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

Free Software, Part Deux: Software For Starving Students

How could I forget Software for Starving Students (SSS)? Apparently, very easily. Same idea -- free software for Macs or Windows, and you can download the software immediately with a bit-torrent client, or via direct download (defintely try bit-torrent, if feasible, due to file size). Sweet! From their intro page:

What is SSS?

The Software for Starving Students CD enhances the Windows and Mac desktop computing experiences by providing an easy way to install free, high-quality software titles via a user-friendly interface. It includes popular open source programs like Firefox and OpenOffice, intended to help students learn about and benefit from open source and free software programs. The SSS team put all the most commonly used free programs onto one CD to make it easier for students to install useful software (including fully-featured office suites, 3D graphic editors and much more) for free.

Why do you do this?

We created the SSS CD because we love open source software and want to help make it more accessible to students all around the world. Although all students need good software to be successful, many have a hard time getting it on student budgets. We empathize with them because we've felt that pinch ourselves. This software enables students to achieve more for less, and that inspires us. People all over the world are using free software to make their lives better.

After all of these years of mooching off of great volunteer programmers, this is our little way of saying thanks. By providing a tool that makes their great free software more accessible to software-hungry students from Boston to Bangalore, we feel we've given a little back to the free software community and to students all over the world. We are proud and happy to do so.

Have a great academic year, everybody!

SoftwareFor.org

Free, Open-Source Mac Software

Hello, everyone. With students getting ready to return to college (or having already arrived), I though it would be nice to post two site links. If you are a Mac-totin' and Mac-lovin' student (or anyone else, for that matter), and are looking to score some quality Mac software for free, have I got the links for you.

OpenSourceMac.org features software in a bunch of categories -- web browsers, e-mail clients, IM clients, FTP, bit-torrent...just to name a few! Plenty of Universal Binaries here, as well.

From their site:

Open Source Mac is a simple list of the best free and open source software for Mac OS X. We aren't trying to be a comprehensive listing of every open-source mac app, instead we want to showcase the best, most important, and easiest to use. This page should be a handy reference and a useful tool for getting more people to start using free and open-source software. If you think we're missing any great apps, please let us know.

Then there is FreeSMUG, or Free Open Source Software Mac User Group, dedicated to free software on the Mac. More fantastic software listings.

Enjoy!

iPod eBooks Creator Script

Just ran across this handy script today, courtesy of a site called Ambience...if you've got a large text file that you'd like to break down into smaller 'notes' that can be loaded and read on your iPod, check this out...from the page intro:

This utility/PHP script loads large text file and splits it into notes for use on iPod. It is easy to read your book in plain text format on your iPod via Notes functionality. All notes will be automatically linked, so you can move from one to another with absolute ease. It's as simple as turning pages of the book.

And so it is...now you can download large text files, like web site news, or reviews, or any other text, really...upload it via this site, and come away with something easily handled by your 'Pod. Niiice...

iPod eBooks Creator

Play Chess And Watch the A.I. Think

For those of you out there who love chess, here's a fascinating website, Thinking Machine 4. From the intro:

Thinking Machine 4 explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you.

The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer's thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.

I am by no means a good chess player, but it was interesting watching the A.I. sketch out its thought processes.

Thinking Machine 4

New Blog Layout via Beta Blogger

Hello there, K A C H U P fans. You may notice that the layout of my blog has changed. This is because I am one of the folks Blogger invited to their beta.blogger.com party, and so I 'updated' my blog to experience some of the upgrade features. It's pretty nice looking so far, and it does retain your previous template settings, so if all goes awry, I can hopefully revert back to my old layout. A major item I do see missing right now is the ability to edit the raw HTML so that I can put some of my own custom elements back in, like my page count and other tags. When that becomes available, I'll add them back. Stay tuned.

Make a Life Poster Using Your Mac

Hello...this is the coolest project I've seen in a while using your Mac, iPhoto, and PhotoShop. With these tools, you can select up to 98 photos, lay them out in a poster-size contact sheet of 30" x 20", then ultimately use iPhoto's built-in Kodak Print Service to order your poster. Too cool -- looks like something you'd find in the techie DIY "Make" magazine, but for Macs. It's all thanks to Mike Matas.

How to make a Life Poster

Sketch Swap: Share An Online Doodle

For the artist in all of us...there is Sketch Swap. You sketch something, submit it, and get a sketch back! From the About page:

You can draw anything except: if it's only a writing with no sketch, or writing only your URL, or anything a child wouldn't wanna see, anything completely garbled, just a dot, just a line, just a stick man etc. If you want to write something, you also need to sketch a bit... also, please only write in English so we can understand & approve it.

What a fun little toy...it sort of reminds me of passing notes in school, except in an unknown, pen-pal kind of way...

Sketch Swap

Google Games

You may remember back in February when I blogged about a game called Fastr that used the Flickr website to have you guess what tags a series of pictures had in common (don't remember that? It was back here). Well, that was Flickr. Let's look at Google.

You know I'm a Google fanatic. Sure, you got yer A1 and Yahoo and Ask, but I always come back to the king of them all in my opinion, Google. Well, who's to say that all you can do with Google is look up search terms? With all the technology Google leverages, surely there must be some creative soul that has come up with a way to play games using Google in some fashion, right?

Oh yeah. Courtesy of the Google Blogoscoped blog, here are so many Google games to keep you amused that you may forget what you went hunting for in the first place. Have fun...

Google Games

Key Points from the WWDC Keynote 2006

As promised, Mac fans, here's a quick list of links to what Steve Jobs & Co. presented at the Apple WWDC keynote this morning...

• MacOS X 10.5 Leopard, to be released in the Spring of 2007. Partial list of features here.
• Mac Pro replaces Power Mac tower, features 2 dual-core Xeon Woodcrest processors.
• Xserve, also featuring Intel Xeon processors.

A link to the QuickTime stream of the keynote is now online! Find it here.

[Thanks Verne! :)]

Links to Apple WWDC Keynote Address

I wouldn't be a Mac blogger worth my salt if I didn't post links to on-line coverage of the Steve Jobs keynote at the 2006 Apple WWDC (World Wide Developer's Conference). MacDailyNews coverage is here. MacRumors coverage is here.

Enjoy the presentation! I'll be back to report some of my first impressions later on today, hopefully...start your engines!

[Thanks, Verne!]

Mac OS X Picasa Web Album Uploader

Google has had for a while now a service called Picasa that allows you to post photos online via Google, and organize them into albums, share them with others, etc. Very nice -- unless you were a Mac user. Well, that has been rectified as of today. The latest post to the Google Blog mentions, in part:

I'm happy to tell you about the release of Picasa Web Albums Uploaders (beta, of course) for Mac OS X. Picasa Web Albums makes it simple to share photos with friends and family, and now we've made it even easier on the Mac. This new download comes with two handy tools for uploading photos: There's a plug-in for uploading your pics within iPhoto. If you don't use iPhoto, or just want to upload the occasional picture, just drag your photos into the provided standalone app and click Upload. Either way, I can't wait for my fellow Mac users to showcase their talents.

Read all about it here. Links to creating a Picasa account (if you don't have one) and to the uploaders are contained within the article.

Geocaching Stats Added [sidebar]

I wanted to mention a great hobby my wife and I have been involved in for two years or so now, called Geocaching. Certainly you've heard of it, yes?

No? OK, in a nutshell, it's like a world-wide scavenger hunt, organized online the best by the folks at Groundspeak, via their website, Geocaching.com. Legend has it that, many years back, in Seattle, one individual was contemplating the idea that this new GPS technology could find practically any position on earth, if you knew the coordinates to punch in to your GPS receiver. He thought it might be fun to take a container with some trinkets in it, hide it out of plain site, post the coordinates on the internet, and have friends with GPS receivers try to find the cache. They did, and a new sport was born (please bear with me; this tale is from memory, and I'm sure greatly generalized...but the idea is the same). UPDATE: Read how it all got started in 2000 here.

Today, this sport has boomed, with caches hidden all over the country, in every state, and now around the world as well. The stated goal is to help folks get out, see the country, and travel to places you might not otherwise -- a scenic view, a fantastic campsite, a historical site. No digging is involved...the cache container is generally about the size of a Tupperware food storage container, something that is dry, and contains a log book for the cacher to log their visit, and occasionally toys or other trinkets to trade.

I am skipping over mountains of details here, and I really encourage you to visit the geocaching website and read all about it. Back to the point of this post, though...once you create an account, you can search for caches anywhere in the world to find (surprise yourself by searching around your town -- you'll be flabbergasted at how many are practically in your own backyard), and once you find a particular cache, you come back to the website, and log your visit online. Then they update your stats with how many you've found, and how many you've hidden yourself. They then have a way to generate the code to be able to post your stats 'banner' online, and that's what I did today ;)

You'll note that our total is rather low. One good reason for this...I use a power wheelchair to get around, so my wife and I try to filter out the caches that seem accessible to someone in a wheelchair like me. One method they employ is to rate caches from 1 to 5 in both difficulty of the hide, and difficulty of the terrain. I usually can get to most caches whose terrain difficulty is rated 1 or 1.5.

But enough about us...you can track our stats by the new little badge I posted here, but what's stopping you? If I can do it, anyone can! Get yourself a decent GPS receiver (some are available for $100 or so), and the forums on geocaching.com devote entire areas to discussing different GPS receivers. Once in hand, register yourself on geocaching.com, and then get out there!

In the words of Groundspeak..."Let's go geocaching!"

Groundspeak - Geocaching.com

Google Quick Reference Guide

For all you Google lovers out there...sometimes, you want to really refine your search, but you're not sure what different parameters you can define. You do know about what they call "Advanced Operators", right? These are ways to specify your search on Google.

For example, if you wanted to search for the definition of the word 'dictionary', instead of just typing the word 'dictionary' in the Google search bar (which will bring up websites featuring that word), you can type in 'define: dictionary' (without the quotes), which then does a lookup on the definition of the word, and returns those results. Similarly, you can type in 'movie: Superman Returns' and get back movie reviews and showtimes. Pretty neat, eh? Well, this only scratches the surface. And yes, there are places on google.com itself to find information on the available operators...but, in true 'net community-goodness fashion, Nancy Blachman has done the work for us, and come up with a cheat sheet that you can print out, and have handy for your next Google search. Clicking on the text near the top of the page ('Google Guide', or the 'Quick Reference...' title) takes you to more in-depth webpages on Google searching.

Quick Reference: Google Advanced Operators (Cheat Sheet)

Canadian Animation Online

One of my passions is film, and animation in particular. In the art house theaters that I encountered in my college years, one of the treats was when an animation festival was slated to appear. In these, many works by directors you might know (but many more by folks you didn't know) would be displayed, one after the other. The producers would string together enough shorts to make an overall program length of an hour and a half or so.

One of the most consistently funny animation groups were the ones sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada. Do titles like "Blackfly" or "The Balgonie Birdman" ring a bell? No? Then get yourself over to the NFB webpage listed below to view any of 50 animated short films right in your web browser. You'll be glad you did. You can search the films as well, by title, director, production year, and more. Enjoy!

Focus on Animation - ONF

Etch-A-Sketch Master

I grew up in the late 60s and early 70s. Back then, it seemed like every kid, at one point in their kidhood, was presented with an Etch-A-Sketch as a gift. It was fantastic how you could manipulate two small knobs and produce an etching in silver powder that was your own personal masterpiece...until a sibling or some other individual with no conception of fine art grabbed your one-of-a-kind design, and shook it away into so many particles of inspirational dust again. Back to the tabula rasa.

Well, there's playing with an Etch-A-Sketch, and then there's mastering it. Don't think you can really create art on one? Check out the work of George Vlosich III on his website Etched In Time. You will be amazed. And you will find a new definition of the word "patience".

Etched In Time

Misheard Song Lyrics

By now, I'm sure many of you have heard about the books and desk calendars that feature misheard song lyrics. It all started in a collection called "'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy", a goof on Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix. I got my sister a desk calendar for this year featuring a different misheard lyric each day, and some will have you in tears, they are so funny.

Well, I read something the other day online somewhere (nice and vague, huh?) that reminded me to check out the website. And so I did. It had been a while since I visited, and the site looks much nicer and has more interactivity than it did before. Take a look! You can look up lyrics by using the alphabetic index, or you can click on "Grab a random lyric", and see what random goodness is in store. Either way, it's a great way to find out what other people *thought* they heard. Probably the best part is, you can submit misheard lyrics yourself! Enjoy.

'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy (1st book in collection)
The Archive of Misheard Lyrics (website)