Looks fantastic, but not so tasty, May 31, 2007
By Benjamin Hallert (Springfield, OR)
While the wrapper is artfully done, I was disappointed with the filling. I don’t know if the one I got was a factory defect or not, but once I had removed the elaborate wrapper, I found it was empty, without even the smell of chocolate. After this, I’ll stick with Cadbury eggs, but my experience may not be representative of the normal presentation. I’ve given the product 4 stars because of the wrapper, though, while difficult to tear off, it was certainly stunning.
StumbleUpon offers a browser toolbar allowing users to submit sites they want, and discover new sites suiting their interests by clicking the “Stumble” button, and giving the option to indicate whether they liked the site or not. Continue reading eBay buys StumbleUpon→
CBS has purchased last.fm for $280 million. Congratulations to the last.fm team, I’m sure they’ve put in a lot of work to last.fm, so they sure deserve a nice payout.
Okay, here’s a trip down Memory Lane… Sock Master’s Video Game Controller Family Tree is a history of game controller evolution through time, showing all the main consoles and where they borrowed ideas from etc. An interesting read, and makes me want to dig out my SNES :)
OK, StumbleUpon led me to this irritating yet very clever game. It’s like Breakout in that you move a paddle to keep a ball bouncing… but there’s a second ball balancing, and every time you move your paddle to one side, the platform the second ball is on moves the other way. Annoyingly addictive to try to beat your best time. So far I’ve managed 22.995 secs… can you do better?
This is a test entry in the “asides” category. K2 (the WP theme I use) allows “asides”, which are small entries of lower importance than regular blog entries.
I’d like to be able to use that for little trivial updates. Alternatively, I might try out Twitter and show latest Twitter updates in my sidebar.
Just released version v0.4.0 of Lyrics::Fetcher - a Perl module to fetch song lyrics">Lyrics::Fetcher to CPAN… it’ll take a little while to be distributed to the various CPAN mirrors.
Version 0.4.0 introduces the ability to automatically try all available fetcher modules until one suceeds, or pass an arrayref of fetchers to try in order. Lyrics::Fetcher::LyricsNet has been removed from the package until it can be fixed up (the LyricsNet search doesn’t seem to work at the moment).
I bought a cheap (~£20) Logitech Quickcam Messenger to connect up to my Linux box at home to act as a basic security camera – coupled with the cunningly-titled motion detection program “motion”, it can detect movement, capture images and/or video, and execute any commands etc. (More on this setup in a future post!).
The Linux kernel now includes a quickcam_messenger driver, but it didn’t work for my camera. Checking the USB ID showed that it’s a different product ID, so they’ve changed the way the camera works, but kept the name (I wish they wouldn’t do that). I had to use the spca5xx/gspca driver. Continue reading Logitech QuickCam Messenger under Linux→
David Precious – professional Perl developer, motorcyclist and beer drinker
I bought a cheap (~£20) Logitech Quickcam Messenger to connect up to my Linux box at home to act as a basic security camera – coupled with the cunningly-titled motion detection program “motion”, it can detect movement, capture images and/or video, and execute any commands etc. (More on this setup in a future post!).