Mr. Speaker

Possession of low-voltage consumer electronics. A love of very noisy things. A do-it-yourself aesthetic - Do you possess these items and/or attributes? Then come join the Circuit Bending hoedown! It’s disturbing and easy! Here’s the how and why (no, actually, the how and what)…

Circuit Bending is the art of messing with the electronics inside of stuff that makes noise, in order to make new and more useful random noise. The goal is to augment gadgets, kids toys, guitar pedals and cheap synths with new knobs, buttons, switches and “body contacts” that boldly go where no manufacturer would ever be bothered going.
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3 years without even a mention of Star Wars on this nerdy blog.

That is pretty impressive.

OOooh, I’m all giddy! Moments ago I discovered today’s release from Google: Google Gears. It’s like they reverse-engineered some advanced cookie technology from a crashed web-based UFO. Or something similar.

I’m typing this post as I explore, so we’ll see how my opinions of it change from now to the end of the post - I predict I’ll be impressed, but a little wary.

Google Gears is a cross-browser extension that integrates all manner of nifty tools to allow web application providers to make their apps work off-line. There are two main aspects to the release: database and local server.
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Bug fixing web services at 8.30am on a Monday morning is not really that much fun. The first 2 coffees haven’t even started kicking in yet. And a crashing IDE doesn’t usually help the situation along either.

Usually doesn’t - but the error message returned to me today has added a slight spring to my (normally lifeless) Monday morning step:

Thank you ReSharper, you’ve given me hope for an enjoyable week ahead…

Tags: crash

Nah, I’ve got nothing.

I was getting scared there for a minute. It had been at least a few weeks since I last found something on the interweb that rocked my web-based world.

Things were getting desperate, and for a moment I feared I might be forced to go back and work on one of my half-finished projects or something. But I was saved. Saved by the crunchy goodness of Chickenfoot. Yes, Chickenfoot will (slightly) change your life.

Chickenfoot must be compared to Greasemonkey. Indeed, from the vague description I was given at Sydney BarCamp (I was told the wrong session time, and missed the actual demo) I assumed it was just someone re-inventing the monkey.

But I was wrong. Slightly wrong.
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