Here are some interesting things I’ve found around teh intarwebs in the past few weeks that never made it into my blog here… until now (I’m pretty sure most of ‘em made it onto Facebook or Twitter, though).
If you ever, ever want to know what an octopus is doing right this very second, Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center has installed a camera in the tank of their resident 40-pound Pacific octopus, Deriq.
It is for some reason very enjoyable and relaxing to watch Deriq meander around in his tank.
Artist Alex Varanese has imagined what it would look like if someone from today went back in time and re-created today’s modern electronics—cell phone, laptop, hand-held video game system, mp3 player—using the design aesthetics of 1977.
I was born in 1977, so I completely remember this style of design. Y’all have no idea how much I miss high technology that had a faux-woodgrain finish. Glorious.
This is a fascinating collection of still frames and clips of people reading newspapers in dozens of films and television shows. The exact same newspaper each time. Going back decades. It looks like this:
It’s actually kind of astonishing how wide-spread this newspaper really is.
AQUATIC VIDEOS
Here are a couple of videos of aquatic awesomeness:
I wasn’t particularly happy with the default wallpapers that came with my Android T-Mobile G1, nor was I happy with any of the ones that I found online, so I decided to make my own!
I really like the little Android logo robot, so I was sure to include him (click for a full-sized version):
And here it is “in action” as the kids like to say these-a-days:
It’s kinda blurry, but as you can see I don’t put any icons in the 2nd row, so the little android guy shows through. That’s why he’s not dead-center in the image. I use this empty 2nd row as the place where I swipe my finger when I’m switching between Android’s three screens.
This weekend I did something so awesome that it deserves an X. I performed some aweXome surgery on my MacBook.
Here’s some background first: I tend to name all of my computers. Usually they have something to do with pop culture. My first laptop was named Raichu. My tandem PC towers that are in my office right now are named Totoro and Voltron. These names just kinda find their way into my lexicon; I never really sit down and think, “What would be a good name for this computer?”
Except that’s exactly what I did when I got my white MacBook almost 2 years ago. I thought, “I need a better way to identify it rather than just ‘laptop’ or ‘MacBook.’” I wondered (probably because I’d been hanging out with tangentbot) what the Japanese word for computer was. So I typed “computer” into Google Translate, and it came back as コンピュータ (sorry for anyone who doesn’t have Japanese character fonts installed).
With my limited knowledge of katakana (and help from Wikipedia) I figured out that コンピュータ is pronounced “konpyuta.” So the Japanese word for “computer” turned out to be “computer” pronounced with a Japanese accent. I began calling my MacBook “Konpyuta,” saying it with the accent and everything.
Quickly, though, with my wife and I talking about it quite a bit (mostly asking where it was and if the other one of us had it or not), Konpyuta developed a nickname: コンピューュー, or “Konpyupyu,” which was very quickly shortened to simply ューュー, or “PyuPyu” (pronounced like you’re shooting a tiny, cute laser pistol—”Pew! Pew!”).
PyuPyu came with an 80 gig harddrive, which seemed like a lot at the time. But Carrie & I like to have a wide variety of music on hand, and I’ve made quite a few videos and movies for Fools Play. As you might know, audio and video are two of the most expensive things to put on a computer from a memory-hogging perspective.
When I got under 8 gigs of free space I knew it was time to do something.
I simply followed all the steps and it was absurdly easy. Copying PyuPyu’s harddrive to the external took about two hours. Actually swapping the harddrives took about 20 minutes.
So now instead of a dwindling 8GB of dwindling space, I have in the neighborhood of 400GB to luxuriate in. That’s a lot of audio. That’s a lot of video. And that’s plenty of space to finally be able to dual-boot with Windows XP (on my to-do list for Saturday).
To commemorate this aweXomeness, PyuPyu has been renamed “PyuPyu 500.” But we still just call it “PyuPyu” for short.
Well, you might have heard of this, but it was leaked (due to an early mailing of promotional material) that Google has *surprise!* created its own web browser! It’s called Chrome, and since I’m a big fan of Google’s other products, I’m really looking forward to trying it to see what it’s like. You can read about it at the Official Google Blog.
One of the coolest things about the whole launch, though, is that they got Scott McCloud, one of my favorite comic book artists, to draw a 30-page comic as an introduction to the concepts of Chrome! Here’s the first page:
You can read the rest of it here. It’s got some interesting stuff! I’m totally downloading it on Tuesday when it’s released.
So my computer surgery was only partially successful. I had to take one of my two hard drives to a doctor. The computer doctor guys called today and said they couldn’t recover anything from my hard drive. It equals kaput. Lost a lot of stuff, including handouts and advertisements I made for the Bead Fact’ry. Also all of my business invoices I mailed out last year, which are kind of important come tax time so I have an accurate account of how much money I made. Not quite sure what to do about that.
But I ordered a fancy new hard drive from TigerDirect, and it should show up sometime next week. Then I’ll re-install XP and all of the programs I need (I still have all of those) and I should be mostly back up and running again.
If you ever, ever want to know what an octopus is doing right this very second, Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center has installed a camera in the tank of their resident 40-pound Pacific octopus, Deriq. 
