A Cat and Girl book!! Cat and Girl is my favorite kind of comic: intellectual, funny, and it sometimes goes over my head.

Filed under: comix | 1 Comment

It’s good to see the Germans working towards the greater good. Dig on Napshell, the latest in power-napping technology. I like Janine Anderson’s rationale here:

Since they’re designed for outside use, you’ll soon see these cool mobile beds at your favorite park, nightclub or hotel. But you might want to pick one up for yourself as well because — well, do you really need a reason?

Features include ergonomic matresses and Dolby Surround. Hopefully the Make people will pimp these out with knobby tires and solar powered motors.

Link to Napshell (english version).

Filed under: all talk, medicine, science, support, tiki lifestyle | 2 Comments
Tagged: ninja

This poor guy drew boring “inspirational” quotes on napkins and put them in his daughters’ school lunches for five years. His daughters saved them and he’s now uploading them to flickr.

There are a couple things interesting about this project.. One is his crazy dedication. The other interesting thing is these are linked from Heather Champ’s blog. Heather is a flickr employee who explained flickr’s policy after flickr removed drawings from the 700hoboes tag:

Flickr is a community for photographers. Your photostreams seems to be a collection of illustrations.

These napkin drawings are in public groups, just like 700hoboes were. It’s strange that she’s linking to these and not deleting them.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment

For all the monsters that ever lived inside your head, Andrew Bell’s got something for you…

• well… they’re mine now.
• no, it shouldn’t be a problem…
• i hope you like it… i can’t return it.
• if you love me, you’ll let me go…
• hurry up and pick something so we can get out of here…
• behold… the power of cheese!
• you shouldn’t see me like this…
• it’s like you were born to do this…
• i will destroy you.
• especially hamsters. Zog had three…
• this time… this time i’m ready.
• … she won’t even come near me.
• it’s… it’s the only one they had …
• everything turned out just fine…
• … this helps me think.
• today wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be…
• i’m cold, and i can’t sleep…

Here’s the whole archive of Creatures In My Head.

Filed under: comix, no code | 1 Comment

Very neat! Thanks mr. foo!

Filed under: tronix | 3 Comments

Filed under: Uncategorized | Enter your password to view comments

This American Life (the best thing on radio) no longer requires you to use the disgusting realplayer to listen to their wonderful show! Yay!!

Filed under: all talk | 4 Comments

You would think that a mayor who keeps talking about bringing free WiFi to San Francisco would at least make sure his own city’s public buildings have wireless. Instead, the Hall of Justice has contracted with a paid-wifi provider.

The cool thing is that I can see sflan 7 from the courthouse waiting room. The bad thing is that sflan doesn’t actually work.

Filed under: tronix | 5 Comments

I saw the coolest thing this morning. First Train!!!!!! The SF Muni T Line started testing “rolling stock” yesterday AM. They are just testing folks. As the MUNI website helpfully explains:

Hopefully service will begin sometime this summer.

Filed under: all talk, tiki lifestyle, upcoming | 3 Comments

This comic reminds me of the time I was about 3 or 4 and my babysitter asked me if I wanted to go to a party.

“OOOH YEAH!!” I replied “lemme go put on my dress!”

She looked at me sort of funny and then rolled her eyes as if to say, “whatever, kid…you’re weird.”

So I went to my room and put on a fluffy party dress - not sure why I had to go looking like a bon-bon, but I’d been cooped up inside all day so I was super excited and came out all ready for cake, balloons, games, and happy party goodness.

“Are you ready?” my babysitter asked impatiently.
“Yep, all ready.” I said, preening myself.

Then she took me by the hand, walked down the hall, and lead me to the bathroom.

“Tell me when you’re done so I can wipe your butt,” she said.

Apparently, she had asked me if I wanted to go potty.

Link to Joe Sayers’ site.

Filed under: all talk, comix | 4 Comments

A current project of mine involves some JavaScript hacking. Every time I deal with JavaScript I lament its lack of distribution as a programming language platform. A listing of debian packages for keyword “lisp” (yes, lisp!!!) gets 283 hits on debian/intel, and 22 hits on fink. A listing of debian pages for keyword “javascript” gets 58 hits on debian/intel and 4 on fink (and none of the fink hits appear to be programming packages).

Is everyone just using js.jar now from the rhino project? I wish spidermonkey was more popular in it’s own right. But for years now the spidermonkey page has said the same thing: “The core SpiderMonkey engine can be found in mozilla/js/src. The stand alone interpreter can be built using Makefile.ref”.

Hey guys, make a debian package already!

Link to SpiderMonkey project page.

Filed under: code code | 3 Comments
Tagged: javascript , mike

Skype is absolutely the worst software installed on my mac. If you leave Skype.app running in the background for a bit, it launches these processes that consume 100% of your CPU. Further proof that everything ebay touches turns to crap.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Shag is one of my favorite hackers.. his latest hack: adding support for the Canon 5D to gPhoto!!

Now we can control the 5D using Linux (or OS X), instead of having to use the super-buggy Windows and Mac drivers that Canon ships..

This is a test image that Shag took of me with a Canon 5D, using gPhoto on Linux!! ROCK!

Filed under: tronix | 2 Comments

Just over a week ago, some folks at WebKit invited me to make my little web development tool, tixe, an official part of Webkit. I am super excited. That is just about the best compliment I could have imagined. So I jumped right in, and after furious coding (which actually amounts to embarassingly small amounts of code), I’m happy to say that the framework formerly known as tixe (and even formerly known as BionicDOM) is now part of the WebKit nightly builds. Plus, I’ve gotten the opportunity to work with a really tight group of smart people.

So, to celebrate, we’re having ice cream! Raj and I and anyone else we can round up will be at Maggie Mudd in Bernal (903 Cortland) tonight at 9. There’s internet access there, and if anyone will let me, I will try to show off the li’l WebKit hack that made it big. Join us!

Filed under: code code, osx, upcoming | 4 Comments
Tagged: cocoa

Hee, I love love LOVE this! Combinatoric critters is an experiment in generating unique organisms by randomly combining sets of different attributes (from a set of pre-rendered graphics). The result? a whole town of utterly charming and whimsical loopy-heads!

If you click on the interactive illustration it generates a random individual, so I took the liberty of picking some out for us. Can you guess which one is you?

Filed under: comix, doodles | 1 Comment
Tagged: neat

Yesterday I found that if you squeeze the oranges, lemons, and limes and pre-mix the citrus stuff with the pineapple juice before people come over, you can cut the time it takes to make a Mai Tai down to one minute.. Everyone gets drunky faster :)

Anyway, check out bottleopener ring.. perfect for drunkies!

Filed under: tikibar | 1 Comment

These look more like lobsters than cephalopods to me…nonetheless, there are some gorgeously moody paintings by Ric Stultz over here.

Filed under: bobslobster | 2 Comments

but I’m going to check out these shows next week!

Heaven and Earth Magic. Avant-pop band Deerhoof will be playing a live soundtrack to Films 1-5 of Harry Smith’s Early Abstractions next Thursday 4/27 at the ever-fabulous Castro theatre….and

Scribble, Scrapple, I.C. You. Projects by Golan Levin, Sue Costabile, and Laetitia Sonami will screen on Friday 4/28 (also at the Castro!)

Presented as a series of audiovisual vignettes, The Manual Input Workstation (Golan Levin, Zachary Lieberman, USA 2004, demonstration by Golan Levin) reinvests the screen with our primal fascination with light and illusion. In Mini Movies (Sue Costabile, USA 2005), Costabile manipulates objects—and sings—to produce beyond-ethereal animated shorts. Scribble (Golan Levin, USA 2000-2004) is a live color-music performance that revives and updates a decades-old tradition of kinetic light performance. Scrapple (Golan Levin, Sue Costabile, USA 2005) treats a table’s surface as if it were a kind of musical tablature, producing music in real-time from objects lying on it. Video projections of the table’s surface produce a simple augmented reality, elaborated through luminous and explanatory graphics. Finally, I.C. You (Sue Costabile, Laetitia Sonami, USA 2006) is a live cinematic thriller based on a script by poet Tom Sleigh about an ice delivery man whose job is to keep America cold. Costabile and Sonami use a suitcase-sized foley stage, photos, drawings, videos, shadow theater and miniature lighting rigs to chronicle his saga.

Filed under: beats, tronix, upcoming | 1 Comment

Moon Lee is writing about his experiences living in China and studying Yiquan. He is also posting gorgeous pictures to his flickr photostream. Check out this pic of of a monk practicing at the Baiyunguan temple!

Filed under: Uncategorized | 0 Comments

JohnJohn found some new planets!
JJ: ‘One of the planets in this paper orbits its star in just 2.1 days, which is a new record for close-in planets, commonly referred to as “hot jupiters”.’

We present a modification to the iodine cell Doppler technique that eliminates the need for an observed stellar template spectrum.
[snip]
We used this new Doppler technique to discover three new planets: a 1.5 Mjup planet in a 2.1375 d orbit around HD 86081; a 0.71 Mjup planet in circular, 26.73 d orbit around HD 224693; and a Saturn-mass planet in an 18.179 d orbit around HD 33283. The remarkably short period of HD 86081b bridges the gap between the extremely short-period planets detected in the OGLE survey and the 16 Doppler-detected hot jupiters (P < 15 d), which have an orbital period distribution that piles up at about three days. We have acquired photometric observations of two of the planetary host stars with the automated photometric telescopes at Fairborn Observatory.

Filed under: science | 1 Comment

These luggage tag monsters are made by frombelgiumwithlove on etsy.com. Aren’t they adorable? I laugh every time I see them, which is funny, because it’s me.

Link to “Pink and orange Monster luggage tags (set of 2)”

Filed under: no code, support | 5 Comments

Working in Cocoa is fun, until you make the mistake of trying to use AppKit. Today I ran into an bug that perfectly illustrates how high the AppKit team was when they wrote this stuff.. (I’m obviously working on the wrong team!)

Someone please reproduce this and let me know if this is for real, or if it’s just me.. Start with a window in Interface Builder, and put two things in it. Make them autosize horizontally, and make the two things a subview of an autosizing NSSplitView. Now Your window will look like this:

Now *quickly* resize your window to be wider. It should now look like this:

Notice how the left and right sides of the NSSplitView resize unevenly? Wait, it gets worse…. much worse. Start again with your original window, but this time resize the window *slowly*..

That’s right folks. While my team was pulling several years of all-nighters, these AppKit guys were spending Steve’s money on blow and strippers. When something is this broken, you don’t write up Radars, you write blog posts and then cry yourself to sleep..

Filed under: all talk, no code | 2 Comments

It’s all about uber-hacked full-of-regular-expressions 97-line PERL script that brings two great things together at last: Slide and Etsy! Head on over to the etsyfans page on Slide and subscribe to any of the Etsy categories, of which my favorite is either Toys or Crochet. It’s like Cute Overload, except you can buy the stuff !

Link to all the Etsy feeds on Slide

Filed under: code code, tiki lifestyle | 4 Comments

Upcoming tomorrow night…

Creative Commons Salon - San Francisco
Wednesday, April 12, 6-9 PM
at Shine 1337 Mission Street (between 9th and 10th)

Featuring
James Polanco; “Podcasting and Fake Science Digital Music Store”, Fake Science.

Lucas Gonze; “How the Net is Changing Music”, Webjay

Bob Ostertag. He recently made all of his music available he has rights to under CC BY-NC

Plug, music by Minus Kelvin

Filed under: all talk, upcoming | 1 Comment

Found via Slide.app, of course :)

P.S. .app should be a top-level domain!

Filed under: bobslobster | 1 Comment