While staying in Sydney last month, I spent a lot of time at the botanical gardens, and, since it was spring, there were ducklings. I watched one family go from sleeping under the tree to swimming in the pond one morning, and I took a lot of pictures.
What follows after the jump is an annotated photo essay in which one duckling is forced to answer the question, “If your siblings all jumped off a cliff, would you do it, too?”
Continue reading The Ducklings go to the Pond
As of today, one thousand people have saved our little web site to their del.icio.us bookmarks.
Everybody else is doing it, Shouldn’t you? =D
We are crazy about Thanskgiving, both for being the only real food-centric American holiday and for giving us an excuse to make all kinds of things that we don’t make the rest of the year. One of the few downsides is that we usually end up eating the same leftovers for days on end afterwards. These can be amongst the best leftovers that you get, however even your favorite dish can start to wear on after having it reheated for the fourth meal in a row.
The solution? Food hacking– a tasty form of recycling! Incorporate your leftovers into new recipes to bring them back to life. While reworking leftovers certainly isn’t a new process (Bubble and Squeak, anyone?), it is one that benefits from a fresh approach from time to time. After the jump, a few of our favorite out-of-the-box approaches to eating well on Black Friday.
Continue reading Five Tricks for Thanksgiving Leftovers
Two weeks ago, after observing the bizarre search suggestions that ask.com gives for searches, we launched a little contest (which we have run a little late in posting the results of). Here are the results in our several categories:
Ironic:
Winner: “how do i go“, which ask.com helpfully expands into (among other variations), “how do i google someone.” Submitted by Josh Gurian.
Honorable mentions:
“Does anyone actually use ask.com?”
“Where is jeeves? What have you done with him?”
How to style your lack of hair
Insightful:
Winner: Evidence that people are looking for stuff that hasn’t been invented yet. (Hint: it isn’t on the net.) Submitted by flickr user samaritan.
Honorable mentions:
“Did you fire Jeeves?”
The question “Should a” produces some interesting ethical issues.
The simple query “when can” produces some insight into how obsessed ask.com (or perhaps its users) are with pregnancy.
Well, maybe pregnancy and international cuisine.
Depressing:
This was the hardest category. There were too many to choose from. The depressing entries struck various notes depression because very unhappy people are querying the search engine, but also because of the terrible grammar issues, and genuinely scary things that one would hope no one ever searches for– both self-destructive and frighteningly ill-informed.
The idea of choosing a “winner” for questions like these is rather stomach turning– but labeling them losers won’t help either.
Winner:
Why don’t i have any friends?, Submitted by flickr user samaritan.
Honorable mentions:
“When will the” (insert terrible thing) happen?
How dumb am i?
Why does everyone lie to me?
Grammar:
Winner: The Most winningest, naturally. Submitted by flickr user dennisw.
Honorable mentions:
loose my belly
I hat you.. (It’s both brilliant and inexplicable.)
Funny:
Winner: The winner makes you wonder how they type the queries. Submitted by flickr user predatormc.
Honorable mentions:
How to kill a mockingbird
Can babies breathe underwater?
This one borders on scary, but the thing about sheep puts it in the funny category.
Finally, two good entries from the Stupid question department: First entry, Second entry
Congratulations to our winners!
(The revenge of random stuff; November edition.)
All cynicism aside, one of the cool things about the holiday season is that it often provides a good excuse to play with lights.
Hanukkah in particular has been a festival of lights for more than a dozen centuries longer than there have been lights on Christmas trees. History notwithstanding, Hanukkah still lags behind Christmas in the transition from traditional light sources like candles towards microcontroller driven arrays of LEDs. While that may be simply due to the relative flammability of dry pine trees versus that of metal menorahs, the irony is that Hanukkah– unlike Christmas– actually requires observers to light up specific lights in a specific order, which is exactly the sort of thing that you want a microcontroller for.
Can’t find an open-source LED menorah at your local big box store? Not to worry!
Make one yourself from our instructions, which include source code for the AVR microcontroller (we use an ATtiny2313). Complete soldering kits to make your own– no programming needed– are also now available in quantity at our new web store.
(Note: While I cringe every time that I see Christmas displays up before Halloween, we aren’t actually too early in this case. Hanukkah starts on the evening of December 4th this year.)
Adding a seat belt buckle to a commuter bag improves its accessibility and usefulness. It’s a pretty easy modification, and super cool if you can find just the right buckle. Airline safety belt buckles (fasten low and tight across your lap…) are becoming more readily available and have a certain industrial charm.
Continue reading Seat Belt Buckle Bag Mod
Lolsaur is a new site that has (silly) potential.
Here’s my attempt, adapted from the original photo by Marjorie Morris Lipan (CC-BY-NC-SA/2.0 license).
[And, created with fd’s Flickr Toys.]
One of the nice things about having an Intel-based Mac is that you can, in principle, run a variety of operating systems including Microsoft Windows. You can do this using Apple’s Boot Camp utility, or through virtual machine programs such as Parallels.
I recently came across an esoteric “Windows only” electrical engineering program that I wanted to run on my Mac (LTspice/SwitcherCAD III — more about that later). And, while contemplating the $200-$300 cost of a legitimate Windows license, it might occur to you that the goal in this case is to run a program that runs under Windows– not actually to run Windows itself.
So why not look at Wine? Wine is a venerable software compatibility layer that allows unix-like operating systems to run programs designed for Windows. It turns out that there is even a Parallels-like virtualization environment so that you can run programs programs in Wine alongside Mac programs. It’s called Crossover Mac, and it’s $60 from Codeweavers.
And the verdict? It’s not for everyone, but it’s a great start.
Continue reading Run Windows apps– without Windows– using Crossover
