Monday, August 29, 2005

August 26th Geek Dinner Mugshots

So here are the mugshots for the recent geek dinner, held at the illustrious Pizza Hut on the 26th August.

It was a pretty short & sweet affair but it was great meeting all you folks! Let's try and make it regular guys. :)

Thanks again to Tejas for organising. :)


Dave Glover


Parvesh Tanwar


Cameron Reilly


Daryl Cook


Tejas Patel



Robin Froosh


Michael Specht


Justin Marshall


Nirav Patel


Chris Bell


Simon Heap

Monday, August 22, 2005

Melbourne Geek Dinner

OK folks, those of you who are livin' it large in our wonderful city of Melbourne take note! Pencil in a geek dinner for Friday the 26th (yep, this Friday). Tejas has done the superb job of picking a date and venue (OK, Pizza Hut wouldn't have been my first pick, but hey, whatever!) so trundle off to read his blog post and mark the time in your calendar.

I'll be there with my camera (still without my blessed 80-200mm) at least for a while. Feel free to say g'day to the guy holding the Nikon. His name will be Matt. :) [1]

I will have to leave early-ish as I try to go to Salsa dance classes (at Viva Cabaret on Smith st) at 9:00 Fridays. If anyone wants to come along Salsa-ing let me know! :)

Looking forward to meeting some more of you... :)



[1] Unless there's another guy holding a Nikon. In which case their name may not be Matt. Though it might be - it's a pretty common name. Regardless, I'm sure you can say hi to him too. :)

Friday, August 12, 2005

Freerunning

Warning: Totally off topic and way too cool for this blog. :)

Just an awesome clip I saw recently that I want to remember:

Putfile - Upload Video and Upload Images

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Synergy is the schizzle

Synergy is an open source, multiplatform application to share a keyboard and mouse between two PCs. If you're like me and work with two PCs on a daily basis you'll find it a godsend. No more confusion when trying to figure out which keyboard/mouse you should be using!

Engadget recently had a nice how-to.

Great piece of software. :)

There's also the commercial (though it is only US$30!) alternative MaxiVista that takes things even further - allowing you to use an old PC and monitor as a secondary display. It comes recommended by way of Scott Hanselman's 2005 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Matt ♥’s...

I gave a presentation today at work about various useful tools and wanted to keep track of the links. So here they are!

Bloglines
A web-based blog aggregator.

Matts list of blogs
A list of the blogs I'm subscribed to. There may or may not be something there that you'll enjoy...

Sauce Reader
A client-side blog aggregator.

Blogger
A web-based blog-authoring tool. Owned by Google.

MSN Spaces
Another web-based authoring tool by Microsoft. Has great integration with MSN Messenger.

Technorati
A search engine that only indexes blogs.

PubSub
Another blog search engine.

Doppler
A podcast aggregator.

Matt's list of podcasts
My list of podcasts, to get you started!

Google Maps
Web-based mapping application. Satellite & road data, with local search.

Microsoft Virtual Earth
As above, but from MS.

Google Earth
A client-side map application. Like Google Maps but with a richer interface.

NASA's World Wind
Similar product to Google Earth but open source and uses freely available satellite imagery. No road data.

Microsoft Mappoint
Renamed to Streets & Trips. Rich mapping application. Not free.

Copernic
Desktop search application. Just install it already!

Windows Desktop Search
A solid alternative to Copernic. [BTW Yahoo, Google and many others have other desktop search offerings, these two are just my favourites]

Firefox
Improve your web browsing experience!

Firefox Extensions
One of the many websites that host Firefox extensions.

Matts Firefox Extensions
My list of extensions.

Picasa
Great photo management software, owned by Google.

Nvu
Cross platform, open source web authoring system.

StrokeIt
Mouse gestures for any Windows application.

ToDoList
A simple todo list manager. Allows hierarchical tasks among a plethora of other features.

Firefox extensions

I've had some queries about which Firefox extensions I use so I thought I'd post my current list. Hover over each link for a description.

Adblock 0.5.2.039

Bloglines Toolkit 1.5.6

BlogThis 0.3

Bookmarks Synchronizer 1.0.1

BugMeNot 0.6.2

Copernic Desktop Search Toolbar 1.1

Duplicate Tab 0.5.1

Ebay Negs! 0.6

FirefoxView 0.31.1

IE View 1.2.4

Image Zoom 0.1.7.1

lget 0.1

ListZilla 0.5.1

miniT (drag+indicator) 0.5

PDF Download 0.5

Print It! 0.3.6

Resizeable Textarea 0.1a

Scribe 0.21

SessionSaver 0.2 0.2.1.028

Sort Extensions 1.1

SpellBound 0.7.3

SwitchProxy Tool 1.3.2

Tab Clicking Options 0.5.2

Tabbrowser Preferences 1.2.7.1

TinyUrl Creator 1.0

undoclosetab 20041125.5

Web Developer 0.9.3

xMirror 0.2


For some reason Flashblock doesn't appear in this list (which is generated by the extension ListZilla).

And I've recently been impressed with TabMix - if I was to start installing extensions from scratch I would use that tab manager extension which would replace a handful of those above.

Monday, August 08, 2005

Paper Steam Engine

Another one for Dad:

From MAKE: Blog:

Paper Steam Engine

Friday, August 05, 2005

Robotic hand catches 300km/h fastballs

My Dad is going to love this.

No Dad, they're not for sale. Yet. ;)