900 post-it notes and eight sticks of hot glue later, this costume from Office Space was a hit, even though the character didn't actually appear in the movie dressed this way, it's still instantly recognizable from the poster and DVD box. What a great job! And a good job on the Lumbergh character too.
Link. Thanks Russ!
One of the little mentioned additions that comes in the payload of Mac OS X 10.4.3 update is that Safari now supports server push delivery. This means you can now view web cameras (Axis cameras in particular) with Safari. Finally!
With the nightly temperatures dropping to the mid to upper 30's on a regular basis, I scramble to bring in my formidable collection of houseplants that have been enjoying their days outside. Inevitably there are always hitchhikers hiding on the leaves and in the soil that find the conditions inside the house quite pleasing indeed (high temperatures and low humidity). Before you realize it, you have an outbreak of white flies or spider mites (pictured). I have battled spider mites on a couple of my prized citrus trees and never really win the battle– only control. They can easily take a plant down in three weeks or less if not kept in check.
I'm very weary of using harsh chemical insecticides since the citrus trees bear fruit and I plan to eat them. So I've always used just liquid hand soap that I've had (last year was Johnson & Johnson Baby Soap).
This year I have some new tools. I picked up Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap, a 100% vegetable-based castille soap that folks have claimed it works well as an insect soap. Today was the first application. I'll post an update in a couple of weeks. (Warning: the bottle of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap is highly dense with text; may cause dizziness). A good spray bottle is also essential for treating your plants. Home Depot has a nice Zep Professional Sprayer for about four bucks.
Pegasus 1 is a homemade high altitude balloon project that managed to reach over 66k ft and travel 63 miles before being retrieved. The payload included a tiny linux computer, an old Nokia phone, a GPS receiver and two digi-cams. The linux box (a Gumstix) was programed to take snapshots with the cameras every thirty seconds after take off. The GPS receiver logged the current location of the balloon and even sent the GPS coordinates back to the ground via SMS through the Nokia to aid in recovery. Very clever. I need to get one of those Gumstix for sure.
Link via hack a day.
You can't keep 'em down. Some of the folks from TechTV have banded together to create how-to videos that are both polished and informative.
“Systm is a downloadable how-to technology show geared towards teaching the common geek, such as ourselves, various hot topics and projects. Each episode focuses on one subject and is between 10-15 minutes in length.”
The episode that caught my eye was the MythTV how-to. Having already done a MythTV installation on a Fedora box that was not easy, it was good to see there's a linux distro that comes prepackaged just for MythTV.
Is there anything you can't do with LED's? Here's a very simple set of plans and schematics to build a random changing color LED light kit for your pumpkin, all from easily attainable parts (from Radio Shack if need be).
Windows and Linux users have had this for a while now and finally there's a Sourceforge project for the Mac called gDisk. It's not 100% perfect in that it doesn't actually mount as disk in the Finder– rather it's an application. But nonetheless, it works as advertised. Last check, Gmail space is at 2657 MB.
There's a blog for whatever you're into. If you're into food (who isn't?) then you'll want to check out Slashfood. They're part of the Weblogs, Inc. group now owned by AOL.
Corsaire network security have released a white paper titled “Securing Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.” It includes the obvious things such as enabling software update but also includes some gems such as the password assistant tool that's available whenever Mac OS X prompts you to create a password. Some great information for everyone, not just the paranoid. The holiday of no Mac vulnerabilities will be over at some point, so why not be ahead of the curve?
If you have a PSP or a PowerBook or perhaps an LCD monitor on your desk that has a stuck pixel, it's probably driving you insane. You'll probably try anything to fix it. Of course you've tried gently massaging the pixel back to life. When all else fails, there's one last resort. Someone has created a video that flashes through RGB in rapid succession. The theory is that all that flashing will cause the pixel to become unstuck and begin working. I've read elsewhere it has worked for some although it took a couple of DAYS (looped). Give it a try, post your results and whatever you do, don't stare at it!
Link via PSP-Vault.
