You’ve probably heard of Disney’s Animatronics – the robots that enact scenes from history and popular culture at the Disney theme parks. I thought it was pretty cool that they recently added one of Woz in the famous garage, banging away on the keyboard and inventing the original Apple Computer.

Here’s a free, handy little utility for windows, Driverview, that provides a full list of every driver on your system. There are already ways to get this info but this little utility makes it more convenient to get at, puts it all in one place, and lets you export it to a text file.

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In case you didn’t notice, Amazon is making the rounds pitching their new epaper-based ebook device, the Kindle. My reaction? Amazon, you can bite me. Go back to your publishing partners and explain to them that there is no way in hell I am going to pay for a device purporting to allow me to read books that has less features than, you know, an actual book made of paper. I can’t loan my kindle books to someone else, I have to rely on Amazon maintaining the service in perpetuity because if they ever shut it down I could lose all access to my book collection, or I have to have faith that Amazon will do a one time ‘remove all DRM from all books upon shutdown of the service’, which I’ll guarantee won’t happen, in fact I’ll guarantee it’s in their contracts with the publishers that they can’t. The device also has really limited file format support, including a lack of pdf support, and to convert files to the kindle format you have to have the amazon.com website perform the conversion. Additionally, apparently some file formats can only be moved onto the device for a fee. The device lets you read blogs and other web content on it…again for a fee. Amazon may gloss all this in a ‘yeah but you get free wireless internet access to all this great stuff, and the books cost the same or less as paper ones,’ but it’s all smoke and mirrors designed to get a trojan horse DRM’d to hell print content distribution device into lots of people’s hands.

Get back to the drawing board, Amazon. In short, your DRM schemes designed to appease your publishing partners are shit, and I hope your device fails miserably as it deserves to. Anyone with half a brain should stay far, far away from this thing. Sony manufactures a similar device for less money that allows you to put whatever content you want onto the thing. It’s not perfect, and it’s missing some of the interesting features of the Kindle (get your daily newspaper automatically on the thing, shades of the Dynabook), but you don’t have to sell your soul to a DRM scheme designed by (greedy) idiots.

Check out Visuwords, a cool little flash-based visual dictionary. Type in a word and it’ll pop up the definition along with connections to other similar words along with their definitions. Reminds me of touchgraph, a UI for relationship illustration that I was enamored of.

Here’s a clever idea – put a wifi chip on a memory card, add a receiver to your PC, a little software magic, and viola, for ~$100 you have a digital camera which automatically publishes your photos online or sends them off to be printed. It’s got pretty broad support too – everything from Smugsmug, flickr and their ilk to things like the Gallery software that I run. It’s somewhat impractical for me in that mostly the photos I publish are of the hikes and adventures I go on, where there is no wireless. While I do a good bit of ebay photography around the house, it’s not enough to make the $100 expense worth the convenience, I think, but still – slick idea.

As I’ve mentioned from time to time, I love a good shmup, and today’s friday fun link is a great example of the form. Varia has beautiful, stylized graphics, a pulsing techno soundtrack, and challenging gameplay. It’s a vertical scroller, with 4 axis movement for your ship and the typical boss battles to conclude levels. The most unusual aspect of Varia is the fact that it comes with a comprehensive tutorial. Check it out, oh, and here’s a youtube clip so you can check it out before downloading:

Team Fortress 2 is the finest multiplayer FPS to be released in years, a triumph of design and art direction. I’ve been playing it constantly. Here’s a handy archive of scripts you can use to enhance the playing experience. Perma-duck ftw!

Sure, you can edit csv files using excel or a text editor, but depending on what you’re trying to do the former may be overkill and the latter is generally inadequate to the task. If you’re on windows, check out CSVed, a freeware csv editor that saved me some time this week when I was trying to diagnose the output from a form script.