73% geek, the rest is girly-bits

_K7Z1809, originally uploaded by Anaura09.

This pretty cake graced the fantastic wedding of beautiful brides Anli and Laura. Adorable cakes, people in love and pink hair are all things the world needs more of.

A collection of links I’ve happened upon, or re-discovered during the past week.

Sarien.net
Sarien.net offers a lovely way to relive the fun of Sierra’s old adventure games directly in your browser. As a bonus, if you happen to be on the same screen as another player you can chat, making an oldskool singleplayer game into something more multiplayery.

Nest box with IR cam
I’ve always wanted to spy on a nest box, and adding a wireless IR cam made me want one of these a lot. Bit pricey though, for spying on well… eggs.

World of Goo Sheet Music
I love piano music, and as I’m particularly enamoured with game music played on pianos, discovering the World of Goo sheet music made me happy. It’s free too!

Sebastian Wolff’s Sheet Music
If the World of Goo sheet music is up your alley too, take the time to check Sebastian Wolff’s music page. Sheet music for a few movies and games, and most importantly for Still Alive (I’ll never get tired of that song).

Erfworld
An absolutely adorable web-comic. So cute!

YourFonts
A nice way to make your own font on-line. I don’t know how pretty the font ends up, but hey it’s fun.

D&D Test Drive
This makes me tingly, very tingly. WotC have made some D&D quick start rules and an adventure or two free to suck people in. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay away… *DM muscle starts twitching*

Widgets to Cure Writer’s Block
Lots of cool writery/languagey/roleplayey stuff here, not just a way to cure writer’s block.

A collection of links I’ve happened upon, or re-discovered during the past week.

Anki
Anki is a nifty spaced repetition system (SRS), which is basically an advanced form of flash cards. The intelligent scheduling of the flashcards allows you to learn faster and better by making you practice what you don’t know well, rather than forcing you to wade through things you already know every time you practice. Great for learning kana and kanji.

The Regex Coach
An interactive way to experiment with regular expressions. Windows only.

HOTUD.org | HomeOfTheUnderdogs.net | Hotu.pratyeka.org
They are back! Well, more or less. Home of the Underdogs was one of the most important abandonware sites on the net, and a great resource for reading reviews of old games, learning about games you missed the first time around and, in some cases, the ability to download them. After the site went off-line in February 2009, I was saddened because I thought it would never be back. Happily I was wrong, and now there are even multiple iterations to browse through in order to get your old-school gaming nostalgia on.

The Problem with Ice-Planets
A wonderful how-to on making the ice-cream ball on a string frozen dessert from Firefly. I will have to try this some day, looks like fun to eat.

How to Make a Reusable Sandwich Wrap
A nice tutorial on how to sew a reusable sandwich wrap. Not only do they look nice, they are a greener option than paper or plastic, and I suspect may also do away with the sweaty cheese problem.

“Hey I’m Dead!”
A great story from NPR about zombie ants, and what the colony does about them.

BlogBooker
Easily turn your Wordpress or LiveJournal blog into a PDF book ready for printing!

Programming Tutorials
Links to more programming tutorials in various languages than you can shake a stick at.

Natalie Dee
An adorable comic every day. Perhaps not always laugh out loud funny, but the drawings are consistently super-cute!

Cooking Conversions Calculator
GourmetSleuth have a nifty conversion calculator that helps you convert recipes. What’s cool about this compared to using Google is the ability to convert for specific food items. It’s super-handy!

A collection of links I’ve happened upon, or re-discovered during the past week.

The Cook’s Thesaurus
Although it doesn’t really look like much (these days), The Cook’s Thesaurus is a really cool site. It’s basically a very useful cooking encyclopaedia with thousands of entries covering a wide range of foodstuffs and kitchen tools. Entries have lots of information including pictures and descriptions and two things I personally find extremely useful, synonyms and suggested substitutions for various ingredients.

Rouxbe
Once you’ve visited The Cook’s Thesaurus and have learnt all about various ingredients, you need to know how to use them. That’s where Rouxbe comes in. With tons of instructional videos, it can really help you learn to cook and improve your skills in the kitchen. Sadly apart from a 30 free trial it seems all content is accessible by premium members only, but depending on how much you can learn it could be worth the upgrade.

The Young Gallery | Nick Brandt
A collection of Nick Brandt’s stunning monochrome wildlife photography, definitely worth a look.

KnitPro
Ever wanted to knit/crochet/embroider something using a picture you already have but couldn’t stomach the thought of charting it? knitPro is for you! It’s a free web application that can take jpeg/gif/png images and turn them into digital graphs suitable for various fibre projects. It’s seriously cool.

Dungeonaday.com
Dungeonaday.com offers a new dungeon encounter for fantasy role-playing games using the Open Gaming License every weekday, with all the information, handouts and stuff necessary. It’s about $10 a month for membership, and provides an ever-growing dungeon adventure campaign. I’m starting to really miss playing :’(

Learn The Kana
Very useful site which helps you learn both hiragana and katakana on-line for free!

Origami Cherry/Sakura Blossoms
Nice tutorial on how to make some gorgeous origami cherry blossoms. It looks easy but… I think I shall merely sigh wistfully as I read this.

StrokeIt
I am totally dependent on mouse gestures in Firefox and spend a large part of my day flailing wildly in various Windows programs trying to do stuff with non-existent mouse gestures. Enter StrokeIt, a nifty and free app. I haven’t installed it yet, but it looks awesome. Of course if it works well, this just means I’ll really flail on computers that don’t have it installed *sigh*

Cute As Hell
Social networking for pets! Yeah, it sounds silly but I’m a sucker for cat pictures and think it’s a cute way to see more of them. Naturally both WhinyCat and BattleCat have their own profiles.

Greasemonkey Script Compiler
Creates a Firefox extension from a greasemonkey script, very handy!

A collection of links I’ve happened upon, or re-discovered during the past week.

AGDInteractive Studio
Lovely remakes of King’s Quest I, King’s Quest II and Quest for Glory II available for free! AGD Interactive also offer Al Emmo and The Lost Dutchman’s Mine, an adventure game in the spirit of the classics mentioned above, for 19.99 USD.

Unveiling the “Sixth Sense,” game-changing wearable tech
A fantastic TED talk by Pattie Maes featuring work done by Pranav Mistry which is just jaw-droppingly cool. If you like tech at all, and you only watch one TED talk, this is the one you should watch!

LCARS for iPhone 2
YouTube video showing how Andrew in Germany made his iPhone cool. I now want an iPhone!

UP
As one of the few people in the world that didn’t particularly like WALL-E, I’m excited about really liking the look of UP, the new Pixar film. The trailer is adorable, and the film looks fun.

BitNami
A collection of Open Source apps which install quickly and painlessly. After installing Apache, PHP, WordPress et al both the usual way and using BitNami, I know what I’m going to recommend. I ♥ BitNami.

Cramberry
A web-based flash card study aid which looks easy to use and pretty nifty.

Adobe Photoshop Cheat Sheets
A set of keyboard shortcut cheat sheets for various flavours of Adobe Photoshop.

eBook Price Info
Only a couple of bookshops so far, but somewhere to look up and compare ebook prices before you buy is great resource and I’m looking forward to its expansion.

Jalmus
Another study aid, this time an open source downloadable one for improving your sight reading skills. Very helpful for musicians, and Java based so it runs on Win/Mac/Linux. I definitely need to work on my sight reading, makes playing the piano so much easier.

FairShare
A service which enables you to keep track of the stuff you post to the web via RSS. If you need to keep track of whether licences are being adhered to or you just want to see what your work is used for, FairShare seems like an easy way to do so.

A collection of links I’ve happened upon, or re-discovered during the past week.

Nerd Merit Badges
Only two badges so far (and only one which I qualify for *sigh*), but looks like a fun way to geek out in public. As I quit the girl scouts after almost slicing off a finger, this can be a way for me to show off my merit badges without having to be a scout!

OhMiBod
You like music? You have an iPod? You like *ahem* “alone time”? You may find the OhMiBod, a vibrator that plugs into your iPod and vibrates to the rhythm and beats, interesting. I like the look of it… not sure I have the right taste in music though. Hum, now that I think about it. I don’t think I’d have much fun with it after all, my iPod has nothing more than audio books on it

Get Your Music Off of Your iPod
Speaking of iPods, Wired has a nifty guide to getting your music *off* an iPod.

Self-Adhesive Magnetic Tape
Considering how cool I think transparent duct tape is, you can imagine how awesome I think this is. Add a bit more awesome to that, there you go, exactly that awesome.

The Ultimate Guide to Modern Writers of Fantastic Literature: 1990-2009
This is seriously cool! Avi Abrams of DarkRoastedBlend has compiled a huge list of sci-fi/fantasy authors, so if you like speculative fiction and want to try something new, you could do a lot worse than have a look-see at that list.

OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator

I’ve been lusting after the OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator since I first read about it after CeBit 2007. Not because I’m under any illusion that it actually works particularly well, but because it’s like the Future is here Now!

Point is, until now it’s been a little too pricey for me to justify the cost of buying it just to play with. However, luverly ps.no just dropped the price a little, so I’ve ordered one as a Valentine’s present for myself and P. Yay! More on the NIA once I’ve been able to clutch it in my grabby little paws.

After an unrelenting barrage of Kindle 2 pr0n assailing me through forums, feeds and email, I figured I’d write up my thoughts on the new features. Mostly because I’m lusting after one, and need to talk myself down. I have a perfectly good Cybook Gen3 which I’m extremely happy with, and they don’t even sell the Kindle in Europe… yet.

New features in the Kindle 2

• Slim & Lightweight: Just over 1/3 inch and 10.2 ounces
  I don’t care. Ebook readers are too fragile and cost too much to bounce them around in bags willy-nilly (you can tell I’m paranoid, right?). As long as it weighs less than a paperback, and is comfortable to hold I’m happy.
• Books in under 60 seconds: Get books delivered in less than 60 seconds; no PC required
  I love this, my credit card would not. ’nuff said.
• Improved Display: Reads like real paper; now boasts 16 shades of gray for crisp images and text; even reads well in bright sunlight
  I don’t care. I read text, if I want to look at pictures I’ll use a PC or a dead-tree edition. Text doesn’t need 16 shades. My Cybook Gen3 only has 4 shades and is very comfortable to read, also pictures really don’t look too bad on it. We aren’t talking art here, but were I to read Winnie the Pooh, I’d be able to tell Piglet from Pooh, no problem.
• Longer Battery Life: 25% longer battery life; read for days without recharging
  Love it. You can never have too much battery life.
• More Storage: Take your library with you; holds over 1,500 books
  Ambivalent to this. I love that they upped the storage capacity to 2gb, but if the Kindle doesn’t have a card reader of some sort… would it have been too much to ask for them to include one?
• Faster Page Turns: 20% faster page turns
  What is not to love? Turning a page on an ebook is odd to get used to, and is the most obvious difference between electronic and paper books. After having my Cybook for three months I don’t even notice it anymore, but it was very strange at first.
• Read-to-Me: Text-to-Speech feature means Kindle can read every book, blog, magazine, and newspaper out loud
  Again, I’m ambivalent towards this. It’s a truly awesome feature, but I suspect that for those who don’t *need* the feature, i.e. people who aren’t visually impaired, the text-to-speech synthesizer has to be pretty frakkin’ good for there to be any point.
• No Wireless Bills: No monthly wireless bills, data plans, or commitments. Amazon pays for Kindle’s wireless connectivity so you won’t see a monthly wireless bill
  Awww yeah! The only thing wrong with this feature is WHY CAN’T I HAVE A KINDLE IN EUROPE? *sobs* And not just the Europe that’s part of the EU. ALL of Europe thankyouverymuchsaidtheNorwegian.
• Large Selection: Over 230,000 books, plus U.S. and international newspapers, magazines and blogs available
  Large selections are great, but the Kindle could have tapped into a ridiculously huge selection by including native support for the html, eReader, lit, epub, and DRM’ed mobi formats. Srsly Amazon, you guys *own* Mobipocket… can’t you let prc, mobi and azw just get along. Kudos for getting Audible format in there though. That’s nifty, but again… with ebooks *and* Audible content wouldn’t a card reader have been a good idea?
• Low Book Prices: New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases $9.99, unless marked otherwise
  Nice, nice, nice! Nothing to dislike about this apart from the obvious (which is the Kindle 2 not being available to me).

Although I probably wouldn’t buy a Kindle 2 even if they were available to me here in Norway (Cybook remember), I love that Amazon are prepared to be in the vanguard of the ebook industry. If they market aggressively enough, ebook readers will go from being strictly for early-adopters to almost ubiquitous.

My Cybook has changed the way I read. I read more, and choose to use the reader whenever possible, preferring it to paper. Even though ebooks are (usually) cheaper than paper, I’ve spent more on books since I got my reader than I used to in an entire year, simply because I’ve bought a lot of books. I can’t help myself…

The wonderbrains at Scotch 3M apparently decided to go ahead and be awesome without any fanfare, and created transparent duct tape. Transparent. Duct. Tape. And not only did they make it all luvverly and see-through, it supposedly lasts longer too. Six times longer.

A roll of magical transparent duct tape

How could I not know this exists!? I know I’m slow sometimes, but how long has this been around? Without anybody mentioning it? Seriously!

Magical tape in action!

As I am quite good at breaking stuff and like quick fixes, this is simply perfect for me. I must have some.