Every time I mention to people that I write for a blog on the internet, someone’s bound to mention the idea that I have too much free time.

I feel like this is garbage, but even if it weren’t and I was somehow awash with spare time and not begging the clock to slow down just a little while as I feverishly block out the world to finish the thirty assignments I’ve fallen behind on in the last two or three weeks due to my application of all my attention on three other classes whose final projects seemed more pressing at the time, no matter if that were true, I’ll never ever ever have as much free time as the people who sit around and make these:

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the internet’s crowning achievement. We should all be ashamed.

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Filed under: Gaming

Using a simple but bulky cart from Japan, it’s possible to make your DS play Famicom games. It’ll also play NES games if you can get your hands on an adapter for the different cart shape. Mark this down on your shopping list before you make your compulsory, once-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Akihabara.

[Via Technabob]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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This notebook from NVousPC

known as the Britto PC looks absolutely out of this world, featuring illustrations of pop painter Romero Britto’s work known as “Mia’s Jungle” all over its surface. There is only one model available currently, and it sits comfortably in the artist’s gallery. The rest of us will have to wait, as it takes time to produce these custom-painted systems. Several revealed specifications include a 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB RAM, and a 160GB hard drive. There is no word on pricing yet.

Publisher’s note: there is only one model for cost reasons - the design is printed on a film roll that will be enough to decorate 20,000 notebooks. Creating more would mean more inventory and there is a risk of not selling a particular model, although this one doesn’t look too good…

Permalink | Comment | Uberbargain | Uberphones

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Filed under: Computers, Laptops

Apple MacBook and MacBook Pro owners should be aware of a design flaw that may lead to unrecoverable data loss, claims Retrodata, a data-recovery firm based out of the United Kingdom. The company says that MacBooks manufactured in China and equipped with a 2.5 inch Seagate SATA hard drive with a Firmware version 7.01 may have faulty read/write heads that become dislodged from the hard drive’s arm, scratching the magnetic platter surface and causing irrecoverable data loss.

For those customers who wish to know whether they are at risk, Retrodata suggests going to the System Profiler and checking the Serial ATA for the Firmware Revision number. If the computer has Firmware version 7.01, data should be backed up immediately, the company urges. Models affected may include ST96812AS and ST98823AS.

Not so fast, say specialists from other data-recovery companies like DiskEng. While Apple has been silent and Seagate insists that they are looking into the matter, these parties suggest that thousands of instances of the same problem must first be seen and diagnosed before a design flaw can be pronounced for an entire line of hard drives. Some say specific factors such as temperature and read/write head oscillation may be to blame for damaging some computers rather than a general design shortcoming that affects them all.

Just to be safe, consumers should check whether their computer has the specific hard drive in question, and should back up their files if that is the case. Those concerned should also monitor Apple and Seagate pronouncements regarding the issue.

From Retrodata (via Engadget)

Related Links:

• New Ultra Portable MacBook Out in January?
• MacBooks Get Upgrades — Should You Have Waited?
• Fastest PC Notebook… Is a Mac?

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Back from the ICA with Adam, I was struck by the work designer Tobias Wong a provocateur who creates the unexpected from the everyday and the everyday from the unexpected as he was being introduced during the exhibition, but I also think it is more than. What is so special about such art and craft work is to feel inspired in experiencing the work.

The object is special. It takes a refined sensitivity from the artist to make the careful design decisions exhibited by this piece. In the black shade chandelier, a classical design is made new by a switch between the form of the candelabra and the candle. These are two different objects, two different materials that create a single form in glass and insist on the simple mechanism of an oil lamp. These subtleties are the decisions that I love in this work.

In the exhibition was also presented the Disposable Crystal Cup, a sixteen-ounce paper cup printed with a trompe l’oeil crystal pattern. In this piece I felt Tobias Wong took the epidemic of the thrown away and juxtaposed it with the ultimate of luxury imagery.

Tobiad Wong also created this traditional crystal chandelier encapsulated in industrial white rubber

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Filed under: Food Quest, Comfort Food

Yesterday, in my post about the Walnut Sauce recipe from 1978, I briefly mentioned one of the best meals I ever had. A few of you were tantalized by that hint and asked to hear the full story. Well, ask and ye shall receive.

My great-aunt Flora loved good food. In her prime, she was a psychiatrist and traveled to Paris at least once a year to shop for very expensive clothes and eat delicious things. In her retirement, she made a point of taking herself out to a very nice lunch several times a week. The summer when I was 12 years old, my mom and I were in Philadelphia visiting my grandmother and Flora invited us all to go out to lunch with her. She took us to a French restaurant called Michel’s that doesn’t exist anymore. I’ve lived in Philadelphia for the past six years now, and it was gone long before I got here.

I ordered one of the lunch specials, which was a plate of penne pasta in a creamy, beef-infused sauce. It was unlike anything I had ever tasted before. The pasta was perfectly cooked, so it still had a bite, and the ribs on each of the noodles helped carry the sauce to my mouth. The taste sang with notes of mushroom, cream, sage and beef. It was neither too rich, too salty or too beefy, instead just totally right. I can still remember the quiet that fell over me as I ate, slipping two noodles at a time onto the tines of my fork, trying not to eat too fast in order to lengthen the experience. It was the first time in my life that I understood the power that really wonderful food has to captivate.

Okay folks, now it’s your turn. Tell us about your best meal!

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Filed under: News

Kojima Production’s upcoming PS3 exclusive Metal Gear Solid 4 is a very pricey game to make. Making it exclusive to one console is a risky proposition, especially in an era of skyrocketing game development. Ryan Payton told Reuters that the high-profile title “needs to sell over a million copies on the first day it goes on sale due to its costly production.” Will this be likely considering the PS3’s small userbase?

Sony says that it’s been prepared for the loss of third party exclusives from the get-go, understanding that publishers will want to recoup their costs differently in this generation of hardware. “We understand publishers are needing to recoup their investment,” said Peter Dille, senior vice president of marketing for Sony. “From our perspective, as long as the games aren’t going exclusive to other platforms, PS3 gamers are not actually losing anything.” Their strategy? To have the most first party development — more than Nintendo and Microsoft combined.

Metal Gear Solid 4 isn’t the last of Sony’s big exclusives. In the far future, fans can also look forward to Final Fantasy XIII. In addition, Dille noted that “15 PS3 exclusives released between September 2007 and April 2008.”

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Filed under: Deals, Google (GOOG), Intuit Inc (INTU), Small business

Over the years, Intuit (NASDAQ: INTU) has been able to beat back Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), and in the process, build a powerful franchise. But investors are wondering: where will the next stage of growth come from?

Well, if you listened to the Q3 conference call, the company is excited about the small-business category.

So, yesterday Intuit announced that it will spend $170 million for Homestead Technologies, which is a provider of websites for small businesses.

True, this is a commodity business. Yet, it can be a way to sell value-add services, such as Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Adwords, customer relationship management tools, and so on.

On its face, there are some clear synergies, such as with Intuit’s QuickBooks and TurboTax offerings. But, since it’s privately-held, it’s tough the gauge the size of Homestead.

But keep in mind that the company is in a fiercely competitive business, which is undergoing consolidation. So, it should be no surprise that Homestead finally decided to sell out.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

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Harry mentioned the handy little phpm some three years ago. And Sean Coates was kind enough to point out how it could be replaced with a shell one-liner. Doesn’t that just make one love bash?

One thing, I missed with either of the two, was the ability to see the entire manual entry. It’s quite often, that the manual actually holds useful information (Who’d known that!), so I find myself using www.php.net a lot. Or I did, until I decided to do something about it. Now, shell-scripting isn’t what I spent most of my time on, so it’s not with out a bit of pride, that I present to you phpm two-oh.

#!/bin/bash
# phpm
# commandline php-manual interface
# Kudos to Havard Eide and Sean Coates for the original idea
#
# author: Troels Knak-Nielsen <troelskn@gmail.com>
# version: 2007-11-27
#
# dependencies:
#   wget        sudo apt-get install wget
#   sed         sudo apt-get install sed
#   tidy        sudo apt-get install tidy
#   xmlstarlet  sudo apt-get install xmlstarlet
#   konwert     sudo apt-get install konwert
#   html2text   get from http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/html2text/html2text.py
#               symlink to ~/bin/html2text
#   urlencode   get from http://www.shelldorado.de/scripts/cmds/urlencode.txt
#               symlink to ~/bin/urlencode

function print_usage {
  echo "USAGE: phpm <function>"
  echo "To clear cache: phpm --clear"
  exit 0
}

# create cachedir on first run
CACHEDIR=~/.phpm
if [ ! -e $CACHEDIR ]
then
  mkdir $CACHEDIR
fi

if [ $# -gt 0 ]
then
  # parse a few options
  if [ $1 = "--clear" ]
  then
    echo "clearing cache"
    rm -r $CACHEDIR
    exit 0
  fi
  if [ $1 = "--help" ]
  then
    print_usage
  fi
  if [ $1 = "-?" ]
  then
    print_usage
  fi

  URLNAME=$(echo $1 | urlencode)
  CACHE_FILENAME=$CACHEDIR/$URLNAME
  # check cache
  if [ ! -e $CACHE_FILENAME ]
  then
    # fetch from HTTP
    HREF=http://www.php.net/manual-lookup.php?function=$URLNAME
    RESPONSE=$(wget --quiet -O - $HREF)
    if [ $? != 0 ]
    then
      echo "HTTP error" 1>&2
      exit $?
    fi

    # process response
    # test if function has direct match
    if echo $RESPONSE | grep -Eiq '<div([^>]*)class="refentry">'
    then
      # grap and format output
      # the first sed collapses blank lines, the second formats headers
      echo $RESPONSE 
        | tidy -latin1 -asxhtml --input-encoding utf8 --output-xml true --numeric-entities true 2>/dev/null 
        | xmlstarlet select --net --html -t -c "//*[@class='refentry']" 2>/dev/null 
        | tidy -latin1 --input-encoding utf8 -asxhtml 2>/dev/null 
        | konwert utf8-ascii 
        | html2text 2>&1 
        | sed -n 'G; s/n/&&/; /^([ -~]*n).*n1/d; s/n//; h; P' 
        | sed -e '/^# (.*)$/ { s/^# (.*)/1/p ; s/(.{1,1})/=/g }' -e '/^## (.*)$/ { s/^## (.*)/n1/p ; s/(.{1,1})/-/g }' -e '/^### (.*)$/ { s/^### (.*)/n1/p ; s/(.{1,1})/~/g }' 
        > $CACHE_FILENAME
    # test if there are any "best" matches
    elif echo $RESPONSE | grep -Eiq '<a href="http://rss.sitepoint.com/f//manual/en/function[^>]*><b>'
    then
      echo"Best matches for '$1':" > $CACHE_FILENAME
      echo $RESPONSE 
        | tidy -latin1 -asxhtml --input-encoding utf8 --output-xml true --numeric-entities true --wrap 0 2>/dev/null 
        | sed -n 's/.*<a href="/manual/en/function[^>]*><b>([^<]{1,})<.*/1/p' 
        >> $CACHE_FILENAME
    # test if there are any "weak" matches
    elif echo $RESPONSE | grep -Eiq '<a href="/manual/en/function[^>]*>[^<]+'
    then
      echo "Possible matches for '$1':" > $CACHE_FILENAME
      echo $RESPONSE 
        | tidy -latin1 -asxhtml --input-encoding utf8 --output-xml true --numeric-entities true --wrap 0 2>/dev/null 
        | sed -n 's/.*<a href="/manual/en/function[^>]*>[^<]{1,}([^<]{1,})<.*/1/p' 
        >> $CACHE_FILENAME
    fi
  fi

  if [ -e $CACHE_FILENAME ]
  then
    cat $CACHE_FILENAME
  else
    echo "No matches found for '$1'"
    exit -1
  fi
else
  print_usage
fi

Installing it

You obviously need a bash environment to run it (I suppose cygwin will do). Apart from that, you need a host of cli tools and utilities. If you’re on a debian based system, the following should get you running:

sudo apt-get install wget sed tidy xmlstarlet konwert

Then get the following two scripts:

• html2text
• urlencode

Save them (Without file-extension) in ~/bin and make them executable:

chmod +x ~/bin/html2text
chmod +x ~/bin/urlencode

(Or you can put them somewhere, such as in ~/scripts and then symlink them)

Finally, save the above script as ~/bin/phpm and chmod it, like the other two scripts.

Usage

You should now be able to look up a function in the PHP manual as simple as:

phpm substr

As a bonus, you’ll get a list of suggestions for mismatches. For example:

$ phpm substring
Best matches for 'substring':
is_string
substr

Very handy, when you only remember part of the function name.

The script queries the php website for the documentation, so it’s always up-to-date. To improve performance, results are cached in ~/.phpm. You can always clear the cache by calling phpm like:

phpm --clear

Emacs bonus

As a final little bonus for the Emacs-users about, here’s a snippet for binding F4 to phpm for the current word:

(defun php-manual-lookup ()
  "Shows short documentation for the word at the point."
  (interactive)
  (let ((word (current-word t))
        (buffername "*phpm*"))
    (when (get-buffer buffername)
      (kill-buffer buffername))
    (save-excursion
      (pop-to-buffer buffername)
      (shell-command (format "phpm %s"
                             (shell-quote-argument word)) buffername)
      (other-window 1))))
(global-set-key '[f4] 'php-manual-lookup)

This article provided by sitepoint.com.

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Filed under: Action, Warner Brothers, Fandom, Movie Marketing, Comic/Superhero/Geek, Remakes and Sequels, Images

The folks over at Empire Online are slowly revealing what appears to be a brand new image of Heath Ledger as The Joker in this summer’s The Dark Knight. The link on the main site reads: “He is coming … 3 days to go,” which, we imagine, means the full pic will be revealed three days from now. (Click on the image to the right to see the full pic currently on the site.) Whether this is just a photo or the cover of their January ‘08 issue, we do not know, but it looks like we’ll get a nice, crystal clear full-body look at Ledger’s Joker by the end of the week.

Warner Bros. has been going all-out when it comes to marketing one of this summer’s hottest flicks; not only have they been teasing us with images and tiny trailers, but they’re apparently bringing the entire city of Gotham to the web. A few days ago, a number of sites were launched — including a full, four-page mock-up of The Gotham Times (which included real articles), as well as a Joker-fied copy of the same paper. Additionally, other web addresses contained within the articles went live, all of which look to be setting up the film (ie: the current state of Gotham City) in some way, shape or form. You can even send email tips to the Gotham Police, as well as to The Gotham Times itself, and get replies. It’s a lot of fun, and definitely one of the better marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen. The Dark Knight hits theaters on July 18.

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