Stuff, and things and stuff ….

Full time work, it’s a mugs game … ah well, at least after hours you can drive yourself to distraction with the awesome power of the internet. Here’s some stuff I recently found which is cool.

The Great Beer Delivery - they’ve got a merchant freighter, and on that they’re building a pub, then stocking it with Speights and sailing it from Dunedin to London! Wowee, what a trip! Combine that with the awesome power of the Beer Advent Calendar.

I went out and bought Windows Vista Home Premium the other day, I had to because my laptop OEM XP CD wasn’t really supposed to be installed on my desktop PC. A system crash sealed it’s fate. I would have switched to Linux full time but two problems, first of all I couldn’t get my widescreen monitor to run at native resolution (suspect a driver issue, farking about with modelines didn’t help) and secondly there’s a couple of games that MUST run, namely X3 and Oblivion. Turns out Oblivion doesn’t like Vista (well, not the version we have) and not sure about X3 yet. Windows helpfully found a solution a few minutes after Oblivion died which was to point out that there was a new version of Oblivion … neat.

But, the reason for mentioning Vista is that they’ve got that fandangly Gadget thing going on, you know the same stuff as what we’ve had with Konfabulator and I think the Mac OS whatever-its-called has it as well. I found this very complete tutorial on how you might want to implement a Gadget that reads RSS and does video stuff with it. I also had big plans to write a Trademe Gadget, but stopped tonight after a) I found that Tradme have made one just a few days ago and b) they (Trademe) expressly prohibit scraping of their site with 3rd party tools in their T’s & C’s. I also discovered via Rowan Simpson’s Blog that Trademe currently have no plans to implement an API … bah. But then, there’s some hope as they’re playing with making member listings available as XML, see this URL, for example (change the nickname on the URL). So I don’t care anymore right now … I still want a gadget that shows My Tradme stuff though.

Bedtime … Zzzzz …