Category Archives: Tech

Google Wave Swamps My PC

I’ve just been trying Google Wave after I was graciously invited by someone awesome, and it looks like it’s really hard on your computer’s system resources when you’re trying to view a big Wave. Here’s my browser, struggling to render a big Wave:
I was trying to read a random Wave that had 129 other users [...]

Colour Schemes from Nature

Linked from a Hacker News “Ask HN” post about how to pick colours for websites, I was inspired by this Flickr image showing how to create a colour scheme from a photo.
I decided I’d try this colour scheme from nature business, and because I’m lazy I took a picture with my phone without [...]

Tips for Living In a Big City #1: How to Get Directions

If you’re lost in a big city like, say, New York City, a very effective way to be sure that strangers will help you find your way is to be a small, helpless, cute cardboard robot with a flag that has your destination written on it.

Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with [...]

Online Scams In Plain English

This video from the guys at CommonCraft does a great job of explaining what Phishing scams are and how they work:

Stupid Website Content “DRM”

Today somebody sent me a link to MIS Australia’s article about some ridiculous filters the ever-paternalistic Australian government is trying to foist on the Australian public for our own protection. Like, thanks you guys.
Anyway I got feisty when I realised that you can’t cut and paste from the Australian Financial Review’s MISAustralia website. As soon [...]

Creator of PHP Language Hates Programming!

I’m listening to an IT Conversations podcast of Rasmus Lerdorf (the guy who created PHP) speaking about PHP, and I have to say I’m pretty surprised to hear him say “I hate programming with a passion — I created PHP to avoid programming.”

Rasmus says that he wrote PHP while building a web-based system for Toronto [...]

What Web 2.0 Is

The Buzzword
Like any good buzzword (say…agile — or is that AGILE? No, it isn’t.), Web 2.0 is overused and bastardised to mean a thousand different things by some groups of people, and at the same time it’s mocked and dismissed as just another buzzword by others.
OK so it’s March 2008 and Web 2.0 is [...]

Mozilla Shortcut Keys and AWESOME Thunderbird Extension

Whoo yeah I’m excited!
About two months ago I got a new Apple Macbook Pro. I love it, it’s rad, I love using it etc. But something that’s been bugging me no end is that I don’t know the shortcut key to jump to the address bar (where you type http://…etc) in Firefox. In [...]

Patience is a Virtue…for NERDS

If patience truly is a virtue, then the guys who made these two videos are really virtuous. Check out this Line Rider insanity:

Yes it’s crazy huh? Well this is nutser in a more hardcore nerd way. A guy has built a robot that can solve a Rubik’s cube! It’s called Rubot. Apparently [...]

Fixing a Blurry Philips 107P Monitor

My shiny, expensive (for a 17″) TFT is being a moron and going bright for about a second before turning off its backlight so I can’t see a thing. I think it’s under warranty…I hope it’s under warranty.
Anyway you don’t care about that, you care about finding out what to do when your Philips [...]