Merry Christmas

Have a great Christmas everyone. Feel free to send me interesting links over the break (lucas@digitalus.co.nz) and don't forget to check out this column online at http://www.digitalus.co.nz/onthenet/

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Groove Tube

Sick of TV? The Groovetube is a translucent plastic box that attaches via suction cups to the screen of your television. It has a grid of dividers inside it that diffuse the colours from your television, producing an amazing, colorful abstraction of anything you watch. Check out http://www.groovetube.tv/site.htm

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Enigmo

Enigmo is a 3D puzzle game where you move various streams of flowing liquid so that the droplets get to their destination. Liquids (water, oil, and lava) fall from "droppers" and will bounce around the walls of a mechanism. You move and rotate into position various types of bumpers, sliders, accelerators, and sponges in order to divert the flow of the falling droplets. The faster you complete each level, the more bonus you will receive. Check out http://www.pangeasoft.net/enigmo/info.html to find out more about the game and download a demo.

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My Sky

My Sky is a new service from Sky TV that allows you to record tv shows directly to their new decoder/recorder. You can fidn out how to use it at http://www.skytv.co.nz/myskydemo/index.html where "bert the Badger" takes you through a cheesy demonstration in Flash. PVRs (Personal Video Recorders) are becoming all the rage, allowing you to record TV shows to a digital set-top hard drive and then play them bacxk at your leisure. The more sophisticated ones will actually record entire series of shows for you, strip out the ads, recommend similar shows you might like, and so on. In America, TIVO is probably the leading PVR service. You can find out about TIVO at http://www.tivo.com/0.0.asp Although TIVO isnt available in New Zealand, Kiwi TIVO enthusiasts have set up a website at http://www.nztivo.net/index.php/Welcome_to_NZTivo which explains how to buy a TIVO box online and configure it manually to work in New Zealand.
If you're a REAL geek, you might want to check out some Linux projects like MythTV (http://www.mythtv.org) and Freevo (http://freevo.sourceforge.net). These are free, open-souce, software-based PVR systems you can use with a Linux PC. Right now I'm building my own media management system using Ubuntu Linux (http://www.ubuntu.com). I can scan a barcode from a DVD case, the system will look up all the details from amazon.com and store them in a database, and then I can search for and play the relevant DVD from the hard drive.

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Drew Petersen, Piano Virtuoso

At the tender age of 11, piano virtuoso Drew Petersen prepares for his solo debut at the Hamptons Music Festival under the direction of world-renowned conductor Lukas Foss. Drew's engaging first hand perspective on music, achievement, and life illustrate a unique perspective of a child prodigy. You can watch this amazing documentary at Google Video, the link is http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7262693013991823795 (If all of the numbers are a problem search for 'Drew Petersen' at http://video.google.com)

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Firefox and Sage

The Firefox web browser is at version 1.5 now, and is an admirable replacement for Microsoft's hacker-plagued browser, Internet Explorer. You can download Firefox for free from http://www.mozilla.org and you'll soon find you cant live without some of it's features, like the ability to open sites in new tabs rather than new windows.
Extensions are also available for Firefox, many written by users, and these can enhance the browsing experience significantly.
The Sage extension is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed reader for Firefox. Many news sites offer "feeds," or the ability to subscribe to news headlines. The Sage extension collects feeds - either from your bookmarks, or manually added by you when you visit a feed-enabled site. Sage displays all of these feeds in one simple pane and will let you know which news feeds have been updated. You can click on the feed to read all of the news headlines, and click on a news headline to visit the actual site. Check out http://sage.mozdev.org/ for the free download

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Doctor Who

The new Doctor Who tv series has taken off in Britain, and Season 2 is nearly upon us. Starting with the Christmas Special, the new Doctor (played by David Tennant) will be facing off against enemies old and new - like the cybermen, and re-united with old friends like K-9. If you're a Doctor Who fan check out http://www.doctorwhonews.com and http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho for the latest news

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Ubuntu - Linux for human beings

Sick of Windows and the associated trojans, viruses and spam that besiege you every day? You could switch to a Mac (if you've got the cash) or you could think about using Linux instead. Despite being an "open" operating system - free and customisable, the product has evolved into a mature and business-ready operating system. There are many "flavours" or "distros" of Linux, and the new Ubuntu distribution is quickly rising through the ranks to become the most popular. "Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others". Ubuntu also means "I am what I am because of who we all are". The Ubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world. Ubuntu is a complete Linux-based operating system, freely available with both community and professional support. The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Manifesto: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit.
If you dont mind formatting your PC and playing with a new operating system, check out http://www.ubuntulinux.org/

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Blowfly Flying Alarm clock

How often have you woken up to your alarm clock, turned it off, then fallen back asleep again? Ena Macana has developed a stylish new way to wake you up - the Blowfly Flying Alarm Clock. Once it goes off, it flies around the room and you have to catch it and put it back in it's cradle to turn it off! It's pretty stylish as well - check out http://www.yankodesign.com/product_info.php?products_id=641

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God's Debris

God's Debris is a "thought experiment" book written by the creator of the Dilbert cartoons. Scott Adams, creator of the popular comic strip "Dilbert," has written a modern-day parable about a young man and an unlikely mentor. God's Debris starts with a young deliveryman trying to hand over a package to a man with a San Francisco address. But delivering the package to this old man proves to be as difficult as trying to understand the meaning of God. "As in many parables that have come before, the deliveryman learns the meaning of life from an illusive mentor who seems to arise from a wrinkle in time. The cleverness of the God's Debris concept is original and bound to leave readers pondering some altered definitions of God, the universe, and just about everything else." says reviewer Gail Hudson. You can download the book for free at http://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/godsdebris/

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The Doomsday Argument

The Doomsday Argument (otherwise known as a version of the Weak Anthropic Principle) is a fun subject to debate with your friends. From seemingly trivial premises it seeks to show that the risk that humankind will go extinct soon has been systematically underestimated. Nearly everybody's first reaction is that there must be something wrong with such an argument. Yet despite being subjected to intense scrutiny by a growing number of philosophers, no simple flaw in the argument has been identified. Essentially, the argument uses maths and probably to show that the fact that you are living right could be proof that the earth's population is about to plummet to a very low value in the near future. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument and http://www.anthropic-principle.com/primer1.html

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The Beerbelly

The Beerbelly is made up of a neoprene “sling” and a polyurethane “bladder” with a tube for dispensing. The bladder is held in an insulated pouch in the sling which is worn under your clothing for concealment. When worn, it looks just like a beerbelly. This means you can sneak your favourite beverage into the movies or sporting event without having to pay the inflated prices on the day. I didn't believe it either at first. Check out http://www.thebeerbelly.com/

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DOT-Tunes

If you're an iTunes user (and for free, you can be - check out http://www.apple.com/itunes and download a free copy) then take a look at DOT-Tunes. DOT-Tunes was conceived by a group of professional musicians who use iTunes for storing their own copyright music and recordings and who wanted to be able to easily demonstrate their work to clients and to share 'works in progress' and other original compositions with others.
You can use Dot-Tunes to share your original iTunes tracks with everyone in your home or office, or share your compositions with the world via any web browser. Download a copy at http://www.dotpod.net/ (The server costs money but the client is free)

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Yahoo 360

Yahoo 360 is a new blogging and social networking service developed by Yahoo! and currently in beta testing. It allows you to set up your own page to share with friends and family - you can upload photos, post blogs, create your own profile, and basically share your life with others on the net. Check it out at http://360.yahoo.com

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The Google Zeitgeist

The Google Zeitgeist is a weekly listing of search trends and patterns based on the behaviour of Googlers around the world. It's a fascinating snapshot of the online world. Check it out at http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

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Protopage

AJAX is an implementation of existing web technologies that allows a web browser to communicate with a server without you having to refresh the page. Normally, when you submit a form or perform an action on a website that requires information from the server. your browser has to refresh the page, meaning you have to wait. AJAX is a way of using technologies like javascript to let let parts of web pages communicate with the server without requiring a complete page reload. You can see examples of this technology on the Google Maps website (maps.google.com) where you can scroll and zoom the map without having to refresh the page.
The Protopage site at http://www.protopage.com/ is a showcase for Ajax - you can drag boxes around the screen, set up sticky notes and links panels and change the way page looks without any delays or reloading. You can expect to see more of this technology popping up around the web as developers bring it on board.

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Family Guy

If you're a Family Guy fan, check out the show's website at http://www.familyguy.com/ You can download screensavers, podcasts, clips and a great "Xtreme" desktop full of Family Guy quotes, clips and images.

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Free Physics Textbook

How does one empty a bottle as rapidly as possible? What are the highest force and power in nature? How does one connect water pipes to a turning wheel? What are the dangers of a can of beans? What is the single page of unsolved problems in fundamental physics?
The Motion Mountain site at http://www.motionmountain.net/ publishes a free physics textbook that tells the story of how it became possible, after 2500 years of exploration, to answer such questions. The book is written to be entertaining, surprising and challenging on every page. With little mathematics, the text explores the most fascinating parts of mechanics, thermodynamics, special and general relativity, electrodynamics, quantum theory and modern attempts at unification. The essence of these fields is summarized in the most simple terms: it is shown how they are based on the notions of minimum entropy, maximum speed, maximum force, minimum change of charge and minimum action.

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BBC Radio

The BBC have made their radio stations available for listening to through the internet. The built-in BBC Radio Player lets you choose from a variety of british stations to listen to - check out http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/

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Live Internet Guitar Lessons

Riff Interactive offers live guitar lessons covering a variety of styles from blues to metal to classic rock to jazz. Each week new lessons are uploaded that include video, a virtual animated fretboard (the neck of the guitar), jam tracks and live chat with the instructor. Each lesson is archived when complete and made available in the archives list. A small browser plugin is required (installation is automated once you click on the link in the Downloads section) to enable the virtual fretboard. Check out http://www.riffinteractive.com/

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