Blog

English cut is a blog from Thomas Mahon, Bespoke Savile Row Tailor, London. I’ve been reading Thomas’s site since Hugh McLeod dropped it on me. Clive Thomson from Slate properly identified why I think it’s so appealing… “After all, suits have many of the things that geeks particularly appreciate: Intense levels of engineering, an obsession with structural elegance, physics, totally wicked gear that’s used to create them, topographic geometry, and materials science that burrows right down to chemistry and – these days – nanotechnology. And when it comes to ties, my god, you’ve got the most awesomely realized application of knot theory on the planet”.

Jeremy Wagstaff has a great collection of programs (or ways to run programs) off USB drives. Chat/instant messaging, Browsers, Operating Systems, PIMs/organisers, Email, Encryption, Office, Music, and Web Authoring- I have a few of these on my perpetually hacked up Shuffle so when I visit foreign computers I can get stuff done without installing anything.

This Brainboost search engine is kinda neat. You can ask it regular questions like “Why is the sky blue?” or “When was the great pyramid built?” and many other types of natural kid-like questions. Their site calls it an answer engine as opposed to a search engine- which takes the search results and answers your question (or tries to).

Make group pool Flickr member “tv” posted a couple photos of a the $11 Mattel JuiceBox modified in to a photo frame. He says “I’m working on an LCD frame hacked out of a Mattel JuiceBox ($11 at Wal-mart). The ‘Box runs uclinux and accepts MMC cards”. Wow, this might be the way we can all have low-cost photo frames.

Check out this amazing gallery of latte artwork. It looks like most of the creations use milk/soy as their Jackson-Pollockian tools of choice. I want to drink this lion from Victrola barista Bob and this leaf.

I just ordered what might be the cool hack toy of the year. It’s called the GameOptics LCD Display available at ThinkGeek and it’s a little USB device that displays instant messaging software, incoming emails, MP3 and internet radio playback, and weather. The purpose of this device is to use it while you’re playing MMORPG’s (Massive multiplayer online role playing games) and still tune in to the meat space. I think there’s a lot to hacking in store for this little guy, first item of business- add IRC support.

FreeCycle is a hub of email lists from different cities where you can post WANTED, OFFERED, or TAKEN messages to get, give and look for free stuff. There are over 1 million members out there in over 2,500 communities. You have to go and pick up the stuff in person, but that’s not a bad deal at all. There has been some talk of a Maker-like list where you could offer up usage of tools and equipment, but I think the FreeCycle list(s) might work. You could post OFFERED: Use of DNA sequencer, etc…