Rod Begbie

I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

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.

Entries for week beginning May 14, 2006

➠ May 20, 2006

MacSaber: Turn Your Mac Into A Jedi Weapon

Hah! Using the motion-sensor built-in to recent Mac laptops to synthesize lightsaber noises. Genius!

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Apple Store - Fifth Avenue

Apple is posting time-lapse videos of the first 24 hours outside their new NYC store. Respect is due to the person in that 5am video who uses the camera to propose marriage!

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➠ May 19, 2006

Eurovision Song Contest

Hooray! The annual tacky-fest is tomorrow. The question on everyone’s lips: Since Cyprus hasn’t made the final, who will Greece give their “douze points” to?

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Jinjur: Welcome to Eltingville

Failed pilot for an animated series based on Evan Dorkin’s “Eltingville Comic Book, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Role-Playing Club”. Most of my Star Wars trivia knowledge comes from reading those strips.

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Bacon and his Bone

Bacon and his Bone

Bacon has had this bone since February. He hides it, then a few hours later "finds" it again, before marching around the house with it for a few minutes looking for a new hiding place. Ad nauseam.

My parents' dogs got similar bones, which they devoured in five minutes flat. I like to think that Bacon's just making economical use of the entertainment value of his bone.

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Curmudgeon Gamer: History of Console Prices

Absolute and relative pricing of consoles on their US launches. Interesting fact: Every Nintendo console (NES, SNES, N64 and Gamecube) has launched at the $200 mark. Wonder what the Wii will cost…

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➠ May 18, 2006

Illuminating the shadows: Opportunistic network and web measurement

Stanford research project (from the folks behind the Coral caching system) tracing the outer leaves of the internet.

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Refund Me Do

I’ve linked to it before, but I want to give another shout out to Refund Please, a site that tracks your Amazon purchases and tells you if any have dropped in price. Amazon has a no-quibble refund-the-difference policy if they drop the price within 30 days—You just have to contact them and ask.

Last week, I got $6 back from four CDs that had become discounted since I’d bought them, and yesterday, it alerted me that the Shop-Vac I picked up on Tuesday for $99.95 had plummeted a whopping $24 in one day!

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JungleDisk - Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3™

Cross-platform mountable network file-system storing your precious data with Amazon’s S3 service.

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➠ May 17, 2006

jQuery: New Wave Javascript

Javascript toolkit. I don’t need all the fancypants “Make text swoop in” stuff, but the DOM querying syntax looks dead handy.

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YUI Tetris!

Tetris implemented in XHTML and Javascript, thanks to Yahoo’s javascript UI libraries.

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Flickr: The Edinburgh Cow Parade Pool

Edinburgh’s been infested with cows. This is happening in Boston this summer too.

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➠ May 16, 2006

Flickr: Advanced Photo Search

Best feature of the Flickr “Gamma”? Proper fulltext search functionality, including Creative Commons searching. Huzzah!

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The Daily Show Effect: Candidate Evaluations, Efficacy, and American Youth

“Overall, the findings … show that for young people, no other news source drives cynicism toward the candidates and the political system more than The Daily Show.”

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Apple - MacBook

My next laptop. I love the fact that they’ve made the black shell a “premium” offering, costing $150 more than the equivalent white. They’ve managed to make a black Macbook into a status symbol!

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Google Notebook

Google’s new “Gather webpages and search results” tool is launched. I quite like it — It’s a different approach than del.icio.us (there’s no tagging, and you’re not limited to sorting by time), but I think it might fit in with people’s usage a lot better.

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➠ May 15, 2006

Tabblo: Poster Child | Boston WTF

glenn’s written an excellent review of new photo-sharing site Tabblo for BostonWTF.

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TechCrunch » Moola’s Interesting Business Model

Hooray! It’s the first fucking idiotic, easily-gamable, pyramid-scheme, AllAdvantage-style “We’ll pay you to watch ads” business model of the new bubble.

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13 Shocking Secrets You’ll Wish You Never Knew About Lemony Snicket

PDF containing new clues and details regarding the upcoming final book in the Series of Unfortunate Events (Due out Friday the 13th October)

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No running, shouting or piddling in the shallow end.

No running, shouting or piddling in the shallow end.

Our basement, with the delightful addition of a couple of inches of floodwater. Every hardware store in the area is sold out of pumps, so we're waiting for the fire department to pop round and help us out. Oh, the joys of homeownership.

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Snap

Snap (the olde Idealab search site) has relaunched. It’s an endearingly different approach, and good for browsing, but I imagine it’s be a PITA when doing in-depth technical searches.

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Free calls to all landlines and mobile phones within the US and Canada - Skype Blogs

US Skype users can now use it to phone anywhere in the US or Canada. This is going to be painful for the mobile companies — I’m sure a large part of their money comes from people using the “free” longdistance that your minutes bring.

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Life After the Video Game Crash

Fun rant predicting an impending crash. “We’ve now advanced from realistic 3D to slightly prettier 3D and… even slightlier prettier 3D with slightly better reflection effects and slightly better animated water ripples and - oh, look! This game has the most realistic fog yet!”

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Fancy Pants Adventure

Enjoyable hand-drawn Flash platformer.

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DailyTech - Pirate Windows? Buy The Retail Version at a $100 Discount

If MS detect you running a pirate copy of Windows XP, they’ll try to sell you a discounted legal copy. Smart.

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➠ May 14, 2006

"Lock The Vault? What Kind Of Maniac Would Steal Money From A Bank?"

Diebold voting machines are found to be easily re-flashable by anyone wanting to invisibly rig an election. Diebold spokesman: “I don’t believe these evil elections people exist.” I have not the words.

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Fare comment! BBC interviews cabbie by mistake

This is just splendid in ways unimaginable. A cabdriver who was in the BBC’s reception area was rushed onto air by mistaken producers, thinking he was an internet expert to talk about the Apple vs. Apple case. Full marks to the bloke for struggling through the interview despite being clearly horrified!

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SNL: If Al Gore were President

Nicely done parallel-universe cold-open from last night’s SNL.

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About This Site

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.

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