Interesting Drug

Ben Heck’s VCSp Rev 5.1 Portable Atari System:

“Benjamin Heckerdorn has been making consoles portable for a while, but who knew that he has been getting his paws dirty with console parts for seven years now. In honor of the sevenyeariversary of console modding he created a new revision to his Atari-playing VCSp portable, but it is a bit different this time around because you can actually buy it! Ben will be creating between 20 and 30 of these devices and selling them for around $300 each. -Travis Hudson

VCSp Rev 5.1 Prototyped at 7 Year Mark [Via Gadget Lab]

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TUAW Tip: temporarily prevent your iPod from syncing:

“Filed under: iPod Family, Software, Productivity, Tips and tricks, iTunes, TUAW Tip

Out of the box, the iPod is designed to work seamlessly with iTunes, so the system automatically syncs (by default) when you connect your iPod. This is typically fine for most users, but what about those times when you don’t want this tag team to kick into gear for one reason or another? Perhaps you just had a library goof-up, and you need to use iPodRip to recover some playlists or media files before iTunes syncs and blows either away, or perhaps you’re just in a hurry and don’t have time to sync down that new 1.5GB movie you just bought, though you you still need to dump some files over for work or class. Whatever the scenario, there are a couple of simple ways to arbitrarily prevent iTunes from working its magic on a case-by-case basis.

The first method, I feel, is the least intrusive and most useful: assuming iTunes is running, all you need to do is hold down cmd+opt (possibly ctrl+alt on Windows, though I don’t have a machine to test that on) when connecting your iPod to make iTunes look the other way and not begin a sync. The iPod should mount on your desktop and even appear in iTunes, but it simply won’t sync. You’re free to go about your business and eject the iPod as quickly as it mounted, with no argument from iTunes.

The second method assumes that you have enabled hard drive use for your iPod, and you don’t have iTunes set to automatically start when you plug the ‘pod in. In this case, simply quitting iTunes when plugging in your iPod will solve your problem altogether. Simply do your business and eject to get on your way quickly.

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MacGyver Tip: Shine your shoes with vegetable oil:

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Real Simple magazine’s got a quick tip for shining up scuffed shoes in a pinch:

Use a damp cloth to wipe away dirt, then apply a small drop of [vegetable] oil to a soft cloth and rub the surface to remove scuff marks.

You can get rid of shoe scuffs using Pledge wax/wood shiner, too. —Gina’Trapani

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18 Confessions Of 2 Former T-Mobile Reps:

“Eighteen insider consumer tips from ex-Tmobile customer service representatives Christof and Anon. Oh no, we’re not done with that series. Not by a long shot.

1. Pay Attention to overages

If you…

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HOW TO - Run AppleTV on a Mac mini:

“
Here are a couple AppleTV hacks and a special how-to from Dave on running AppleTV on a stock Mac mini!

Here are the steps I took to get the Apple TV OS working on my Mac mini. Just so you know, I have a core solo Mac mini - stock configuration.

I started on this site - Link.

It mentions there is a hacked Finder app floating around the web.

I booted up the Mac mini. Copied the AppleTV OS disk image over to it. I also copied the new Finder file to it (note: don’t change the name of the finder file).

I didn’t reinstall the OS - I just took what I had. Before you do anything, I’d enable file sharing, remote access, ssh, the whole thing. That way you should have access to the box after the mod has been done.

I then followed the steps listed at the URL above. So the first two steps were:

cd /Volumes/OSBoot/System/Library/CoreServices/
sudo cp -pr ./Finder.app /Volume/FreshOSX/System/Library/CoreServices/.

The next step, which has you cd to the directory and overwrite the finder file within the Finder.app, I actally did this remotely

To do this, I killed the finder in the Activity Monitor.

I then Connected to the Mac Mini from my Mac pro and made the copy from there. I actually did this from the Mac Pro’s finder.

Then, I returned to the instructions and did:

sudo chown root:wheel Finder
sudo chmod 755 Finder

I finished with the final three terminal commands and rebooted. Works perfectly.

One minor thing, in the instructions, I changed ‘Volume’ to ‘Volumes’ anywhere it referenced the FreshOSX volume. I don’t know if that was an error on their part.

More:

• Apple TV running on a Macbook | Apple TV Hacks - [via] Link.
• Boot from a USB drive - Link.

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Otis 1.0:

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About Otis A strategy/puzzle game, based on a classic game popularly known as Same Game, Chain Shot, or JawBreaker. The object is to remove all the blocks from the board by clicking on groups of two or more blocks with the same color. Clear as many blocks at once as possible to score higher, but only through careful maneuvering can you clear the entire board. Written in Cocoa with an attention towards design and interface, Otis packs addicting gameplay, stunning visual effects, and multiple levels of difficulty for every player.

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[Cool] Did you know that there’s a stone Darth Vader gargoyle on the Washington National Cathedral?:

“(Some Guy)

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Images: U.S. Postal Service reveals ‘Star Wars’ stamps:

“The U.S. Postal Service aims to put its stamp on the Star Wars saga by giving all the major characters their own first class, 41-cent postage stamp.”

15 Javascript Snippets You Can’t Live Without:

“‘You either love Javascript or you hate it. Either way it can provide great functionality that users love. And it doesn’t have to affect usability. Here are my top 15 Javascript snippits for making great sites that bit extra special.’”

Humped by a Dolphin (Funny):

“This guy has a great sense of humor about it.”

Don DeLillo’s new novel, Falling Man, is about 9/11 and…:

“Don DeLillo’s new novel, Falling Man, is about 9/11 and the title is a reference to the falling man photograph taken of a person falling from the WTC. (link)”

Easter Eggs, Adventure, And VR Frippery:

“ Here’s a new Gamasutra article which is very GSW-worthy - a ‘Playing Catch Up’ column featuring Adventure creator Warren Robinett, who made the first video game ‘easter egg’, of course - and also founded educational game firm The Learning Company, which I didn’t know.

Anyhow, there’s some good stuff in here: ‘Adventure… capitalized on the console’s success enormously well. By the end of the decade, there were around 1.8 million Atari 2600 owners, and 1 million of them were playing Robinett’s game. However, despite the incredible sales—at $25 each, no less—its creator was still on a salary of $22,000 a year, and soon decided to leave the company…

‘I was tired of working, and Atari management didn’t value the 2600 designers,’ he says. ‘Boy were they stupid, because the designers all quit and started competing companies.’ Years later, he notes with some enthusiasm, the company ‘came crashing down, like a whale dropped from a 747 at 30,000 feet’.’

Later on, post game biz for Robinett, boy, there was some craziness: ‘In 1991, Robinett was talking with Stan Williams—a college and grad school friend who was, at the time, a chemistry professor at UCLA—in regards to a Scanning-Tunneling Microscope that had been developed by Williams and his grad students. Together, they decided that the idea of connecting the microscope to Robinett’s VR system would be ‘interesting’. The resulting invention was the Nanomanipulator, a VR interface that allows its user to ‘see, touch, and manipulate individual macromolecules’. The machine was implemented later on by Russ Taylor as a PhD thesis, who still runs the project.’ Nice!

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Bruce Lee Hand Painting:

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Bruce Lee Speed Painting

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TOP 30 Wordpress Plugins in Blogosphere « Staska.Net:

“
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by derlinzer

- more about this bookmark…
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1000 Journals Project spawns a book:

“Cory Doctorow:
Lucas sez,

I wanted to alert you to a new book that just came out from a friend (goes by the art name Someguy) called the 1000 Journals Project.

Six years ago, Someguy sent one thousand blank journals out into the world. Those who found them added stories and drawings before passing them along in an ongoing, collaborative art form.

The journals have come to rest in hostels, cafes, and law offices; they’ve been lost and found, forgotten and remembered. They’ve been the subject of treasure hunts (#354), brought to remote mountaintops (#323), abandoned at airports (#001), left in the lost-and-found (#300), and stolen at gunpoint (#949). In journal #587, someone wrote a heartfelt apology and then sent the journal to they friend they had wronged. Unfortunately, the apology wasn’t accepted.

Link

(Thanks, Lucas!)

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You Have Won Second Prize In A Beauty Contest. Collect $10.:

“Have you ever gotten stuck in a never-ending game of Monopoly? Turns out the game wouldn’t take so long if we didn’t play with so many made-up rules. There are many different variations of house rules. Some people even make up their own extreme game. The official Monopoly rules are posted at Monopoly Collector, which also has game history and facts, as do the Monopoly pages at Hasbro. If you’re into statistics, Durango Bill has an excellent article on Monopoly probabilities. Also related, old-style Monopoly card illustrations. And just for fun, check out ‘Monopoly Cards We’d Like To See’ at Dribble Glass. Or, make your own Chance and Community Chest cards at Sign Generator.”

How to access a Mac’s files on your PC:

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You’ve got both Macs and PC’s on your home network, and you want to share files between them. Yesterday we ran down the steps for mounting a Windows shared folder on the Mac. Today the tides have turned.

Read on for the details on how to read and write files to a shared Mac folder from your PC.

Enable Windows sharing. First, on your Mac, in System Preferences’ Sharing panel, under Services, check off ‘Windows sharing.’ Your Mac may ask you to ‘enable an account to use Windows sharing’ - which means you choose which Mac user’s files will be accessible. Click on the ‘Enable Accounts’ button and check off a user. When Windows Sharing is turned on with an enabled account, it will look like this:

Take note of the text on that dialog that reads ‘Windows users can access your computer at \\192.168.1.101\gina.’ Your address and username will be different, obviously, so write it down.

Connect to your Mac from Windows. On your PC, from the Start menu, open the Run… dialog, and type the address you wrote down in the step above. Instead of the less-than-memorable IP address, you can use your computer’s name, too. My Mac’s name is nyx, so the sharing address I used is \\nyx\gina:

Windows will open a regular Explorer window that’s peering in on your Mac user’s home directory. If you have ’show hidden files’ enabled in Windows like I do, you’ll see all of the Mac’s hidden ‘dot’ files and folders in the listing, like here:

And that’s that! You’re happily saving files to your Mac from your Windows PC. Isn’t it nice when we all get along? Share your Mac and PC networking tips in the comments. —’Gina’Trapani

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Incubus is a 1965 horror film that was filmed in…:

“Incubus is a 1965 horror film that was filmed in Esperanto and starred William Shatner. What more could you want, really? (link)”

Blackface on primetime:

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India’s Zoom channel is running a cricket-themed comedy show for the World Cup called Yo Maan. It stars comedian Suresh Menon in blackface with a silent bimbo by his side.

Here’s Menon in real life:

(more…)

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A reminder:

“The reason there is a fight over Iraq funding is because Bush decided not to include such funding in the regular budget.

Why not?

Who knows? Perhaps because his election-year budget presented fictional progress toward a ‘balanced budget’. If he included his war funding in that budget, he couldn’t pretend a balanced budget was within reach. (A trillion dollar war makes that difficult.)

But let’s not forget, the only reason this fight is being waged, is because Bush chose to underfund our troops in his regular budget.

And now he’s threatening to veto the funding Congress is allocating for the war. In other words — Bush refused to fund the troops in his budget, Congress is providing that funding, and Bush is threatening to veto that funding.

Nice way of doing business.

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The Worst Films of All Time?:

“The Worst Films of ‘The Modern Era?’ There are dozens of places to start - do you go by cost of production to theater revenue? Here’s a list of criterias to make it the worst of the worst. Or perhaps by continuity errors? Blatant ignoring of the laws of immutable physics? This Christian Group has their criterias … (American Psycho-ZERO). IMDB’s ‘people’ votes? man, there’s lot of hate for ‘Crossover.’ It didn’t get any noms at the ‘Razzies.’ And if your memory fails, check out the previous ‘losers.‘ Is Everyone a Critic? Or the best film critic - here’s Ebert’s list (though I SERIOUSLY disagree on TOMMY BOY!). Many others weigh in: Digital Dreams; Maxim, Rotten Tomatoes, Stinkers (in alphabetical order); Metacritic and Leonard Maltin for your PDA/mobile (you’ll have to do a sort on BOMB).

And of course, (NSFW) the worst porn titles.

Er, Enjoy!”

9 Times Travel Insurance Isn’t A Ripoff:

“Travel expert Peter Greenberg talks with Matt Lauer about if and when you should get travel insurance. Most of the time it’s a ripoff, but here are 9 situations where it comes in handy:

1. Your…

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Civilization IV expands:

“Add-on for the popular Sid Meier game series coming in July, will include 12 new scenarios and five new wonders.”