.:kenneth's:findings:.

Ever wonder what the path of a Roomba looks like as it cleans your house? It’s an amazing combination of randomness and precision, as shown by this long-exposure shot.

The shot was taken by shutting off all the lights in the room for 30 minutes and taking a long exposure of the path the Roomba took while cleaning up. It’s beautiful and surprising. I always assumed it worked with using some sort of grid, but that clearly isn’t the case at all. [Doobybrain via The Daily What]

Since all white people consider themselves to be “creative,” they are constantly in need of products and accessories that will allow them to capture their thoughts.  One of the more popular  products in recent years has been the Moleskine notebook.

This particular type of notebook is very expensive and was quite popular with writers and artists in the olden days.  Needless to say, these are two properties that are highly coveted in the white community.   In fact, it’s a good rule of thumb to know that white people like anything that old writers and artists liked:  typewriters, journals, suicide, heroin, and trains are just a few examples.

Much like virtually everything else that white people like, these notebooks are considerably more expensive yet provide no additional functionality over regular notebooks that cost a dollar.  Thankfully, since white people only keep their most original and creative ideas in the Moleskine, many of them will only be required to purchase one per lifetime.

But the the growing popularity of these little journals, is not without its own set of problems.  One of the strangest side effects has been the puzzling situation whereby a white person will sit in an independent coffee shop with a Moleskine notebook resting on top of a Apple laptop.  You might wonder why they need so many devices to write down thoughts?  Well, if a white person has a great idea, they write it by hand, if they have a good idea, it goes into the computer.

Not only does this help them keep their thoughts organized, but it serves as a signal to the other white people in the shop that the owner of both instruments is truly creative.  It screams: “I’m not using my computer to check email and read celebrity gossip, I’m using it to create art.  Please ask me about it.”

So when you see a white person with one of these notebooks, you should always ask them about what sort of projects they are working on their free time.  But you should never ask to actually see the notebook lest you ask the question “how are you going to make a novel out of five phone numbers and a grocery list?”

This is hilarious!

Clipboard: Friendpaste is a Code-Friendly Text Sharing Tool

Friendpaste is a web-based clipboard tool that can quickly shares snippets of plain text and computer code with friends or co-workers.

Friendpaste supports simple text sharing for revision, or you can lock your pastes against viewing and editing with a password. You can use formatting for dozens of different kinds of code, and it has a revision and annotation system so the friends you share your code with can leave smarter comments. One of the great code-centric features is the ability to leave a comment based on the line number of the code you are reviewing making it easier to reference comments to their appropriate place. If you have a trick or service up your sleeve for sharing your clipboard contents with friends and colleagues, sound off in the comments below.Thanks Steve!

Friendpaste

You can set up a custom domain using Posterous. Here’s the skinny:

1. Find a domain you like using Instant Domain Search. Most great domain names are taken, but there are a few gems out there left yet.
2. Register your domain using Go Daddy or register.com. This should usually cost about $10 per year. Avoid the extra fees around website hosting, and other services. All you need is a Domain Name Registration, probably for the period of 2 years.
   Using GoDaddy? See below for some additional screenshots of how to configure your domain.
3. Create an A record from the desired internet address to the following IP address hosted by Posterous: 67.207.139.81
4. Click Manage » Edit Site to set your custom domain to www.yourdomain.com.
5. You’re done!

Since 2003, prostitution has been legal in New Zealand. Contrary to what the right-wingers may have thought, the country didn’t denigrate into a nation of violence and sexual abuse.

Instead, it cleaned up the underground world of prostitution and turned it into a legit business, giving sex workers the same protection as regular workers. They can turn down work without fear of being beaten or killed. Health standards mean less sexually transmitted diseases. Sex workers can get quality clients instead of only those desperate enough to risk criminal charges.

So it’s been a success. Should the US and the rest of Europe do the same thing? I think so. Do you?

Since 2003, prostitution has been legal in New Zealand. Contrary to what the right-wingers may have thought, the country didn’t denigrate into a nation of violence and sexual abuse.

Instead, it cleaned up the underground world of prostitution and turned it into a legit business, giving sex workers the same protection as regular workers. They can turn down work without fear of being beaten or killed. Health standards mean less sexually transmitted diseases. Sex workers can get quality clients instead of only those desperate enough to risk criminal charges.

So it’s been a success. Should the US and the rest of Europe do the same thing? I think so. Do you?

W00T! If exam fever has you! and you have already made mind that you will FAIL this exam then why you are tensed? Chill out! because you already know you are going to fail this exam. Do it with fun, I suggest you 20 ways to fail an exam with extra ordinary fun and making it memorable moment of your life. Here they are:

1. Come into the exam wearing night clothes. Chew gum loudly with all the disgusting noises and blow bubbles.
   
2. Bring things to throw at the instructor when she/he’s not looking. Blame it on the person nearest to you.
   
3. Go into the exam room. Sit down, put on a helmet with the blast shield down and tell the professor the Force will guide your pen.
   
4. Bring a water pistol with you, and start shooting in the middle of the exam.
5. Upon receiving the exam, look it over, while laughing loudly, say “you don’t really expect me to waste my time on this ?!?!
6. Run into the exam room looking about frantically. Breathe a sigh of relief. Go to the instructor, say “Gotta go.” and run off.
   
7. Get the exam. 20 min into it, throw your papers down violently, scream out “F*** this!” and walk out delightedly.
8. As soon as you get your exam paper pretend puking on it (better is that you really puke on it), hand it over to the teacher and leave in a calm manner.
9. Bring a black marker. Return the exam with all questions and answers completely blacked out.
   
10. Bring a giant cockroach into the room and release it on a girl nearby.(It works awesomely).
    
11. Upon receiving the exam, look it over, while laughing loudly, say “you don’t really expect me to waste my time on this ?!?!
12. Answer the exam with the “Top Ten Reasons Why Professor “Somebody” is a Terrible Teacher” .
    
13. Leave the whole exam blank after writing ‘THERE ARE ALWAYS MARKS FOR NEAT WORK’.
14. Bring cheat sheets of any other subject (make sure this is obvious… otherwise you’re not just failing, you’re getting kicked out too) and staple them to the exam, with the comment “Please use the attached notes for references.”
15. Call the teacher over. Repeatedly call him/her. When he answers, wait 5 seconds, then say “We’re taking an exam teacher!”
    
16. Stare at people doing their exams. When you catch their eye…give a BIG smile and wave fervently.
17. If it is a written exam, relate everything to your own life story.If the exam is math/sciences related, make up the longest proofs you could possible think of.
    
18. Every 5 min. stand up, collect all your things, move to another seat, and continue with the exam.
    
19. Complete the exam with everything you write being in mirror image.
20. After completing a question loudly sing “TA-DAAAAA.”

If you’re unhappy about Apple’s new two-tone keyboard design, you might be surprised to hear you’re not alone. Designer Steve Lee just couldn’t take it any more — and decided to take matters into his own hands.

With just a cheap can of white spray paint, he transformed the Qwerty annoyance into what he calls “possibly the most pretentious keyboard in existence”.

These pictures are for your viewing pleasure. If you’re wondering whether Lee took the keys off before painting them, the answer is no. He says he left them on and sprayed thin coats of paint over the entire thing.

1) Istanbul:

Istanbul is one of the more widely used desktop recording software out there. You can download Istanbul from here. Debian and Fedora users should be able to install it from the repo. Istanbul has a very simple interface (or lack of). When you first start up Istanbul, you will see a small red button on your desktop panel.

Right click on the button and it will give you options and ways to record you desktop by window you choose or desktop area you select by mouse.

You can stop recording you session by left clicking on the record button, and it will prompt you save the screencast:

By default, Istanbul saves your video in Ogg format.

2) Wink:

Wink gives you more control over you Screencast than any Linux screencast software I have tried, and the fact that it doesn’t actually takes videos in the conventional sense of taking videos of your desktop screen, it gives you more control over your video. Wink takes video by taking screenshots of your desktop in frames per second. If you set your Wink to take 20 frames per second and take one minute worth of screencast with wink, it will have roughly 1200 screenshots of your desktop in one minute, which you can edit one screenshot at a time giving you more control over the video. Wink saves the video in shockwave format which you can later convert into whatever format you wish to.

You can download wink from it’ website here.

Wink will not work with newer distros of Ubuntu 8.04, or any Linux distros with libexpat.so.1 file located in /usr/lib/. A temporary solution that worked for me was to simply rename the file to libexpat.so.0, even thoughI didn’t have any problem with my system after doing this and everything worked ok, it is not highly recommended as it might effect other program using this file. You can rename it back to it’s original format when you are done. A permanent solution would be to recompile the program and link it to the new libraries; or wait for it to be officially updated by the author.

To start doing screencast with Wink, start a new project with File –> New, and select the screen size you would like to record.

(click for larger view)

You will see that by default it capture 50 frames/second in Time capture Mode.

After selecting OK a window will pop up giving your shortcuts for video capture.

Select “Minimize To Tray”. From the desktop panel right click on the icon and select “Start Timed Capture”, to start capturing your desktop.

You can select “Stop Timed Capture” whenever you think you are done with your work. It will tell you how many frames have been captured.

To get your video you have to render all the image files into a video file. And now you have a video of your desktop.

Render Images:

Save file options:

3) Xvidcap:

This is a nice little video capturing app that does the job, however for me it was a little too buggy for my liking. You can download xvidcap from here. When you start xvidcap, it will give you red square to work with, which represents the space that will be captured, you can drag the square to your liking, depending on how much you want to capture. To start capturing just click onthe red button. Other options including the ability to choose a screen area to capture and detach the frame area from the video capture selection. However if you select the whole desktop screen or large portion of the desktop screen, this will slow down your computer to a crawl.

4) vnc2swf:

Another popular, but inconvenient, way to screencast desktop is to use vnc2swf to record desktop sessions. vnc2swf works by connecting to vncserver and recording sessions. Debian users can use this program by installing sudo apt-get install pyvnc2swf. Others can download from it’s website: http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/

To start recording, assuming you have vnc server installed, just type this command in the terminal vnc2swf -o test.swf -N -S localhost:0 and it should pop up a simple window for recording purpose.

For more options check out the official documentation.

5) Recordmydesktop:

Another fairly widely used desktop recording application which runs in command and has a graphical frontend, debian user can install both with apt-get, sudo apt-get install recordmydesktop gtk-recordmydesktop, others can download from their project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/recordmydesktop. Recordmydesktop works the same way as Istanbul and has almost the same look and feel down to the desktop panel shortcut. But RMD has more advanced options that are missing in Istanbul. the options are self-explanatory and should be fairly easy to configure.