“Dream Workshop” is a new device from Japanese company Takara Co. That is supposed to help you control your dreams by playing music, displaying a picture of a person you’d like to be in your dream, and playing recorded keywords. The music varies depending on the kind of dream you’d like to have, though surprisingly “Bow chicka wow wow” is not an option. Takara Co. claims a 22% success rate that one of your keywords will be involved in the dream. You can expect to see spams in your inbox guaranteeing a 20% increase in the success rate of your keywords and “dream rank” next month. Read more »

Or a really cool water gun, if you don’t want to get arrested for being a terrorist. I think it’s important to note that even though this kid has a few gallons of explosive strapped to his back and is blowing a thirty foot flame around his yard, he remembered to wear his safety goggles. Click the link for all the info, as well as animations of the device being used, seconds before he’s raided by the Department of Homeland Security. :) Read more »

Gadgetopia has an excellent review of 37Signals’ “The Building of Basecamp” seminar. This was something that I wanted to attend but was unable to for about a million reasons. If you are interested they have announced their next seminar. All in all, an excellent seminar on two levels: (1) the actual information presented, and (2) the vibe you got from 37 Signals in general. I came away with a very, “if they can do it, so can we” attitude which will perhaps be the biggest benefit of all in the next few months. Read more »

Apple has released a preview of its Rendezvous technology for Windows 2000 and XP. There are also releases for Java, and Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD Rendezvous technology is now available on Windows 2000 and XP. This preview release includes full link-local support, allowing Windows machines to discover advertised HTTP and FTP servers using Internet Explorer. It also includes a printer setup wizard which allows Windows machines to print to Rendezvous networked printers, including USB shared printers connected to the AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express Base Stations. With the included Rendezvous SDK, Windows and Java developers can begin the process of adding Rendezvous service discovery to their applications. Read more »

With .Mac, Apple users have been able to sync their Safari bookmarks between multiple machines for a while now. But with this setup you are limited to using a Mac (obviously) and Safari. Now there is a way to synchronize your Firefox bookmarks as well, and thanks to the cross-platform nature of Firefox, you can also synchronize your bookmarks across any OS platform that Firefox is available on. Bookmark something on your PC at work, and see it on your Mac when you get home. It works by using your own FTP server to store an XML file which can then be parsed into your bookmarks list by Firefox. Try Read more »

I wrote fanmail to a couple of programmers. The programmers in question were Havoc Pennington and Keith Packard. I don’t know too much about programming per se (I am very early in the process of learning Python, my first language), but I do know what I like. Keith Packard does lots of stuff, and one of the things he works on is X, the graphics server for unix. He works with freedesktop.org and does things like make antialiasing work well in linux. Havoc wrote metacity, was chairman of gnome, and generally seems to know how to remove features in order to streamline interfaces. He even wrote an essay about that. Read more »

I’m sure that everyone reading this has seen Star Wars at one time or another, and know just how great of a movie it is. Another popular movie favorite of mine is Office Space, which is so true to real life that it’s scary. Have you ever wondered what would happen if you combined the two? Well, wonder no longer – just watch this movie (Windows Media Video format), and find out for yourself! Via Tosh Meston. Read more »

Many sites, including this one now have RSS feeds, and many people use programs like NetNewsWire to easily browse them. But what if you want to add an RSS feed to your site so you could for instance have the latest news headlines on your front page? With Feed2Javascript this can be really simple. Just download the libraries, upload it, tweak a few configuration settings, and you have syndicated content on your site. You don’t have to mess with XML, or any scripting at all. You can use the service off of their servers, or download the open-source code and run it on your own server if you are wary Read more »

A giant exotic plant that has not bloomed in the Northeast in more than 60 years is ready to flower at the University of Connecticut’s greenhouses. The “corpse flower” has the odor of 3-day-old road kill, and UConn botanists couldn’t be more excited. So the flower smells like dead animals and looks like rotten meat. Man I wish I was there to see it! Read more »

In the past few weeks before the WWDC began, Apple Rumor sites were abuzz with speculation about what new products we could all begin thinking differently about. As is the case, the speculation ranged from accurate (several sites predicted the new LCDs) to highly innaccurate (massive iMac design overhaul/g5 processors) to very very tired (Apple Handhelds, Apple Tablets). What I always find interesting is the existence of this rumor mill culture. For a company with 2% market share (or whatever the precise number is now) there do seem to be an inordinate amount of sites dedicated to discussing what it may or may not release. For instance, some mac forums Read more »