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The Unitarian Jihad Name Generator is Back from Hiatus

Bill Humphries — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:01:32 +0000

The Committee is taking applications for names one again.

LEGO is the reason for the season.

Bill Humphries — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 19:09:40 +0000

I run the slogan Axial tilt is the reason for the season at the end of each year. A parent in Alaska built an orrery out of LEGO to explain this to their kids. [ via Subrata Sircar ]

Big Damn Easter Egg

Bill Humphries — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 08:08:00 +0000

The “Big Damn Movie” is Serenity that came out on DVD Tuesday.

The easter egg is the ad for ‘Fruity Oaty Bars’ that causes River (Summer Glau) to go all Buffy on a bar full of space cowboys.

You get to the easter egg from the main menu: put the cursor on Play Movie, and hit the left arrow. A bit of chrome on right hand side will light up. Press enter.

Harry Potter and the XMLHTTPRequest Object

Bill Humphries — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 08:47:57 +0000

Using AJAX and a chatbot to create Tom Riddle’s diary from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The creator explains it on his weblog.

WolframTones

Bill Humphries — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 08:37:51 +0000

I’ve been playing with WolframTones tonight, after finding out about them from Kathryn Cramer.

These are little musical compositions created by running a one-dimensional cellular automata, then taking a slice, rotating the slice, and mapping a musical scale to the result.

You tweak the result by playing with the generator’s initial conditions, changing the instruments, tempo, and musical scale.

Save your experiments in in a menagerie, and for $2, you can send one to your phone to use as a ring tone.

Some examples:

poodlespider!

Bill Humphries — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 05:08:31 +0000

Combining annoying yappy little dogs and creepy eight legged things.

Fitzmas Bingo

Bill Humphries — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 02:41:33 +0000

Fitzmas Bingo cards! Thank you Dori! If you don’t know what Fitzmas is, go read dKos.

Web Sudoku

Bill Humphries — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 06:57:49 +0000

I haven’t played Sudoku until now. It is a fun game. Needs a widget-version.

Brad, Janet, Rocky, Bunny?

Bill Humphries — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 04:18:55 +0000

The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 30 seconds with bunnies.

Click on the bunny in the balcony at the end to see the Time Warp HOWTO.

We love Katamari

Bill Humphries — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 06:19:11 +0000

The sequel to the best goofy game in the whole world, Katamari Damacy, has shipped.

New Genres for Hamlet

Bill Humphries — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 06:45:51 +0000

Last weekend, my gaming group tried a “parlor LARP” of Hamlet, set after the Prince kills Polonius, but before Claudius sends him off to England with that letter.

I just found an Infocom-style version of Hamlet you can play in a browser. Now you can type kill claudius. [ via Elizabeth Bear ]

Flipbook

Bill Humphries — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 07:00:00 +0000

[ via Ned Batchelder ] Hey Badger, Moomin might get a kick out of this Flash-based animation tool.

Minesweeper in XSLT

Bill Humphries — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 08:00:00 +0000

[ via Micah Dubinko ] A client-side Minesweeper written using JavaScript and XSLT.

The main page uses javascript to handle the mouse-events and to generate the random numbers. Everything else is done in 3 different xslt files. The first stylesheet takes a set of random numbers and a pair of min/max values and returns a list of elements representing a full grid. The next style sheet transforms the list of nodes into grid of HTML buttons. The third sheet returns the set of squares that are revealed when the user clicks on a square.

Requires Firefox/Mozilla/IE

Talking Back to Your Squeezebox

Bill Humphries — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 07:00:00 +0000

Some silliness with a Squeezebox:

http://hostname:9000/status.txt?p0=display&p1=firstline&p2=secondline&p3=5

Tells the SlimServer at hostname:9000 to send the message in p1 and p2 to the display of the Squeezebox it controls for p3 seconds.

Worth a try if you’re on a friend’s network with a Squeezebox.

Proving that any good piece of software will expand until it reads email, there’s a hacker community around the Squeezebox. You can find plugins that will play PacMan, display Test Match scores, and-of course-read email.

I wrote a simple AppleScript you can start modifying to have fun with this feature.

Start with getLine().

Flux Capacitor and Plutonium Sold Separately

Bill Humphries — Sun, 25 Apr 2004 07:00:00 +0000

I saw this in the window of the body shop around the corner from me when I was walking over to Dana Street Roasting this morning.

My friend Chad has one of them which he keeps garaged in Dearborn.