Calendaris!

El Compact Calendar de David Seah és ben mono, i sembla molt pràctic; és un excel per imprimir. Hi ha adaptacions, amb els dilluns on toquen i les festes d'aqui, en Excel i en Open Office.

Aqui altres calendaris ben macos, però amb aquestes extranyes semanes de cap de setmana partit.

Tanta il·lusió que em fan els calendaris, i tan nerviós que em posen.

Tag-decorated feeds

Tags should be a good cue to tell us if a blog post should be read or skipped. I find puzzling that most (all?) feed readers just ignore tags. Surprisingly enough, I could not find any feed decorator.

Yahoo! Pipes to the rescue: after some copy'n'paste, a pipe that decorates feeds appending to every post title its categories (for atom and rss 2 feeds), and also adds the tags to the top of the post: http://pipes.yahoo.com/xverges/tagsintitle

This one does the same, but also adds the results from Yahoo! Term Extraction to the top of the post. I just cooked it, so I am not really sure if the list of terms is a useful addition: http://pipes.yahoo.com/xverges/tagsandtermextraction

Annoying side effects: the feed name, url and description become those of the pipe, so a bit of manual work is required after subscribing to a feed. I hope they fix it...

3D means that the screen frame is like a window frame (or More Procrastineering Wiimote hackery)

Another amazing video by Johnny Lee (or was it Leonardo?). This time on using a Wiimote for head tracking providing an amazing 3D experience.



If that was not enough, check out his video on foldable displays

Procrastineering

Someone that names his blog Procrastineering has to be brilliant. And Johnny Chung Lee proves it by using a Wiimote to let you have low cost interactive whiteboard in a LCD or any surface where you can project your screen.

But not everything is about gadgets: check out the Community Splash project, co-authored by Johnny, that used a giant slingshot to throw paint filled ballons against a 18-story building in Pittsburgh. Do not miss the project's image gallery.

Social Note Taking

I just played a bit with Ripplerap, a tool to take and share notes during conferences. Brilliant. If downloading and unziping is too much for you to get an impression, take a look at Phil Whitehouse's ripplerap-is-about-to-be-born post.

It is in its infancy, and there are several things that need some ironing, but I believe that its simplicity gives it a huge potential. Good news for us compulsive note takers and/or conference-life-blogging addicts.

And I must confess that I did not see much of a point in one of Ripplerap bulding blocks, TiddlyChatter...

Update: It is a funny coincidence that the very same day that I played with Ripplerap for the first time, fellow IBMer Sacha Chua - tech evangelist, storyteller, geek - made me aware of this collecton of tips for conference bloggers.

Wiimote as an accessibiity enabler?

The picture of The ThinkGeek WiiHelm I jokingly attached in my last post has suddenly made me wonder if the Wiimote could be a very cheap accessibility enabler for people with some specific mobility limitations... The Wiimote can interface with computers, but I don't know if its sensitivity is low enough.

I'm posting this just because I didt not get any obvious google hit on this.

Update: This post has reminded Josep Maria Ganyet about a video of a Wiimote being attached to a spring horse, turning the mostly static experience of driving videos into a sort of motorcycle simulator. Nice idea.

Wiinflación

Wiis agotadas. Wiimotes/Wiimandos agotados; de 40€ de precio normal a 60€ + portes en eBay. Veo que amazon.fr vuelve a tenerlos en stock (40€ + iva + portes), lo que me hace suponer que la escasez no tardará en desaparecer y que ha sido una suerte contener mi instinto estraperlista.

Pero mucho más intersante que todo lo anterior es el origen de la palabra estraperlo.



Actualización:

1. En La Vanguardia la semana pasada trataron sobre la escasez de Wiimotes.
   
2. En fnac.es venden el Wii Play (un juego que incluye un mando) por 45€

Happy Geek Dad

Stumbled upon Jason R. Briggs' Snake Wrangling for Kids:

"Snake Wrangling for Kids" is a printable electronic book, for children 8 years and older, who would like to learn computer programming. It covers the very basics of programming, and uses the Python programming language to teach the concepts. Examples are presented for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

You are flying! How?

Read the rest of the strip

Bus o taxi? Opera Mini i TMB t'ajuden

Dues coses que em fan la vida més fàcil:

• iBus, un servei de TMB que et diu quan falta per que arribi el bus a una parada. Pot dir-ho amb un SMS o, gairebé gratis, via web.
  
• Opera Mini 4, que et deixa definir-te les teves pròpies cerques personalitzades (molt semblant a les quick searches del Firefox).
  

En lloc de buscar a Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon... (les cerques predefinides) pots fer-te una cerca a
http://www.tmb.net/piu/ca_ES/piusolucio.jsp?parada=%s
i amb pocs clics podràs introduir el codi de parada (cal incloure els zeros a de l'esquerra si n'hi ha) i veure si tens temps d'anar a comprar el diari abans de que arribi el bus.

I aquest és l'aspecte que té l'Opera Mini quan et diu quan tardarà l'autobús.