Interesting Drug

Brian Wood - 12/31 Sunday New York Times:

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Article here, as well as the 12/31 print edition, page 33 of the Arts & Leisure section. If you can’t access it, here’s a scan.

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Full page of the Sunday New York Times… just about as good as it gets, and I am unabashedly proud of this. When you start a new project, of course you’re optimistic about its chances, but this level of recognition is the sort of thing you can only dare to hope for. Will, Casey, Karen, David, Sierra, and of course Riccardo, thanks a million.

And you guys, thanks for supporting the book.

-bri”

Mind Sex:

“BBC quiz: What gender is your mind?“

It Must Be a Good One, Look at All the People Going In!:

“Tourist mother: Where do you guys want to eat?
Tourist child: I don’t know.
Tourist father pointing to flashing subway entrance: Look, there’s a Subway, we can eat there!

–42nd & 7th Ave

Overheard by: Jen Chick

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really cool photo mosaic image making thingy:

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You know those cool photo mosaic thingies, where you get one big picture, but it’s actually made up of hundreds of little pictures? It’s sort of the 2000’s equivalent of the 1990s Magic Eye posters in the mall.

I was Netscapin’ this morning, and came across this bookmark, which goes to an Image Mosaic Making Thing, which lets you upload your own pictures and turn them into image mosaic thingies, like mine right there. The higher the contrast in the original image, the better the mosaic result. Also, I converted this from 1.4MB’ file to a 32K .jpg (you’re welcome, dial-up users) but if you simply must burn my bandwidth and see the full-sized file, you may click it to embiggen.

I recall reading somewhere that there’s a tool you can use to build these using your own images, but if you’re just interested in getting one made quickly and easily, this is a dangerously fun way to avoid being productive.

”

The BBC’s annual list of 100 things we didn’t know this last year:

“The BBC’s annual list of 100 things we didn’t know this last year. ‘Barbie’s full name is Barbie Millicent Roberts.’ Here are the 2005 and 2004 editions. The Tampa Tribune has a list of 50 things for 2006.”

Hidden games in Mac OS X:

“Filed under: Arcade, Culture, Hacks, Mac, Retro

Mac OS X uses emacs as a text editor, which contains a number of hidden games including Snake, Tetris, Pong and a whole slew of others. Follow the simple steps included here, and you could be playing a boatload of games that you didn’t even know were on your Mac. Granted, the games pretty much suck (the graphics make the Wii look like Super High Definition 2160iii), but if you’re trying to kill 30 minutes while sitting in the library, look no further.

We’re still exploring these and trying to figure out what the heck some of the games are.

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”

MTA Launches New Trip Planning Website:

“released a new and improved Trip Planner website last week to replace the somewhat aggravating Trips123 site. The new site is supposed to be more accurate, taking into account ‘up-to-the-minute service changes and many of the system’s lesser-known idiosyncrasies.’ We played around with the Trip Planner which is at travel.mtanyct.info and liked that service advisory alerts, but the options offered still leave something to be desired.

For instance, we planned a trip to leave 1 Centre Street (the Muncipal Building across from City Hall) at 5:20PM on December 31 to go to 1 Times Square. We asked to minimize transfers as well as tp walk no more than a 1/4 mile and to travel by subway. So the first option the MTA offers is to take the 4 to Grand Central and then transfer to the 7 train to go to Times Square. Eh, that transfer is okay, but walking out of the 7 at Times Square is no fun. We personally prefer the second option - taking the 4 to Union Square and then taking the R to Times Square.

The main tip is that It often produces more sensible trips if you tell it you’re willing to walk a little further — if you were to walk to the other side of City Hall, you could get the R and take that directly to Times Square. The next thing that the MTA should include in their database is the amount of walking one needs to do within a station to transfer to another line or exit.

Try out the MTA’s Trip Planner and let us know what you think. We find the schedule of trains’ arrivals and departures hilarious.

”

Develop a WordPress theme on your Mac:

“Filed under: Odds and ends, Blogging, Blogs

I’m going to tell you a secret, that I hope we can keep between us: I am a big fan of blogs and blogging. I love to write and I love to read, so blogging is a natural extension of that (and I hope my level of enjoyment makes its way into my posts here). WordPress is the hottest blogging tool out there. It is open source, dynamic, and all the cool kids use it. Sadly, while content is king, people also love a pretty face.

Circle Six Blog has a great post up that outlines Brett’s workflow for designing WordPress themes locally on his Mac. He lists a number of useful apps that we have covered on TUAW and includes some good general web design tips.

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”

2006 Foot-in-Mouth Awards:

“Kids, as Art Linkletter once observed, say the darndest things. But grown-ups say some of the stupidest things, and the adults who populate the world of technology have mastered the form. Enjoy some of the year’s best. Compiled by Tony Long.”

History of Computer Role Playing Games (1974-1983):

“Matt Barton writes ‘I thought Slashdotters might be interested in my History of Computer Role-Playing Games Part I article on Armchair Arcade. It starts with the birth of the CRPG on mainframes and ends in 1983. I start by discussing tabletop D&D and number games like Strat-O-Matic, move into mainframe classics like dnd and Rogue, and then cover the first CRPGs for home computers. I wrote this article for CRPG fans who want to learn more about venerable old classics like Akalabeth, Temple of Apshai, Ultima, Wizardry, Tunnels of Doom, Dungeons of Daggorath, and Telengard. Please share your own stories!’

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Link Graffiti:

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Check out this graffiti of Zelda’s pixelated main-squeeze from Melbourne, Australia. Why doesn’t Denver get anything cool like this? Brian Crecente

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Ice, Ice Baby:

“Sure, I didn’t get you a Christmas present, but I’m linking to this classic video of Vanilla Ice on SNL, so do you forgive me?”

Mac Geekery - Turning Off Unneeded Services:

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Falling Leaf Alky Project - Bringing Top Games to the Mac?:

“Filed under: Gaming, Software, Beta Beat

Here’s one for all you forlorn Mac gamers out there. Falling Leaf Systems claims to be working on a new technology called Alky which will allow Windows games to run on OS X (and Linux). It’s somewhat hard to tell what exactly what they are doing, but it seems to be something similar to WINE. Each of the Alky Converters will be specific to a particular game, so for instance right now they are working on Converters for Prey (as above), The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Neverwinter Nights 2. They have an early access program for $50 which will let you play around with the alpha release of the Alky Converter for the Prey demo. If they could actually pull this off, it would certainly be a great boon to the Mac gaming community, but I don’t think I’ll be giving up my 50 bucks just yet. Anybody out there with any experience running an Alky Converter?

Thanks Brian Thomason!

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”

Winter Wonderland (Funny):

“Commercial for Christmas store in New Jersey. Warning- adult language.”

Broadcast Radio Turns 100:

“GraWil writes ‘On Christmas eve 1906, a Canadian physicist named Reginald Fessenden presented the world’s first wireless radio broadcast from his transmitter at Brant Rock, MA. The transmission included Christmas music and was heard by radio operators on board US Navy and United Fruit Company ships equipped with Fessenden’s wireless receivers at various distances over the South and North Atlantic, and in the West Indies. Fessenden was a key rival of Marconi in the early 1900s who, using morse-code, succeeded in passing signals across the Atlantic in 1901. Fessenden’s work was the first real departure from Marconi’s damped-wave-coherer system for telegraphy and represent the first pioneering steps toward radio communications and radio broadcasting. He later became embroiled in a long-running legal dispute over the control of his radio-related patents, which were eventually acquired by RCA.’

”

Amazing Propaganda Posters (News and Politics):

“‘’You can’t beat the Axis if you get Venereal Diseases'’ and other American, Soviet and Nazi posters.”

Bohemian Rhapsody Played With Hands (Entertainment):

“This guy is the master of hand music.”

HOW TO - Magnetic Rubik’s dice cube:

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Burzvingion made a really nice dice based magnetic Rubik’s dice cube

‘The non-symetrical nature of some of the die patterns gives the dice cube an extra element of strategy not present in regular Rubik’s Cubes. This variable of rotation is an aspect of the ’sudocube,’ but the dice cube is easier to solve, because each face contains identical figures, and every cubie is unique–two properties of the original Rubik’s Cube that are not carried over to the ’sudocube.'’ - Link.

Related:

• Pimp my Rubik’s Cube - Link.
• Rubik’s Cube Mario pop art wall hanging - Link.
• LEGO Rubik’s Cube - Link.
• Magnetic acrylic Rubik’s cube - Link.
• Rubik’s cube costume build - Link.
• Rubik’s Cube solving robot - Link.
• Rubik’s Cube Solver - Link.
• Touch based Rubik cube - Link.

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DSC_0695.JPG:

“satanslaundromat posted a photo:

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DSC_0708.JPG:

“satanslaundromat posted a photo:

homeland security threat level on corner of building

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Gawker has a list of blog-media cliches:

“Gawker has a list of blog-media cliches. I’m especially tired of ‘Best. Thing. Evar!’ and ‘teh’. They also forgot ‘Internets’ and ‘the Google’. Then again, I’m partial to ‘wait for it’ so whatever.”