Free Online File Conversion

Zamzar is a very user-friendly site that provides a file conversion service for files up to 100Mb in size. It's very easy to use: browse to the file or files (multiple files have to be the same type), choose the filetype you want to convert to, provide your e-mail address, and blammo! The files get e-mailed directly to you! And with even stupid Hotmail -- I mean Windows Live Mail -- offering 2Gb of space right now, this shouldn't cause anyone any hardships.

Link

The Hug Shirt

One of the coolest uses of modern technology I've heard about, and one that I hope will pave the way for cooler and even better stuff.

The hug shirt is designed to transmit a hug from one wearer to another. There are sensors under the red parts of the shirt that record things like body temperature, pressure, duration, and heartrate. The data is then transmitted by Bluetooth to your cell phone, which is then sent to your friend's phone, and by Bluetooth to his shirt.

Wild enough for you? This is definitely one of the better arguments in favour of me owning a cell phone.

Link

The Art of Willard Wigan

I was fortunate enough to see a micro-miniature show at the Dunlop Art Gallery in 1997. I'd actually seen some of the works on the internet before I saw them on display. It was bizarre to think that sculptures that small could ever be created.

Then I found Willard Wigans. The work he does is baffling, and rich with ten times the detail of anything I'd seen either in person or on the internet. Pictured at right is King Henry VIII and his six wives, all in the eye of a needle. For something so amazingly finite, it's almost as though you could look at it for hours and continuously find something new.

Willard has photographic prints of his work for sale, but for me it's enough to look at the pictures on his website and let my eyes bug out in wonder. (NB - not that I need any help in letting my eyes bug out.)

Link

Two Winter Time Wasters

This first game, Snowcraft, has been around since 1998. I remember spending my lunchtime playing it while I worked at SEDA. I eventually completed the game, but it was very frustrating. In fact, this game is as frustrating as it is fun.


The object is to defeat the green team by hitting them with snowballs. It takes three hits to remove a player, and they do pause to wipe snow off themselves when they're hit. To move your players, just drag them around the screen. Release the mouse button to throw a snowball: the longer the button's held down, the further you can throw.

In Snowball, you use the arrow keys to control a snowball rolling down a very long hill. It gets larger and harder to control as it rolls, and you can absorb dogs, people, and other objects as you grow. Hitting a tree with reduce your size, and hitting a house will stop the game. You can see my best score in the picture.

Two simple, addictive games for your continued amusement. If I don't hear from you I'll forward your mail.

Link to Snowcraft
Link to Snowball

Dark Side of the Rainbow

This is what the internet is all about.

Remember a few years ago when A&E played The Wizard of Oz and told you exactly when to start your copy of Dark Side of the Moon? And it seemed like a really cool idea, but you didn't have a copy of the album because you always thought Pink Floyd kinda sucked? Well now someone has kindly done all the hard work for us and simply uploaded the movie complete with Pink Floyd soundtrack to Google Video.

I've read about this a lot in the past, and although Pink Floyd maintains that it's all just coincidence, fans have compiled more than 100 links between the movie and the album. I hope it's as interesting as I've been led to believe.

Link

xkcd

I have to admit that I've been addicted to this web comic since the first day I saw it. The art might not be that good, but the comics themselves are as clever as anything I've seen. I read through the archives on the first day, and there was a startlingly good mix of gut-shaking funniness and tear-jerking poignancy.

I think this cartoon is my favourite. And pretty much sums up my life's philosophy.

Link (via BoingBoing)

Dicewars

I guess it's time for playtesting to be over.

This is a highly addictive Risk-type game played with dice instead of armies. The number of dice on your land determines the strength of your attack: if you roll higher than your opponent, then you win the territory. Armies are replenished randomly at the end of your attack, one per connected territory.

There's a lot of luck involved, but maybe that's part of its charm. It's definitely part of the frustration. Although you can play with up to eight computer opponents, be sure to try some of the lower levels: it's sometimes a lot tougher to defeat two or three opponents than seven.

Link (via Games1.org)

When you want a restaurant in your home

Sometimes what you want from a restaurant is not someone else doing the cooking (although I always seem to want to have someone else do the cleaning!), it's a specific dish that the restaurant makes. Of course, it's irrlevant to those of us in Regina to have access to Olive Garden recipes, but there is a host of other things to be found here - so search away.

http://www.copykat.com/

Because you need to know.

I was going to give you all this link
http://cmgm.stanford.edu/pbrown/mguide/index.html
because I think it's something everyone should know. But then I thought of who might or might not be reading this blog, and I've decided to go with this:
http://members.tripod.com/~spows/cow.html

Snowflake Maker

In the middle of a scorching summer heatwave, nobody wants anything more than to think about an ice-cold winter. Which is why this post about the snowflake maker is coming at just the right time.

I suppose you could make real snowflakes yourself using the method they show you, but what good would that be? You'd have your kitchen table littered with tiny scraps of paper, hundreds of snowflakes hung from pipe cleaners, and no way to display them to thousands of people a day. No, this is definitely better and more convenient.

After you're done cutting your masterpiece, the site allows you to e-mail your snowflake out to people, or even to download an EPS to use in your own projects. You can also visit the gallery, where similar options are available for more than eleven million snowflakes! For what it's worth, the one in the picture is #11985365.

Link

Warn the World

There may come a time when you need to serve notice on someone. Maybe that time is now. Or not, I'm just sayin'
http://www.shipbrook.com/onnotice/

So you think you can dance

Lordy Day I'm easily amused:
http://community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt/7870150.html

12 Myths About Hunger

This excellent page from Food First debunks 12 common myths about hunger. There are some fascinating and startling statistics here, and it does a very effective job of driving home the point that the majority of starving people in the world are doing so not because of environmental or market forces, but because of someone's greed.

Myth 1:
Not Enough Food to Go Around

Reality: Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the world's food supply. Enough wheat, rice and other grains are produced to provide every human being with 3,200 calories a day. That doesn't even count many other commonly eaten foods - ­vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide: two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs - ­enough to make most people fat!

link

The MIT Blackjack Team

Four years ago, Wired ran a great story on a bunch of math wonks from MIT who used an amazingly clever blackjack strategy to clean Vegas out of millions of dollars. It's a bit long, but definitely worth the read.

The Wired article was actually adapted from the novel Bringing Down the House, which is available for download as an ebook (or, I suppose, as a regular book; but like Cory Doctorow, I prefer being able to read things on my Palm).

"One mistake can cost a team a large amount of their expected advantage," Lewis says. "We had these charts calculated out that could tell you what a single error in play costs in terms of profit."

After passing the BP exam, Lewis moved to real world application. During Lewis' first weekend in Vegas, the team made $100,000. He was hooked and soon became one of the team's premier players. Personally, he didn't have problems with the ethics of the venture. "It isn't really even gambling. It's no different than the stock market. We use our brains to earn a profit. It isn't illegal. And it isn't cheating."

Link to Wired story
Link to Bringing Down the House ebook

Homebrew Mosquito Trap

We've all heard the joke: the mosquito is [insert province/state]'s official bird. Here in Saskatchewan it's just short of being true, and quite frankly, I'd do anything short of hanging a big bucket of blood outside just to keep the pesky little critters off me. So you have to understand how intrigued I was when I read about this DIY mosquito trap.

I've mentioned Hammacher Schlemmer before because of the cool stuff they carry, and I'd seen this mosquito trap there long before I caught it on BoingBoing. My friend Wendy has a similar contraption called "Skeeter-Vac" in her backyard, which I believe she picked up at Costco. It runs on propane to generate the carbon dioxide, and, as far as I remember, it does a decent job of keeping the outdoors relatively mosquito free. But it's expensive, and I'd prefer to spend my hard-earned cash on slurpees during those sweltering summer days.

The instructions for building the DIY trap are very simple, and I was able to put one together in less than 30 minutes. The most time consuming part, especially if you're a perfectionist like me, is getting the water to 40 degrees Celsius. We already had most of the necessary materials lying around the house, so my total cost was $1 for two huge sheets of construction paper from Dollarama.

Although there's nothing preventing mosquitoes to come flying out of the bottle, they're thankfully too stupid to know that. The carbon dioxide apparently gives them direction into the bottle, but once inside there's nothing to provide them with direction out. I'll post in a week or so with what my results are: personally, I'm wondering how this stacks up against more natural solutions, like bats and dragonflies.

Link (via BoingBoing)

Edit Aug. 10/06: Well, I regret to inform everyone that this experiment has failed miserably. I did not catch a single mosquito, but I did catch three daddy longlegs, some kind of crazy-ass beetle, and half a bottle of dandelion seeds.

Final tally: Mosquitos 2, Deron 0.

Cool and Frustrating Puzzles

I came across these Grow puzzles a couple of years ago, but they were weird and I didn't spend a lot on them. Returning to them now, they're still weird, but brilliantly weird: like the guy you meet on the subway who does your math homework for a pouch of Pop Rocks, not like the guy you meet on the subway who carries a duffel bag with his wife's severed head in it.

The premise of all these puzzles is the same: there are a number of items along the left and right sides of the screen that must be activated in a certain order. The twist is that different orders give misleading results. A lot of times you'll think you're making progress only to find you're straying dawn a misleading path. In Grow 3, for example, the tornado attaches to the windmill to provide the globe with electricity; but if the tornado is activated too early, it destroys the windmill -- and then a misleading "bonus" pops up, suggesting you've done the right thing.

These puzzles are perfectly crafted and great fun to watch, even if you're not trying to solve them.

Grow v2 (via Kent's Blog)
Grow v3
Grow RPG
Grow Cube

Update: It turns out the all knowing, all seeing Wikipedia has a link to Grow and a mysterious fifth puzzle called Glow Ornament. Solutions for all the puzzles are also listed, so don't look too closely or you'll ruin the fun!

Link to Wikipedia article

Free Text Messaging Service

I think I may be one of the last people on the face of the earth without a cell phone. The problem is that I want the gadgets but I don't want to be in constant contact. I leave my house to get away from the phone, not to take it with me.

"You should get a cell phone," my buddy Rob said, "so I can text you." Texting has somehow become the "killer app" of cell phones, which I find especially hilarious because cell phones already have a brilliant and perfectly natural method of communication built in. But texting is fun, so they tell me, and in some places it's far cheaper than standard cell phone rates, so that explains much of its popularity.

But even without a cell phone, I can use txtDrop to text message my friends for free. The site is very straight-forward, with only three fields to fill out and a button to push. Now I'm half-way home: if I can find a good site that will let me receive texts, I may not need a cell phone after all (but I will need a wireless card for my Palm).

Link

Simple (and Surprisingly Accurate) IQ Test

There are a number of IQ tests out there, and I've probably tried them all. Most are gimmicky, and nearly all of them artificially inflate your score.

But this test provided me with the same score I received when I took my Mensa application tests. It consists of 38 true/false questions that must be completed in 13 minutes. You apparently get bonus marks for completing the test quickly, and there's a break after the 19th question so you can relax before tackling the second half.

I'll send a postcard to anyone who can guess what my score was.*

I'll send a prize to anyone who can beat it!**

*Family and close friends excluded from this offer; you'll get a phone call.
**Screenshot verification may be required. Prizes are expensive, especially now that I'm out of work.

Link

Snacksby

A few years ago I had this idea for a countertop recipe appliance that would synch to the internet and pull down recipes based on what you have in your cupboard. Like a lot of great ideas I've come up with, this languished into obscurity, and I started using AllRecipes.com for my cooking needs. (And, FWIW, AllRecipes.com remains a pretty good, if hard to navigate, site.)

But today I chanced across Snacksby, a recipe site that gives you options based on the ingredients you enter in a field at the top of the screen. It looks to be a fun site, with different recipes tagged with "snackonomies" like vegetarian and low-calorie, and even provides ingredient substitutions if you're out of cloves or something. It also knows about measurements, so it won't pull up a recipe requiring a dozen eggs if you've only got two.

There's a link on the front page from comments to a review at LifeHacker:

Great idea but completely worthless at the moment given that they currently have less than a dozen recipes in there and are relying on users to fill the database.

Fair enough; but as another commenter posted, user-edited content is pretty easy to get. And once this does fill up, it'll be just what I'm looking for!

Update: check out this great message letting me know that they couldn't find a recipe for me!

SNACKSLET
You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot
so inoculate our old chicken stock but we shall eat relish of
it: I found you recipes not.

YOU
I was the more decieved.

SNACKSLET
Get thee to a grocery. Why wouldst thou be a
cooker of nothing? I am myself indifferent honest,
but yet I should accuse me of such things that it
were better my mother had not borne me: I am very
gluttonous, revengeful, ambitious, with more recipes at
my beck than I have cards to write them on,
imagination to give them shape, or time to cook them
in. What should such gourmets as I do crawling
between earth and heaven? We are arrant chefs,
all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a grocery.
Where're your cookbooks?

YOU
At home, my lord.

SNACKSLET
Let the pantry doors be shut upon them, that they may play
fruitless nowhere but in'r own kitchen. Farewell.

YOU
O, help him, you sweet heavens!

SNACKSLET
If thou dost cook, I'll give thee this compost
for thy dinner: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as
snow, thou shalt not escape famine. Get thee to a
grocery, go; farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs
cook, cook for a fool; for wise men know well enough
what illusory meals you make for them. To a grocery, go,
and quickly too. Farewell.

YOU
O heavenly powers, restore him!

SNACKSLET
I have heard of your garnishes too, well enough; God
has given your dishes one face, and you make them
another: you salt, you drizzle, and you accent, and
put ketchup on God's creatures, and make your wantonness
your diet. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath
made me hungry. I say, we will have no more meals:
those that have already, all but one, shall
eat; the rest shall starve as they are. To a
grocery, go.

Exeunt

Oh, Snacksby!
Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love.

Link

Sudoku Combat

Like I really need another diversion in my life.

I often find myself playing sudoku on my Palm with this excellent software. It's a very addictive game; when I gave Heather my Tungsten|T for her birthday, she said, "Yay! Now I can play sudoku!"

So now there's Sudoku Combat, a simple site that pits your /\/\4D 5K!11zorz against some random opponent. The game is very easy to operate: type in a name and start the fun. It must set a cookie in your browser, because your settings and ranking are saved when you leave the site.

There are about 100 different avatars to choose from, and some are pretty funny. There's also four levels of sudoku to provide a challenge, from "easy" to "evil". And if you don't feel up to a head-to-head challenge, you can always choose to play by yourself.

Now, I'm not very fast at solving the puzzles, so most of the people I played handily kicked my ass. But it was still a lot of fun, and I expect it to eat up a lot of my free time in the coming weeks.

Link