Archive for September, 2009
#25199 – Your favorite pop culture icons have been…
30, Sep 2009Your favorite pop culture icons have been created in LEGO, just like Jules and Vincent above, from Pulp Fiction. Chewbacca, Batman and the crew from Big Lewbowski are all present. (Want more? See NOTCOT.org and NOTCOT.com)
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Browntooth enabled…
30, Sep 2009Let me call you back, we’ve got a crappy connection…
Photo courtesy of Devon Kuser.
Seen in Manzhouli, China.
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- Tags: Chinglish
Write HTML and CSS quicker with with Zen Coding
21, Sep 2009A pretty neat plugin for TextMate (and a few other text editors) that I have started using is Zen Coding. I’d heard of it before but didn’t “get it” until I read Jonathan Christopher’s blog post The Art of zen-coding: Bringing Snippets to a New Level.
Jonathan explains very well what you can do with Zen Coding, so I’m not going to get into much detail. One example though. Zen Coding lets you use syntax that looks very much like CSS selectors to write HTML, which can look like this:
div#news.module>div.header+div.body>ul>li#item-$*5
When you put the cursor at the end of that line and execute the Zen Coding command, the result will be the following HTML snippet:
<div id="news" class="module"><div class="header"></div><div class="body"><ul><li id="item-1"></li><li id="item-2"></li><li id="item-3"></li><li id="item-4"></li><li id="item-5"></li></ul></div></div>
This is just one quick example of what Zen Coding can do. Try it out for yourself.
Posted in Coding, Productivity.
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- Tags: Coding, Productivity
Thank God the Piranha Plant is Not Real
20, Sep 2009Jamie Margary has a talented, yet horrifying imagination. He somehow took a simple character from the cute Mushroom Kingdom and made it as evil as he could. Up top is his vision of what a Piranha Plant would look like in real life and is made out o…
- In: Uncategorized
- Tags: Adventure, Nintendo DS, Retro, Retro Gaming, Super Mario Bros., Wii
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Tip #95: Did you know… That Web Application Projects and Class libraries are now available in Express edition?
20, Sep 2009Creating a Web Application Project was possible only in VS standard SKU and above in VS 2008. But with VS 2008 SP1 we went ahead and added support for WAP and class libraries in Visual Web Developer Express edition SP1. You can now create WAPs by going…(read more)
- In: General
- Tags: Tips and Tricks, Visual Studio, visual Studio 2008 sp1, VWD, WAP
Become pencils after you pass away…
19, Sep 2009
Nadine Jarvis’s “Carbon copies”… A little morbid, but a clever idea -
Pencils made from the carbon of human cremains. 240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash – a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind. Each pencil is foil stamped with the name of the person. Only one pencil can be removed at a time, it is then sharpened back into the box causing the sharpenings to occupy the space of the used pencils. Over time the pencil box fills with sharpenings – a new ash, transforming it into an urn. The window acts as a timeline, showing you the amount of pencils left as time goes by.
Augmented Reality Pool / Pool Playing Robot
18, Sep 2009Deep Green, the pool-playing robot from the Robotics & Computer Vision lab at Queen's University has been making the rounds on other websites recently. Its robot arm uses a huge gantry to move anywhere over the table, and then a special cue stick tool to hit the ball.
It’s hugely impressive, but the size and complexity of the hardware puts it out of reach for most Makers [please -- someone prove me wrong!]. So, that’s why I was attracted to the second half of the video: The students developed an equally impressive augmented reality mode that works without the robot. By using a projector and a camera located above the table, it recognizes the position of balls. As the player moves their pool cue, the system projects the predicted trajectory of the balls right on the table. If you can hit the ball consistently, this could be a great help in visualizing & setting up complicated shots!
See also: Roomba Pool
via waxy
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Wi-Fi dowsing rod
18, Sep 2009
Dutch maker Mike Thompson designed and built this Wi-Fi dowsing rod by joining old and new to deliver a whimsically arcane device.
Todays technology advances at such a speed that often consumers are left in awe of it all. The high tech terminology, the ultra small, ultra portable, metallic or white devices we carry around with us are, to the vast amount of consumers, simply baffling. The Wifi Dowsing Rod aims to work against this. By basing the design for a wireless internet detector on century’s old technology, the user feels immediately at home with the product, whilst feeling less intimidated by the simple shape and natural materials.
[via techchee]
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On the ZendCasts site today there’s a new video looking at the Zend_Cache component of the Zend Framework and how it can be used to speed up the response time for things like calls to a web service.
This is part 4 in a four part series on Google Docs and Google maps. While this example shows how to cache a Class to a file, you could easily modify the code to work with other caching backends such as a memory-based caching engine or something like Zend Optimizer or APC.
If you want to get caught up on the series, here’s the links to part one, two and three.
- In: General| Uncategorized