This is one way to get your perfect coffee fix…
If you’re both a coffee- and gadget-freak, this project by DIY’er Tim Hirzel will probably be a notably inspiring hack. By combining a fancy-pants Rancilio Silvia espresso machine, the multi-purpose Arduino micro-controller, a Wii nunchuk, and some seriously high-level hacking, Tim has created a one-of-a-kind masterpiece. The typically straight-up espresso maker is now controlled electronically, allowing integration of a calendar, sleep timer, wake-up alarm, and temperature regulation. The system also allows a user to time its functions (to get that perfect cup of espresso), and the nunchuk can be used to alter settings on the unit. Be sure and take a look at the video after the break to see this mod in action.
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Late to the game as always, I finally got onto COD4 last night.
Oh. my. god. This game is frigging awesome!
I had no idea what I was doing half the time, and spent most of the night watching replays of how I died, but I haven’t had a laugh like this with a game since Gears of War came out. Halo 3 was good, great even - but it just didn’t have that stand out ‘you’re gonna remember this’ feeling to it, it was just more, well, Halo.
Maybe this is because COD4 is my first COD game and i’ve just been missing out all of these years (the WWII stuff never really appealed).
Anyway, enough of my rambling… If you own a machine capable of gaming in anyway, be it Xbox, PS3, Wii, PC, your toaster, whatever - you need to try out COD4.
Oh, and for real giggles, try an 18 player free-for-all on the world’s smallest map ‘Shipment’. I think I had on average about 5 seconds between respawns! 
I somehow managed to miss this one. Quake 3 running on hacked iPod Touch’s! They keep making it harder and harder to resist an iPhone/iPod Touch…
Future generations will most likely divide the timeline of history at this point: when Quake 3 achieved motion-sensing, wireless network play on two iPod touches. Just think, less than a year ago we were salivating (or at least mildly enthused) at the prospect of rocking Doom on this thing, and now Quake 3 Arena is yours for the taking — or at least will be once we get any sort of hard info on this app.
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This has officially just made my day!
Microsoft has officially announced that the Xbox 360 sequel to the popular shooter Gears of War will launch in November of this year.
Much of the Xbox 360’s first year success was dependent on Epic’s Gears of War. It proved much more than just substitute until Halo 3 arrived and really showed the gaming quality that the console could deliver. In fact, many still favour Marcus Fenix over Master Chief Petty Officer John-117.
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Engadget are running a story with pics for HP’s answer to the Eee PC. It does look quite sweet, but no details of the full spec or final price as yet.
If they could pitch this about the same price as the Eee - I could see this being quite sweet… However, it says that it can come with Vista or Linux - my bet is that it’s going to be a touch more powerful than the Eee (it’ll need to be if Vista is an option!), and a shedload more cash!!! Please let me be wrong, (on the cash point 
)!
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I really like the Eee PC - some people at work here have them, and if I could get it past the wife, i’d happily have one!
Seems like the well spoken geek Stephen Fry is quite a fan too:
I am writing this article on a kind of mini John the Baptist, a system that prepares the way of the software saviour whose coming will deliver the 90% of world computer users who suffer under Windows from the expensive, clumsy, costly, ugly, pricey toils of Microsoft.
The Asus EEE PC perched on my knee combines GNU software with a Linux kernel powered by an Intel Celeron Mobile Processor to produce a very extraordinary little laptop. It weighs less than a kilogram, starts up from cold in about 12 seconds and shuts down in five. It has no internal hard disk and no CD drive. It offers 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage and a seven-inch display; wireless, dial-out modem and ethernet adaptors are available for networking and internet connections, three USB ports, mini-jack sockets for headphones and microphone, a VGA out, an SD card slot and a built-in webcam. All for about £200 - less than the price of a show, dinner and taxi for two in London’s West End.
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I watched a presentation on this about 18 months ago at a conference and it looked pretty interesting - some good potential applications in the scientific field. Glad to see things are progressing.
“The W3C just gave SPARQL the stamp of approval. SPARQL is a query language for the Semantic Web, and differs from other query languages in that is usable across different data sources. There are already 14 implementations of the spec available. Most of them are free software. There are also billions of relations out there that are query-able, thanks to the Linking Open Data project. The structured data of Wikipedia is now query-able at DBpedia. Also, have a look at Ivan Herman’s presentations on this topic.”
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This is great news - NetNewsWire, the best news reader on the Mac is now completely free! Not just the ‘Lite’ version anymore, but the full product! This is my default (and only) news reader on the Mac.
There’s a FAQ that explains a bunch of things—I’m not going to repeat it all here.
But I will say that, for me personally, this is a dream come true. Every developer wants to be able to work on the software they love, make a living at it, and give it to the world for free.
Usually you get to pick two out of three—if you’re lucky. Me, I get all three.
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SSH is a great tool for remotely accessing another machine, but entering your password every time you log into a remote box can be a pain if you would like to set-up some background scripts to connect to a server and do something (i.e. a backup script running as a cron job). Here’s how I set-up my Mac to be able to log into my server without the need for a password to be entered each time - the instructions should be good for any variant of Unix/Linux, but you need to take into account path names etc. on your machine.
Continue reading ‘SSH Shared-Key Setup - SSH Logins Without Passwords’
I’m a bit of a command-line freak and like to spend a fair amount of time with the terminal open… As such I like to spend a small amount of time getting the terminal set-up nicely. Other than changing the default colour scheme and font, one (slightly) more drastic change is to replace the standard implementation of ls for one that is slightly more configurable.
The default ls on OS X comes from BSD and compared to the GNU/Linux alternative is slightly lacking when it comes to comes to changing how things look - so what I like to do is replace it with the GNU ls available in MacPorts - this allows me to get a terminal setup like below:
Continue reading ‘A Better Ls for Mac OS X’
