Prepare for geek war

The USB Missile Launcher just got wireless - prepare for fun battles at the office :)

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Photographs by Nick Brandt

Check out his gallery for more stunning photographs.

Stephane Halleux sculptures

I just browsed by some really amazing sculptures made by Stephane Halleux - a French sculpture artist.

Robot spider by Stephane Halleux. Don't forget to check out all the other creations.

Asciimation - ASCII animated Star Wars

I stumbled upon the Beer Brewing Bender Project and found out that Simon Jansen also previously worked on an ASCII animated version of the Star Wars movie. I remember browsing by the Asciimation webpages years ago thinking that this guy had too much spare time. Looking at his other projects it seems that he has way too much spare time :)

Awsome- although I personally prefer the real stuff.

The art of beer making - part 1

After months of speculation I finally went to the local supermarket and bought a Micro Brew Kit from Coopers. The total costs were about 55 USD and the kit included the following:

• 1 plastic fermenter (30 liter)
• 1 airlock
• brewing sugar
• carbonation drops
• 1 adhesive digital thermometer
• 1 hydrometer
• 1 plastic spoon
• 30 plastic bottles (740ml)

The kit also included an instructional video (VHS) which turned out to be completly useless since I don't own a VCR anymore (it broke down ages ago). More importantly, the kit included a can of Coopers Lager Home Brew (1.7 kg malt extract and some yeast) for making the first brew. Since I'm not a big fan of regular lager, I will save the lager can for some future experiements and try out a wheat beer or a stout instead (I will report back when the brewing will commence).

Finally ready to unwrap my pre-Christmas present.

The beginners kit in all its glory.

Top-down view.

Binary marble adding machine

Some people just have too much spare time. Check out this website for more information.

Win virtual money...

Try out this Flash-based Blackjack game. Watch out - it is very addictive.

Also, check out this website for more information about Blackjack strategies and odds.

Virtual slipstick for Mac

Why use modern calculators when it is more fun playing around with slide rule devices. Caveman’s Calc for Mac OS X makes it possible to play around with this incredible device while still having the comforts of modern technology nearby.

Caveman’s Calc.

Stick figures fight by Xiao Xiao

You can find more animated movies by Xiao Xiao here.

Stickmen by Christopher Ford

Apple.

Spikes.

Want more? Check out http://www.fordcomic.com

Roller Coaster Tycoon slaughter

Quote from The Last Boss:

Anyone who has purchased a Roller Coaster Tycoon game has made a demonically evil or outright broken roller coaster on purpose before, just to see dozens of carnival casualties, but this video has to be the one that defines them all. Watch as an amusement park is constructed of only one small walkway that methodically aligns itself with the dead end of the uncompleted roller coaster killing machine. He politely waits for the amusement park to fill up, giving them all free balloons, and then . . . kills every single person.

Exact + attitudes = exactitudes

exactitudes.

Make your own Pong arcade game

Ronald Dekker has managed to make the world's smallest microcontroller based Pong game. For more details and downloads to diagrams and PONG code check out µPONG.

Complete &microPONG with control units.

Flash Earth - satellite and aerial photos of the Earth in Flash

Flash Earth is a Flash-based application providing an interactive map of the world using satellite and aerial data from Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, NASA, etc.

Flash Earth.

mimobots - USB flash drives for rich kids

Just stumpled upon this weird collection of mimobots - expensive USB flash drives for people with an urge to spend money on weird gadgets. I particularly like the Darth Vader mimobot although it reminds me more of a mixture between Cat Woman and a Pokémon character :)

Darth Vader minobot by mimoco.

PaintBrush - MS Paint for Mac OS X

Yet another bitmap image editor for Mac OS X has been released - PaintBrush is similar to the (in)famous MacPaint and MS Paint that we all both love and hate (mostly hate :)

PaintBrush 1.0

If you want something more sophisticated, I can highly recommend Pixen and Seashore for Mac OS X or Paint.NET for Windows. Another very cool painting program worth looking into is ArtRage - available for both Mac OS X and Windows.

//DeletedImages - a sanctuary for blurry and unfocused pictures

Quote from DeletedImages.com:

DeletedImages.com brings unsharp, moved, blurry and unfocused pictures back to life. So before you delete you images on your camera. Have another look and start sharing what you would have deleted with the rest of the world.

Wow - sounds like the perfect place to waste a few hours :-)

Deleted 0361.

Snacks for hardware nerds

Selfillumination

'Big Brother' is watching your Mac

Slife is an activity browser for Mac OS X that makes it possible to monitor your computer activites in an easy way (the screenshot below shows a few of my typical activities).

You can even share the information with your friends and colleages so they can see how much time you spend on surfing the Internet instead of doing your job :)

Unfortunately, the free version of Slife only allows you to monitor 3 applications making it rather useless but the registered version will certainly be a handy tool for control freaks :)

Slife 1.1 screenshot.

The Falkirk Wheel

The Falkirk Wheel - a rotating boat lift located in central Scotland is an amazing constuction. Not convinced yet? Then check out this movie showing the wheel in action.

The Falkirk_Wheel.

Virtual paper tossing

If you are getting bored at work, you can now improve your paper tossing abilities without being spotted by your colleages. Try out this Flash game and see how good (or bad) you really are.

Another, Flash game taking wind speed into account is Paper Toss. Happy tossing...

Get your 15 seconds of fame

Visit www.15x15.org for more info.

Room for one more?

RegExplorer v1.0 released

The first official version of RegExplorer was released today (finally :). See the RegExplorer blog for more details.

RegExplorer screenshot (Mac OS X).

Human space invaders

Wanted - dead or alive

Today I stumpled upon Ultimate Flash Face which is a great online tool for making wanted posters. I played around with it for a few minutes and came up with this fictitious person (perfect look for a Dirty Harry sequel :)

BTW: This picture is not a self-portrait!

You can also spice up the poster and make it more western like using the Wanted Poster Generator.

Pong on steroids

Plasma Pong is a new variation of the good old Pong using real-time fluid dynamics to speed up the game play.

Quote from the Plasma Pong website:

'Players have several new abilities that add fun twists to the classic game. In the game you can inject plasma fluid into the environment, create a vacuum from your paddle, and blast shockwaves into the playing area. All these abilities have fluid-based kinetic effects on the ball, making Plasma Pong a fast-paced and exciting game.'

See more screenshots here.

Create 'icns' icons from images

I was looking for a simple utility that allowed me to convert some png images to icns icons. I did some Googling and found img2icns, which is a tool made for that particular purpose.

img2icns screenshot.

Making your desktop dynamic

If you are not satisfied with your static desktop wallpaper you can use Wallsaver to spice up your desktop. Wallsaver makes it possible to run your favorite screensaver full-time on your Mac OS X desktop.

'Flurry' screensaver running...

Wallsaver looks quite nice but I turned it off after a while since the screensaver distracted me too much :)

Mouse gestures for Mac OS X

While I was trying out the new Safari 3 (Public Beta) browser, I really missed mouse gestures that I have been using in Firefox for a long time (and which I cannot do without!).

However, adding mouse gestures to Safari (and all other Mac applications) turned out to be quite simple. The shareware program xGestures makes it possible to define gestures for individual programs and map them to useful functions.

After defining various gestures (e.g. Back, Forward, New Tab, Close Tab), Safari became quite useful but I still prefer Firefox because of the massive amount of indispensable Add-ons available.

Goodbye Tumblr

Today I made the final transition from Tumblr to Blogger - moving my relatively new tumblerlog to this location. I liked the simplicity of Tumblr with the very Mac-like interface etc. but the simple design failed in the end (I needed a 'blog'). Two things I really missed with Tumblr was the option to add labels for my postings and a simple archive for browsing old postings. The only thing I miss on Bloogger is the option to have a few static webpages (currently solved by linking to other blogs on Blogger :)

I also replaced the header image since someone found it too obscene. The new one is made using NodeBox.

Testing regular expressions (II)

Since I wasn't able to find a suitable (and stable!) regular expression utility for Mac OS X - I decided to write one myself. It took me a few hours of programming (using C++ and Qt) and I'm very satisfied with the result so far :)

The program is called RegExplorer and it is based on the built-in QRegExp functionality provided with Qt. Basically, the user can type in his or hers favorite regular expression and the program will validate it and highlight matching patterns in a text sample. Previous expressions are stored and can be retrieved from the combobox and the number of matches found is shown in the status bar. The application will be available free of charge (for Mac, Windows, and Linux) when I have found a nice application icon :-)

RegExplorer

Testing regular expressions (I)

Today, I was looking for a simple utility that I could use for testing (and experimenting) with Regular Expressions. For Windows, Regulator is the obvious choice but for Mac OS X several small utilities exists. Here is a list of some of the hits reported by Google:

• Reggy 1.1
  
• RegexTester 1.0
  
• RegExpress 1.2
  
• RegExToolbox
  
• Regex Widget
  

Some of them should be considered work in progress. In some cases, closing 'about' or 'preference' dialogs also closed the main application :) From the list above I would recommend Regex Widget and Reggy although Reggy often crashed on my MacBook.

Reggy

RegExp Widget

MAME for Mac OS X

The Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) makes it possible to revive the glorious moments from your childhood where you most certainly (if you can remember Commodore, Atari, and Amstrad) played on the video arcade games arranged in the back of the local 'grill bar'. For Windows I always used Mame32 and when I switched to a PowerBook and Mac OS X, I found MacMame to be a reasonable substitute for Mame32. Unfortunately, MacMame is not a Universal Binary, so I had to use something else when I switched to an Intel-based MacBook (I'm not too fond of Rosetta). Fortunately, MAME OS X - a native OS X port of MAME is being actively developed. Compared with MacMame, it is designed to take advantage of all the latest OS X technologies, such as Core Video and Core Image making rather useless visual effects (see below) possible. Overall the program works very well when not playing around with visual effects too much...

Playing 1942 with bloom, edges, and cube visual effects.

Context Free Art

Context Free is a program that makes it possible to edit and render Context Free Design Grammars (CFDG). In short, CFDG are sets of non-deterministic rules that are used to generate images. With only a few rules it is possible to make amazing art beyond imagination. Be warned - the program is very addictive!

See gallery for more CFDG examples.

For Python evangelists, NodeBox offers a more low-level programming approach than Context Free with the possibility to create very cool pictures.

Remember Fractint back in the MS DOS era? GNU XaoS has gone a step further with fractal generation and rendering. To summarize, GNU XaoS XaoS is an interactive fractal zoomer, which renders the fractal in real-time while the user explores the fractal universe by zooming in and out of user-selected areas of interest. The program is licensed under GPL and is available on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux platforms.

GNU XaoS for Mac OS X.

Commodore 64 nostalgia (II)

If you simply cannot get enough of the groovy music from the good old Commodore 64, you should take a look at the Danish Commodore 64 revival band: PESS PLAY ON TAPE.

ImageWell - free image editing for Mac OS

I was looking for a handy application for editing my photos and stumbled upon ImageWell. ImageWell is not as fancy as Photoshop but it is very useful for everyday tasks, such as resizing, cropping, and rotating images. You can save the images in PNG, JPEG, or TIFF format and even add watermarks (for very secret or copyrighted stuff :) Oh, I forgot to mention that ImageWell is freeware and available for Mac OS X only.

ImageWell for Mac OS X.

Alternative Clocks for the iPod generation

Do you also fell that conventional clocks are too boring and too mainstream. Well, if you are looking for new ways of spending your time without knowing what time it is...you should take a look at the three rather innovative clocks below. You can get both the Polar Clock and the Grid-Based Clock as screensavers for Mac OS X and Windows.

A classic battle between Steve and Bill

Commodore 64 nostalgia (I)

Do you remember the good old tunes accompanying the classic C64 games? Would you like to revive them? Yes, I assume that you are very interested in hearing soundtracks from great games, such as Commando, Burning Rubber, Flying Shark, Into the Eagle's Nest, Nemesis, Spy Hunter, Wonderboy, Tiger Mission, and my all time favorite Who Dares Wins. Well, I could go on forever...

For Mac OS X, you can use SIDPLAY to play C64 songs. SIDPLAY is a Commodore 64 music player that emulates the C64 sound chip (SID). You can get most of the classic tracks from The High Voltage SID Collection, which contains more than 33,000 titles keeping you busy for a long time :)

SIDPLAY for Mac OS X.

Detecting LCD pixel errors

Just came across LCDTest, a Mac OS X application for detecting pixel errors, checking color transitions, etc. by providing various test patterns. Fortunately, I didn't have any pixel errors on my MacBook. Unfortunately, I have encountered the infamous display flickering problem.

Analyzing web traffic using Google Analytics

If you are looking for an easy-to-use-and-free online tool for analyzing your website, Google Analytics is certainly worth trying out. It has been around for quite a while but the latest update offers a complete rewrite of the user interface (using Flash) which is really cool. Tempted? Take the guided tour and sign up afterwards :)

Uphold the law - protect your Mac!

iAlertU is the computer incarnation of a car alarm for your Apple MacBook (or MacBook Pro). The program triggers both audible and visual alarms if movement of your laptop is detected (using the built-in sudden motion sensor). The alarm can also be triggered by keyboard and mouse/trackpad movement. iAlertU also utilizes the built in iSight camera to take a photo of the intruder and email it to a user specified email account...see example below!

iAlertU can be activated and deactivated using the infrared remote control (or using the keyboard), which makes it perfect for protecting your personal information when going out for lunch. Instead of switching to the login window and typing in your password when you return - you simply press the menu button on the remote control. Life could not be easier :)


See Stupid Apple Remote Tricks for a short introduction to other applications of the Apple Remote.

Smultron - a nice TextEdit replacement

If you are looking for a text editor with features, such as tabs, syntax coloring, text replacement using regular expressions etc. but are reluctant to install e.g. Emacs look no further. For Windows, Notepad++ is the best choice that I can think of (and it is free!). For Mac OS X, I have been searching google for a Notepad++ look-alike. Finally, I found a nice TextEdit replacement - Smultron (also available free of charge :)

For programming, I always use the built-in editor provided by Xcode which works very well (after a few shortcut modifications :)

Integrate SVN into the Mac OS X Finder

After a long time of envying Windows developers, it is now possible to integrate Subversion into the Mac OS X Finder using the SCPlugin (note: it was somewhat possible beforehand but now it actually works). The current version is still far from the superiour TortoiseSVN with respect to everything but the new development team behind SCPlugin is making nice progress. Other Subversion clients, such as
svnX or the built-in features of Xcode are also highly recommended.

Channel Frederator - free cartoon podcasting

Control the Mac OS X startup sound

Are you also very annoyed by the startup sound when booting up Mac OS X on your MacBook? Look no further, StartupSound.prefPane is here to help you :)

Max - CD ripper for Mac OS X

If you are not thrilled with the built-in CD-ripping features of iTunes, Max is a good alternative. I can also highly recommend CDex if you are using Windows.

Snap Shots...

Just added Snap Shots to my Tumblr template which shows nice visual previews of posted links.

Cyberduck - a free FTP client for Mac OS X

I was looking for a nice freeware FTP client for Mac OS X and stumbled upon Cyberduck, which is quite OK. Would be nice to have FileZilla for Mac though!