2008 Sep 3, 6:15"National University of Singapore's Mixed Reality Lab is fast becoming my favorite in cutting edge (and a little wacky - okay, a lot) research. Take, for instance, this project titled Poultry
Internet, where a chicken is outfitted with a special dress that lets its owner pet it over the Internet." Johnny Cat writes: "Kudos to Gonzo for inventing this." I can't get to the actual site with
the info on the project but it is available on the Wayback Machine.
chicken humor internet virtual-reality mixed-reality 2008 Aug 15, 4:02VS debugs XSLT. Didn't know that. Neat. "You can use the Visual Studio debugger to debug XSLT. The debugger supports setting breakpoints, viewing XSLT execution state, and so on. The debugger can be
used to debug a style sheet, or to debug an XSLT transformation invoked from another application. XSLT debugging is available in the Visual Studio Team System and the Professional Edition."
Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to pass in parameter values... I just ended up setting the default value for my param elements. Otherwise, cool.
debug visual-studio microsoft msdn reference xsl xslt xml 2008 Jul 24, 12:59I love this poster but I can't believe it was really displayed by the London Metro. Amazing. Reads: "Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes, CCTV & Metropolitan Police on buses are just two ways we're
making your journey more secure."
poster propaganda london england cctv art bus photo flickr privacy security 2008 Jul 18, 2:13A neat looking blog to investigate.
blog cool humor monthly 2008 Jun 19, 4:53Create word art from your Delicious tags or any arbitrary block of text. Neat.
me delicious tag tagging word 2008 Jun 12, 10:45Neat stuff for a Mobile Firefox concept: "A demo of an experimental UI for Mobile Firefox by Aza Raskin, Head of UX for Mozilla Labs. See azarask.in/blog/post/firefox-mobile-concept-video for more
information."
browser interface video firefox mobile ui phone 2008 Jun 6, 3:36A neat little flash thing that shows you flickr photos with 3d tilting and zooming.
via:ethan_t_hein flickr flash mashup visualization 2008 May 6, 12:12Get Google Map display of and RSS feed of your package progress via UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc package tracking. I was looking for an RSS feed to do this but I didn't think of Google Map integration. Neat
idea. He should do georss in the RSS feed too.
geo google map rss package UPS visualization mashup 2008 Apr 30, 10:51TwittEarth displays where twitters are coming from on a globe. Neat looking.
twitter 3d mashup world visualization via:kris.kowal 2008 Apr 29, 10:59A browser plugin that does an 'immersive 3d photo gallery' thing. Its neat looking but otherwise not sure how useful it is. However, they also provide an easy to use .js file that lets you easily do
a lite javascript version of their gallery (no 3d but n
free gallery photo tool browser plugin web piclens 3d 2008 Mar 7, 10:03More videos and photos of megaphone in action. Neat idea.
megaphone video videos videogames game games social 2008 Mar 4, 10:57Live Maps supports exporting collections you make in Live Maps as a GeoRSS feed. That's neat, but what I want to do is add my flickr GeoRSS feed to a collection in Live Maps...
georss live microsoft maps blog article 2008 Feb 20, 6:44Develop games using XNA available on the Zune. Sounds neat. Remember that if you're a student you can do XNA dev for free now...
microsoft arstechnica zune xna xbox game games development news 2008 Jan 16, 2:58Library of Congress puts up photo collections on Flickr. Neat!
copyright flickr library-of-congress library congress photo photography tagging community 2008 Jan 6, 1:33A virtual FS that has a tree of open windows and a screenshot as an image file. Not sure if its useful but still neat.
mac image screenshot filesystem osx 2007 Aug 22, 12:12Software that resizes images while maintaining the relative ratios of important features. Just go watch the video its neat!
image images software photos photo siggraph video 2007 Jul 25, 10:53New keyboard and mouse I bought. Its neato and it looks cool!
media keyboard microsoft wireless mce 2007 Jun 6, 4:59A list of free web based language translation services including language guessing which I think is neat.
dictionary translation tool language reference free internet 2007 Apr 18, 11:31A shoulder holster to replace your wallet, store your keys, ipod, etc. Sounds neat but I imagine it would take some explaining at the airport. Also, I like the idea but I don't think I'd want anyone
to see me wearing this.
shopping clothing gadget shoulder holster bag 2007 Apr 17, 11:45Opera (
the fifth most popular web browser) has a new feature named
Speed Dial (video of it in action). Whenever you open a new tab you get your Speed Dial view which consists of nine thumbnails of user-settable
pages. Its like a quick-favorites that appears every time you open a new tab. I think this is a neat idea and was considering how I might do that in IE7. The following is my hack-y and ugly but no
coding required version of Speed Dial for IE7. I like my hack and I'm about to expound upon it in unnecessary detail so skip to the last paragraph if you're afraid of losing interest.
By default in IE7, whenever you open a new tab you navigate to 'about:Tabs'. As noted in wikipedia the result of
navigation to 'about:Tabs' is determined by values in the registry. Specifically, values in the key in
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs". Usually this fact is exploited by
malicious software to hijack
"about:blank" and show you ads but we can hijack it too in order to display our Speed Dial-ish page.
Of course since this is a code-less hack we've got limited options on what to change 'about:Tabs' to display. It should have the following requirements.
- Something local so that our 'about:Tabs' doesn't disappear when we go offline and so that its relatively fast.
- The user should be able to modify its content.
- Show links that the user uses.
- Show thumbnails of those links
- Provide easy to use drag and drop interaction and generally look cool.
Now, I use del.icio.us which allows me to store all of my favorites online and which provides RSS feeds that list my saved links. New in IE7 is an
RSS platform that will, among other things, cache RSS feeds locally. So, by pointing
about:Tabs to my del.icio.us feed 'http://del.icio.us/rss/sequelguy/quickreference' I get (1) from IE7's RSS support, and (2) and (3) from del.icio.us. Of course requirements (4) and (5) are missing
but hey, I said this was ugly.
In summary, if you change the registry value "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs!Tabs" to point to an RSS feed of your favorites you can get a hack-y version of Opera's
Speed Dial. I should note that although its referenced on pages such as wikipedia changing your 'about:Tabs' URI in the manner I describe is not documented and not supported by Microsoft. There could
be all kinds of horrible repercussions from this change of which I'm not aware. Yeah, actually you know what? Forget I said any of this. Pretend I never wrote it...
browser technical hack
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