Flour Power

It's part of the Coraline movie promotion, debuting on the 6th of February, which is inspired in a book by Neil Gaiman himself. Ever wondered what koumpounophobia is? Neil answers.

(Via Neil Gaiman's Journal)

We didn't really have a clue back then, did we?

Well it takes over two hours to receive the entire text of the newspaper over the phone, and with an hourly use charge of $5 the new "telepaper" won't be much competition for the 20c street edition.

(Via Techcrunch)

One of Ireland's biggest ISP's, Eircom, signed an agreement with the four major record labels in which it agreed to disconnect customers if they illegally download music. This came as a result of a lawsuit initiated by EMI Ltd., Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music and Warner Music Group Inc. (via the Irish Recorded Music Association - IRMA) in which the labels wanted Eircom to install network monitoring equipment. The offenders will be given two warnings before being shut down.

So now, instead of having to go to court to get an order asking the ISP to shut off a subscriber's connection, the music labels will directly to the ISP, making the whole process much faster. And the record companies have agreed that they will take all necessary steps to put similar agreements with other ISPs in Ireland, although there are no signs of that for now.

Now let's be realistic. Illegal downloads will not stop. Ever! So why do they even bother? I think it's quite easy to understand that music sales will not rise because of this. People who download illegal music wouldn't buy it anyway, and there's the even the chance that music downloads increase record sales. That's what far smarter people than me have been saying for a while.

Anyway, the existence of quite a large number of alternatives might eventually make Eircom change their mind, or at least place some effort in trying to avoid shutdowns by being especially strict about the evidence presented by the labels. I guess they don't want their customers running away to their competitors.

So much hype about this being a big thing, but I don't think it will really make any difference.

Faux Cyrillic is the use of Cyrillic letters in Latin text to evoke the Soviet Union or Russia. This is sometimes used in book covers, film titles, comic book lettering, artwork for computer games, or product packaging by switching Latin letters with their Cyrillic look-alikes. One such example is the film "Borat", that had the title in the posters written as "BORДT".

The Fake Cyrillic Generator makes it easy for anyone to convert text into faux Cyrillic. For instance, converting "Flour Power" results in "FLФЦЯ PФШЗЯ" and my name is "ДИTФЙIФ FДЯIИHД" in Fake Cyrillic.

Now it would be even cooler if there was a tool to render a whole website this way. It would look something like this, but readable by English-speaking people.

(Via Labnol)

It took some time, but the Google folks finally did it. It is now possible to use Gmail while offline:

Today we're starting to roll out an experimental feature in Gmail Labs that should help fill in those gaps: offline Gmail. So even if you're offline, you can open your web browser, go to gmail.com, and get to your mail just like you're used to.

Offline Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of the mail and as long as there's an active Internet connection, that cache is synchronized with Gmail's servers. When the connection is lost, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored locally instead of sending/fetching it across the network. It's possible to access almost all of Gmail's features while offline, and those will be automatically synchronized with Gmail's servers when there's an Internet connection available. There are some features missing, though: it's not possible to add attachments, the contact manager is not available offline, and it's not possible to customize which messages to download. Gmail uses some algorithms to determine which messages to cache locally: in my case it downloaded 3 months of email (some labels were downloaded completely, while Spam and Trash were ignored), including attachments, which amounted to about 280MB.

This should come in handy for those that rely a lot on email but can't be connected all the time. It's now possible to get some inbox cleaning done while commuting, or on an airplane. And as the Gmail team point out, it's a good solution for those with crappy connections:

And if you're on an unreliable or slow connection (like when you're "borrowing" your neighbor's wireless), you can choose to use "flaky connection mode," which is somewhere in between: it uses the local cache as if you were disconnected, but still synchronizes your mail with the server in the background.

The setup couldn't be easier. Just go to Settings > Labs, enable it (you'll have to install Gears if you don't have it yet.) and after the browser is reloaded press the "Offline" link on the top right menu. It will take some time downloading everything, though.

... this is what I see. Not bad, eh?

Yesterday me and a Portuguese friend undertook a very interesting experience: cooking "Bacalhau à Brás", a typical Portuguese dish made basically with codfish, potatoes, onions and eggs. "And what's so interesting about that?", you may ask. Well, the interesting bit is that it's impossible to get salted codfish here in Galway (I've heard it's possible to get it in Cork, so I'll probably bring a few kilos when I go there). They only sell fresh codfish, and that is not proper bacalhau, right?

Well, even though we were apprehensive at first, and although we had to add quite a bit of salt right after the first bite, it was actually quite good (kudos to the chef, who was not me), and a great alternative to all the junk food I've been eating.

And it even looked somewhat nice, complete with olives and all

In my early days of the Internet, it was considered quite impressive when the combined shared files of everyone in a Direct Connect channel passed the 1TB mark. Well those times are far gone and today Western Digital released a new hard drive that can take 2TB. And it's not that expensive either - around €170. It's also released as part as their green range of eco-friendly hard drives. I could sure use one of these, as the 500GB external disk I bought just a few months ago is getting filled real fast.

I've just seen the first episode of the fifth season of Lost that aired last wednesday. And although I'm a bit disappointed, that didn't really surprise me.

It's just that it keeps getting weirder and weirder. What's up with making the plot more complicated in each and every episode? What about finishing up on some stuff before moving along? I miss "The X-Files" (the first few seasons), where most episodes had all kinds of bizarre stuff happening but in the end everything was wrapped up and explained. The explanations were always quite... "supernatural", but at least they didn't leave us wondering what the hell just happened and salivating for next week's episode in the hopes of getting some answers. And people kept coming back to watch it next week anyway.

Getting back to the season premiere, we do get some answers on this episode (or maybe just one), but those answers come at a cost... You guessed it, more questions! I don't want to reveal any spoilers... but I don't like the direction where this is heading, with so many time-travel-related stuff. It never works out! It always makes everything too confusing and most of the times completely incongruous. I only remember it working out well a few times, like in "Back to the Future" and "The Butterfly Effect". I don't even want to get started on how wrong it's working on "Heroes"...

Anyway, I was a bit afraid of what might show up in this fifth season and episode 1 just made me confirm that I only keep watching this show because I'm too stubborn to stop after I've watched the previous 4 seasons. I mean, there has to be some kind of unifying story behind all of it. Although I'm really starting to doubt it will make any sense at all.

Oh well, at least I still have stuff like "How I Met Your Mother", "The Big Bang Theory" and "Californication" that continue to be a lot of fun to watch.

I really couldn't take all that pinkness. Maybe if it wasn't so strong, or if the stay was shorter, I could have endured. But not this way. And the pink curtains with the pink Playboy bunnies didn't help either...

So I spent this past weekend repainting the room. I decided for a red color. Not "Benfica red", but a darker shade of red. They call it "English Fire".

Saying the painting process was hard is an understatement, but I'll describe all the pains in another post, if I can get myself to write it. It started on Saturday afternoon (was supposed to start in the morning, but I couldn't wake up early after one week of sleeping only 5 hours per night) and lasted until just a few hours ago. That included going to the shop to buy the paint, removing everything from the room, placing some masking tape, applying the first coat, waiting for it to dry, applying the second coat, waiting for it to dry while washing the brushes and the roller, removing the masking tape, and finally moving everything back inside the room. That basically meant spending the whole weekend stuck inside the house and, to make it even worse, the weather was the best since I arrived. Even the sun decided to show up...

All things considered, I still think it was worth it. I can now spend bigger amounts of time inside my room without going nuts, and it's somehow cool to have a room that you painted yourself. Ando so, without further ado, I present you "The Room", now in red: