The most valuable supply of worthlessness on the web
Here’s a pic of my littlest one pretending to be grown up and singing in church a couple weeks ago.
I should point out that he just turned 5 at the start of the month, and can’t actually read yet. So cute as this is, it’s just him imitating his mother.
[tags]My children, Church, singing[/tags]
An introduction to PSP homebrew gaming
OK, so on this paper cutter at the office, there’s this interesting little cap over the spring attached to the blade handle. Am I the only person who sees a problem with this?
So, um, how exactly would someone know they should not use the cutter if the guard weren’t in place when they arrived? Maybe a label on the cutting board warning against using the cutter if the spring guard is not in place?
[tags]Stupid, Cutter, Do not operate, User interface, Design flaws[/tags]
Results from a badly worded survey are in, and if the numbers are to be believed (hint: they aren’t to be believed), approximately 50% of Floridians are in favor of teaching creationism in place of evolution as science
.
Only 22 percent want public schools to teach an evolution-only curriculum, while 50 percent want only faith-based theories such as creationism or intelligent design, according to a new St. Petersburg Times survey.
Here’s a clue. If you only use penicillin to deal with your occasional infection, you can make a reasonable claim that you don’t buy in to the theory of evolution. If, however, you use such as Azithromycin, Ciprofloxacin, Amoxicillin, or any of the other updated penicillin alternatives or medications which fight some of the same classes of illness, then you are getting medicated based on evolution theory. If there were no evolution, you wouldn’t need to fight penicillin-resistant medications, as penicillin would always work against the class of ailments for which penicillin worked many years ago.
If you want to believe in some higher power, that’s great. But don’t confuse faith issues with science and try to get evolution taken out of school just because the science disagrees with your faith. If you feel children must be taught Intelligent Design or Creationism, take them to church and get your Sunday School teachers to educate them. Because as appealing as these concepts are, they are most certainly not science.
I lack the proper command of the language and sufficient depth in the subject to write a very good post about this, but I do know the difference between science and non-science, and am so tired of people trying to teach one as the other. (via Pharyngula)
[tags]Pharyngula, Science, Evolution, Creationism, Intelligent Design[/tags]
Web-based gaming for a slightly more hard-core market
Folks, please don’t be this driver:
You know, there are only 3 facts you need to know about Ninja:
So when one shows up on Staten Island robbing houses, you know eventually someone is going to end up dead. It hasn’t happened yet, but someday…
[liveleak 8c3_1191087140]
Phear the Ninja, people.
[tags]Ninja, Real Ultimate Power, Staten Island, LiveLeak, Video[/tags]
Posted this long ago to a site version lost in a failed webhost. Shootin’ Starz – simple yet appealing
Please give me a way to save my default station and frikkin’ volume level on my Zune. The damn thing has a hard drive.  Surely there’s a few bits of space on it to save that information. And I don’t give a rat’s ass about the solid-state Zune owners – satisfy my desires to make this ultimate in poor design media player a little less phail. Given how incredibly quickly the battery drains unless I fully shut the device down and lock the controls, I have to suffer a reboot and ear-drum breaking volume setting on a static filled non-station every time I want to listen to the radio or my stored music.
I won’t even go in to other problems I’ve found since I first complained about how bad this device is, but know that I keep finding things to dislike about the implementation. Yes, I keep using it. But I recommend buying a different player to people who ask me about it, and I’m kinda invested for $100 that I hate to just toss, because it does function as a radio just fine once I set my station (although there are bad choices in the radio interface, but that should be no surprise given how many bad choices were made with this device).
Honestly, sometimes I even surprise myself with the subjects that I find interesting. Quite randomly, I recently found this very short, but very cool article on work around the world (well, at least a couple of locations) to build the world’s largest ferris wheel. A ride that had fallen out of favor some years ago, the ferris wheel seems to be suffering, you might say, a resurgence in interest since the London Eye opened a few years ago.
The larger these monstrous rides become, the greater their capacity and potential profitâ€â€and the more seriously builders take them. To start, they don’t call them Ferris wheels. “We categorize them as ‘observational wheels’ because of the capsules,†says Alexander Pieper, spokesman for the Great Wheel Corporation, which developed the Singapore, Dubai and Beijing wheels.
My bad. The world’s largest observational wheel. It’s hardly an article, being no more than sidebar length for any magazine publication, but I found the accompanying illustration (captured in part above) to be chock full of useless cool knowledge. For instance, the original ferris wheel, the Eagle 16 noted in the illustration, made a revolution in a mere 12 seconds. Now, it’s around half an hour start to finish on the giants. To borrow a phrase from Keanu Reeves – Whoa.
[tags]Ferris Wheel, Observational wheels, Singapore Flyer, London Eye, Beijing Great Wheel, Extreme Engineering[/tags]
Celebrate the oddity of love’s expression that is Valentine’s Day with Yahoo! Movie’s look at the 10 most mismatched movie couples.
Dan Aykroyd & Rosie O’Donnell
Exit to Eden – 1994
“Exit to Eden” was a dark, romantic novel by “Interview With a Vampire” author Anne Rice about bondage and S&M. Who better, then, to turn it into a movie than the creator of “Mork and Mindy?” An even better question: what movie executive thought that the formula for box office gold was putting Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O’Donnell in skimpy studded leather outfits? As the comic relief they are painfully unfunny, and not even the kind of painful that a dominatrix would enjoy.
Also making the list are painful pairs like Hayden Christiansen and Natalie Portman (I adore her, but he is Gore-like in his woodenness), and the laughably bad Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck coupling in Gigli. A couple of the movie couples feel almost like “We can’t come up with couple 9 and 10 – throw some forgettable pair in.” Otherwise, it’s dirty-laundry comforting to see where others agree with your feelings.
[tags]Yahoo!, Movies, Mismatched couples, Valentine’s day[/tags]
I hadn’t even heard of this before, but for all you Linux-lovers out there, work is being done to get KDE running on Microsoft Windows. If I get a bit of time to work on this, I’m going to try it on one of my systems and see how it goes. I suspect it will make it easier for me to get the family ported to Linux based systems at home.
So how did I learn about this? Why would I care? Well, MrCopilot has a good, moderate length write-up on his experience with installing and using KDE for Windows. This is a port that has been in-process for quite a while, because, let’s face it, porting a full development library set like KDE and supporting libs is a big undertaking. But after showing a few screens of the install, he gets right to the meat of the experience. What works?
Quite a lot actually. See below for Screenshots of included apps that work. Almost all the apps shipped “work”. Two are all but useless due to bugs. The rest seem to function perfectly as long as you don’t need to refer to Help. Fortunately most apps have an online help while this bug gets ironed out.
And he shows a lot of what does work, what standard KDE tools and apps are included, and so on. But first, he has to answer the opposing question – what doesn’t work?
Sound, at least on my setup there was no sound, any application that tried to make a peep instead produced this error message. Most Apps let you disable sound.
. . .
Konqueror – KDE’s Swiss Army Knife, Web Browser, File Manager, FTP Client, Embedded File Viewer, Etc … Unfortunately on my Windows box it is reduced to a Web Browser (without Flash support) and a Menu Explorer (without being able to launch anything.)
And a few other things that would probably be minor to most folks. I always like the concept of changing my Windows interface, but the fact that it doesn’t follow me to other machines really hinders my enjoyment of that idea. This is why I don’t use Stardock’s GUI re-skinner or desktop customizer tools, as much as I like the company, the concept, and the cost.  Of course, that means there’s a good chance I would try this and not stick with it. But again, the concept is appealing, and the more universal desktop experience this could enable at home when I move between Windows and Linux is very appealing to me.
And I’m hopeful that developments like this will push content creators (read “developers”) to put out more portable, cross-platform software. Once the support libraries are more globally available, it should make it easier for more globally portable software, right? I mean, I know it’s not a case of “Well, the libraries are there, so *POOF* our software now works on 12 different operating systems.” But as middleware and support libraries become more portable, I would think that applications would naturally follow to become multi-platform entities. So I will be watching KDE for Windows as it is worked on to see if this does anything to improve computing for the masses. I’m hopeful, but I realize what an uphill battle that change will be.
