That's How It Happened

Things to be excited about:

Partying in Pyongyang.

The BBC's iMP is about to enter beta testing.

Google Calendar is possibly almost about to go beta. (If it's non-GTD, non-hipsterPDA, non-Moleskine, non-iCal, non-Backpack compatible, I'm going to freak out. One boy can only handle so many organisational tools.)

Horrible German laptop pranks.

TV on the PSP (maybe).

Symbian software to scare away mosquitos, dragonflies, and bats.

Gmail Dropbox - A new Automator action
I quite often email myself stuff as a way of backing up the files offsite. I'm paranoid about it since a harddrive crash last year where I lost 3 years worth of photos, essays and MP3s. I've had a hunt around and I can't find an adequate commercial tool for automatically uploading stuff to Gmail. XMail Hard Drive, that I blogged yesterday doesn't really do what you need, because it uses a web interface, plus you have to divulge your Gmail password to them.
Having not written a single line of code in almost 20 years (not since writing text adventures in Basic on an Acorn Electron), I've hashed together an Automator workflow for OSX. Here's what is does:

1. You drag a file or folder onto the icon for the workflow. (Or single click a file, then double click the workflow icon).
2. It opens the Mail app and emails those files to your Gmail account
3. It gives the email the name Filestore, and Gmail files them under a label called Filestore, for when you need them back

To get it working you only need to add your gmail address in the address line of the workflow. You can adjust this using Automator. (If you don't already have Mail app configured to send mail, you have to set up POP mail in the Gmail preferences and configure Mail app to send emails via smtp.gmail.com, as per instructions in the Gmail help). To get the system working really well you also need to make a new filter in Gmail, to filter all messages that arrive with the title "Filestore" to be filtered into a label "Filestore". Despite my name for it "Gmail Dropbox" this Automator Action isn't really limited to Gmail, you could use it with Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail Beta. I'm calling this version 0.3. For reasons I can't explain, I can't seem to upload the directory via blogger. If you want to beta test my Automator action email meand I'll send you a copy.

XMailHardDrive is GMail Drive for OSX (via)

Little $25 magnetic cameraphone lenses (0.5x thru 4x zoom)

Pixen looks to be a ridiculously fun old skool 2D graphic design tool.

New Chinese humanoid robot doesn't do anything lame like "standing up from lying", or "running", instead it does "saberplay".

Fricking brilliant personal black box recorder running on an iPaq.

Does Google Zeitgeist 05, have anything to do with Google's new telecoms hotel? If I had the secret blogger password for the invite details, I'd sit next to Larry Page's girlfriend, who has a cool job, and is pretty too.

Hidetext is cool. I could use it to hide stuff like this.

Slawesome is awesome too.

Words for which there is no word in English.

Bloop is so hot right now. Being as it is the world's loudest, most mysterious sound ever.

Endtroducing performed LIVE by children. Best "remix" since the Grey Album.

Everybody loves everybody hates chris.

Super-duper Big Lebowski cast reunion.

Chewbacca groping Leia, pr0n for furverts (ess eff double-yoo).

At last, the UK gets the Samsung Z320i, that my pal Noriaki had this time last decade. i-mode a-go-go.

The Author's Guild are suing Google, because they believe Google Print infringes copyright. A lot of people including the EFF and boingboing are saying this is "fair use", and that the authors should be glad their books are now better "indexed". However much I usually condone internet downloading, the Author's Guild do have a point. Here's the Google Print results for a Sushi recipe book. Every single page is available for free, to read at home anytime you choose. What's more Google Video is also hosting a ton of copyrighted material. Here's Charlie Murphy's Hollywood Stories via Google. Who needs Suprnova when Google are hosting so much good stuff? I'm fascinated to see how this works out in the courts.

Examples of Chuck Cunningham Syndrome.

Bozack: a magazine

Art Muck a (now defunct) journal of "intellectual thought of varying quality."

Do we really know Dewey? (Even nerdier than it sounds).

The Spoonbill Generator, a collab literary adventure.

Interestingly the word "neologism" itself hasn't been a neologism for almost 200 years. In the course of researching the origins of "It's on like Donkey Kong", I came across the Sly Records Slang Archive. It's full of incredible phrases such as: The Craptown Pipers, Illy Corgan, and the Perfect Plex, all lovingly cross referenced, with occasional illustrative photos. Sadly the Slang Archive ceased archiving in April. I propose to continue it as a weekly entry here. Submissions as ever, are more than welcome.

I'm looking forward to Liberty City Stories, and MY MY Katamari, for PSP. Now though I'm hyped about Every Extra Extend, by the creators of Rez and Lumines. The PC version is available as a free download. The backstory?

"One day suddenly,you receive 12 UCHU- guided bombs. What do you do? 'Suicidal explodion' game with new feelings. Blow up self to involve enemies!"

According to Wired that means: "It's a shooting game where the object is to die. The only things you can do are move and make your ship blow up.". IGN makes it sound even more intriguing: "The game opens over a giant floating mouth, which the swallows you, and as you travel down its esophagus, there are countless neon signs cluttering the play field."

How to: Turn your hamster into a fighting machine.

I'm way into fire boats, since seeing one in New York. Child-like awe and all.

Big ideas come out of big pencils, beautifully designed flash GUI.

List of myths busted by the MythBusters.

The natural history of the @ sign. Internationally it's known as monkey tail, rollmop, strudel, and most bizarrely in Slovenian "a woman who overdresses".

Halliburton Watch are leading the fight against corporate evil, with Monbiot as their wingman.

The list of weapons that don't exist but should, which in an act of blogging serendipity already lists the "sharpened hamster".(Thanks, HAZ!)

// posted by Rufus @ 12:37 am 0 Comments

After a lot of struggle, and rather undirected scribbling of confused flow diagrams, I decided that the means to solve Eyezmaze's Grow Cube do not justify the end. If you still want to struggle with the solution look away now: man, water, flowers, pot, tube, fire, saucer, bones, ball, spring.

Grow 3: Cube is not only awesome flash, but great gaming too.

Self-defense against a gang of tweens, best ask.metafilter thread ever. Hilarious stories, and demonic ideas for defeating unarmed 11 year olds.

Horse and jockey papercraft.

Surfboard anatomy flash guide.

Diary for a life expectancy, one page a day for 82 years.

I've joined the Skype revolution, if you care to skype me I should be delighted. My username can be easily deduced via the Skype dashboard.

Footie Lookalikes

With Chelsea at 18 points out of 6 games, with no goals conceded, the Premiership has become boring. Lucky that football fans are still finding ways to entertain themselves. (Thanks, Tomsk!)

I'm in awe of gelatin, and in particular their 2000 World Trade Centre "Surgical Intervention":

"In days of conspiratorial work, somewhere on the 148th floor and using building site refuse they had tediously smuggled into the building under their pullovers, they constructed a functioning load-bearing balcony. In a long complicated process they scratched putty from the tall heavy window, which couldn't be opened. Then they extracted it using suction pads, shunted the balcony out, posed on it at 6 in the morning and had themselves photographed there from a helicopter for their nearest and dearest back home."

(Thanks, mk)

Avast, me land-lubbin' deck rats, for today it be International Talk Like A Pirate Day, arrr!

Pirate Riddles For Sophisticates

The Black Pirate Aristocrats Joke

Other piratical blogs.

And some pirate treasure by the other Rufus, from theguardian crossword today: Goes off for the booty (6)

I am completely overwhelmingly busy at work. I like totally shouldn't be doing any blogging. If I had free time this is how I'd be spending it:

Switching from GMail back to Yahoo Mail beta, and back again, and back again. ((Neologism watch: AJAX goodness (see also AJAXY)) (Neologism watch: neologism watch (which is I believe a Barger)))

Exploring Lego Factory.

Watching Bill Gates x Napoleon Dynamite.

Being overrun by grey goo: "About 200 of these could march in a line across the top of a plain M&M."

Word of the day is: banausic, spotted here, but apparently a favourite of Norman Mailer's.
Norman Mailer also happens to have invented the word "factoid". He intended it mean "something which has no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper". That has a conceptual resonance with Vic Reeves' "84% of all statistics are made up on the spot". The fact that factoid now has a (quite different) real meaning, in no way diminishes it's rather amazing, possibly self-referential, coining.

My two favourite non-PC jokes du jour:

Q: Who was the last person to fuck an Australian and bring home the ashes?
A: Paula Yates.
(Thanks, Tomsk)

Q: Did you know Al Qaeda have claimed responsibility for New Orleans?
A: Apparently they sent a team of suicide plumbers.

With these two gags I expect to be the toast of the dinner party circuit for weeks to come.

I'm so bored at work today that I've sent a letter to Alan Rusbridger. I give him a less than 1 in a 100 shot of printing it tomorrow, so I've taken the liberty of reproducing it here:

Dear Sir,
In your editorial "Fuel Prices. They protest too much" (14.9.05), you
support the Petrol Retailer's Association suggestion of a minimum fuel purchase of £20. Drivers of Smart cars would be severely
inconvenienced by such a suggestion, because the tank holds only a
shade over 20 litres in total. Unless fuel prices increase to over £1
per litre, it will remain impossible to spend as much as £20 in one
fill. I had hoped the Guardian would show more consideration for
relatively ecologically minded drivers of microcars.
Congratulations on the new format, unexpectedly (despite the cliche) less is definitely more.
Yours sincerely, etc etc

A taxidermy genius at work. I'm told someone called Danny Jones deserves the credit.

This has been my least productive day of web surfing ever. Nothing on the internet is fun today. Except maybe this one photo of Sergey Brin in a wetsuit. It has more than a touch of the old Mahir about it. Explore more of Sergey's college days.

I'm delighted to note that this blog is the top result in Google Blogsearch, for that most searchable of terms: Rufus. It's nice to be number one at something. To misquote Dirk Diggler, "I know f*cking (Google) karate".

Exploiting Bigley For Fun And Profit
Southern Railways have started running a subtle but tasteless manipulative poster ad on their trains. The copy reads:

"Pay the fare, or pay the cost. Each year 8,000 people are prosecuted for fare evasion on the UK rail network."

This runs over an image of a young offender in a jail cell wearing a Ken Bigley/Nick Berg/Guantanamo orange jumpsuit. Quite apart from the obvious deception, that no-one ever goes to prison for fare evasion, there's the anomaly that no-one in the British prison system has to wear an orange jumpsuit.
This should qualify as a form of subliminal advertising. They are relying on the adversive Pavlovian conditioning of the Bigley and Berg videos, to be unconsciously recalled in association with their preachy fare evasion message. Most aversive conditioning is instrumental in nature. For example consciously learning not to slam your fingers in a car door. Only something as horrifying as the Bigley video however actually evokes a visceral unconcious response. Watching Bigley's murder makes you feel queasy, literally "gut-wrenching terror". When Pavlov's dogs heard the bell they salivated, but didn''t know why. Similarly when we see the jumpsuit, even in an inappropriate context, we are supposed to make a strong negative association; unless you analyse it carefully you wouldn't know why.

In among all the hype about the new size, new style Guardian (or should that be guardian), something simultaneously revolutionary and retro happened on page page 13 (larger clearer pdf). Scattered through the text are key phrases, both underlined and coloured blue. These "links" lead to a small glossary box in the lower right corner. This seems like html adapted for the page, but strangely these "dead tree links" haven't been translated into actual html links, on the matching Guardian Unlimited page. Even stranger, to my eye at least, is that the blue of the links doesn't match the blue used for links on Guardian Unlimited. Instead it looks like the same blue that links used to be in Mosaic. How retro is that?

Much as I loathe the supercilious tone of Coolhunting and Cool Tools, this is a rather cool-esque entry. This is an inflatable roof, courtesy of inflate.co.uk. It's covering a building project near to my house. It's genuinely cool to see this technology put to a real architectural use, instead of it's usual setting of "arty" structures. I'll report back if it blows down in any bad autumn weather.

Free Ruler "Free Ruler is only available for Mac OS X. It may work on Mac OS 9, but this has not been tested. It most definitely will not work on your stupid Windows PC."

Liberty City Stories; how retro is a game set in 1998?

Free Second Life, which I really don't have time for.

Goldstrike, a game distracting enough even for Newark C.

has anyone tried Reader2, a book suggestion engine? It looks like it might be a powerful way of dumbing down one's booklist.

I'm in transit back from Canada to Gatwick, with two hours to kill at Newark Terminal C. The fortnight away has been an education. I never quite got a handle on what it is to be "Canadian" though. Francophone Canada is quite suprisingly French. The average Quebecer doesn't speak better English than the average Parisian, and they have a similar surly attitude to match. However Anglophone Canada (by which I mean Ontario, because I never got further than Niagara), is not dissimiliar to the vast swathes of the Midwest. Every service professional sports a US-grade professional smile, and every little town is dominated by it's own McDonalds (though the Canadian M logo has a small attached maple leaf).
In comparison with their big neighbour, Canadians do seem to be justly proud of their relaxed multiculturalism, healthy democracy, and generous health and social services provision. The Montreal weekend press is full of 9/11 4th anniversary pieces, hastily bastardized to include global warming/Katrina gloating. As I came back through Montreal Dorval airport I did get a little taste of US imperialism and arrogance. At Dorval there's a separate passport check area for US-bound flights. It's manned by US immigration officials trained to record biometric data. There are also very prominent signs profferring a hearty "Welcome to the United States of America". If there were similar signs at Waterloo eagerly declaring "Bienvenue a France", they could only be read as ironic. Evidently this is not so at Dorval. I was tempted to protest, but there was an ominous "Reconciliation Room", that threatened only rapprochement with a probing latex gloved hand.
I'm going to do my bit for global reconciliation now by drinking a green tea frappucino, that I notice has made its way here from Tokyo *$s (Starbucks, stoopid).

Those f$ckin f%cks at google, have opened up gmail to joe public, and guess what? The servers have gone down. I`m stranded in Montreal sans-email until they get it fixed. This may seem a small gripe, in comparison to bad things that are happening right now in other parts of the world, but it is damnably annoying.

Conferencing in Montreal is kind of strange. I'm absolutely overwhelmed by sleep deprivation, gourmet tasting menus, and the giant postmodernist conference centre. I don't have any energy to actually express thoughts or feelings. There are some things I've really enjoyed in Montreal though: the underground city, Toque! (though my face did seem quite numb after the 7th or 8th fancy organic wine), Le Club De Chasse Et Peche (signature dish, a new-style surf and turf, of lobster claw and deep fried veal sweetbreads), Turf Gallery, and most of all the insane storms and rain that have been attributed as the tail end of Katrina.