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 March 18, 2007

March 24, 2007

This American Life On Showtime

Full video of the first episode of the TV version of “This American Life”. Vaguely considering subbing up to Showtime.

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March 23, 2007

We just got xvid working on the Apple TV

So simple, it barely counts as a “hack”. If this is for real, then I’ll buy one in a heartbeat. Guess the Apple TV really *is* running OS X.

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Unusual software bug - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“A Schroedinbug is a bug that manifests itself apparently only after the software is used in an unusual way or seemingly at the point in time that a programmer reading the source code notices that the program should never have worked in the first place, at which point the program stops working entirely until the mysteriously now non-functioning code is repaired.” I’ve coded a few of these in my time.

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March 22, 2007

BarCampBoston2 Video Collage

Video snapshots from BarCampBoston2. Top middle is me over-excitedly and choppily-editedly raving about OpenID. See if you can spot the joke I stole from Simon Willison.

Media Molecule - We make games.

This month’s issue of Edge practically creams itself over the game which is now named “Little Big Planet”. Watching this preview video, it certainly looks like it could be fun, but it’s not convincing me I need to rush out and drop $600 on a PS3 like Edge suggested it would.

March 21, 2007

Desktop Tower Defense

Excellent Flash strategy-ish game which cost me about 20 minutes of productivity. So far.

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Is it possible to get a partial database-dump? - Last.fm

Last.FM confirm that, despite their claims for the last two years that “We will also provide periodic for data mining and research purposes, soon.”, they’re never going to do another Creative Commons-licensed data-dump, as the data is considered “too valuable”. This is why I’ve been scraping my real-time feed and storing it myself.

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March 20, 2007

Amazon.com: EXPRESSCARD/34-5:1 Card Reader

This SD Card reader fits flush in the ExpressCard slot on the Mac Book Pro. Well worth $20 to avoid having to carry round the USB thing I was using prior.

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Google Homepage introduces dynamic themes - Download Squad

The new Google personalised homepage themes are gorgeous. Updating them based upon time and local weather is just ridiculously lovely!

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Shouts & Murmurs: The Wisdom of Children: Humor: The New Yorker

“A Conversation at the Grownup Table, as Imagined at the Kids’ Table” “DAD: We just saw the PG-13 movie. It was so good. MOM: There was a big sex.”

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BBC NEWS | Judge rules against cheap CD site

A British online music store is being banned from purchasing cheap (legal) CDs in Hong Kong and selling them to British people cheaper than the “official” British release. How in the name of sodding fucksticks is this “copyright infringement”?!

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CRACKED.com - Sickboy Syndrome: Five Great Comedians Who've Lost It

I agree with all of them, except I never found Jim Carrey funny to begin with.

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March 19, 2007

EURion constellation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I knew of the security feature that prevents scanning/photocopying modern paper currency, but I hadn’t heard this name for it.

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March 18, 2007

twittervision

Twitter posts plotted on a world map in real-ish time.

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Pixels to Penguins

Aron Atkins’s first-prize-winning Flickr+MIDI+Tux mashup from BarCampBoston2’s Programming Contest. Enter a one-word keyword and hit the button.

BarCampBoston2 Programming Contest entries: BBQ Calculator

BarCampBoston2 Programming Contest entries: BBQ Calculator

"Boston Bar Queue Calculator". Won second place in the contest.

BarCampBoston2 Programming Contest entries: BBQ Calculator

BarCampBoston2 Programming Contest entries: BBQ Calculator

BarCampBoston2 Programming Contest entries: Match of the Penguins

BarCampBoston2 Programming Contest entries: Match of the Penguins

BarCampBoston2 Programming Contest entries: Geneguin

BarCampBoston2 Programming Contest entries: Geneguin

Voice-Recognized Calculator-Barbecued Genetically-evolved Penguin

BarCampBoston2 Programming Contest entries: Geneguin

BarCampBoston2 Programming Contest entries: Geneguin

BarCampBoston2 Programming Contest entries: Pixels to Penguins

BarCampBoston2 Programming Contest entries: Pixels to Penguins

By Aron of Spot Story. Takes a text entry, finds related tags, loads photos with those tags into an image of Tux, and plays a MIDI track based on it. Won first place in the contest.

Qualitative Methods for Quantitative People: Instructions

Qualitative Methods for Quantitative People: Instructions

Qualitative Methods for Quantitative People: Shoes

Qualitative Methods for Quantitative People: Shoes

Qualitative Methods for Quantitative People

Qualitative Methods for Quantitative People

Mel Chua leading the QMfQP session.

Messed-up sticker printing.

Messed-up sticker printing.

These are two of the original batch of stickers I got from PSPrint. (The middle logo is a printout on work laser printer). As you can see, the rich emerald green of the BCB2 logo got printed as a dirty greenish-gray.

Luckily, PSPrint were incredibly lovely and helpful in trying to rectify this at high speed, printing and shipping out replacements that were delivered Saturday morning.

Geneguin

Geneguin

Clearly some people are taking the BCB2 programming contest with the seriousness it deserves.

BarCampBoston2 laptop sticker

BarCampBoston2 laptop sticker

Alas, I didn't have them in time for Day 1, but the laptop stickers have arrived and I'll be handing them out today.

BarCampBoston - DayOneLinkDump

BarCampBoston2 got of to a roaring, if less-busy-than-planned-due-to-weather, start today.

First of all, the most important link—the one that I was asked for repeatedly throughout the day—is the source of the lolcats that I used to help time the 10-Second Introductions. You can find all the anthropomorphized cats you desire at I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?.

Onto less important matters… OpenID! If you want, you can grab a copy of my slides (though they are hopefully relatively useless if you didn’t see me present). Useful OpenID links:

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to exhume the presentation I gave last year, as I’ll be giving it again tomorrow morning due to “popular demand” (ie. one person asked me).


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.