Tim Danner

After you have amassed a collection of Nintendo game consoles, what’s the best way to display them? A trophy case would work, but that takes up a lot of space. Plus managing the cables would be awkward. How about a custom wooden contraption? (via Boing Boing)

Alternatively, if that’s just too classy for you, you could always build the game console wrapper out of Legos. “Don’t worry if something goes wrong R2D2 is in there to fix stuff, along with a shark.” (via Engadget)

A couple of guys playing ping pong Matrix style. No camera tricks, either!

Enter The Meatrix, which is sort of like a Flash-based PETA commecial, except with “Moopheus” played by a cow. (Via Matthew McGlynn, who is my new hero.)

Today’s Chronicle had a story about plans under consideration to install public pay toilets downtown. The model at the top of their shopping list is the Exeloo, which is apparently made in New Zealand. That’s where I first saw one. The concept seemed so strange to me that I took a picture of the instructions:

(Warning: pointless geekery follows.)

The look I chose for this site is called “Simple Sky,” which I found in a big gallery of WordPress themes. It’s really just a CSS file that works on the default WordPress template, which makes installation trivial and upgrades more likely to go smoothly. I tweaked it a bit, but that’s all. It has sensible fonts and Rice-like colors. It would be nice if I could spiff it up a bit with a subtle text-shadow on the headlines, but the time is not yet right.

When I was using Movable Type (from August 2003 to June 2004), I wrote pretty much all of my posts using Zempt, a Windows app, because Movable Type’s web interface irritated me . After a month on WordPress, I haven’t really felt the need for a Windows writing app—the WordPress web interface works just fine. The only thing I miss is a spell-checker. If I used IE then I could use ieSpell, but there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent for Firefox.

A couple of weeks after rearranging the URLs and setting up the 301 redirects, I went through the 404s in the server log looking for things I had missed. I only found three types of URLs there: attempts to exploit bugs in IIS and common CGIs, robots.txt, and favicon.ico. There’s nothing I can do about the IIS/CGI crud, but I did create an empty robots.txt file to make those errors go away. My ability to draw 16×16 icons is an order of magnitude smaller than my ability to draw regular size graphics, which is pretty tiny to begin with, so I just stole one from the Iconfactory. Actually their terms permit this sort of use, and they have lots of nice-looking icons. I chose a boot icon from the Take a Hike collection because the top hit on Google for “danner” is Danner, Inc., maker of fine hiking boots, and because hiking is cool.

Paul Lamere gives a glimpse into the complexities of doing real text-to-speech in English. The 60,000 word dictionary in FreeTTS is just for the exceptions that aren’t handled correctly by the 13,000 states in the letter-to-sound state machine! But the cool part of the post is a poem that illustrates the problem. It reminds me of a silly sentence I heard years ago: “The tough coughs as he ploughs the dough.” (via Tim Bray)

The Good Thief is the standard to which I will hold other heist remakes.

Hacking Netflix is discussing the ratings system. I’ve rated 275 movies, just a handful behind the author’s 279. The comments on the post vary in opinion from “The Netflix ratings system IS their competitive advantage,” to “I find the recommendations ok but not particularly valuable.” I lean towards the latter.

If I were having trouble finding stuff to watch, I would certainly try some stuff from the recommendations. As it is, my queue runneth over, and friends recommend movies to me faster than I can watch them (though that may be due to the fact that I’ve watched six seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in as many months).

Dan tells a tale of his helplessness in the face of the evolution of language at Starbucks, where whole thoughts like “Would you like for me to leave room in your coffee cup so you can put cream in it also?” are reduced to “Room-for-cream?” Of course, this is nothing new in food retail—anyone wishing to order fast food in Boston must first decode “fuh-heah-tuhgo?”

John “Winter” Smith has a mission: to visit every Starbucks in the world. Because he’s a huge fan of their coffee? Nope. “It doesn’t taste good at all—I’m not enjoying drinking it.”

He’s doing quite well; in seven years, he’s been to almost 90% of the nearly 5,000 stores worldwide. Starbucks is opening new ones at the rate of about 10 per week, but he’s going faster than that. Will he catch up, or will he lose his mind first?

My sister-in-law asked me to link to Duma Explorer, a safari company in Tanzania that she’s involved with. I’ve never been to Africa, but if I were going, I would certainly ask her for advice.

Today I received an email at work reminding us of the process for dealing with features requests that come in from customers via tech support. As I imagine happens in most software shops, these requests go into the same system as regular bugs, but they have the “enhancement request” flag set and don’t generally get implemented until they’ve been explicitly added to a release schedule. That’s all good and well, but through a typo/spell-checker snafu in the email, these were referred to as “enchantment requests.” Cool.

One of the small pleasures in life - accepting a free ticket in exchange for a later flight, only to see the original flight be delayed.

How to hide a valuable laptop - in a (”genuine Italian-style”) pizza box. This would be more realistic with grease stains. Also note, as Cult of Mac points out, this will be more convincing if you carry it horizontally - it always looks suspicious when you carry a pizza tucked under your arm.

Saddam Hussein had, among other items in his tacky collection, a gold-plated AK-47.

It has come to my attention that this fine, scholarly website is inaccessible from some public computers at the UT-Houston med school. That is all.

My pity wells up for Paul, who has just endured the Gloom, a heart-wrenching brief deviation from the “Mediterranean climate” of Santa Barbara. I, on the other hand, live in Houston (climate: humid subtropical), where we just enjoyed the second wettest June on record. June 2004 was surpassed only (and only slightly) by June 2001, home to Tropical Storm Allison and “catastrophic flooding.”

Fortunately, Houston too has returned to sunny weather. I think we overshot the 75° mark though.

Hacking Netflix has finally made contact with the PR guys at Netflix. It seems that they’re working on a plan to “reach out to the online community.” That sounds like a good thing. With competition in DVD rental by mail from Wal-Mart, Blockbuster, and several others, Netflix will have to differentiate themselves to stay on top.

Their distribution center network is strong (turning Wal-Mart and Blockbuster retail outlets into mail distribution centers would be non-trivial, to say the least), their website is decent, and their selection is comprehensive. However, these advantages are all vulnerable. Since I would rather have a service of Netflix’s caliber than a stripped-down Wal-Mart-style service for a couple bucks less, I want to see Netflix stay profitable (well, return to profitability, I guess, since they posted a loss last quarter). The way for them to achieve this is to be creative and force the competition to play catch-up.

I look forward to seeing what they come up with. How about a web services API like Amazon’s and Google’s?

“They do get it. We just have to give them some time to figure out what to do with us.”

If only the accident signs were always this humorous. (Via Dave.)