Archive for the ‘Just for Fun’ Category

Watch Movies from the Command Line

In one of the geekiest (and coolest) things I’ve ever seen, How-to-Geek published a how-to on how to watch movies from a Linux command line. The trick uses mplayer to play the movie using colored text. It’s almost as cool as the ‘sl’ command which is clearly just as powerful and useful :) From Ubuntu, you just do:sudo apt-get install mplayer and then run mplayer to open the file with the “caca” option: mplayer -vo caca filename

Tags:
Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Feb 24th, 2009

Celebrate 1234567890!

Looking for a nerdy good time? It’ll be 1234567890 Unix time this Friday, February 13th at 3:31:30 PM PST and the parties are being added to the 1234567890 day website as I type. What is Unix time, you might ask? It’s the number of seconds that has passed since midnight on January 1, 1970. It’s used by a lot of operating systems (like Unix in case you hadn’t guessed) to tell time. You can find more about Unix time at Wikipedia and find a party to join at the 1234567890 day website.

Tags:
Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Feb 12th, 2009

Isn’t It Ironic..

Tonight an article made it to the top of the technology page on Digg from msnbc.com which ripped on Linux users and called Linux a pain to use. Msnbc.com, of course, runs on Microsoft IIS (hence the ms in msnbc), but I think they ought to think twice before bragging about the Microsoft platform too much..

Tags: ,
Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Jan 23rd, 2009

Missing Some Documentation?

This weekend I picked up something I’ve always wanted but never taken the time to order: a USB-powered aquarium. That’s right, you can get the enjoyment of watching real fish without actually having to feed or take care of the real fish. Plus, it plugs into a computer so any geek would enjoy it. What more could I ask for? I decided to take a look at the instructions to ensure I didn’t break anything when I put it together and what I found was a bit surprising. Pay close attention to the instructions in the right column:

Notice anything that could be missing? Though the picture shows pouring water into the aquarium, at no point in the instructions was water mentioned! I’m not sure how the aquarium was supposed to work without water.. Must be one of those new fangle-dangle computer gizmos..

Tags:
Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Jan 12th, 2009

Online Pets?

Okay, I guess I’m going to show my ignorance on the toy industry here, but I couldn’t believe this when I saw it in the store. I was walking through Target last night going after some last minute Christmas gifts and saw this sign. Apparently the whole aisle was designated for “Internet Pets”. They’ve had virtual pets for a long time, but do we really have to have online pets? Perhaps thanks to a little shell scripting and cron we can have fully automated pets that are fed, walked, and loved on automatically. Now I just need to find a way to get my virtual dog to pee outside instead of on the carpet all the time..

Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Dec 24th, 2008

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »