This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.
It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.
“The Wiimote just slipped right out of my hand and broke my TV.”
Young at Heart is a choral group of senior citizens who cover rock songs. This rendition of Fix You is just chilling.
Anatomy of a pump’n’dump scam. Or: Why you’re getting so much more spam this month.
Threadless are sufficiently large now to get to design the actual fabric of their T-shirts. “Imagine a tee that is less boxy than a Fruit of the Loom, but not as skinny as an American Apparel. Imagine a tee whose fabric is softer than American Apparel but not as thin.” I think I just came.
HOWTO rip the audio from 5.1-mix music DVDs and play it back on a Squeezebox. I’ve got an increasing number of surround music releases, so this’ll come in handy.
“How late was your train? [ ] Hours. [ ] Days [ ] In my day, all this was fields”
Hands getting sweaty from too much Wii-playing? Here’s your solution!
People think I exaggerate about how dull my hometown of Tillicoultry is. So, for you doubters, here’s a “news”paper headline from last year. The top story? Joss Stone had stopped at a pub in Tillicoultry for a wee. Hold. The. Front. Page.
Visualizing the structure of a song, based on the pattern of words used in the lyrics.
Sit through three “webcasts” on “exciting” “new” Microsoft “technology”, and get a free legitimate license for Windows Vista and/or Office 2007.
Another bubblicious startup — Email photos and letters to “people who don’t have a computer” *cough*old people*cough*, and have them print out on their hooked-up-to-the-phoneline HP inkjet printer. I can’t imagine that the old-person-without-a-computer market is going to stay large much longer, but it’s an interesting idea.
Make your Wii like a bit more NESy! (I just ordered a Union Jack skin for my Wii, so I can play Super Monkey Ball for Queen And Country)
Good bloody grief. Damn that 2.4Ghz band, and all its illness-causing ways. Hope the schools also removed all cordless telephones and, erm, microwave ovens. Won’t somebody think of the children?!
Small start-up producing reasonably-priced stand-up comedy DVDs from comedians who aren’t mainstream enough for high-street stores. Starting off with a set the splendid Stewart Lee. Ordered!
I was pondering what license I apply to Twadget. I think I’ve found my man.
As an occasional insomniac, I am massively jealous of Clyde's ability to just fall fast asleep, no matter where he is. Middle of the hardwood floor with no mat? No problem.
Inappropriate beverage dispensers, spotted in Target.
This is a cool new feature in ZoneTag: Gather up your location information in your cellphone (either with a Bluetooth GPS, or just by cell-tower/location matching), then upload photos taken with your regular camera to Flickr and have ZoneTag geotag them automagically.
New from The Onion: Elaborate boxes for really crappy-sounding gifts (“Salt of the Month Club”, anyone?), which you hide your real present inside. Genius!
The rumoured “All Star” edition of The Amazing Race is confirmed. I’ll wait to see the full cast-list before I get too upset.
Research project from the music & neuroimaging lab at Beth Israel Deaconess. Test your musical memory.
One of the advantages of working at a location with the street address of "The Mountain"? Getting to see some gorgeous sunsets from the parking lot.
Good article by Joel — Why *does* the Vista shutdown menu require *seven* options?
is 8208 9478 2034 3274.
If you want to see my scruffy, portly (and endearingly accurate) Mii strut his stuff in your Mii Parade, or just want to send rude messages to my TV screen, let me know your friend code.
I wore my kilt into work today, for reasons that aren't terribly interesting (let's just say I agreed to it on Saturday night after I'd imbibed some Harpoon Barleywine.)
If anyone asked, I told them it was "Sean Connery Day".
AIM/Jabber/MSN client for cellphones. Seems nicely designed, but not sure it’s worth €25 a year for the service.
“Puppet Up” — a recording of the Jim Henson Company’s puppet improv show — will be shown tonight on TBS. Improv on TV never quite works, but I’ll be watching this regardless.
I’m having lots of fun with Twitter. My “Emergency Snark Broadcast System”, if you will.
The story’s kind-of interesting (Screw-ups at the Copley Mall meant that people who waited outside for three days didn’t necessarily get a PS3, and the CT robbers), but the reason I’m blogging this? The fantastic photo illustrating the story.
Home, unpacked, and rawkin'! Four hours in the cold? Worth it!
The Wii bundle (the console plus Excite Truck and Zelda, neither of which I really wanted, but which I should be able to sell on eBay no problem), plus Super Monkey Ball and Rayman: Raving Rabbids. In my car boot. Mine!
I'm a happy camper.
Updated to add: Zelda and Excite Truck both sold on half.com in about 10 minutes, recouping my $90. Ace!
Twelfth in line. My Costco had 48 to hand out, and everyone in line at 9am got one. In fact, the manager had to stand around outside with a spare ticket until a family showed up at 9.31am and claimed the final system!
This kind gentleman showed up with a Box of Joe and donuts to share amongst the line.
The line for Wii, outside Costco in Everett MA at about 7.30am.
Originally, I was planning on going to Target, but when I got there about 6.30, they'd already handed out tickets to the line for all the systems they had. (Some students were offering to sell their places in line. I didn't bother asking for how much)
The official word from Costco earlier in the week had been that they weren't stocking Wii's in their retail stores, to avoid lines. This turned out to be untrue, as when I wandered round the corner, there were 11 people waiting, including an off-duty Costco employee who said they had 48 in stock!
Marc Hedlund’s start-up launches. Looks like an awesome light-weight social web-based finance manager, for folks for whom Quicken is too much hassle. Whether users will entrust their financial info to Web 2.0 remains to be seen.
FFS. Detailed explanation of the how’s and why’s of reading/cloning a UK RFID-chipped passport — which don’t even have the tinfoil protective cover that US passports will. “‘This doesn’t matter,’ says a Home Office spokesman.”
$20 for five experimentally-flavoured bags of Kettle Chips. Vote for your faves, and they might appear on shop shelves some day. “Royal Indian Curry” is calling my name.
Audiophiles claim that an original model Playstation, if left on for about three days to “warm up”, is an amazing sounding CD player.
The Sox today paid $51.1m for the rights to negotiate exclusively with a (reportedly outstanding) Japanese pitcher. $51.1m to *negotiate*. It will cost them many millions more to actually sign him. Wow. Just… wow.
Ouch. I’m not sure Microsoft will be happy that their launch-day feature on CNN features incredulent hosts (“Who do they think is going to buy this?”), one of whom ends the segment raving about her new teeny iPod Shuffle.
Programmers/Designers! Got an idea of something you want to build, but no time to do it? Got a hankering to build something, but no ideas? In New England? Come along to Dev House Boston on Dec 9th.
Wow. What a great move by Apple. Further domination of the iPod-only connector, plus it solves the “iPod batteries only last 4 hours when watching video, that’s too short for a long-haul flight” problem in one foul swoop.
I’m playing with Vista on my laptop, and this “improvement” from Microsoft was pissing me off. Thankfully there is a “solution”. One that is a usability nightmare waiting to happen (drag a folder too close to the edge of the screen, and it becomes a toolbar that is hard to work out how to close).
Man, I consider it a chore to have to watch SNL on TiVo each week, when I can fast-forward through it. I can’t imagine queuing up each week to go see the show live.
GUI for managing SQLite databases. Best one I’ve found, although it’s not free. Deals gracefully with the 4Gb database files we use at work.
Microsoft’s “you must buy points in $5 increments” makes sense if you consider credit-card transaction costs (I’m sure Apple loses money if you only buy one 99 cent song at a time — that’s why they batch up your transactions), but the user experience of “1.25 cents per point” is ridiculous, and probably going to bite MS.
Best SNL sketch in AGES. Sadly, I can’t find the video on YouTube, so here’s the transcript. “Bobby McFerrin raped my grandmother” has become a wholly-inappropriate running joke between Joy & myself.
The Japanese versions of the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads. They’re entertainingly precise copies of the originals.
Alarmingly prescient story from January 2001. “Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there’s much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation’s hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it.”
Login as “foo@example.com” to hear four tracks from the forthcoming old-rope-remixed disc ‘Love’. It’s not as bad as you think.
Handy guide to understand the purpose of branching in source control, and examples of how it works in Subversion.
I’m a political junkie. Election night is like my Superbowl—Watching the results trickle in, cheering on my “team”.
Which makes it odd that, aged 30, I have only twice in my life cast a vote in a political race, and the only time I did so by visiting a voting booth was in a referendum rather than an election. (In 1997, I was a student in Edinburgh, and cast my vote by proxy for my hometown MP whose seat was more marginal.)
Shortly after moving to the US eight years ago, I attempted to get my name onto the British electoral register as an overseas voter, but due to a screw-up by the registrar in Stirling I failed. Since then I haven’t bothered trying again as the new rules for registering as an overseas voter are too much hassle (involving finding a British citizen to whom I am not related). Besides, overseas voters can only vote in General Elections, not local or Scottish ones, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out on much and have just resorted to trundling along as a disenfranchised soul, grumbling occasionally about taxation without representation.
But today, I was looking at the US Immigration Services site, and realised that I will be able to apply for American citizenship in January of 2008. The naturalization process reportedly takes an average of six months so, theoretically, it is possible that I will get to have a say (beyond trying to convince Joy how to vote) in the 2008 presidential election.
(As an aside, only a true child would be amused by the fact that the final page of the official Guide to Naturalization, in an appendix giving examples of the kind of sentence you might have to write in your citizenship test to prove your English-speaking abilities, includes the sentence “The colors of the fag (sic) are red, white and blue.”)
But for now, I’m sat on the sofa with a beer, refreshing CNN.com every so often and cheering as the Democrats steal seats in the Senate, and just enjoying waiting for the victory speech from our new Governor Elect, the splendid Deval Patrick.
UPDATE: And today is my extra innings. The bases are loaded, and Webb‘s at the plate. Fantastic!
Proof that Massachusetts don’t need no stinking electronic voting machines to disenfranchise its citizens. We can disenfranchise them the good ol’ fashioned way: with paper.
NBC will stream an extended version of The Office on their website this week after the normal-length episode airs on TV. Considering how good (and plentiful) the deleted scenes are on the DVDs I’m watching, this’ll be worth checking out.
Man, this is the best sliver of pure P!O!P! gold I’ve heard in a long time. I’m going to have the chorus engraved on my tombstone.
Cool — I was getting bored of the bad Sean Connery impression on mine.
Mashing up the “leaked” (and possibly true) information on how many Wiis each branch of Target will be selling on launch day with Google Maps. I might try the Everett Target instead of the Somerville one — they’re looking to be getting almost three times as many.
New in the freezer section at Stop & Shop. "Diana Ross & The Temptations' Salisbury Steak Dinner" not pictured.
It would just seem like bragging if I were to say how many of these (at least my corner of) RhymesWithNose meets.
Spec for a forthcoming book from Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby. I look forward to finding out how to raise my web service designs above the level of “HTTP+POX”.
That mime-doing-Torn you may have seen before - extended remix with live Natalie Imbrooglywoogly.
Eyetracking survey recommends placing labels above-and-flush-left with inputs on web forms.
Cory Doctorow’s spectacularly pant-pissy and, with hindsight, almost 100% inaccurate flameout about Apple including a TPM module. I wonder if he’s had the tattoo lasered-off yet.
Really interesting article on the TPM “Trusted Computing” chip inside some Intel Macs. Explains in detail that TPM != Microsoft’s evil Palladium scheme, and that the chip (which is not in newer Macs) can’t even be accessed without special device drivers.
Ah, the pleasures of working from home. (See notes on picture.) I could get quite used to this.
Wicked-nifty Javascript UI library, generously open-sourced by Yahoo. Using this with Django and Lucene, I was able to knock out a pretty decent AJAXy autocompleting search box within 24 hours of opening my big yap in a meeting and suggesting it as a feature. (The “Design Pattern Library” is also worth a read to anyone who juggles HTML)
Could this year’s election result in a hanging-chad-like farrago which convinces the general public that electronic-voting-without-paper-trail is A Bad Thing? I don’t know whether I should hope it does or doesn’t happen.
Another great pop-culture T-shirt from Threadless. Shame it arrived a week after their $10 sale.
Rilly rilly simple DS flash cart. Plug into USB, copy over roms + MP3s, then plug into your DS. “Only” $125.
Book about Django, being written in public to encourage peer review. The commenting system is particularly clever.
This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.
I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.
