearing that the top 3 frozen dinner makers have fallen bankrupt. I guess I should have warned them about my vast consumer power. Ha ha, hahaha!

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