Here is a cool RSS Feed icon. Download and enjoy. There is a flattened PNG, Fireworks PNG, PSD, and Ai file in the zip. License in zip file.

Demo image:

Its new segment time! Previously, I’ve been issuing news updates that consist of several stubs of stories that aren’t post-worthy individually. Well, Miscellanea isn’t exactly news, it is more like a collection of unrelated, cool stories that I want to bring to a larger audience. OK then, lets jump right into it.

First of all, Acer’s Vice President, James Wong, had said that they plan to release an open platform gaming console. To quote Gizmodo, “WTF?” Wong allegedly takes issue with the current proprietary, closed consoles that dominate the market. The console should use PC technology. I think the decision to make it entirely open platform closes off some potential money, but since it is good for the consumer, I’m fine with it. My German isn’t good enough to fully comprehend the original source, but if someone is better than Google Translator, feel free to repost it in the comments.

• GameStar (Translated English)
• Gamestar (Original Deutsch)

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Back in October, Hulu was launched as a joint venture between Fox and NBC. The site was to offer free, ad-supported videos of popular TV shows and movies. Back then and until a couple of days ago, it was still in private beta. I managed to get an invite a couple weeks ago, and I have been enjoying the service greatly (thanks again Alec.) Read the rest of this entry »

3D Film and Projection: 

After many years of learning from the Jedi, we have learned to make our own holographic film, although it IS a little more crude than those in the Star Wars movies. Right now, our main source of entertainment is that little metal box we call TV. But that all will change soon as a new polymer will develop to help doctors, military personal, and engineers to analyze disorders, plan battles, and plan future constructions respectively. (If you feel offended that doctors cannot plan battles or engineers cannot analyze disorders, please make a mental block on the word “respectively”. Want to move on now?) Best of all, these holograms could soon replace the TV and computer! Score: Mankind-1 Dolphins-0!

To read more about 3D-Projections, click here. 

Teleportation: 

As there could be a possibility to hack the universe, why couldn’t there be a way to teleport from point A to point B? In fact, it is very easy to teleport with a new, revolutionary idea. First, we must understand that the shortest distance from point A to point B is a straight line that can be called line AB. Then, there could be a number of different ways to get from one point to another by a route of more than one point. Let’s call any such path A…B. Finally, let’s consider the mechanics of going forward or backwards. When we head toward point A from point B, we are going forward in the right way. However, if we begin to walk away from point B, we would be going forward in the wrong way. Finally, we can see that we are still approaching point B even if we are going the WRONG way. As a result, by going the wrong way toward our target, we must be going faster at our target the RIGHT way than a straight line. Thus, by going the WRONG way, we have discovered how to get to point B in a shorter distance than a straight line. What do we get if the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line? Teleportation!

Obviously realizing that there is some trouble afoot, Microsoft on Thursday announced price cuts on its most expensive versions of Vista and said those discounts will range from 20 percent to 48 percent. Ironically, those discounts are designed to coincide with the release of Vista Service Pack 1, which according to Microsoft, will usher in a slew of security fixes and improvements that should make the Vista experience much better. I’m still skeptical that Vista will ever truly get off the ground, and it looks like Microsoft is starting to wake up and smell the rotten eggs. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that the rumors of a formal investigation were true and less than 30 minutes ago, at time of posting, four of the owners of The Pirate Bay were ordered to pay over $180,000 dollars in copyright damages each. The four said that they knew this would happen eventually, so they made sure that The Pirate Bay’s servers were spread throughout the world. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most annoying things I find in a website is a search bar that says “Search Here…” or something of those likes, because when you click in that box you have to manually erase the text, it is not a big thing but it is very easy to solve. All you need to do is copy and paste this code into the <input /> tag.

Code Snippet:
onfocus="this.value=''"

Full Code:
<input type="text" name="test" value="search" onfocus="this.value=''" />

Example:

Now this won’t work if the user has Javascript turned off, but that is their fault not yours. This only works on <input type=”text” />

Look for my article on the basics of CSS soon.

I use Skype and listen to music a lot in Songbird, the opensource media player by Mozilla. I wanted the music I am listening to to be shared with the person I was talking too so my friend suggested scrobbling from Last.fm. Natively, Songbird doesn’t support this feature, but making it work is easy. I thought scrobbling was only for Windows Media Player, iTunes and Winamp. I was wrong. Find out how to do it after the break.

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So, here is the back-story. There is a Firefox extension called Greasemonkey which allows the user to build a library of scripts that change web pages. They automate tasks, and creating a script for Greasemonkey is much easier than writing and publicizing an extension.

Apparently there is now a script called Netflix Download Links which automates the long process of finding, hacking, and downloading a Netflix streaming movie.

DISCLAIMER: Download these movies at your own risk. This is a questionable process as you pay for the service, but are still violating copyright laws. In addition, it is possible to get your account banned for this. Don’t come crying to us if this doesn’t go well.

Now that we’re past that little bit, let’s get in to the details. You DO have to have a subscription to Netflix to do this. The script claims that it works on all platforms, but if you’re using Vista it is reported to have problems. The non-windows user will need to set the variable "IAmRunningWindows" to false, and you’ll still need a Windows machine or a Windows emulator to remove the DRM. For more help with this, you might want to look through the comments on the article that I heard about this from.

I wanted to highlight one of my favorite artists in this post: Jonathan Coulton

I would say that the genre most of his music falls under is geek humor. Here are a couple of his songs.

Code Monkey

Skullcrusher Mountain

Re: Your Brains

He also wrote the credits song, Still Alive, for Portal.