Positional Sound Events

I think from a usability standpoint it would be kinda nice if you could tell what application was making noise if the noise sounded like it was coming from the app's position on the screen. Think Instant Messaging. You get an IM from a message window on the right side of your screen and the sound event is louder on your right speaker. Any thoughts?

27 May 05 | +Permalink+ | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

Let the pixel fontsplosion begin!

BitFontMaker(via kottke) is a site that lets you design a 10px by 10px Pixel font and export it to a TrueType font. This is the greatest thing since spiced meat! I know there are already a lot of killer pixel fonts out there, but now... well... there'll be a whole lot more.

Aw hell lets take this opportunity to look at some amazing pixel jockeys.

Those lovable K10k dudes
The minipops guys who spawned the K10k crew's mini pixel love
Eboy who is in no way related to K10k
and it took me forever to dig up this last one...
Trevor Van Meter! (thank you so much for finding it for me ryan)

Speaking of kottke, now I know where you got that slick nav font...

22 Feb 05 | +Permalink+ | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

MSN Desktop Search

Usually I won't touch anything that says "MSN" in its title with a ten foot pole, but that changes with the new MSN Toolbar featuring MSN Desktop Search. This is Apple's Spotlight feature of their next OS X release, for Windows, available immediately. Google Desktop Search, which I loved, pales in comparison. And the core technology is still just a Linux user's "locate" as Windows' normal search is a Linux user's "find". This is the best you're gonna get until Longhorn Blackcomb's WinFS sees the light in your next life. The beta just went live. You need to check this out for yourself. This is an invaluable new addition to your Windows installation.

http://beta.toolbar.msn.com/

14 Dec 04 | +Permalink+ | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)

WhatTheFont!?

Holy crap! You have to try this thing out for yourself to appreciate it.

WhatTheFont!? is a site that allows you to upload an image of some text and it will do its best to identify the font for you.

13 Dec 04 | +Permalink+ | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati is F'd up

The idea of Technorati is that they will show you other sites who have linked to your site. A recent search of their database for "http://blog.kordix.com/marv" yielding a single result: jimfl.tensegrity.net/. Getting to the site, I can't for the life of me find where my site is linked to.

The only explanation I can come up with is that Technorati is F'd up. For the context of the site that supposedly linked me, it gave a paragraph that looked exactly like this:

Danesicle's Palace of Suckass. Josh is Lost in CyberSpace The Peoria Pundit Humor - as seen / heard / read by Sudhir T-Mobile Sidekick II aka HipTop 2 officially announced take it easy runawaysoul - runawaysoul marv on record neunvoltblog レã... Mademoiselle_M Aurora's Rants & Raves Dwelling sweet-flavour.com Techbook Dorothée et ses tricots Diary disaster and love, vengeance and dust Tatham's Social Exposure

My theory is that these are other poor souls who have tried and failed to claim blogs on Technorati, and now it is just spewing them out, disguised as the result of a search. I remember signing up with them not too long ago, and they had me enter my blog address to "Claim" it. Then it identified this address as "Steve Riley's Programming Blog" in a link thing it told me to add to my site. I'm willing to bet that your website will be identified as one of Steve Riley's other blogs, too. Damn that Steve Riley is talented.

But its more than just that. This site that linked to me has, in its latest entry (here is a permalink to it), an account of a trip through the Dakotas and Wyoming. I just got back from a trip through the Dakotas and Wyoming. The blog goes on to reminisce about reading "the recent Al Franken book" during the trip. I too brought this book along. Then in the previous blog entry, there is mention of the Tour de France. This is related here, to a lesser extent, because we did a good deal of biking during the trip, and called a friend to find out the latest Tour results.

[Update] That blog has a section called "Ping'd" where it lists sites that have recently pinged it. Blogs "ping" other blog sites when they have a link to them. Or at least polite blogs behave this way. (See The Joy of Trackbacks, 7-13-04) But in order for this site to have me listed there, I would have had to link to it, which until this very blog post, I haven't. This is sounding like one of those "Don't worry about the vase" paradoxes.

5 Aug 04 | +Permalink+ | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Follow-up on Skype: PhoneGaim

Follow-up on Skype post:

PhoneGaim looks like a very strong potential Skype-killer.
1. Its Gaim- an already heavily adopted messaging client.
2. There are actual plans for calls to the regular phone system.
3. You can test out calling to landlines FREE for 5 minutes EVERY DAY.

So unless Google acquires Skype and adds their trademarked "free love" like they just did to Picasa, Skype might die young.

19 Jul 04 | +Permalink+ | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The Joy of Trackbacks

See that thing at the bottom of each entry called "Trackbacks"? Its a nifty feature that lets one blog know that another has referenced it; a very cool way of interconnecting the blog-verse.
If your blog uses the "Movable Type" system, you should go into Preferences and select "Allow pings by default" and "Turn on Trackback auto-discovery" to make sure your blog is always doing the Trackback dance. I'm not sure of the full extent to which other services offer Trackback, but if you're on "Blogger, Blogspot, Diaryland, Diary-X, iBlog, Newspro, Pitas, and many other..." services, you can sign up for free at HaloScan.com and join in on the fun.

Note to blog.kordix bloggers- I have personally set up Trackbacks for each and every one of you. If you want Trackbacks on old entries, you'll have to edit each one and select "Allow Pings" individually.

13 Jul 04 | +Permalink+ | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Skype

You are going to hear about this soon enough, so I thought you'd like to hear about it here first. It is a program called Skype from the people who brought you Kazaa, and allows you to "call" people who use the program. It is available on for Windows, Pocket PC, and Linux.

Skype is a VoIP client. VoIP stands for Voice Over IP(Internet Protocol). VoIP is an exciting technology that is pushing further into the mainstream. Once this gets popular enough, I wouldn't be surprised if before you know it cell phones can talk to Skype users.

Check out Skype

22 Jun 04 | +Permalink+ | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Its called EMULATION, Kyle!

So much joy from a half eaten fruit...
I'd just like to say that PearPC kicks major ass. It is the first program to let you run Mac OS X on a PC (emulated, through Windows, Linux, and more). A build was just put up in the nightlies that enables networking in Windows, so I was finally able to get online and download some cool mac apps. Well not only that, I was able to have DUALING iTUNES!

dualingitunes.jpg

Anyway, if you are anywhere as much of a Mac fan as me, and like me don't want to actually buy a Mac because deep down you know you can do all that stuff on those other machines, check PearPC out. Then, if you really get into the whole emulation of Mac OS's, go grab Basilisk II and *find* a copy of Mac OS 8. Its fun!

And I guess I have to throw in VMware, which will let you run pretty much any other OS you can come up with (see screenshots on their site).

Is there anything better than running multiple OS's at once, one on top of another?

30 May 04 | +Permalink+ | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Marv's Clean Computing Snack Standard

Some snacks are better kept away from computers. In order for a snack to meet the MCCSS, it must obey the following:

--Must not leave any residue on fingers.

--Must not be susceptible to crumming in keyboard.

--Must not involve conductant liquid.

Add more in the comments section.

29 May 04 | +Permalink+ | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

Destruction, Rebirth

I've just finished my journey installing a fresh copy of Windows on a wonderfully clean, formatted drive. On a laptop that has a 100% busted CD drive.

Now I don't mean to say I performed the miracle of installing software without a working CD drive.. I did use one. Instead of shelling out oodles of cash to a "Certified Toshiba Repair Center" for labor and price-inflated parts(*cough*COMPUSA*cough*), I picked up a USB drive enclosure on Newegg for ~35 bucks, and popped an old would-be-useless CD drive I had laying around in there.
You can't just tell my laptop to boot from an external USB drive. Its accessible area of anything resembling a BIOS is limited to some pre-determined boot devices you may choose from in the form of cute little icons, displayed for you at boot if you figured out the F-keys go all the way up to "F12".
Well thankfully, a very useful site exists at Bootdisk.com. There, for a "donation" of $4, I was able to get my hands on an assortment of drivers/files that let you boot random USB drives from DOS. Its quite an adventure when the fate of your machine that can run at THOUSANDS OF MEGAHERTZ is in the hands of a modified *Windows 98* boot disk. What are we supposed to do when Microsoft finished completely, for real, we mean it this time, abandoning Windows 98? Am I going to actually have to pay to get my drive fixed? Oh, right... In that future, the future of Longhorn and Palladium (ugh), I'll be solely dependant on *Slackware Linux*.

Speaking of Longhorn...

Upon making this laptop from which I am typing this blog so fresh and so clean clean, I've decided to keep quite a few applications off the hard drive, and on web servers. What I mean by this is that I use web applications in place of their client side brothers. For e-mail, I use Horde, the best e-mail client... EVAR! And for instant messaging I'm going to try and stay committed to using ICQ Go and AIM Express clients. The way I see it, many applications will move in this direction in the future.
-Wherever you are, you can access the same applications with your data stored server-side. Of course strong authentication measures would be necessary, but I see the industry moving in that direction anyway. You wanna try and brute force an eye or fingerprint scan?
-Software companies can easily enforce subscriptions, and know their users are actually paying to use their software. Hey, we knew it would have to happen eventually, right?

Anyone can afford a terminal with minimal processing power on its own. All joe-user needs to buy is a nice big screen and the bare essentials. Have all the services run on super-computers that spawn from the latest booming university trend to build them cheaply (what, you haven't heard of Virginia Tech's Apple G5 Supercomputer? It was only the cheapest fast supercomputer of ALL TIME or something... no big deal...)

What does this have to do with Longhorn? According to some mockup videos I saw on microsoft.com a while ago (can't seem to find a link) Longhorn aims to eliminate the server.
Oh wait, they intend to eliminate the personal server now that I think about it. They want tasks that a small server would do to be done by a very powerful personal computer. Well they have to keep the families of AMD and Intel employees eating, right?
But joe-user of the future doesn't want to pay an assload for a computer he doesn't need. Common non-geek should not get used to shelling out so much for a PC. They need nothing more than a terminal.
And Microsoft Word.

Saw The Day After Tomorrow today. Enjoyed it. I don't lump it into the cheesy massive destruction blah blah movies. Maybe I would have if it weren't so damned well done. Except for those terrible CGI wolves.

29 May 04 | +Permalink+ | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)