Month: January 2007

I was looking for fun mini-projects last night over at instructables (I made this Simple Circuit Game today but with a buzzer instead of an LED during lab today – if you’re local stop by and play!) and along the way I discovered a ton of instructions for office toy guns, mostly out of K’Nex. The video on the K’Nex Gatling Gun is really awesome. But then again, K’Nex are awesome. At the least, I want to dig mine out and make a K’Nex iPod dock.

Relating to another colleague’s intersession class, I lost a lot of time browsing the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods [via Boing Boing]. The periodic table itself is pretty nice, though I found it distracting that the abbreviations were not the expected abbreviations from the periodic table of elements. What would be great would be if, in addition to getting examples of the visualization methods on mouse-over, clicking took you to a page describing the method in detail. I also find their distinction between data and information visualization interesting – they seem to use a distinction similar to the one I … Continue reading Meta-visualization

Actual Conversation: Them: Guess what tomorrow is? Me: What? Them: MacWorld keynote! Me: (sarcastic) wooo Them: It is wooo! That’s when we find out what all the cool new gadgets are. Me: It’s like a cult. Them: Yeah – tomorrow is when we hear from our leader! Me: I hope he doesn’t tell you all to take multiple wives….

Building on yesterday’s post about the command-line interface, the same sorts of interface concerns play into this discussion of the renewed relevance of the vi input model when using a laptop [via Digg]. The argument is that, without a mouse and with generally poorly placed navigation keys, editing that centers on the home keys and minimizes complicated key combinations is ergonmically desirable. This actually relates nicely to an article I saw linked over at Slashdot about motivations behind the design of vi based on an interview with its creator Bill Joy. The liimiting factors back then were certainly different than … Continue reading A resurgence of vi?

I had a conversation a few weeks ago about frustrations that current OSs, or at least their documentation/presentation, overly obfuscate the ability of users to have a command-line interface as wll as a graphical one, reflecting an invalid, in my opinion, assumption that only hard-core power users would ever want a command-line interface. Over at Lifehacker, there is a really nice analysis of the current incarnation of the command-line embedded in our GUIs. Intuitively, this model of the merging of the two approaches to interaction feels right to me. A trivial example of my own habits is that I always … Continue reading GUI v CLI

This is probably the best electronic hacker project I’ve seen ever: a computer-controlled push puppet for IM notifications. [via JK] How can you go wrong? You get to build a neat robot thing, attached to a cuddly puppet dog, and it contributes to your IM addiction by letting you know when your friends are around! Scroll down for the video – soooo cute! It’s enough to make me switch to Linux….

It’s too bad I’m not teaching my Cyberattacks class again this January, because the Month of Apple Bugs would be a great resource. I always run that class on Windows PCs because, statistically, there are just more Windows exploits out there right now, but it’s important to remember that no operating system is immune from exploits. We should definitely expect that, as Apple continues to grow their market share, OS X exploits will become more common too. What’s interesting is the number of exploits that aren’t just coming through traditional operating system holes anymore, but are taking advantage of online … Continue reading Worm in the apple?