Author Archives: Brian

Tinchilla

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Tinchilla

Warning: I use the word “cool” way too much in this post. Forgive me.

Besides having a cool name, what Tinchilla does is actually pretty cool. It cools a can of soda in about 60 seconds.

The Tinchilla is a simple device which utilizes the scientific principle of thermal conduction. By spinning the can at an optimised speed the metal of the can is rapidly chilled by exposing its surface to the ice cubes and water surrounding it. The spinning can is also given a slight wobble resulting in a whirlpool effect inside. This whirpool allows as much of the drink as possible to be exposed to the now chilled surface of the can thus rapidly transferring the heat from inside to the surrounding water and ice.

Runs on 2 AA batteries and ice. Cool.

[tags]geek, soda, cool, gadget[/tags]

National Towel Day

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Towel Day

With a website named MyVogonPoetry, How could I NOT mention that tomorrow, May 25th is National Towel Day? Carry your towel with you everywhere! Why?

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

(from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy)

This is one time I wish I didn’t work from home – walking around the house with a towel just isn’t the same.

[via BoingBoing]

[tags]geek, hhgttg, douglas adams, towel, towel day, national towel day, scifi[/tags]

Is there a Firefox extension that will grab all email addresses off a page?

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Is there? I can’t find one. I have a webpage with a bunch of email addresses and I want to grab them all easily. I can’t seem to find a plugin that does this. Is there one? I was thinking I could write a quick Java program to do it. I actually wrote a java program before that would do this but I can’t find the source code! ARRGGHH!

UPDATE: I found a freeware Windows app that worked – XSite

[tags]geek, firefox, plugin, plugins, email, java, extension, firefox extension[/tags]

Pinball Memories

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NOTE: I actually wrote this the night after I got the pin, but am just now posting it. It’s still not perfect, but it’s close enough.

My dad died 26 years ago from injuries sustained in a motorcyle accident. I was 10 years old. He was a great dad. He taught me how to play baseball and always went to my little league games. My Mom says he would always say “That’s my boy!” when I played. He taught me to play pool and snooker at the recreation center on base (he was in the Army). We played Atari Basketball and Midway’s Sea Wolf at a place down the street… and we played pinball.

That place down the street had a Harlem Globetrotters pinball machine. I rememember playing it many times with my Dad. Was he any good? I honestly don’t remember, but it doesn’t matter. My Dad played pinball with me and that’s all that matters. It’s one of my fondest memories of him.

Now that I’m grown and have a gameroom of my own, I thought it would be really cool to see if I could get a Harlem Globetrotters pinball machine of my own. I poked around online a few years ago but didn’t find one in my price range. It came up again in my mind so I posted on a local mailing list a few weeks ago and as luck would have it, a local dealer, Donnie, had one and agreed to sell it to me 100% working and at a great price. I picked it up last night and on the drive there I actually teared up a few times thinking about my Dad and playing this game with him.

Tonight I set it up and played some games with my almost-5-year-old daughter. Hopefully I am giving her some great memories of playing the same pinball machine with her dad. So, the moral of the story? Enjoy your children. Play baseball, video games, chess, pinball or something with them. Make memories. You never know what memory will stay with them for a lifetime. I think I’ll own this pinball machine forever. And Dad, I’ll keep a credit in it for you.