This blog entry is being written from 11,877 feet above sea-level and transmitted over the air via the magic of GPRS. (my phone has awesome signal from up here - probably because just about every cell phone tower in Utah Valley is within line-of-sight from here)

The hike up here is strenuous. The last few miles are definitely the hardest part of the hike. My butt hurts worse than a drunken sailor in san Francisco (they have uncomfortable bar stools over there)

There is another peak to the north of here that is slightly higher - up until 1970 this south peak was listed as the highest peak, but by then the trails already went up to here. If we really wanted to prolong this trip by a few hours, we could head over there, but I will save that trip for when I am actually in shape.

I’ll post some pictures later.

Google today launched Google Notebook. Notebook lets you easily gather clips of things you see on the web and store them into little Google-hosted booklets. By default, your booklets (called “Notebooks”) are kept private for you to use for whatever you want.

Here’s how it changes your life. First - you don’t have to bookmark as many pages anymore. If you are using FireFox or Internet Extorter - all you need to do is right-click on the content you want to save to some kind of notebook - and then tell your computer to “Note This (Google Notebooks)”. It will copy the cliping (pictures and all) and dump them into a convenient notebook for you.

If, at some point, you decide that your collection of web-clippings on the origins of the Sanskrit language is good enough other people might like it - you can make it public. The second way Google Notebook will change your life is it will change the way you search for specific content. Instead of piling on search terms hoping to get some kind of magic result - the Google Notebook may provide you with a way to find a notebook of someone who already scoured the web searching for that same content.

Currently, public notebooks are not searchable… so I can’t provide any examples of this. In a few days, you will be able to search through them and see what kind of Notebook pages people have been making.

Anyone who has ever spent hours searhing the web on a specific topic can understand how useful this is. Just create a new notebook for it - and when you find stuff that is of interest - throw it in there. No need to keep thousands of windows opened any more… and no need to go crazy trying to find some way to organize your links. Note it and forget it - until you want to remember it.

Features I would like to see

• Collaborative Notebooking - It would be nice if you could create your notebook and give access to cetain specific people - so that you could all add interesting web clippings to a notebook related to a project you are working on… It would work like a dumbed-down wiki. Allowing open edits may be problematic due to spammers… but allowing specific other users to edit would be a very nice feature
• Blog Integration - It would be marvelous if you could scour the web - collect text clippings, and then have Google Notebooks easily post the content to your blog for you. The FireFox spin-off Flock currently has some kind of clipping service that does this - but it would be nice to have it ingetraged with Google Pages. (Perhaps Flock could just write the plugins to do the heavy lifting for that feature anyway)
• Multiple Levels of Subcategories Currently you can create your notebook and you can have subcategories - but that’s the limit to the depth of the notebook. More depth = easier organization.
• Better URL Names for Notebook Pages - When you make a notebook page public, the URL for it is gigantic - and impossible to remember. Easy-to-remember URLs would make public notebooks much more useful.
• Safari Plugin - an while you’re at it… an Opera plugin as well… FireFox and Safari are both rather slow browsers (once you load hundreds of windows like I commonly do). Between the two, most Mac users preer Safari - and if a browser is wanting raw speed they will likely use Opera. Supporting Safari and Opera
• Archive Option - If you use Google Notebooks to keep track of some temporary search… like looking for the best place to buy a certain digital camera or something - that notebook becomes mostly useless after you find the place. Still - in the future, you might want to access that notebook as a jumping point for another search. In the meantime- you don’t want to see it in your list of notebooks because it’s not important to you at the moment. Archiving them would be a good solution to the notebook-clutter problem that may arise.

If you want to see an example of what you can do with Google Notebook - you can look at this Google Notebook on Google Notebook that I threw together this morning. I snipped content from some news releases and form some review pages. It was very easy to put together… I can promise you that it reads better inside the Google Notebook viewer on their website - for some reason their public Notebooks look like trash.

Sign up for Google Notebook and have fun building Google’s search index collecting your information easily.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love Free Cone Day, and I love telling people about Free Cone Day… So last night before I went to bed, I posted a link to the press release describing Free Cone Day to digg.com - and I posted a link in the comments telling people where to go in order to find out if their local scoop was participating…

At around 9:00 AM the story made it to the front page of Digg, and millions of people started heading to www.benjerry.com. Ben & Jerry’s may have been ready to serve ice cream to over a million people today, but their web servers weren’t ready to handle the traffic… and they were dead for almost an hour.

Sorry Jerry. I would apologize to Ben, but everybody knows that he doesn’t really do much with the company anymore…

In any case - be sure to enjoy Free Cone Day while it lasts. Their website is back up and running now. We can all be happy now.

It’s Easter time, so the Cadbury Bunny is hard at work cranking out her little eggs.

Every year, before I chomp down on one of her sugar-filled gametes I wonder, “Why don’t they just sell these things all year?” This question quickly goes away as soon as the viscous yolk molests my tounge. I immediately feel the disturbance in the force… It’s like a thousand sugar canes crying out at once, and then… silence…

These are a seasonal product for two reasons. First, they aren’t really that good. Second, if they were eaten on a regular basis - they would kill a small child.
(more…)

Israel has developed what they are calling a “force field” - that will repell rocket-propelled grenades. Well, it’s not really a “force-field” as it is just a system of two RADARs tracking incoming projectiles - and sending out a “countermeasure” to hit the RPG and make it blow up before it hits the vehicle - but in practice it seems like there is an invisible bubble around the vehicle protecting it from the explosive rounds.

It would seem to me that this system could be defeated with a few RADAR jammers - (not those lame passive ones that Radar Roy says clearly don’t work - but something of the active variety).

The video includes animations of tanks and RPGs, and even shows the “force field” in action.

Watch the FoxNews video here

Free Cone Day is one of the happiest days on earth. There are plenty of new flavors to keep you busy all day. So - request time off of work now before everyone else does.

Experience has shown, that if you want to get a ton of free cones - get there right around noon. In the evening, it gets very busy.

DOSBox is a multi-platform, open-source, completely-free program that lets you run DOS programs on just about any platform. (Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Linux, OS/2, BeOS… etc the only OS it doesn’t seem to support is DOS itself - for obvious reasons).

It has full sound and mouse support (yes, some DOS games used mice) - and you can use it to run your favorite old DOS games. This includes the better-than-any-of-the-countless-copies game Scorched Earth (the classic aim-your-tank and fire-your-weapon at someone else… with lots of weapons and variations…)

Those who grew up in the Gardner household in the days of the Sperry will remember Castle!. You can now get your fix of being a spade symbol walking around an ASCII Castle and pursuing such things as the “@” snake. The game is just as tough as it was then, so don’t get your hopes up.

How to get DOSBox running on your Mac

1. Go download DOSBox
2. Drag the DosBox application from the disk image that will open into your Application folder.
3. In the Finder, Go to your “User Directory”
   • the easiest way for me to tell you how to do this is to say - “Under the ‘Go’ Menu, select ‘Go To Folder’ - and in the Dialog box, type ‘~’ and hit enter” - or to click on the icon with a house next to your login name in the side of your window (if that icon is there.)
4. Create a folder inside your User Directory called “DosGames”
5. Go download a good quality DOS Game (links at end of article.)
   • I suggest you start with Scorched Earth - or perhaps Warcraft I (if you are asked for an install password for Warcraft I - you can get it from this Blizzard support post
6. Move the game you downloaded into your DosGames folder.
   • (You probably downloaded a .zip file, and it expanded itself into a folder. Just click the magnifying glass in Safari and it will find the folder for you and show it to you in the Finder.) Note, if you download Castles - it will expand to “Castles.1984″ - rename the folder to “Castles” to be DOS friendly… Remember - only short file names
7. Start DOSBox. Double click on the application.
8. Mount your Games folder. It’s really easy.
   • In DOSBox - just type “mount c ~/DosGames/” and it will mount the games folder you made as your C drive.
9. Go to your “C” drive and find your game.
   • Type “C:” hit enter, then type “DIR” hit enter - and see what the name of your game folder is. Type “CD ” where is the name of the folder want to go play… Then type “DIR *.exe” and it will show you the things that you can actually run. Type the name of the .exe file (without the .exe) and voila!

Where to find Games

There are plenty of sites online that host Abandonware games. If one site only has a demo of the game you are looking for, dig around and another one may have the full version. These games are so old, nobody cares that they are being given away for free… They are called “AbandonWare” for a reason.

http://www.abandonia.com/
http://www.classicpcgames.com/
http://www.dosgames.com/
http://www.oldgames.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware#Games

Some Russian guy has posted a lot of amazing pictures of what you can do with a little excess Cat-5 cable, and a lot of time. These are some amazing little action figures he has made. Throughout the first series, he kind of shows how you go about making the basic guy (there is one main guy in the image, along with the in-process guy…)

These things are very tiny. Scroll down and see the one standing on a dice, and next to a matchstick to get an idea of how small they are.

First person who makes one of these bad boys will get their image (with the little guy) in the banner rotation for my masthead!

Check them out here… If anyone can translate the text to English please feel free to enlighten us on what it is saying on this page…

Update: the original page seems to have gone down. A Flickr photoset has the images still hosted… it can be found here. There is a post on digg.com about the Cat-5 action figures.

Find lost instruction manuals

The Brickfactory is an online repository of TONS of Lego instruction booklet scans. There you can find instructions on Lego projects such as the 1985 Airport (Search for box number 6392… they don’t make it easy to link to specific instruction books)… or the 1988 Emergency Treatment Center (box #6380). Those who grew up in my family will fondly remember both of those. (Did we really get the airport in 1985? I was only 5 when I built that thing? I guess kids grow up faster than I thought. I was planning on at least six or seven years until I could interact with the up-and-coming lego master)

Relive the joy of the Old School catalogs

At The Construction Toy Homepage there is a guy who has a whole lot of images of Lego construction toys - but near the bottom of the page you will see a link to the cover scans of the Lego catalogs and Lego idea books. Yes - I vividly remember staring at each of the books that came out durring my formative years…

Build a friggin harpsichord

If you are really crazy, you can build a harpsichord out of only legos. (well… and string) The guy who built it has tons of pictures and even example Mp3 file - so you can cast the thought “this might sound really good” out of your head… No, plastic is not the new wood for resonating materials, that’s for sure - but if you are crazy and rich, why not build one?

He also has some technical information about harpsichords on his page, and he describes why there will never be a Lego Piano.

Enjoy those retro Lego links. Good thing I don’t have a Tub of legos lying around - or my day would be shot right now.