candescence.org

I’ve been using colloquy on my Mac and iPhone for a while now but the simple fact is getting constantly disconnected because of calls, following links, or what-have-you really gets old (and annoys everyone else in the channel). When i saw that the new iPhone app supported push notifications i was excited but a little hesitant – after all i don’t exactly want to route the entirety of my IRC traffic through someone else’s server. Thankfully the guys have been working on a rather interesting approach to push notifications – you host the server yourself. With an upgrade to the colloquy client i run on my Mac at home i can how log in to one persistent connection while on the road. Pretty handy if you ask me.

Just a couple of projects that have caught my eye over the past few weeks with a common theme – super-sizing toys from our childhood. The first project is Jeri Ellsworth’s 52″ net-controlled Etch-A-Sketch. It was built from an HD TV and is controllable via an IRC bot.

More recently the NYC Resistor hackers have been working on an 8′ Lite Brite. It’s not net-enabled, but that’d take the fun out of it.

Any other super-sized toys i’ve missed? Wonder what’ll be next.

Like designers, if you give a programmer a problem with parameters, they’ll apply every bit of genius they have to solve it in the best possible way. If you tell them how to do it, you’ll suffer the wrath of an angry God.

Was just poking around last.fm today and noticed that an Epson ad on the page was asking me to enter my last.fm user name to “see [my] music tastes in color.” Being a visualization nerd i went ahead and entered my name and found myself presented with a little animation of the graph printing from an Epson printer. The ad then linked to a full-sized and branded, of course, graph over at aeracode.org who’ve been doing last.fm visualizations for a while now. Just found the use of social sites’ data visualization an interesting concept in advertising. The full graph is below:

This is a simple little trick that i’m not sure where i first read about.

If you’re in the terminal and need to copy something to the clipboard (say the output of a command) you can pipe it to the pbcopy command. Likewise the pbpaste command will spit out the last thing copied. Likely not the most useful thing you’ll find all day, but still interesting to know.

One small caveat however is that the pbcopy command will copy newlines at the end of your output so often the copied text isn’t as immediately useful for re-inserting into another command as one would hope.