Ryan Sit sent in a link to Swurl, a Web 2.0 application/startup he's been working on that attempts to collect all of the artifacts of your digital life and assemble them into a sensible whole. You could call it an aggregation tool—which, deep down, it is—but it does a little more than other things I've seen. Namely, it does a really nice job of taking in a wide range of relationship oriented services and turning the their inherent lock-in inside-out.

You just do your normal stuff online, Digg stuff, Delicious stuff, favorite Youtube videos, Twitter, rent videos on Netflix, bookmark songs on Last.fm, post photos on Flickr, etc. And Swurl brings it all together in a really deep way. We also enhance data, adding trailers to movies you rent and Lyrics to songs you bookmark.

All of these services get pulled together into a blog format and discussion and commenting can take place around any item. I think the idea is to help centralize the conversation instead of having it scattered about your different networks. Depending how busy your various online activities are, this may help you or it may just add yet another place to track comments.

What I like most, and the real hack from a Web 2.0 startup perspective, is that they programmed this to encourage you to maintain friends and use features across a number of social networks and easily traverse the relationships and data in all of them from a single location. Flikr is good for storing photos. Del.icio.us is great for bookmarking. Facebook is awesome for tracking friends. Swurl aggregates the relationships from all of the networks you inform it about and it recognizes when those users are also Swurl members. This encourages network growth, but isn't so greedy that it forces you to work only inside the Swurl fence.

Swurl [via Ryan]

I'm told that one of the most popular projects at the CRAFT table at Maker Faire is our friend Becky Stern's electronic embroidery. If you're into crafting, all it takes is a little conductive thread and you can make your own fabric gadgets.

Becky posted an introduction to electronic embroidery on the CRAFT blog today and I think I just learned how to backstitch. Her introduction shows how to wire up a couple of LEDs and a switch, but there are a lot of directions to take this. Of particular interest is the LilyPad, a tiny sewable Arduino board that's about the size of a half dollar. There are also various sensors designed around this platform, including sew-friendly accelerometers. There must be a good running jacket idea in there somewhere.

Electronic Embroidery - CRAFT Video Podcast
Conductive Thread and LilyPad Components at SparkFun

In celebration of my favorite planet, I'd like to open the comments up to any and all Earth Day hacks, links and activities. Think of it as an opportunity to quickly catalog a list of ideas and tools that can be used for the other 364 days of the year.

Here are a few simple things that you can do tomorrow. I figure it's as good a day as any to start forming a few practical habits, so for my list, I just chose a number of things that you can easily make a regular part of your day.

1. Bike to work. If you need to find a route, citybikemap.com is a good user contributed resource
2. Compost the garbage. If you don't have a composter, here are some construction ideas from Instructables: Sinmple Pentagon Composter; Mini Wooden Portable Compost Bin; Trench Composter
3. Avoid the purchase of anything with excess packaging
4. Turn lights off when not in use. Convert remaining incandescent bulbs to CFL
5. Check faucets and toilets for leaky valves. For your toilets, shut off the water while you are at work and see if the water level goes down in the tank. It's a common problem that's easy to fix.
6. Print no emails.
7. Bring a mug to work and use it instead of styrofoam or paper cups.
8. Reconnect with nature: start a garden; go for a hike; take the kids out and identify some plants and birds.
9. Reclaim some of the yard for native plants and grasses.
10. Encourage others to do the same, and share your own Earth-friendly tips and hacks.

You may be more or less ambitious, but I think this represents something that's feasible for much of the year. It'd be cool to get a read on what the hacker community is doing to make a positive impact on the globe, so make sure to post your own Earth Day hacks and resolutions in the comments.

The trick is setting up a number of CSS rules that use "*=" substring selection on an element's properties. For instance, matching an IFRAME tag with the SRC parameter containing doubleclick would look like IFRAME[SRC*="doubleclick"] and matching an anchor tag with an HREF containing a url with "ads." in it would look like A:link[HREF*="ads."]. Giving the style "display: none ! important" to all of the possible combinations and adding the stylesheet to your browser's chrome effectively turns off the ad-serving web. The site below has a comprehensive CSS file that's been tailored to assassinate ads from most networks.

To be honest, I didn't realize that you could do this type of parameter matching and subselection in CSS, so it's worth looking at the CSS source for that alone. If you don't use it for this purpose, perhaps the technique will come in handy for something else you are working on.

Better Ad Blocking for Firefox, Mozilla, Camino, and Safari
Ad Blocking userContent.css

The command format is fart <options> filename search <replace>. Basic options are -r (recursive), -c (print filename and match count), -i (ignore case), -n (print matched line numbers), --c-style (interpret backslashes as c-style characters).

For example, let's say a Linux buddy of yours sent you a bunch of html files and they have unix line endings that are barfing in notepad. One simple command fixes the problem, replacing all the newlines with a full PC carriage return, line feed combo:

fart --c-style *.html \n \r\n

Or perhaps you need to quickly track down some work that is left to be done throughout a big project directory. You can use fart to recursively search a directory and spit out all the file names and line numbers containing the text "TODO":

fart -nr * TODO

It's easy to see how you could shoot yourself in the foot with this one. Make sure to fart with caution and back up your files before doing a big search and replace.

FART @ SourceForge - Link

Hackszine reader nathaN writes:

i have mind performance hacks here on my lap, and i found hack 56. you included transformational grammar, surface/deep structure, you have to be aware of this other book on my desk, next to my lap. The book describes a method of using transformational grammar to analyze statements and gather incredible amounts of information, the technique is called the Meta Model, i had to write this post after i found #56 in your book. it's out of print, i think, but it's not too hard to find used if you make a few calls. it cost ME $35, but its probably online as well, torrents or whatever =(

its the single most useful "hack" i've ever found, ive been using it for about an year and it gives me more options than i know how to take advantage of.

The Structure of Magic I, by Richard Bandler and John Grinder
Introduction by Virginia Satir and Gregory Bateson.
Science and Behavior Books, Inc
copyright 1975

Unfortunately, the Google Books entry for The Structure of Magic I wasn't a full scanned version. There is, however, a wealth of information about the Meta-model and other Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) tools on Wikipedia:

The meta-model in neuro-linguistic programming (or meta-model of therapy) is a heuristic set of questions designed to specify information, challenge and expand the limits to a person's model of the world. It responds to the distortions, generalizations, and deletions in the speaker's language.

In the process of communicating, the mind is forced to translate a person's experiences and their internal understanding of the world into words, making language a highly optimized and compressed representation of a complex internal mental state. This translation occurs a second time, as the listener parses language and interprets that communication based on their own mental world model and past experiences.

The meta-model provides tools for quickly parsing the structure of a communication, determining implied meaning, and locating potential points of misunderstanding. When you can recognize the linguistic translation artifacts that are common patterns in the communication process, you can respond to them. On the receiving end, this helps you better understand the experiences that underlie the speaker's language. On the sending end, it helps you to better communicate without misunderstanding. Internally, it helps you to analyze and debug your own model of the world.

Meta-model (Neuro-linguistic Programming) - Link
Mind Performance Hacks @ the Maker Store - Link

It's a real drag when you think you've taken a great picture, only to load it up in photoshop and discover that your hands weren't as steady as you thought they were. Depending on the magnitude of your error, chances are you can correct most small camera bumps or pans using a deconvolution filter. The particular technique used depends on which package you use, but they are all built around manipulating the image in the frequency domain to reduce the photo's linear blurring.

Nathan Willis dissected three applications for removing the effects of camera movement from your photos. Two of them, Refocus and Iterative Refocus, are open source Gimp plugins. The third, Unshake, is a closed source Java application that is capable of producing high-quality results with little user effort (though your CPU will be hurting for a minute or two).

If you watch the movies, you have probably seen the impossibly accurate "computer enhancement" hand-waving that turns a blurry mess into a crystal clear mug shot or license plate for the hero to chase. Real-world image enhancement is not that good, but you may still be surprised at the level of quality a good Fast Fourier Transform and deconvolution can produce.

All three of these applications produce admirable results. Refocus is the fastest, and subjectively Unshake produces the cleanest results. It is unfortunate that among the three alternatives, one is not free software and the other two lack active maintainership. But since the math is well understood, maybe someone will pick up where the other programmers left off, and bring even better refocusing technology to the image editors of tomorrow.

The above photo is from the Unshake site. It seems to work well for predominately straight-line blurs over the range of 8 pixels or less. I haven't tried the two Gimp plugins, but I have a feeling the Iterative Refocus package could produce the best results given enough tweaking of the setting.

It's all Fast Fourier Transforms and way over my head, but it works (and frankly, if it was good enough for the Hubble, it's good enough for me).

Unshaking and refocusing your photos - Link
Unshake - Link
Refocus - Link
Iterative Refocus - Link

GrabFS is a clever MacFUSE-based file system created by Amit Singh that creates a live screenshot file system for all of your running applications.

When you run GrabFS, a new drive volume will appear. Inside, you'll find a folder for each running application, and inside each application directory, you'll find a tiff file for each of the application's windows. When you drag, copy or open one of these files, you get a snapshot of the application window at that point in time.

GrabFS requires Leopard and the Leopard build of MacFUSE. I think it's time for me to upgrade.

GrabFS: The Screenshot File System - Link
MacFUSE - Link

What is Lecturefox?

It's all about the joy of learning.

Lecturefox is a free service. You can find high-quality classes from universities all over the world. We collect without exception lectures from official universities, and we have a special interest in lectures from the faculties physics, chemistry, computer science and mathematics. In the category "faculty mix" you can find miscellaneous lectures from other departments like electrical engineering, biology, psychology, economics, history and philosophy.

I really like what they've done in collating these resources into a single index. Tracking the companion blog's RSS feed, you can get updates about new material that's become available. Video, audio and text courseware are included in the index and it appears to be actively maintained and comprehensive, especially for computer science and other math/science related courses.

Forget your other new years resolutions. You couldn't do much better than treating yourself to a free lecture every weekend.

Lecturefox: Free University Lecture Index - Link
Lecturefox Blog - Link
Previously: Bootstrap Education - Link

Like most of us, you've probably got some last-minute shopping to take care of. Or maybe there's a special someone in your life who keeps asking you for gift ideas and you need to start dropping hints to avoid another button down and a neck tie. Whatever the reason, here's a quick and dirty hacker gift guide with a variety of gift ideas that should put a smile on someone's face.

Make sure to add your own favorites to the list in the comments area and pass it along. I'm focusing primarily on smaller items that are available in local stores, but feel free to toss in whatever you think is important and shouldn't be missed.

Reading Material:

• Make: The Best Of - a killer collection of the best 75 projects from our favorite magazine.
• The Dangerous Book For Boys - this is a great book for sharing with your kids. Chock-full of essential information like how to tie knots, play poker, use a compass, build a tree house, and relate to girls.
• Knoppix Hacks, 2nd Edition - the swiss army knife for your computer.
• Illustrated Guide To Astronomical Wonders - ideal for anyone who's interested in knowing their way around the universe.
• Also check out other books from the O'Reilly Hacks Series - Link

Gadgets:

• Asus Eee PC - this ultra-tiny Linux laptop is just starting to appear in stores - Hacks
• Linksys WRT54GL Router - the L in the GL stands for Linux. It's a $60 router that can be customized to do more than it's thousand dollar big-brothers - Hacks
• Western Digital MyBook World Edition External Hard Drive - any extra storage is really nice to have, but this network-available drive contains mirrored RAID storage and a mini Linux computer that can run a web and database server - Hacks
• iPhone or iPod Touch - did I really put that here? - Hacks
• Broadband Mobile Card from Verizon or Sprint - they are getting super
  popular, and heck, they are cheaper than an iPhone.
• Nokia N95-3 - the winner of our most hackable mobile phone survey - Hacks

Toys:

• Air Hogs Havoc Heli Laser Battle - remember the Picco-Zs and their clones from last year? Here's two of them in a single package, enhanced with a trigger that let's you zap your friend's heli down.
• E-Sky Lama V4 Helicopter- Yeah, I'm crazy for helicopters right now. The counter-rotating models like this one are about $100, ready (and easy) to fly, and very hackable.
• WowWee RoboSapien V2 - fun for the kids. More fun with a soldering iron - Hacks

Gear:

• 2GB or larger micro SD card, plus various SD and USB adapters - perfect for scooting files around, the size of a finger nail, and you can put a full Linux distro, anti virus software, or a Puppy Linux virtual machine on it - Hacks
• Mini Multimeter - always handy.
• Bike Multitool - a good one will pack allen and hex wrenches, screw drivers, and a knife into a pretty small package. Perfect for voiding warrantees in a pinch. Oh, and there's a chain tool, too - Link, Link
• Soldering Tools - whether it's a new Weller or just a pair of helping hands, it'll be welcome in any stocking - Link, Link

What have we missed here? Add your wishes to the comments. Then find a completely non-tacky way to get this list into the hands of someone who wants you to be a happy hacker.

I read today on Lifehacker about a freeware tool called Linux Reader. It provides you with read access to ext2/ext3 partitions within Windows and has an explorer-like interface that allows you to drag and drop files from a standard Linux partition.

What about full read/write access? With a little googling, I found another freeware utility called Ext2 IFS that provides full write access. It's is essentially a kernel ext2/ext3 filesystem driver for Windows, which allows the operating system to access your Linux partitions in a more native manner.

After installing, you can mount your Linux partition under a drive letter, just like you would an NTFS partition. The drive will be available in Explorer and within any file browser dialog in your favorite Windows applications.

As far as I can tell, both packages pretty much ignore the permission settings on files, so you'll have full access to files across the entire partition. One caveat is that LVM volumes are not supported by the Ext2 IFS driver (and I'm assuming the same is true for Linux Reader). ReiserFS, XFS and other filesystems are also not supported. For your plain Jane dual-boot system with an ext3 partition, however, you should have no problem accessing your Linux files from within Windows.

Ext2 Installable File System For Windows - Link
Linux Reader - [via] Link

ShiftSpace is an open source platform that uses Greasemonkey to place an API layer over the web. When you have the plugin installed, ShiftSpace connects back to a central server to locate "shifts" that other users have left behind for the URL you are viewing.

By pressing shift+space on your keyboard, you get a list of these "shifts", which are essentially a layer of user-contributed annotations that are layered on top of the web page you are viewing. The current tools allow you to leave post-it notes, swap images, highlight text and even reformat the html of the underlying page. To add a shift to any web page, you just hold the shift key down and a little menu appears.

Right now, the shifts you see appear to be global. In the near future, it's supposed to have the ability to filter shifts based on friend groups, friends of friends, or just you own shifts. This could make it a convenient way to take notes on pages that you view, alone or collaboratively.

The bigger deal is that the underlying API is open source, and the tools provided are just examples of what you might be able to build. The server-side is written in PHP using the SQLLite library, so it should run on just about any web server environment. If you want to hack a meta-web application of your own, you can just download the source and start coding. Just make sure to tell us about it when you've got something to show.

ShiftSpace: An Open Source layer above any webpage - Link
ShiftSpace documentation - Link

Google recently added a collaboration feature to the "My Maps" area of Google Maps. Similar to the collaborative document editing in Google Docs, when you've made a map you can click the "Collaborate" link and share your map with specific people or the entire world. What's cool is that when you do the latter, you've effectively created a map wiki that anyone can edit, expand upon, and help maintain.

After messing around with the new collaboration feature for a bit, it occurred to me that we should make a map where we hackers can add our own markers and share interests and projects with each other. It might be a good way to network with people around you, and it's also just cool to see what projects people are working on around the world.

So I went ahead and created the hackers in your neighborhood, an open-access collaborative map that we can use to map the hacker world. Some of my favorite hackers at Make and Craft have added themselves to the map already, but I'd love to see how far we can push this... maybe it'll become too many data points for gmaps to handle.

Just connect to the map, log in to your Google account, and you'll find an "Edit" button on the left. Clicking this will put the map in edit mode, where you can drag a new marker onto the map for yourself. Toss your name into the title and put your interests and project websites in the description field.

If you have a programming or robotics club, toss that in there too and give it a red marker or something.

I should mention something else about the collaborative feature. As you can see above, it looks like PT from Makezine has tagged my digital hood with some mapfiti.

The one downside of the collaboration feature is that someone might end up vandalizing your work. In reality, though, most of these open-collaborative projects end up working really well just on good faith and community policing. It's why large open source projects work. It's why Wikipedia works. Frankly, I think Phil's Make: tag looks pretty sweet over Minneapolis anyway.

The Hackers in Your Neighborhood - Link

What do you do when good hard drives go bad? Tell me if this sounds familiar. You spend a year or two filling up an enormous external hard drive, and just as you start thinking it might be a good idea to buy another enormous drive to back up your data, you boot your computer and hear a heart-stopping sound from your disk: thuck... thuck... thuck... thuck... @#$%!!!!

I had a huge amount of data go dark on me two weeks ago. I suppose I reached the end of the grieving process this weekend, because my mind started to clear up and it occurred to me that maybe all was not lost. After all, there are a lot of electronics in those external hard drives, separate from the drive itself. Inside your typical external hard drive is just a normal 3.5 inch internal hard drive plus the electronics necessary to power everything, control the drive, and provide USB or Firewire connectivity to the host computer.

So, voiding the warrantee, I pulled the enclosure apart and replaced the suspect drive with a working EIDE drive I had lying about. Sure enough, when I turned things on, the drive I knew to be good started clacking away. At this point, I was pretty sure my data was still safe and sound, but being that I didn't have a machine handy that could mount an XFS formatted disk, I couldn't verify things for sure until I could get the disk connected back to my iMac.

Most computer stores sell really cheap (approx. $30) hard disk enclosures which you can just slap an EIDE disk into to create an external Firewire or USB drive. I ran to my local store, picked one up, and I'm happy to say that I just recovered 320GB of data that I had just about given up on.

If you own an external drive that's failed on you, make sure to test the drive and enclosure before you throw it out. It's quite possible that your data is still intact and you can save yourself a couple hundred bucks and a lot of trauma by just replacing the enclosure.

At the very least, you might have a bad disk but a working enclosure that you can use to make a new external disk.

On a side note, until today I only owned a single external drive. Being that there's only one data point, I can't say a whole lot for sure, but I keep thinking that I'm just a random person with a 100% enclosure failure rate. Until I hear otherwise, I remain suspicious that this might be a fairly common failure point.

A friend of mine was commenting today on a common scenario that a lot of us run into. When you're actively working on a project, you often times have several tabs open in your browser solely related to that work: some API documentation, a couple versions of a site you are working on, a google spreadsheet, a project resource/status page, and things of that sort.

When you change gears to work on something else, you might have another entirely different set of pages that you keep open all the time. If you juggle several projects at the same time, it can be a nuisance (not to mention a waste of time) to constantly be closing and opening all those windows throughout the day.

This isn't new news, but Firefox and Safari both have a really convenient--and often overooked--feature built into their tabbed browsing and bookmarking functionality that makes managing groups of commonly viewed documents really simple.

In Safari, just create and fill a folder in your bookmarks menu for each group of sites. When you open the bookmarks menu, in your project subfolder there will be a link titled Open in Tabs. Clicking that will open the entire folder's bookmarks at once, each in a tab of the active window.

Firefox makes it even easier. Just set up your tabs the way you normally would, then click on Bookmarks->Bookmark All Tabs. Firefox will create a new folder in your bookmarks menu and automatically import all of your current tabs to the folder. When you open the bookmarks menu, in your project subfolder there will be a link titled Open All in Tabs. This works just as you would expect, conveniently loading all of the documents in the bookmark subfolder.

Only Two Cross-Browser Web Fonts
If you want to choose fonts that will look similar across most modern browsers you have two choices: Georgia and Verdana. Yeah, there are a few other fonts, such as Times, Arial, Helvetica, etc., that are available on all platforms, but they tend to look really nice on one platform and really crappy in another. Or they look nice in both, but the kerning or the letter height will be different for the exact same font size.

The web is a boring, two-font world.

Here's the thing though. Georgia and Verdana are really decent screen fonts. For large blocks of body copy, they provide you with a very respectable serif and sans-serif font option. When it comes to titles or navigational elements, however, you often want something that will stand out from the rest of the copy on your page.

Fonts in GIFs: The Old Way
The typical solution is to create your titles and nav buttons in Photoshop, then cut GIF images for placement in the web page. This lets you use any font face you desire, ensures that things look exactly the same in all browsers, and takes an extraordinary amount of extra effort.

If you want to put slick looking titles on your blog posts, this method will probably have you in a big white coat with extra long sleeves before a month is up. Even worse—hey, some of us look good in white—if you're using images for navigation or titles, the text isn't selectable, it isn't search friendly, and it's probably a nuisance for people who use screen readers to navigate your site.

sIFR: The Better Way
sIFR is a little Flash/CSS/Javascript hack created by Shaun Inman and maintained by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben. It uses Flash's font-embedding and rendering capabilities to place whatever typography you like in your site. What makes it different from the GIF method is that you develop your site with plain-ol' HTML, apply normal CSS classes, and if your browser supports Javascript and Flash, sIFR replaces the text on page-load with the desired typeface.

sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. Here is the entire process:

1. A normal (X)HTML page is loaded into the browser.
2. A javascript function is run which first checks that Flash is installed and then looks for whatever tags, ids, or classes you designate.
3. If Flash isn't installed (or obviously if javascript is turned off), the (X)HTML page displays as normal and nothing further occurs. If Flash is installed, javascript traverses through the source of your page measuring each element you've designated as something you'd like "sIFRed".
4. Once measured, the script creates Flash movies of the same dimensions and overlays them on top of the original elements, pumping the original browser text in as a Flash variable.
5. Actionscript inside of each Flash file then draws that text in your chosen typeface at a 6 point size and scales it up until it fits snugly inside the Flash movie.

Essentially, you can have the titles on your site render in any font you like by just adding a few lines of Javascript to the page template. Search engines and screen readers will still see normal HTML text, you can still use traditional fonts in your CSS classes so that it degrades gracefully on unsupported browsers, and the other 95% of browsers out there will render your site exactly as you designed it, regardless of platform. Oh, and you can select your fancy text too.

Seriously? Flash can used to improve web design _and_ promote web standards, accessibility, and indexability... This has been available for a couple of years, but I'm still left scratching my head.

Links:
Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses - Link
Download sIFR - Link
sIFR Wiki Documentation - Link
sIFR Example Page - Link

FreePOPs is an open source, plugin-based POP proxy that you can run on your local machine. It was originally designed to allow you to use a normal POP email client to read your mail on a multitude of webmail systems. You point your mail client at the FreePOPs server, and it connects and screen-scrapes your webmail account so that you can read your email in the comfort of your favorite mail reader.

The great thing about FreePOPs is its filter plugin architecture. There are a number of different plugins to support the specific requirements of most of the popular web-based email systems. There's even an RSS plugin that will pull an RSS feed and make it look like a normal POP mailbox. Thankfully, you don't need to configure anything on the server. Instead, you connect to the FreePOPs server using a particular username and password format to activate the appropriate plugin.

Here's how to set up an RSS-to-POP mailbox using FreePOPs and the standard OS X Mail.app email client.

When you're on an untrusted or unencrypted network, everything from what you browse to the email and IM messages you send can potentially be snooped by a third party. Sure, some sites use https and you can use ssh to connect to a remote server, but what if you want to jack in and enjoy the relative comfort of knowing _all_ of your applications are communicating over a secure channel?

For that, you need a secure proxy. By setting up a SOCKS proxy, you can have your applications route all of their network communications through a secure connection to a network you trust. Gina at Lifehacker put together a quick guide for setting this up, and once configured in OS X's System Preferences, most of the default apps like Safari will just start using your proxy and you're good to go.

A lot of your favorite applications--ie. Firefox and Adium--need to be manually configured to use the proxy, however, as they don't pull this information automatically from the system preferences. This is straightforward to do, but it means that every time you cruise over to the local coffee shop, you need to set up your proxy configuration in multiple places.

Albert Lee came up with a nice solution to this problem. An application profile manager called rooSwitch and some quick Actionscript is all you need to make a couple of command line scripts that will set up or tear down your proxy, as well as switching all of your application preferences.

If you save this script with a .command extension, then you can run it by double-clicking on the icon in the Finder like a regular application. When it runs, it will change the location, switch your profile, and start up the SSH tunnel. Enter your password and off you go!

I should mention that his script also introduced me to a useful mac command line utiliy called scselect. By typing scselect [locationname], you can switch your Mac's location straight from the command line.

Safer Surfing on Untrusted Networks (Mac Edition) - Link
How to configure an SSH SOCKS proxy @Lifehacker - Link
rooSwitch - Link

I bought some GE bulbs that are supposed to work in ceiling fans, but they flicker and flash big time. I was able to get them to stop, oddly enough, by activating the dimmer and finding a sweet spot for the settings, but that was a hassle. So I did some trial and error tests and as you can see in the embedded video, 3 CF bulbs + 1 incandescent is the magic recipe.

I think the problem is in the fine print that says the bulbs aren't designed for dimmer switches; even though the lights are set on full power by default, I think there's something in there that interferes. So a future project might be to remove the dimmer from the fixture, get a new fixture, or find a CF bulb that supports dimmers and ceiling fans.

I decided to brave the manure, mullets and *-on-a-stick this weekend and swung by the state fair. It seems like every time I go there are a couple people walking around all day with enormous stuffed animals, presumably won through some feat of basketball tossing or ring flinging. Enormous. Impossible to win enormous. Paid carnival employees walking around with giant stuffed bears tricking innocent folks into thinking it's actually possible to win enormous. Like, such as, the Iraq.

Anyone who's attempted the balloon dart throw or the coin toss knows how rigged these games are.

What if you knew a few tricks that could increase your odds? For those of you who'd think about climbing back on that Jacob's Ladder and giving it another try, here's a guide to beating a few of the more popular carnival games.

How To Beat Carnival Games - Link

Meet Sue. She's straight out of school with 0 investments and a $36,000/year job. She's hardcore in her simple living, and has a roommate so she can save for an early retirement. She manages to live on a tiny $16,320/year take-home budget.

It's hard work, but she'll be a millionaire at 44, even without a major promotion. There's a good chance she could retire at 40, or keep working to drastically increase her retirement quality of life. If she keeps it up for about 30 years, at 50, she'll be making 140k just on investment income and she'll have a couple million in the bank (and growing toward major f.u. money).

Introducing FU Money Calculator 2.0
My trial run of an open-access wikisheet was a huge success. Thanks to the hundreds of you who have collaborated and experimented with the document in the last couple of days, I've put together an update that accounts for your pre-tax 401k contributions as well as a home loan. Special thanks to James G. McIlhargey, who contributed the loan debt model!

In the interest of proving a point, I've put together 3 example scenarios of very normal people becoming wealthy by being excessive in their frugality.

John Q. Hacker

John doesn't care about being rich. He just wants to retire ASAP so he can focus on his software and robot projects. He's a 27 year-old hacker and has been working hard for several years. He makes reasonable money, could make more, but enjoys a fun open source job working for a small company. He reads Hackszine daily, and decides to try taking an aggressive retirement path of 13 years, so that he can spend the rest of his life writing his own software, making robots, and tending to the garden in the house he just bought.

It's not easy and he has to make some sacrifices, but John is able to retire at 40. Any side jobs he decides to take on are just gravy. He's his own man.

Dick and Jane

Finally, meet Dick and Jane. They're college grads and have been out of school for a while. They have some savings, and a combined income of 80k. They have just taken out a loan on a modest home for 170k. After a few years, they have a baby and their income drops 25% due to childcare and one parent working part-time.

Before their kid is in college, they could start thinking about retiring.

Run Your Own Simulation
FU Money Calculator 2.0 is available both as a template that you can copy to your own private spreadsheet, or as a fully collaborative wikisheet for those of you who would like to contribute fixes, improvements or other simulations back to the Hackszine community. Thanks to Hackszine reader jrochelle, who tipped us off on how to make a Google Spreadsheet template.

FU Money 2.0 Template: run your own numbers in your own private copy - Link
FU Money 2.0 Wikisheet: help improve and update FU Money - Link

If you're a Cryptonomicon fan, you might recall uber-hacker Randy Waterouse's business partner, Avi, who had a spreadsheet which tracked a particularly interesting value.

The subject heading of Avi's first message is: ``Guideline 1.''

We look for places where the math is right. Meaning what? Meaning that pop. is about to explode---we can predict that just by looking at age histogram---and per capita income is about to take off the way it did in Nippon, Taiwan, Singapore. Multiply those two things together and you get the kind of exponential growth that should get us all into fuck-you money before we turn forty.

This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for ``fuck-you money.'' It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators. Sometimes when Avi is working at his computer he will leave the spreadsheet running in a tiny window in the corner so that he can see the current value of ``fuck-you money'' at a glance.
- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

There was a post recently at Lifehacker about the "crossover point," another magic number—albeit with a less colorful name—representing the point where your investment income exceeds your living expenses.

For all intents and purposes, the crossover point _is_ the attainment of FU money, as you could essentially quit your job on a whim, check out, and live off of your investments for the rest of your life. What's funny about the crossover point, is that you actually are in control of the major factor determining how long it will take you to acheive it.

In a simple model, you can think of your crossover horizon as being effected by 3 parameters: your income, the percentage of your income you invest, and the rate of return you get on your investments. Only one of these factors is really up to you to control to a large degree. Your percentage of investment is directly tied to your lifestyle, your ability to live frugally, and your willingness to skimp in the short term for a larger long term benefit.

The Hackszine FU Money Spreadsheet
To illustrate the point, I've created our own Hackszine version of Avi's FU spreadsheet with Google Docs.

It would probably mean skipping yearly computer updates, eating out a lot, and the purchase of all the latest doodads and gizmos, but if you can be happy only spending half of what you earn and investing the rest, a hacker earning 50k a year can actually pass the crossover point in about 10 years.

Given 18 years of living like a spartan college student, your investment income will actually have passed your salary, at which point you can start raising your standard of living a bit while watching your investments continue to grow exponentially.

What I find really amusing and counter-intuitive about all of this, is that an increase in salary doesn't necessarily put you any closer to the crossover point. Assuming you invest at the same percentage of your salary, you'll have increased your standard of living, but you'll also have increased the sum you'll need to accumulate before hitting the crossover point. Think about it: if you can be happy living simply, assuming you earn enough to live on 50%, you could actually retire in 10-20 years, no matter what age you are.

Run Your Own Numbers
Keep in mind, I haven't included the nitty gritty details like inflation and taxes, but you get the idea. I've given you all edit access to the spreadsheet (should this be called a wikisheet?), so you can run your own numbers, fix any glaring bugs, or even add your own FU money model to another sheet. Feel free to experiment with different scenarios and discuss this stuff in the comments.

References:
FU Money Calculator 1.0 - Link
Make your investment returns exceed your spending - Link
The "Crossover Point" - Link
Cryptonomicon - Link

A couple people wrote in today in response to my post about WiiRemote, the Windows Wiimote input device driver. More specifically, I've been reminded that I completely left the similarly capable DarwiinRemote for OS X out of the discussion. In all fairness, there was a driver roundup back in March that mentioned it, but what the heck - it's a cool app and deserves a little more attention.

So this hack goes out to all the Mac diehards who have an older machine sans Apple Remote. You folks don't need to upgrade your trusty system just to control Keynote or iTunes from a distance. Just pick up the cheap (relatively speaking) Wiimote and download DarwiinRemote.

When you start the program up, you'll need to hold down the 1 and 2 buttons on the Wiimote. This will let the device pair with the DarwiinRemote application, and you should start seeing the three lines on the graph go up and down as you move the device.

At this point, you're set. You can use the arrow keys on the Wiimote just like the arrow keys on your keyboard. The home button is wired up by default to hit apple-esc, which will launch Front Row. The A button is a left click by default, etc. etc.

You can change all these settings in the preferences menu. Most of them are set up fairly logically, I thought, but one nice feature is to set the 2 button to trigger the F9 key. This will help you quickly navigate between applications with your new airmouse.

This brings me to the cool part. Hit the 1 button and you can now control your mouse by tilting the Wiimote forward, back, and side to side. Your buddies with the fancy new macs and Apple Remotes can't do that, now, can they?

You can adjust the sensitivity in the preferences as well. It's a little goofy until you get the hang of it, but it gets easier with a little practice. Just call it payment for looking like a Wiimote wielding rockstar in your next otherwise booring business presentation.

References:
DarwiinRemote: Wiimote as a Mac input device - Link
WiinRemote: Wiimote as a Windows input device - Link
Control Your Applications With a Wiimote - Link

Developed by those nice folks at the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is a visual programming language for kids.

The development environment reminds me a little of the Lego Mindstorms programming interface, where you can drag blocks around and attach them to create procedures. Instead of hacking robots, though, kids can use Scratch to create games, animations, art, and whatever else they have an inclination to build.

As young people create projects in Scratch, they learn many of the 21st century skills that will be critical to success in the future: thinking creatively, communicating clearly, analyzing systematically, using technologies fluently, collaborating effectively, designing iteratively, learning continuously.

After you've created something, your masterpiece can be posted to the Scratch website for other kids to play and comment on. More importantly, kids can download and learn from the source code, which they can then apply to their own projects.

Check it out - it's a social network for 8 year old open source hackers.

Scratch - Link
Deweybears' Scratch Donkey Kong - Link

JanusVM is an open source VMware image that combines Ubuntu, Tor, dns-proxy-tor, Squid, Privoxy, and openvpn all into a convenient little package. Just load up the appliance in VMware and make a VPN connection to the virtual machine's IP. Once you've connected, all of your traffic (including DNS) will be localy encrypted and anonymized over Tor. This is incredibly useful for you road warriors and coffee shop surfers who don't trust the security of a public wifi network.

For windows machines, setup is incredibly easy. The JanusVM server has a network share with a .bat file on it that will automatically configure your VPN for you. Linux users have to set up the VPN connection manually but it's a fairly simple process. I've been trying to get this to work under the new VMware OS X client, but for some reason the network completely conks out as soon as I activate the VPN. If you get this working, let me know. I'll keep monkeying with it myself and let you know what I come up with.

JanusVM network security appliance for VMware - [via] Link

In one method you simply touch the remote to your noggin - Link.

In the other video, a more sophisticated open mouth, below the chin technique is used - Link.

I'm guessing that your head is acting as a crude directional antenna, but if you know more about how this works, let us know in the comments.

Sam Noyoun posted an Instructable with 10 ways to improve your night vision. Robert Bruce Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson covered some of these techniques in Astronomy Hacks (including the pirate eye patch trick), but there are a few I hadn't heard of:

1. Protect your night vision

It takes approximately 30 minutes for the human eye to adapt to darkness. Protect your night vision: do not look directly at bright objects (for instance car headlights when driving).
...

Robert Bruce Thompson, who has had a lot of experience looking at dim objects in dark places, says that only a red filter will work: green and blue won't do the trick. Robert also says that the elite forces and soviet special forces techniques don't work.

Related:

• Astronomy Hacks - Link
  
• Snopes on carrots and night vision - Link
  

Fans of Jesse Vig's GeoGreeting (profiled here for Valentine's Day) might want to check back in to send a Mother's Day greeting on Sunday. Jesse wrote in to let us know that

somebody found a building with a really cool flower design, so I added a temporary flower emoticon in honor of Mother's Day.

Here's that building in its geographical context, San Antonio, Texas: