2007 Oct 18, 5:06More on the ending song for Portal from the creator.
portal game games music jonathan-coulton blog valve videogames song 2007 Oct 17, 11:47A weighted companion cube you can make out of paper!
game games humor portal blog article 2007 Oct 17, 11:45Background images based on the game Portal featuring the weighted companion cube.
portal game desktop background images 2007 Oct 17, 11:31Portal / HL2 E2 Spoilers! This is the lyrics and an mp3 of the end credits of the most excellent game Portal. What a great game. "Anyway, this cake is great."
portal game mp3 music humor 2007 Jul 15, 5:08This previous weekend Sarah and I went to Canada for my friends Palak and Meghal's wedding. Our five day stay took us on
the route from Toronto, to Burlington (for the wedding), and then Niagra.
In Toronto we visited the
CN Tower, the
ROM, and the
Bata Shoe Museum. We generally acted like tourists walking around taking photos of things, putting on sun block, and not saying 'eh'. But we could have been worse
like the drunk American college students in front of us in line for the CN Tower asking the guide if the CN Tower is taller than the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. We stumbled upon the
Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibit which was really interesting. Sarah in particular recalls the cute stuffed animal
monsters.
After Toronto we drove to Burlington where Palak and Meghal's wedding would take place. We got up early and made it on time to the wedding which was
lovely. I hadn't attended an Indian wedding previously so it was a new experience for me. During the ceremony the child in front of me kept peeking over her parent's shoulder and staring at me. It
lasted all day with a break after lunch during which we drove around and experienced small town Ontario. After the break cousins performed dances for Palak and Meghal and then we all danced the night
away until the wee hours.
In Niagra we stayed in a hotel room with a falls view which was lovely. We went on the
Maid of the Mist tour that takes tourists
right up to the falls in a boat and drenches them. We also went on the
Behind the Falls tour which was not as fun. In both we are
given rain coats which are essentially glorified plstic trash bags. For dinner we ate in the hotel restaurant which had a lovely view of the falls. At night the falls are lit up in various colors
with gigantic lights.
niagra wedding personal toronto nontechnical 2007 May 3, 11:33How to easily add portals/websites as entries into Windows Media Center's menus.
msdn mce windows microsoft development 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