When I was a kid, my neighbor had The Dark Tower electronic boardgame. I loved that game, despite the fact that it its core it was a very simple luck-based game. I’m not alone in my nostalgia for the game though – a complete copy of it sells for as much as $300 on ebay these days. More to the point though, fans have recreated the gameplay, in the form of a flash version of the game and an offline java version. Not sure if you’d like to play? Go read a few reviews on the boardgamegeek.com site.
Most excellent office toy
What is it about magnets that makes them so compelling? Whatever it is, it’s induced a serious case of geek lust in me for these mesmerizing magnets. $30 or so shipped is a little on the steep side for a silly office toy, yet still I’m going to indulge myself. Check out the video of them snapping together for a hint as to why.
[link courtesy of Jesse, though he hasn’t actually posted this to his weblog.]
The return of cold fusion?
There’s an article in the new york times [registration required] observing that the U.S. Department of Energy has agreed to review recent developments in cold fusion research. It turns out the Pons and Fleischmann techniques that had been so widely discredited in the early 90’s are still being researched and are showing promise in the labs. Here’s hoping they’re really on the right track this time.
Dave’s Place becomes metamusing
After years (literally – at least 4) I’ve finally registered my own domain for this site – metamusing.net. In part the name is an homage to the sometimes excellent metafilter.com and in part it’s a simple play on words – meta musing or amusing, read it as you will, if you dig through the content here I think you’ll agree the site’s a bit of both. It will take a while for this to propogate, and right now it’s definitely not working. I’ll mention it here when it does start to work. I’ll probably get mail services going as well, and ultimately I’ll get the other services running on this site migrated over to the new domain. I’ll keep daves-place.dyndns.org active as well, so that no one ends up with broken bookmarks.
Handy web-based button maker utility
Have you noticed the proliferation of the little merit badge-like buttons folks are putting on their weblogs? Take a look at the bottom right of decafbad.com for example. Sort of a geek street cred item, the more badges you have the more ‘in’ you are with the vox digerati….or something. Actually I don’t mean to tease, though to some extent I do find it amusing and the comparison to merit badges pretty much sums that up. But anyway the point of this post is to note the availability of a handy web-based tool that will build the merit badges for you. Get with the program and add those badges to your site today.
Super handy software
Got multiple machines running multiple operating systems? Wish you could afford one of those killer USB KVM switches from Belkin so you could run all the machines off of a single keyboard and mouse? Turns out there’s a workable software solution to this issue, Synergy. It’s got less overhead than VNC and unlike Timbuktu, PC Anywhere and so on, it’s free. Runs on Win32, Linux and OSX.
The homepage is back
When I gave the presentation to the Waynflete school in February I promised them I would keep the materials I created for them online for a month. It’s been a month so I’ve pulled them down and the old homepage is back in place. If you’re looking for the presentation outline, you can find it here.
Great write-up of Worlds of Warcraft
Blizzard is releasing a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) this year, hopefully this summer. For the first time a MMORPG will be available at launch for both Mac and PC so if you’re a mac user you’re finally in like Flynn 😉 Blizzard seems confident enough about the qualilty of their game that they’ve skipped the NDA that normally accompanies beta tests. Their publi beta test just began and since there’s no NDA, beta reports are already showing up. You can read a great, thorough overview of the state of the game at present. While I was very curious about this game it didn’t seem likely I would go for it. Now I’m not so sure I was right, the game definitely sounds very promising.
Banish those wall warts!
How annoying those wall warts are – buy a new power strip and find you can only fit 4 plugs in it out of the available 8 because most of your devices terminate in wall warts – the ubiquitous power converters that clog power recepticles everywhere. I stumbled across a great solution to this problem on the cyberguys.com site – a short 1 foot splitter. You plug the splitter into your power strip, then plug the wall warts into the splitter. Very nice – a cheap ($3), effective solution to the problem. I’m ordering up a dozen so I can clean up my office and home theater power situation – I have 4 power strips and a UPS in my office and 3 strips by the home theater system, leaving me with a rat’s nest of cords. This won’t solve the problem but at least it will reduce it somewhat.
Attack of the nasty toilet tablet
So…like most bachelors, I hate cleaning the bathroom. One of the tools I use to help me avoid this chore is the toilet tablet, you know, those little tablets you put in your toilet’s water tank that contain cleaning substances and scents. Recently I tried a new brand that advertised itself as the ‘super blue’ tablet,’ and it led to one of those trademark Dave moments. Of course I have to share.
A couple of days after I popped the thing in my toilet’s tank, the toilet bowl water started changing to odd colors and occasionally had chunks of waxy cottage cheese looking material in it. Two nights ago I investigated and found this:
What the hell is growing in there I don’t know – it’s foul looking yet pleasantly scented. But as I was peering in the tank, the candle I keep on the back of the toilet slid into the water with a splash, spattering me and the bathroom walls with the gunk and the deep blue juice the tablet had made of the toilet water.
I flipped. The label on the tablet had warned to keep the thing away from one’s face when opening the package and to avoid skin contact with it. Now I had it all over myself, in some mad-scientist’s congealed cottage cheese form. God only knew what it was going to do to my skin. I dropped everything and stuck my head under the shower faucet to rinse it off. Then I made matters worse. I needed to get the candle out of the tank, so I got a wooden spoon from the kitchen and tried to dredge the candle out of the goop, but I couldn’t seem to fit it past the toilet bobber. In frustration I just forced it, which caused the toilet to start leaking from the hinge on the bobber. I could stop it by holding the bobber on an angle, but left to its own devices the tank was going to overflow. What to do…what to do. Eventually I decided to dash down to the basement to get tools, and I ran back upstairs with toolbox in hand convinced that the toilet would be leaking goop all over the bathroom. Fortunately I made it in time and some almost Fonzie-class fiddling with the bobber made it stop leaking.
All’s well that ends well, 2 days later and I have no shedding of skin or odd rashes, and though I was convinced the blue stuff was going to hopelessly stain the bathroom walls, it came off easily with soap and water. I have to say to my credit that once I’d rinsed myself off, instead of getting mad I just started laughing, the whole situation was just too comical. There is one lesson I’ve learned though – don’t take the blue toilet tablets, they’re toxic 😉
[I have to point out the best Dave moment I’ve captured on the blog – the jalapeno juice incident which is definitely worth a read if you haven’t seen it]
