Ramen Recipes at The Official Ramen Homepage

I don't think I'll find much disagreement when I say that ramen noodles have to be listed as "the official noodles of the college experience". They are cheap, taste good with their seasoning packets, or you can split them up, and use the noodles for one recipe and the seasoning packet in another. Every now and then, you can find them in the grocery store at 10 for a dollar.

Matt Fischer loves ramen too...so much so that he hosts "The Official Ramen Homepage", talking about everything ramen, but especially featuring ramen noodle recipes.

What, you're asking how he gets to call his site the "official" ramen homepage? Well, I didn't see you claim the title first...

The Official Ramen Homepage

Free Downloads at iTunes Store

Free is good, my friends...so let's call it Free Friday. One of the cool things Apple does in its online iTunes Music Store (ITMS) is offer a free music single each week that you can download to your iTunes and iPod. Recently, they've also offered some free movie and TV downloads. Problem is, I can never remember from week to week to get over there and find out what the free download is for that particular week.

Well, someone else apparently had the same problem as well, and decided to do something about it. Voila, the website Get Free Downloads on the iTunes Store was born. When you visit, you'll see lists of what has been recently offered for free at the ITMS, with buttons in front of each selection, leading you to its location in the store. Pretty cool! When it comes to enhancing your music collection, or perhaps trying a new music group or style, this site keeps your free options open.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

Get Free Downloads on the iTunes Store!

Hidden Tetris in Mac OS X

I have mentioned this here before, but if you're a Mac user, firstly, congratulations ;^) ...secondly, a great small business in Vermont that caters to Mac users (and has a great web presence) is Small Dog Electronics [Disclaimer: I am not associated with Small Dog in any way, other than a satisfied customer].

One of the niceties they offer is a few tech newsletters, which I subscribe to. The latest edition has two stories I'd like to reproduce here, and this one is about the game of Tetris hidden right within the operating system -- Mac OS X. From the newsletter, Tech Tails #333:

[...]According to Wikipedia, Tetris was invented by Alexey Pazhitnov at the Soviet
Academy of Sciences at their Computer Center in Moscow.

Now, like the political messages possibly hidden in Shostakovich’s
music, Tetris is hidden in OS X’s UNIX subsystem. You can unveil and
play Tetris by browsing Applications Folder > Utilities Folder >
Terminal. Type “emacs” and click enter. Now simultaneously press
the “ESC” and “X” keys. Now type “Tetris” without the
quotations. Use the arrow keys to rotate and move the falling Tetris
blocks. Press the spacebar to make the blocks fall.

A whole bunch of games are hidden in emacs in your Macs terminal. To
see the rest of the games, open the Terminal application, and type:

“ls /usr/share/emacs/21.2/lisp

/play” again, without the quotations.

To play these games, repeat the steps above for launching Tetris,
except substitute the other game’s name for Tetris. To quit emacs,
simultaneously hold down the control and X keys, and then
simultaneously hold down the control and C keys.

As always, be careful when you are using the Terminal application!

Thanks, Small Dog! And now, off to play Tetris!

Free Fonts at BetterFonts.com

Are you looking to spice up a Word document, creating an invitation, or just plain tired of the font styles your OS offers? Here, in one place, is a huge collection (over 10,000, by their count) of freeware and shareware fonts. The site is BetterFonts, the "user-friendly font site".

BetterFonts