OstroHoopy

I’m taking part in a neat online sleuthing mission at MacHeist (http://macheist.com) which is scoring me some cool free apps and a bunch of virtual money to apply to a mega pack of cool apps at the end of the multi-week mission.

This week I scored a copy of 1Passwd (http://1passwd.com/) and I am testing it alongside SplashID which I’ve been using for a long time.

One of the mission objectives was also to place a posting to 1Passwd on my blog which might get me some super exclusive secret stuff from Hubert!

Let’s see if I get some comments back from the monkey man himself!

Apple’s new iPod nano just made my 8-month old mini obsolete.
Bummer.

Now I’ve seen one in person thanks to my friend Henning who just got one.
Lust lust lust.

Even though I’m not a very prolific blogger, lately I’ve deferred my need to record links for personal use by posting to del.icio.us. Much less clutter in the blog, easier to search, and still syndicated.

Guess I had better rethink the purpose of this blog.

My del.icio.us page: http://del.icio.us/joshuao (also in the sidebar)

Weirdness. Just doing my occasional vain search for my last name on Google I discovered at the bottom of page 2 a link to a French translation of my blog.

It looks like someone tried to translates my wife’s blog into French, but how did it end up as a Google hit?!

Also amusing is the convenient Google re-translation of my page back into English.

Liberated Games has been around since August 2004. Their mandate is to catalog all commercial games that have been released as freeware to the public.

Some great classics are in there, including:

• Wolfenstein 3D
• Doom/DoomII
• Quake I/II/III
• Descent I/II
• Hexen I/II
• Duke Nukem 3D
• Grand Theft Auto I/II

I love classic gaming!

Unfortunately most of them won’t run on my Mac, but that’s where the open source community comes in. Exult, for example, lets me play my old copy of Ultima 7 on pretty much any platform. Even the Zaurus Linux-based handheld! Descent II has also been ported to OSX. Hopefully some more of these classics will get re-worked in the future.

109_0996, originally uploaded by JoshuaO.

He’s still a little small to reach the 9 and 3 positions on the steering wheel, but Evan has already gained an appreciation for Recaro seats and German cars. You’ve got to like that!

Oi! Only another 15 years before he asks for the keys…

Well, Magmic’s other active co-founder, John Criswick, decided to do his latte budget a favour and pick up an espresso machine for work.

Throwing my somewhat selfish suggestion of a Rancilio Silvia aside, he opted to go for a fully automatic, digital offering from Starbucks. The good news is that it looks pretty, worked right from the moment I plugged it in (though it needs fine tuning before I’ll be happy), and I won’t need to be hit up to make everyone’s shots every day.

The machine is called the Starbucks Barista Digital Italia, but it is actually a white labelled offering from Saeco, the Incanto Digital.
Starbucks Product Page
Saeco’s Product Page

Now, being a proper geek, it’s time to think about hacking it. It would be great to give it a web interface so I could order my coffee as I’m entering the office and have it ready for pickup. Maybe I’m taking it too far…

Reviews:
Coffee Geek Consumer Reviews

This is handy and I’ll have to give it a go!

http://www.ehow.com/how_115509_silence-squeaky-stairs.html

To that end, eHow looks like a pretty handy reference site.

John Carmack, of id Software fame, is now blogging. He even put up an interesting posting on his experience and analysis of MIDP development.

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/johnc/Recent%20Updates

Google’s Picasa has released a v2 of their already wonderful digital photography management software. It’s better than ever.

www.picasa.com