The thing I dislike most about working in a temperature controlled (read air conditioned) office is that if I leave my cup of coffee on the desk it goes cold.
Clearly this little challenge has been occupying the minds of our best and brightest – because an inventor is proposing a system that will harness the power of mouse motion to heat coffee…
Brilliant.
For some reason there have been thousands (well tens) of great coffee tips around the Internet this week. I’m going to start posting them. There’ll be hundreds (well tens) of great coffee posts to follow.
I’m going to call it my international day of coffee posting. Let the calendars henceforth recognise this date as such.
So sit back, get yourself a cuppa, and have a read…
Those little Bluetooth headsets are the most annoying invention ever. You can’t tell if people are crazy babblers, talking to you, or on the phone. It’s a cause for confusion. And nice people don’t confuse their friends.
Nice people buy these phones so that everybody knows when they’re on their mobile phone…
The infamous Portable Rotary Phone is an original rotary phone that has been modified to be a cellular phone. The Port-O-Rotary has a functional rotary dial, rings the original, loud metallic bells when a call is received, and even has a dial tone!
Phone comes fully assembled and tested. All you have to do is open the phone, insert your SIM card, and turn the unit on! The unit will utilize your phone number and account minutes. The internal cellular module works within any country that has one of the 900MHz, 1800MHz, or 1900MHz cellular bands (90% of the world). The Port-O-Rotary is truly international with up to 15-digit dialing, auto-frequency selection, ‘+’ characters, and PIN # entry for pre-paid cards.
Sadly, it’s not quite as cool as the iPhone. But it’s close.
Fixing up collateral damage from World War Two has been an expensive proposition. More than 60 years later a European bloke got so fed up with the holes left by explosions in Berlin that he patched the holes with Lego.
Adam, a friend from Brisbane just won a piano competition. A biggish one (as much as I can tell about piano competitions) and the reaction on Facebook from our mutual friends.
There’s a streaming thing where you can watch his performance in the heats. And probably the semis and the final as well.
Now that the Australian Festival of Chamber Music is over I’m clearly lacking in cultural content on this page – so here it is. For your viewing pleasure.
Kettles come in all shapes and sizes. Music doesn’t. There’s sub genres of sub genres (math rock anyone?). Ben (from Vanishing Point) likes Thrash Metal. Or something. Now, we can coin a sub-sub-genre. Kettle Metal.
Generally, the whistle a kettle makes sounds pretty similar (and horribly atonal) from model to model. Kettles have thus been an unheralded part of the musical ensemble. Well not until now… You can program it to play your favourite song.
There’s nothing more English than English Breakfast tea… except of course the English royal family. So combining them seems to be the most natural thing in the world… especially when you come up with a name like “Royaltea“.
Here’s the description of how it works from mocoloco.
“Narrow rays of light that sneak through small slits in the bezel act as second, minute and hour hands”
It was designed by a Japanese design group called Mile Project.
Talking clocks are pretty annoying. Clocks without hands that tell you the time in words and come in various colours are just plain pretty. And pretty expensive.
Imagine a world where playing with your food is obligatory. When towers of biscuity goodness are limited only by the height of your roof. Are we on the same page?
Ready. Set. Go.
While I was thinking about the whole PK issue the other day I was struck by a comparison that I’ve thought of in the past but not, until now, documented.
Being a PK is just like being Harry Potter. Hogwarts is the broader church, the houses within Hogwarts are either the different types of people within a congregation or representative of multiple denominations. Atheists are muggles, and people who come to faith from outside of Christian homes are “mudbloods” according to some of the less tolerant members of the church – obviously only the nasties. (this actually closely reflects some comments I’ve heard from people who come into the church from other backgrounds).
So being a PK is like being a child of promise – and you rock up to Hogwarts and all the faculty know you by reputation and have expectations.
I promise this will be the last time (for a while) that I mention Harry Potter. But it seems a valid meta interpretation of the world in which the wizards operate.
What say you?
Also, the picture at the top comes from this great article about how Christendom has suddenly decided that Harry Potter is OK because they’ve figured he’s a messianic figure with plenty of plot allusions to Christ.
This video is rightly being hailed as the best lego stop motion 8-bit tribute of all time.
It’s a pretty small pool I guess – but all the typical post fodder is included – Pacman, Mario and Tetris make an appearance…
If you’re a Christian and you want to evangelise and you need convincing that being loving is the best to achieve this outcome then you need to watch this interview that Denton did with a former leader of the Klan.
If you’re either not a Christian, or already convinced that speaking the truth with love is already the way to go, then you should watch the video too…
I am fascinated by the fact that both Denton and BoingBoing (where I found it) push the guy in question’s courage when the thing that strikes me is his love for his enemies.
Just in case you have previously considered commenting but were turned off by the lack of appropriate spacing in the comments to indicate paragraph changes… or for those of you who have been complaining about the long standing issue…
I fixed it. If you are here because you googled “WordPress Comments paragraph spacing” or something related to WordPress Comment formatting…
The offender was this little piece of code in the CSS:
.comment-text p {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
Just so you know. You should remove that if you’re having the same issue.
Pip tip
I’m not sure how big the problem of improperly discarded olive pips is. It could no doubt lead to some sort of olive oil fueled apocalypse… but I like the underlying principle expressed by this image…
Perhaps in my quest to get lurkers out of the shadows I should post a comment on every post?
August 29, 2009