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.
Fab thoughtful piece by Robin Sloan, delivered in an innovative form.
OS X screensaver that shows your friends’ Instagram shots. Lovely!
Beautiful social news gathering tool for iPad. Feeds are “curated” using Twitter lists, giving buttloads of flexibility. (Sadly the social part is buggered at the moment, as they didn’t account for all the iPad users out there)
Unrelated: New goal in life: Create a product that is cool, then get Adam Lisagor to make the promo video.
The free game is not a lie! To encourage download of Steam, Valve is giving Portal away for free for the next two weeks. If you haven’t already played it, YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE NOT TO.
Robin’s novella is now available as a CC-licensed PDF file. I’m about halfway through reading my copy, and proud to have been part of the Kickstarter project that funded it.
Perfect for copying onto your Kindle before you board a flight this festive season!
I love my new Magic Mouse, but was missing my middle click. This app adds it back. Hooray!
Free car routing app for iPhone, which is using game mechanics (points & leaderboards) to crowd-source maps and traffic info. Initial prodding suggests it’s not ready for prime-time — you’re better off waiting for protonerds to fill up their data banks — but it might be worth watching in the future.
Plants vs Zombies is now playable online for free. If you haven’t already had a shot, you’re a fool.
OS X Safari users: Install this! Blocks Flash until you click on the object in Safari (and other WebKit-based applications). A way to mitigate the risk of the Flash exploit without completely nuking Flash Player from your machine.
/me steps on log cabin
Fantastic, highly-addictive and free tower-defense game for iPhone. After three (almost half-hour each) games, having trouble beating Level 30 on Easy.
Update your OS X Address Book with photos and birthdays from your friends’ Facebook pages (sadly, Facebook bars it from doing anything useful, like updating email addresses and phone numbers)
In ye olde days, displaying PDF documents in the browser drove me nuts. You’d unwittingly click on a link, and your entire web browser would freeze up for 30 seconds while Adobe Reader started. But since PDF is baked so closely into the OS X system, this Firefox plugin is wicked fast, and thoroughly helpful.
Testing tool for iPhone development — Replace your mouse cursor with a lifesize finger. Needs a dirty-fingernail easter egg, if you ask me.
Command line tool for interrogating and diffing Time Machine backups.
Another NIN album released for free download under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. It should be noted that Ghosts I-IV was the first NIN album I’ve ever bought, after enjoying its free release earlier this year.
The excellent TrueCrypt now runs on OS X, as well as Windows and Linux. I’ll definitely be shunting some of my files onto an encrypted thumbdrive later.
Cool prototype application by Tom Insam which monitors your foreground application in OS X, and tries to provide you some context by matching it to someone in your Address Book. It’s early days yet, but decidedly cool (and written in Python)
Freeware CD burner app for Windows. If this means I can nuke bloody Nero off my work PC, I’ll be a happy, happy man.
Free development environment for Python code under .NET. Will definitely be having an in-depth play with this soon.
The project formerly known as “Piano Hero”.
OS X screensaver which grabs your friends’ photos from Facebook. Playing with this, I was reminded that a) I have some incredibly hot friends and b) I have some incredibly strange friends.
Dashboard widget for the JQuery docs.
Plugin for Apple Mail which allows you to quickly tag/file/act-on your emails with a couple of keystrokes. I’d been looking for something like this for a while.
Simple easy-to-get-started programming tutorial, based upon Ruby and Mozilla. Written by “Why the Lucky Stiff”. The “Hackety Manifesto” is worth reading.
From the “about bloody time” file, a plugin from Microsoft for Firefox which allows WMV files to stream in your browser. This has been broken (and required lots of DLL copying) for years.
Open source Worms-a-like. Far too many of my student hours were taken up playing “Worms 2” against my flatmates. Admittedly, most of that time was taken up by giggling as we named our worms things like “Sean Is A Virgin” and “Jim’s Cock”, but I think the game was fun too.
Sit through three “webcasts” on “exciting” “new” Microsoft “technology”, and get a free legitimate license for Windows Vista and/or Office 2007.
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)
MS’s anti-spyware app is out of beta. Go install it on your relatives’ PCs post-haste.
Really frickin’ good Photomosaic-making software. I’ve been having lots of fun with this, using around 15,000 album covers as the “tiles”, and it does an bang-up job, without “cheating” by tinting or repeating images (like some other software does).
New version of WinAmp (Remember them? It’s like an iPod, except you can’t carry it around with you. Ask your parents) includes “remote listening” — Stream music from your home PC to wherevers. Since Apple kept disabling hacks that did this with iTunes, I’m curious how AOL think they’re going to be able to keep this “legit”
” Writing songs about corporate malfeasance so you don’t have to!”. Free net-neutrality MP3 from Jill Sobule, Kay Hanley and Michelle Lewis.
Free disposable voicemail that you can get forwarded to you automatically via email. Feel free to spam me with WAV files at (617) 440-3295.
Interesting offering from the Googleplex — Sync your bookmarks, saved passwords and cookeis across your Firefox installations, via Google’s big-ass database in the sky. If there were a way to do this using my own server, I’d be all over it.
Win32 remote controller for Slimserver. I now have toast popping up on track changes, which makes me happy.
Rhapsody try to keep themselves relevant — You can now listen to 25 full tracks without even signing up. So I could link to an album, and you could legally listen to the whole thing in your browser for free. Will this lead to thousands of folk linking to Rhapsody?
jwz’s awesome screensaver collection is now available for OSX. Windows users are still SOL. “There is no Windows version of xscreensaver, and there never will be. Please stop asking. Microsoft killed my company, and I hold a personal grudge.”
Distributed P2Pish secure backups. You give up 10Gb of your hard drive, for the rights to distribute 1Gb of your files across hundreds of peers. Sadly Windows-only, and there’s no way to tweak how much *bandwidth* you’re willing to give up, but could come in handy.
Bootdisk that fits on a 1.44Mb floppy which securely nukes every scrap of data off of hard drives. Handy to have if you’re about to sell an old computer.
Interesting attempt to add more social context (eg. trust, recommendations) to BitTorrent donwnloads.
Fantastic news: VMWare are making their server product free(beer). I’m almost certainly going to use this for a dev server at work — Backup the virtual machine image every night, and if hardware crashes, just startup your backed-up image on a new machine. Also gets around the “You can’t create an image” limitation of the free VMWare Player app.
Really awesome looking self-hosted feed reader. I’ve been using Feed on Feeds for the last month or so, but this looks light-years ahead of it.
Open-source whole-disk encryption package for Windows. Perfect for keeping your USB keychain drive safe from prying eyes.
Ooh. This is just supersmart! A Firefox plugin which works out when you’re on a site with multiple pages to a story (or search results), and lets you flip through them with keyboard shortcuts. This makes TWoP much easier to read. Hurrah!
Podcast promising a new CC-licensed indie MP3 tune every day of 2006. I’m really looking forward to this.
Google continues their quest to consume every nibble of data on the internet — This time, site access logs.
Microsoft have release the various versions of Visual Studio Express for free. Very smart move on their part — It reduces the cost of Windows programming to essentially zero for those who aren’t willing to pay, and MS can make up the money with their “professional” Team solutions and MSDN subscriptions.
Free ebook on the hows and wherefores of running an open source project, from someone who’s been round the block a couple of times.
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.