Posts tagged: FUN

The starting premise here is: most speakers sold to work with the iPod and other DAPs are crap. They have fragile plastic cases, pointless stereo, and little 1" speakers that “deliver surprisingly good sound quality” or whatever euphemism one uses when trying to rationalize spending $100+ on something that sounds like a telephone receiver.

I’ve pitched my idea for a better approach to my cool product designer friends, but they’re busy working on magnesium snowboard bindings, electric mountain bikes, and military-spec safety glasses.

For reasons that will remain mysterious, I was asked about the possibility of an OS X program or script that would allow you to quickly rotate the contents of any window 180 degrees. I had written some image processing scripts before, but nothing involving screen capture, so I got interested. I came up with this Applescript, View180, which if nothing else is a neat demo of a couple of undeservedly obscure OS X commands, sips and screencapture.

Each time you visit the randomly selected Shakespearean sonnet page, you’ll see one of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. If you don’t like the one you get… reload! There’s also a search box so that you can narrow the possibilities down to, say, the two sonnets in which he uses the word “snow”.

The page is currently the #4 hit on Google for the phrase “Shakespearean sonnet.” It’s a little sad that so many of the substantive web pages on Shakespeare’s poetry don’t rank higher than my cheap parlor trick!

As seen recently on the Generator Blog (watch out for annoying popup ads) and Metafilter: ungreek.toolbot.com.

For years, designers have been using fake Latin gibberish known as greeking (or sometimes lorem ipsum, after the customary initial words) as a text placekeeper. It conveys the shape and “color” of text without the distraction of actual content.

Source options include the Esperantists’ Manifesto, Jane Eyre, the Tao Te Ching, the GNU Public License (in Swedish), Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida,” Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” Internet RFC 1630 by Tim Berners-Lee, and good old Lorem Ipsum.

Apple customers have a long tradition of griping about Apple’s silly naming policies. But I take it all back after going over this Kaypro timeline from the ’80s. Let’s see, in chronological order starting in 1982 we have:

• Kaypro II (the first model, so naturally we call it “II”)
• Kaypro IV
• Kaypro 10
• Kaypro 4 (totally different from the “IV” of course!)
• Kaypro 2 (totally… never mind)

This madness continued through several more models until the Kaypro 1 was released in 1986, at which point the company completely imploded, possibly due to a logic vacuum deep in its core or a breach in the space-time continuum.