Celsius1414

"I don't mean to brag. I don't mean to boast, but I'm intercontinental when I eat French toast." - Beastie Boys, "The Move", off of Hello Nasty. So stuck in my head this morning.

Bwa ha ha:

TwitVim is a Vim plugin that allows you to post to Twitter and view Twitter timelines.

"The geeky-awesome sensors are off the charts, captain!"

New version released last week.

See also:

• Twitvim on Twitter

Via reddit.

"BLADE RUNNER revisited >3.6 gigapixels" by françois vautier

An experimental film in tribute to Ridley Scott's legendary film “Blade Runner” (1982) This film was made as a unique picture with a resolution of 60.000 x 60.000 pixels (3.6 gigapixels). It was made with 167,819 frames from 'Blade Runner'.

Via Metafilter.

William Gibson op-ed in the NY Times on the omniscience of everybody's favorite benevolent data-dictator: "Google’s Earth" --

“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, imminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

Continue...

(Photo: "Google street view camera visits Peak District".)

The Torontoist (from, oddly, Toronto) reports on a great idea for a new business: "New Board Game Café Welcomes You, But Not Your Laptop"

Ben Castanie's new Koreatown café, at 600 Bloor Street West, just east of Palmerston Avenue, will emphatically not have free Wi-Fi. In fact, laptops and their attendant air of isolation are completely counter to what Castanie is trying to do. "I just don't want people sitting staring at their screens," he says. Then he starts explaining the system of categorization he'd used to organize his café's library of 1,500-plus board games.

Snakes and Lattes, as the café is (pretty cleverly) known, opened for business earlier today.

Via Reddit

Closer to home, I'm pretty sure Back to the Grind in downtown Riverside has a selection of board games for customers, not to mention books. And free WiFi. ;)

Let's say you have a text file with a list of to-do items, like this:

* Download iX rar file
* Charge iPod
* Install iX on iPod
* Return Ender's Game to library
* Track down The Snake's Pass by Bram Stoker
* Write post on vim editing trick

In order to better organize and sort the list as you view it, you want to add a [PROJECT] "tag" to each line:

* [PROJECT] Action

Now, to edit your original list, you could go down each line and edit manually. You could even use the . (period) trick and make the same change to each line as desired. But to really speed things up, try this.

1. Put your cursor where you want to add the text; in our case, we'll start at the "D" in Download on the first line. Since the first three items in our list belong to the same "IPOD LINUX" project, we'll take care of 'em all at once.
2. Type CTRL-v
3. Move your cursor down two lines (jj) to indicate where the changes will be made.
4. Type I (capital letter I)
5. Make your changes; it will only show up on the first line while you're editing.
6. When you're done with the changes, hit ESC -- your edit will be propagated down three lines.
7. Repeat as necessary.

This leaves us with:

* [IPOD LINUX] Download iX rar file
* [IPOD LINUX] Charge iPod
* [IPOD LINUX] Install iX on iPod
* [READING] Return Ender's Game to library
* [READING] Track down The Snake's Pass by Bram Stoker
* [BLOG] Write post on vim editing trick

For more, see:

• Vim Tips Wiki: "Inserting text in multiple lines"
• iX Project
• The Snake's Pass

Well, sort of. ;) Researchers have found that tea companies have been over-touting the health benefits of their tea products (big surprise, I know). Turns out the antioxidants in bottled tea are no where near the amount available in old-fashioned brewed tea.

NPR: "Bottled Tea Comes Up Short In Antioxidant Tests".

Reseachers [sic] tested bottled teas for antioxidants called polyphenols and found that most brands contain very little of them.

“Out of 49 samples, half of the bottle teas contain less then 10 milligrams of polyphenols,” says Shiming Li, a natural products chemist at WellGen, a company that's working to develop foods for medical use.

A cup of home-brewed green or black tea has 50-150 milligrams of polyphenols. So you'd have to drink between 5 and 20 of those pint-size bottles of tea to get the same amount of antioxidants. That’s a lot of tea.

So, yeah -- take a few minutes and brew your tea. Or let the sun do it, like my wife Denyse has been doing lately.

More about:

• Polyphenols
• Tea
• Sun Tea
• The Mad Hatter

(Photo: "Disney - Mad Hatter Rides the Tea Cups" by Joe Penniston.)