Sunday, May 27, 2007

LinkFest: Hardware, Software, and Lifeware

It's a great thing that I have a three-day weekend to look forward to!

Lots of posts and topics to get off my chest.

Let's start things off today with a LinkFest.

Hardware

Zuse: Toast you can draw on - Are you yearning to incorporate some high-tech into your breakfast time? How about the Zuse toaster. The Zuse allows you to make "dot-matrix" printouts on your toast. Very clever. Imagine the ensuing excitement if all the diners in Boston suddenly started seeing Mooninites on their toast.

Solstice USB Flash Drive Duplicator - Now this could be cool AND useful. Imagine making a USB stick "image" full of your IT shop's needed enterprise software and utilities and then issuing one to all of your team members. Keeping them updated would be a real challenge. With a tool like this, one person could easily maintain a master USB drive image and keep it updated. Then periodically, everyone could drop off their issued USB drive, and the maintainer could easily and quickly update them all in bulk. Quite clever. Coming down the Solstice pipes...a 21 port USB duplicator!

Intel Unveils World's Thinnest Laptop, Almost Skinny as a RAZR - Sure. Product designs for laptops always look so cool and neat. But just how often do they ever see real mass-market production runs? I have to concede to the Intel/Ziba design teams that this one looks really cool. I'd love to have one like this to carry into the field. Just hope it is fairly durable as well.

More Intel Notebook:

Software

Office 2007: X = ZIP - Turns out that Microsoft's new Office Doc format (Office Open XML File Format) is just a zip file with XML and media files packaged up. Daily Cup of Tech's Tim Fehlman takes it apart at the link. Also, via Microsoft's MSDN site: Introducing the Office (2007) Open XML File Formats

Google Librarian Central: Found in Translation - Google announces an expansion of their language translation service. Before you could use Google Translate to translate blocks of text or even entire web-pages. Now, you can actually run searches for terms and and view results over entire webscapes in a non-native language, and have them returned in your native language! http://translate.google.com. Not yet perfect but going a long way to breaking down language barriers to content.

6 Great Free Alternatives to Quicken & MS Money - zen habits drops a list of some nice alternatives to the financial management tools of Quicken and Microsoft Money. I've used Quicken for a long time and like it enough to own a "basic" version. However, if you are really living on a budget and it extends to your software choices...consider looking into one of these tools. While not as fully featured, they might provide just enough muscle to pinch those penny's a bit tighter. Goodness knows with rising gas and food prices, every penny does need to be pinched a bit more.

Lifeware

zen habits | Achieving Goals and Simple Productivity through Daily Habits - This is quickly becoming one of my favorite sites to follow. It pairs nicely with another (non-related) site Lifehacker. Site blogger Leo does a fantastic job sharing his life-tips and lessons in balancing health, life, work and inner harmony. Take for example this recent post: How I Work 2 Jobs, Blog and Still Find Time for My Wife and 6 Kids. Heck. I have one wife, one kid, one blog and one job and I have a difficult time getting them all sync'ed.

No chanting zen monks here on zen habits. Just practical tips for effective living. I'm going to be adding his site to my blog-roll very soon.

Incredible LEGO Star Wars Space Port - via TechEBlog. Wow. I always thought the Millennium Falcon was the coolest ship in the whole Star Wars production.

JapanSugoi - Everything Cool about Japan - another "Guilty Japanese Pleasures" website. Goofy, edgy, and just wacky. Take for example this offering: Mosaic Show from Strapya. Guaranteed to hide your identity and change your voice for anonymous YouTube posts as you confess your secret office-love for a co-worker or expunge stress by reaming out your boss. They will NEVER catch on! I hear Washington has just ordered up several cases of them.

For mother's day, Alvis and I picked up a brick-set of Ai Yori Aoshi as Lavie's gift. She has been reading all the manga titles with fondness. The two seasons of this anime series came out back in 2002-2003 so this isn't a "new" title and I never could find all the single volumes at my different anime store suppliers...so I delayed purchase of the series as I didn't want to get stuck with "holes" in the collection.

It was great then, when both were released as a single "brick" set (though a thinpack would have been even better). So Lavie and I have been fueling our romantic side by watching this tender (and wacky) love story that is a twist on the tradition "harem" plot theme of many Japanese anime serials. There is just something about it that is tender and warm in the love story between Aoi and Kaoru that makes us want to cuddle and smooch. Got to love finding those things in today's world.

Time to go watch some races

--Claus

Posted by Claus at
Labels: , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)