Recently in Friday Fun Category

I love you egg. If you're at work, turn your speakers down (unless you want your co-workers to think you're insane). And if you want the Korean version, try I love you egg, in Korean (click the first balloon under the blue cloud in the upper right corner to start the animation).

The animation for the two versions is similar but different.

Are you still with me? Good.

Because that's not a production of the Korean Egg Council--it's iloveegg! There's licensed characters and a comic book; both based (apparently) on a clay-animation cartoon produced in Korea.

So, the whole thing is designed to appeal to young minds (or immature minds, like mine) and get them to pester their parents to spend money. Presumably, there are licensed character toys, just like Pokemon and all the rest of those "collectible" series. I'm surprised it never made it to the US (or if it, I'm even more surprised I missed it).

Has anyone else seen these things?

Here's a link to a real article in a real newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Man gets Windows Vista to work with printer

It's a follow-up to a story, Vista at one year: Progress and pain, that ran back in January and started off telling the story of Charles Walling, a man who just wanted his printer to work with Vista--after all, it worked with Windows XP.

Six months later, and Mr. Walling is a happier man, after:

Tom White, test manager for documents and printing in Microsoft's Windows Experience group, visited the Walling household on multiple occasions, figured out what was wrong, and ultimately got the printer to work.

Turns out, if you're configuring the printer for Vista but using the original printer driver CD provided by the vendor for Windows XP, you could have problems because Vista has problems keeping it all straight. Somehow. Sort of.

Read the whole article for excuses and spin from Microsoftniks.

I love lists, and I kind of enjoy making my own lists. This one is a sort of paradox: how do you make a list of things with not so much in common (aside from the fact that I think they're all interesting or amusing or just plain worth looking at)? Once you do, they share the attribute of being members of the list. Oh well, enjoy--it's Friday!

• 5 Tools Everyone Working Online Should Have (IMHO)


• The only 7 investments you need


• 10 Essential Sites for Tips and How-To’s


• 15 Reasons Mister Rogers Was the Best Neighbor Ever


• 25 Reasons to Convert to Linux. Actually, there are 26 reasons to convert--and 2 reasons to switch to Windows FROM Linux!


• The 30 skills every IT person should have


• 50 Cool Things You Can Do with Google Charts API


• Believe it or not, 80 How-To Sites Worth Bookmarking has a pretty good signal-to-noise ratio. Or it may just be the fact that most of these sites are places I already have bookmarked myself. Good job!

I'm not sure if this article at Gizmodo is entirely sincere, but it's certainly worth reading if you've got any opinions at all about Vista: Ten Reasons Why Vista Isn't That Bad.

Some of the reasons sound pretty pathetic:

"3. Games work just about as well as under XP." (only a 10% degradation in performance!)
"8. Drivers support isn't as bad as it's made out to be."
"9. It's not any buggier than Windows XP. "

But read the article for the rest of the reasons, the succinct and pungent comments, as well as the link (the first one in the article) to the Youtube video of "lightning bolt, lightning bolt" nerds. Swallow your coffee before you open that one, unless your monitor needs cleaning anyway.

Did you see Minority Report? Tom Cruise uses that incredibly cool GUI that works just by pointing and manipulating objects on screen with his hands.

Well, Microsoft rolled out Surface, their version of that Tomorrowland technology, last year. According to this article at MIT's Technology Review, Tabletop Multitouch Display, the pricetag for a Microsoft Touch runs "$5000 to $10,000, depending on volume and service contract". The biggest public implementer of Touch is AT&T, for selling cell phones.

But of course, it's sci-fi tech, so it's got to be expensive, right?

Maybe not. Technology Review reported this month on a much less expensive Open-Source, Multitouch Display. According to that article, you could put together your own multitouch display for as little as one tenth the price of Microsoft Touch.

Just in case you're interested, here are some links to check out:

• "CUBIT is an interactive surface for multitouch interactions." They're currently taking pre-orders for TouchKit, which includes hardware, software and instructions for developing and building your own setup; the CUBIT isn't currently for sale, but they're talking to people about putting products together. But if you just want the code, it'll be open source and available soon.


• Here's a nice little write-up, with plenty more links, about Multi-touch Table at the Maker Faire, a home-brewed project, complete with applications, like a virtual (piano) keyboard.


• For the hard-core DIY-er, check out this Instructable, Interactive Multitouch Display. Instructions as well as discussion of the design.