Neato. Odeo allows you to embed audio players on your site with feeds of your favorite podcasts so I’ve created a new tikirobot page of shows I like listening to. The only annoying thing is that the player prefaces every podcast title with the name of the channel (which seems unnecessary and prevents me from seeing the specific title of a podcast) Maybe I will write them about that. (okay, I think I’ve fixed somewhat by changing the default width of the players from 400px to 600px.) They seem to be using this open source media player XSPF over here. Anyways, you guys should add shows that you like too :-)

Filed under: all talk, beats, medicine, science | 1 Comment
Tagged: podcasts

Hi,

Although this video might make me look bad, please remember that I’m a *good* puppy!

Love,
Zara

P.S. Bad shoe! Good puppy!

Filed under: zara | 1 Comment

are soooo beautiful!

I love things like this that require 1% in material resources and 99% inspiration! The photos in this slide show were procured from here, here, and here.

(via Drawn my very favorite blog :-)

Filed under: inspiration | 1 Comment

(I unfortunately have no idea who took this photo since it’s been sitting in my computer for a while)

Filed under: no code, support, why are we here? | 4 Comments

Hi, I’m Zara! I’ve been having a great time playing with Raj and Jess! There are so many bugs to chase and sunbeams to nap in! And let’s not forget all the games! We play fetch, then go for a walk, and finish it off by hiding in raj’s shoe.

We’d have even more fun if raj would buy me this great stuff, which is good for my doggie brain:

• Hide-A-Bee
• Molecuball
• Nature’s Miracle
• Small Kong
• Peanut Butter Paste

And from the SF SPCA reading list:

• Culture Clash
• Don’t Shoot the Dog
• The Power of Positive Dog Training

Filed under: zara | 3 Comments

Who’s that puppy??? She’s Zara! We adopted her from Rocket Dog Rescue today! Less blurry pictures coming as soon as she learns to pose for the camera :)

Filed under: bobslobster, zara | 5 Comments

Will Wright will be giving a talk at Herbst Theatre next Monday on playing with time and his new game Spore. Brian Eno who worked on the sounds for the game will be there too. I’m gonna check it out. Lemme know if any of you guys want to go too!

More info at the Long Now Foundation.

Filed under: upcoming | 1 Comment

We Feel Fine is by far the most beautiful and inspiring thing I’ve seen on the internet in years….it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen anywhere in a really long time! In short, the project visualizes a live database of several million feelings scraped from weblogs on the internet every 10 minutes, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings each day.

We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”….once a sentence containing “I feel” or “I am feeling” is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence…

The feelings are organized in a series of different visual “movements” and each sentence is linked back to its original blog post for context (which is both disturbing and comforting at the same time). “Murmurs” in particular, reminds me a little of Slide…a ticker of expressed human emotions that can even be focused down to very specific ones (and filtered by age, gender, weather, location and date). I’d launch the applet and play with all the movements for a while before reading the statement and methodology behind the project, if only because it really is mesmerizing and best experienced without too many a priori notions i think.

Filed under: design, inspiration | 3 Comments

These bicycle LED things are awesome! Way better than Hokey Spokes. You gotta make them yourself though, this is an instructables thing.

Link to SpokePOV: LED Bike Wheel on instructables.com.

Filed under: cycling, tronix | 4 Comments

New release of Slide Player for Mac! Many, many new features in this release including:

• Slide Screen Savers! (pictured above: “SlideTickers”)
• drag and drop items into chat window!
• Text Mode (shows text alongside picture)
• status messages when changing channels
• iPhoto export-to-Slide plugin
• “new” badge on new items
• MySpace notifications - scrapers your MySpace account for cool stuff

Check it out and let me know what you think. The chat feature is a lot of fun.

Link to Slide homepage.

Filed under: code code, inspiration, osx | 2 Comments
Tagged: cocoa

Today I paid another visit to the marin cheese factory but instead of starting the ride from SF (and putting up with scary cars most of the way) I started my ride in Novato and spent most of it on nice peaceful country roads. much better. I stopped by the Tomales Bay Oyster Company on hw1 and ate a dozen oysters (yum!) and sampled 7 different kinds of cheese at the cheese factory. (something to remember for next time - you have to bring your own shucking knife to the oyster company since they won’t let you borrow one…which makes it kinda hard to eat the oysters…luckily a nice family let me borrow a screwdriver which also worked).

The ride is 46 miles with about 1800 feet of elevation gain, most of it happening along 2 hills - a pretty steep one at mile 16 and one that begins right after you pass the nicasio reservoir.

Filed under: cycling | 1 Comment

About 100 or so people showed up on the corner of Market and Church last night for an impromptu dance party, flash mob style! At around 8 pm, Amandeep Jawa (aka Deep) set up his powerbook on top of a trashbin in front of the Safeway (you can see it on the left up there), hooked up some speakers and then we all proceeded to boogie for the next 2 hours! It was fun! This is the second one he’s done and you can find out more as well as sign up to be on his mailing list over here.

Filed under: beats, tiki lifestyle | 3 Comments

Link to stunning 1280×720 version (30MB).
Link to various smaller versions.

Filed under: video | 1 Comment
Tagged: mike , timelapse

After riding my new bike a little bit I felt a teeny tiny bit of knee pain. It’s built up now to what I would call “moderate, chronic pain” and since that freaks me out I’m trying to learn more about it.

First off my bike seat was too low so I got that adjusted. Make sure your bike fits people! I haven’t ever paid attention to this kind of thing in the past (I just adjusted my bike myself until it “felt right”) but I guess it’s pretty important. Getting all the measurements right is pretty hard and reason enough to buy your bike at bike store with good service that knows how to do the fitting. I’ll be sure to get properly fitted for bikes in the future. A quick shout out to the Pacific Bicycle Super Store at 4th and Folsom in SF. They are awesome.

Then there is the actual pain itself. I find the medical system to be phenominally unhelpful for these kinds of problems. If I say “my knee kinda hurts all the time.” I find I rarely get resolution. It’s a major problem though….even though my body is 99.99% functional my day to day life is about 75% OK and 25% Sucky. For example, a couple months ago I exacerbated my tendonitis for a Slide release and I was suprised at how depressing it was to have that constant, gnawing forearm pain….

I read a description of Iliotibial Band Syndrome and it sounds pretty familiar:

The symptoms of ITB syndrome commonly begin with pain over the outside of the knee, just above the knee joint. Tenderness in this area is usually worse after activity. As the bursitis grows worse, pain may radiate up the side of the thigh and down the side of the leg. Patients sometimes report a snapping or popping sensation on the outside of the knee.

I feel that snapping and popping sensation :-(

But I could also have Runners Knee.

The resident triathlete at work says I should ice it. I’m also taking ibuprofen, staying of the bike, trying to minimize walking and standing, and thinking about doing some quadriceps exercises at the gym. I’m sure I will be better in a few days but just a little reminder to stay healthy!

Link to IBS page at Montana Spine Center.

Filed under: all talk, cycling, medicine | 3 Comments