LemLink

Impossible motion trick wins Best Visual Illusion of the Year

admin — Thu, 13 May 2010 08:23:03 +0000

‘Impossible motion’ trick wins Illusion Contest - physics-math - 11 May 2010 - New Scientist

Don’t believe your eyes.

The Best Visual illusion of the Year Contest is a celebration of the ingenuity and creativity of the world’s premier visual illusion research community.

As reported in New Scientist, this year’s winner was Koukichi Sugihara of the Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences, Japan.

In his model, four marbles apparently roll uphill, against gravity.

How does it work?

Watch the video to find out.

Five customized Automator services to help save you time

admin — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:49:22 +0000

Five customized Automator services to help save you time is now available on the TUAW site.

Some cool tips to provide Ctrl-Click actions to

Email a selected file in the finder
Automatically create a thumbnail of an image
Automatically create a bit.ly link
Print selecetd files
Start Keynote Slideshow

(Via The Unofficial Apple WebLog.)

Habuka to Narita Tokyo via Snow Monkey Onsen at Jigokokudani

admin — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:13:45 +0000

Rather than miss out on day’s skiing in Habuka, we decided to visit the Jigokokudani Snow Monkey Park as a detour on our trip back to Tokyo on the last day of our holiday - needing to still make the strict deadline for the 8:25pm Jetstar flight.

Summary

The monkey onsen is a 4 hour detour from Nagano, and costs an extra ¥3100 for each adult and ¥1550 per child in fares and fees.

8:20 Happo to Nagano (bus)
10:10 Nagano to Kanbayashi (bus)
10:50 Walk to Jigokokudani
11:30 Snow Monkeys
12:30 Walk back to bus stop
1:15 Kanbayashi back to Nagano (bus)
2:58 Nagano to Tokyo (shinkansen)
5:03 Tokyo to Narita (express train)
5:57 Arrive Narita Airport

Details

The Bus from Happo Information Centre to Nagano departs 8:20
Tickets ¥1500 adults (cash only)
Kids ¥750 but kids tickets need to be bought from vending machine.

Arrive bus stop at Nagano at 9:40. Bus from Hakuba arrives at East Exit Stop 6 and the bus to the monkeys at Kanbayashi leaves at 10:10 from Stop 4, a few metres further down the street.

Link to Google Maps of Nagano Station

Luggage lockers are located about 50 metres further along that same street under the station next to a shop.The large lockers are ¥500 but take only ¥100 coins, so make sure you have a supply ready.

There’s a Visitor’s Information Centre upstairs in the station on the second floor (2F). There’s an ATM across the road from the bus stop in a Seven11, but as usual I couldn’t get it to give me any money. There’s a post office on the other (western) side of the station, past the information centre (they can help by showing a photo of the building that contains the post office), down the stairs and across the road. The ATM there worked. It was a sprint to get to the bus after that. I’d recommend you set out with the cash, if you have any left.

The bus fare to Kanbayashi was ¥1300 adults, half for children, each way. You pay when you get off. The trip takes about 40 minutes and has excellent views of Nagano. The driver announces the stop where you get off, but it looks like a random location. You walk back down the road and turn right. It is well sign posted from there. You can get a taxi instead of the bus, but it is ¥16000 return.

The walk through the forest takes about 40 minutes and is very picturesque. However it is cold and slippery- you need good shoes and gloves.

The monkey park itself is great fun and it is worth the effort of going there.

At noon the ranger feeds the monkeys so that brings many more down from the hills. The bus back is at 1:15. You need to have left the monkey onsen by 12:30 at the latest to make it. The stop is about 100 metres further down the road from where you were dropped off.

A shinkansen for Tokyo leaves at 2:26 or 2:58. We caught the later one so we could grab lunch. There are also good Bento boxes available on the platform. The train tickets can be bought from the JR Ticket Office, opposite the Information Centre, and I recommend that you get the tickets for the Narita Express at the same time. Tickets on the Narita Express are all reserved seating. Get unreserved seats on the Shinkansen. Total cost was about ¥10000 each, primary school aged kids half price.

The Shinkansen arrives at Tokyo at 4:32, which gives a comfortable amount of time for the long walk through pedestrian traffic to Platform 4. The Narita Express leaves at 5:03 - you will have a reserved car and seats. Terminal 2 is the second last stop. The train arrives at 5:57.

Seeing the monkeys up close was 4 hours very well spent. The efficient Japanese transport system makes all these rather tight connections possible. I don’t think I’d try this in Italy

How to add a link or hyperlink in an Apple mail message

admin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:52:36 +0000

It is easy to add a hyperlink to an Apple Mail message.

Select the text that you would like to be the ‘linking text’, and control-click on it.

In the pop-up window, scroll and select link.

Easy.

On one occasion, when control-clicking in a message, I had another option ‘Import Image’ in the pop-up which allowed me to import an image directly from an attached device, such as my iPhone (or a scanner).

It worked beautifully, but I can’t replicate this now.

Anyone else found this?

How to Embed a YouTube Video in an Apple Mail message

admin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:28:50 +0000

When you need to tell someone about your YouTube creation, you can send a link - but it is cool to have the video ‘embedded’ in your email. The message will then display the ‘poster image’ of your video, and allow the recipient to just to click ‘play’.

Apple Mail does not normally allow you to compose an HTML mail message, but there is a workaround that allows you to embed a YouTube Video in an Apple Mail message.

Thanks to bytes.com for providing a lead on this.

Step One

Go to YouTube, locate the video you want to embed, and copy the text in the ‘Embed’ section on the top right of the page, as in this screenshot.

Step Two

Open the application TextEdit, create a New Document (File>New), and paste in the text you have copied from YouTube.
It will look something like this

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Step Three

Change the format of this document using Format>Make Plain Text

Step Four

Save this document as message.html

Step Five

Open the newly saved document in Safari, by navigating to message.html using File > Open File…. (or Command-O)

Step Six

In Safari, select File > Mail Contents of this Page, or Command-I.
This will magically create a new message in Mail containing the embedded video.

Step Seven

Edit the message in Mail as you normally would, and then send it on its way.

(Addendum - this may not work in Mail 4.2 and you may need an extra step, as described in the comments below)

The Smartpen

admin — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:40:47 +0000

Up until now, I thought my Fisher space pen was the ultimate in pen geek, especially when combined with the hipsterPDA.

But, alas, it has been usurped by the Smartpen. (http://smartpen.com.au) - A computer in a pen!

With the Smartpen , you can take notes, like an ordinary pen. (the Smartpen requires special paper, which you can print yourself)

Unlike a normal pen, the Smartpen also contains a microphone and an infrared camera. It records whatever is being written and makes an audio recording of what is being said at that same time.

At any subsequent time, you can touch your Smartpen on the particular written words on the page, and it will playback what was being said at the time.

So, in a consultation, if you make a note ‘abdominal pain’, you can later touch that word with your pen and it will replay what your patient actually said.

At a lecture, you can make brief notes, and if you later need clarification you can touch the appropriate word (or diagram) and you will hear the explanation given by the lecturer at the time you made the note.

How about that?

Furthermore, at the end of the day you plug your pen into your computer (!) All the pages you have written are automatically uploaded into the computer, and stored. No scanning required. The audio file is also uploaded, so you can still click on any word on the page (with your mouse), and hear what was happening at the time. You can also search your stored pages for particular words.

So, don’t take your laptop to a meeting - just your smartpen and the special pad.

(I’m not sure that I’ve ever gone back and looked at any notes I’ve made in a lecture. Perhaps with the smartpen I would.)

For those docs still using paper records, perhaps they could write their notes on the special paper and then automatically load them into the computer at the end of the day.

The smartpen does some other cool things that enable you to show off with style, always an important consideration with a new gadget. Draw a piano keyboard on a page, and then actually play it with your pen. Write 10 x 4, and the smartpen will come out with 40.

Can you think of a use for the Smartpen to improve your practice?

Let us know below.

Snow Leopard, mysql and php

admin — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 20:51:00 +0000

Upgrading to Snow Leopard installs a new version of php.(5.3.0)

The php.ini file, which should be at /etc/php.ini, will need to be created.
You do this by editing /etc/php.ini.default, and renaming it to php.ini.

The changes required are
1) add the correct time zone,

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[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://php.net/date.timezone
date.timezone ="Australia/Sydney"

2) change the three references of the mysql.sock address from

1	/var/mysql/mysql.sock

1	/tmp/mysql.sock

Then restart apache by stopping and restarting
System Preferences>Sharing>Web Sharing

More detailed instructions are at
Install Apache/PHP/MySQL on Snow Leopard

Rails 2.3 and Mysql on Leopard

admin — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 04:44:29 +0000

I recently had a crash on an old PowerPC server and had to reinstall Leopard and Rails 2.3.

It is not as straight forward as one would hope - here are the steps.

Install Leopard
Install XCode 3.0 from the Leopard DVD
Note that the CHUD part of the XCode install consistently caused a crash on my PowerPC.
If this happens to you, Customise your XCode install, and select only options 1 and 3 (not the CHUD part)
Install mysql from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html
Also install the preference pane and start mysql server.
Activate the root user in Leopard
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071025100950309
Upgrade rails (Leopard ships with Rails 1.2)
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sudo gem update --system
sudo gem install rails
sudo gem update rake
sudo gem install ruby-debug

If you get error messages that ruby.h can’t be found, your XCodes install has not been successful.
Add mysql gem
Rails 2 does not come with the mysql gem installed.
This requires a special command
On Intel Macs

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sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql dir=/usr/local/mysql --with-mysql-config=`which mysql_config`

On a PowerPC

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sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch ppc" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql dir=/usr/local/mysql --with-mysql-config=`which mysql_config`

Any comments or corrections welcome.

Summaries and Thumbnails on Home Page in Wordpress

admin — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 04:58:36 +0000

Thumbnails

What we want

A thumbnail image to be displayed along with the summary of each recent article on the ‘home page’ of the site, but a full size image used when the article is displayed on its own single page.

There may be other ways to do this in Wordpress 2.7, but I haven’t found them.
Please feel free to point them out other solutions in the comments.
See also this article at Tutorial9

How to do it

It is not that hard to achieve, but does require a change to the php code within the template you have chosen.

The file to change is the Main Index File, index.php.

Tthe exact place to add this depends on the the template you using.

It goes in the section

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The code to paste is like that below -

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if ($wp_query->post_count>1){
$thumbnail = get_post_meta($post->ID, "thumbnail", true);
if ($thumbnail != "") {
echo "

\"thumbnail\">";
$values = get_post_custom_values("thumbnail");
echo "\"80px\" src=\"".$values[0]."\" alt=\"".get_the_title()."\">";
echo "

";
}
echo the_excerpt(''.__('Read More »', 'sandbox').'');
}else{
echo the_content(''.__('Read More »', 'sandbox').'');
}
?>

Then, in any post, you need to add the image that you want to use as the thumbnail to a ‘custom field’.
Add the image to the document in the normal way. The text of your document will then include a line like

1	<img src="http://lemlink.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/thumb-150x150.jpg" alt="Thumbnails" title="thumb" width="150" height="150" class="size-thumbnail wp-image-18" />>

Copy the src address of the image.
In this case that is

http://lemlink.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/thumb-150x150.jpg

Paste that into a ‘Custom Field’ down the bottom of the edit post page, as below.

That’s it.

I agree it should be simpler.

The Cult of Done Manifesto

admin — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 04:25:28 +0000

The Cult of Done Manifesto

Thanks Julian for sending me this link!