Boing Boing: Gamers are better at multitasking
And I would have gone back the other way. Jaq can’t talk to me and expect a response when I’m gaming.
2005
Yearly Archive
Mon 12th Dec 2005
Gamers are better at multitasking?
Posted in the evening, filed under Culture , Humour , Xbox Games.
Paul’s Time Sink | iTunes Signature
This is kinda cool. It generates a nice little file that is a conglomeration of the music you typically listen to.
I set it so it didn’t choose tracks from the same artist or album, and found some nice stuff:
Tim Rogers • You’ve Been So Good To Me So Far
No surprises here - one of my favourite songs.
Paul Kelly • Look So Fine, Feel So Low
This one raised an eyebrow. Great song, but not the PK song I’d choose as my favourite.
3 Different versions of Pachelbel’s Canon, by different orchestras
Gymnopédie No. 1 • Satie (Composer): A fabulous tune!
Mel C & Left Eye • Never Be The Same: the song that outed Mel C, or something like that. An alltime great Lesbo song.
Two Antonio Carlos Jobim songs, but only one of them performed by him: Quiet Nights (Corçovado), and Inütil Paisagem (Useless Landscape).
Hanson • MMMBop
This was not all of the tracks, but a pretty good selection, nonetheless.
You can hear my signature here.
I missed the last episode of The Biggest Loser. A friend taped it, but our VCR is still packed away somewhere since we moved house, and we only have the Xbox connected up. This does double duty as our DVD player.
So, he converted the taped version to DVD using his PVR. Except it came out as not a proper DVD.
VR_MOVIE.VRO
This is a file format used by PVR systems, and apparently is similar to a VOB file, but not quite. I went to convert this with some software, but it failed. I then tried to copy it across to the HD so I could manipulate it, but that failed too.
It seems to have something to do with the fact that the file is larger than 4Gb. But I’m not sure… but I do know that no commands or applications seem to be able to open it up. I’ll have to try on the PC.
Update: No good. The PC only has a DVD+RW drive, the disc is a DVD-RW disc.
I’ve been keen for a while now to go through the Blogsome Forums with a bit of a broom - there are lots of duplicate threads and topics that could be pruned, and some stuff probably belongs in different forums. The recent server troubles have generated a flurry of posts, some of which were total duplicates, and some of which were even in the wrong forums.
I think for instance, that a lot of the stuff that is in FAQ should be moved elsewhere, and have this as a place where a really well thought out list of questions, with complete answers, is listed. Perhaps this forum can be limited to a subset of users, and they can create new posts here with answers from other questions asked throughout the forums.
I’d love to hear from some of the other users about this idea, particularly people who might be interested in helping with the writing of actual FAQs.
I wrote a significant rant/rave in the forums about this issue… it will be interesting to see if it gets any replies.
Date and time in the menubar | creativebits
Nice way to have the date in the menubar as well as the time, under OSX (possibly Tiger only).
Saves having to move the mouse up to the top-right and click to see the date.
Of course, this will affect anything else that uses the Medium Time setting, like ecto’s Date view.
I’ve been doing some study as part of my work: a Language and Literacy course run by the Department of Education & Children’s Services (SA). I’ve enjoyed it greatly, in part because I am a pedant and love to pick stuff to bits.
To that end, another document put out by DECS, XPress, had the following in an article on page 19, December 1 2005 issue:
Henley HS remembers … and learns
[snip]
Henley HS teacher Sean Fletcher worked with an all boys Special Sport middle school class to initiate and research the war, during which time students constructed a replica of an observation trench, researching its dimensions to make it realistic.
And I thought the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand had something to do with the start of the war…
Thu 1st Dec 2005
Blogsome Templates
Posted early in the morning, filed under Blogsome , General , Smarty Templates.Say you find a Blogsome site, with a template you really like. You ask the author for the data, but they don’t reply to you.
Never fear. You can always get the data from a Template, as this data is world-readable:
- http://schinckel.blogsome.com/templates/index.html
- http://schinckel.blogsome.com/templates/wp-layout.css
- http://schinckel.blogsome.com/templates/post.html
- http://schinckel.blogsome.com/templates/comments.html
You may need to right-click and Save As…, or view source to see them properly.
Obviously, for blogs other than mine, replace schinckel with the relevant word…
I’m working on getting this so the source of the current templates can be viewed in another web page, but there are some issues with this. The iframe/object will only display the rendered value, and CSS files don’t display at all.
Mon 28th Nov 2005
{todayayearago}
Posted early evening, filed under Blogsome , PHP , Smarty Templates.Another Blogsome user was wanting to use {todayayearago} to get posts from a week ago, which reminded me I do it with a month ago. Looking through the source to see if a weekly one exists (it doesn’t, as yet), I came across this little nugget:
function todayayearago( $when, $wpblog, $spacer ='<br /' )
Now, ignoring the apparent typo (I think there should in fact be a closing tag to that there BR tag…), what do you see that is notable?
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