Need an Online Take-out Menu?
OrderTakeout.ca has lots of menus from restaurants in Kingston and only Kingston. Hopefully more people will add restaurant menus from other towns so that this post is valid to people outside of K-town.
My knitting blog is now located at the Needle Exchange!
Smackbook
Riz was telling me about the Smackbook yesterday. It’s pretty much the coolest thing ever. By tapping the side of your laptop, you can move between two screens. A very cool HCI application of the gyroscope in a MacBook.
Dark matter distribution of the universe
*sniff* they should have sent… a poet.
Found in a meandering sort of way via Mind Hacks.
Needle Exchange
Hey guys, check it out I found this really cool site. It’s by this girl named Eve who runs a knitting blog called Needle Exchange and it’s totally AWESOME.
Cute Things #2: Quasi, the cutest little mechanical turk there ever was
discovery.ca did a piece on Quasi a few days ago. Quasi is a little Mechanical Turk whose primary job is original interaction, particularly with children. I’ve gotta say, though, I’d totally hang with this little guy. I appreciate that they’re not trying to make him look human like the creepy ReplieeQ2. And I love how they’ve designed him to express emotions. Pompoms!
Wikiglut
There’s a new Google item on the market. Wikimapia is powered by Google Maps and Wikipedia, and it has seen a dire beginning. I imagine this going in three directions: people creepily entering their friends’ addresses into it and inventing brand new invasions of privacy (check), shameless advertising (”Dance N Bare Strip Club. Right behind the Kenton Park Imax station. Take the Max to fleshtown!”) or the more likely route; people simply ignoring it. Whichever way it goes, noone’s going to take it seriously. We’ve already got Google Maps and we can easily cross-reference with Wikipedia. Do we really want to subscribe to a brand new web toy whose only notable addition to the universe is a new way of locating “my brother’s butt?” (It’s in Toronto, in case you were wondering.)
The problem is that we’re currently suffering from Wikiglut (or Delugle, if you prefer that term). Wikipedia was useful, and maybe so was Wiktionary. Google Scholar has helped me countless times, and I like playing around with Google Maps every once in a while. But Google Trends was a trend in itself, and Google Video was quickly replaced by You Tube. Then there’s Google Mars and Google Reader, Google This and Google That, Wikiblah and Wikibloo. I’m rambling.
The problem with this service is that it’s slapped two things together and removed features from both of them without adding anything new. There are lots of interesting possibilities which could have evolved from this confluence, but instead it was taken over by Estonian potheads who like showing each other where “lkjdsfgoiut” is.
If you’re going to make a brand new Web 2.0 product that you think will revolutionize the internet, here’s my tip: at least revolutionize the shit you’re copying. Noone has time to look at the site you came up with that combines Google Purple with eBay. Maybe you should think about actually filling a niche that’s empty, instead of squishing yet another wikijobby into the internet.
Spätzle
Spätzle is a much-beloved dish in our family. It’s from southern Germany, where my mom grew up. Here is a really easy recipe for Spätzle:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 cup milk
(The recipe called for 3/4 cups of milk, but that isn’t enough to get the consistency you need unless you want to cut the dough into little pieces instead of straining it.)
Pour the wet ingredients into the dry, and stir. My mother says to stir the dough “bis es blasen wuerft” (until it blows bubbles), which confused me a heck of a lot until my father explained that it just meant “until you develop carpal tunnel syndrome.” Stir it a lot and it actually starts to develop lots of air bubbles.