Tellstick Redux

I was whinging a lot about the terrible Tellstick range in my last post on the issue.  Deservedly so.  It’s terrible!  However, the Telldus people have released a new version of the device:

The revolutionary new invention is the antenna!  Who would ever have thought that an antenna would give greater range?  Kids these days.

Anyway, it really does work.  I had four separate antenna-less Tellsticks that gave me 90% coverage of my apartment earlier.  With the new Tellstick, a single one gives me 100% coverage.

That’s progress.

Make RSS feeds from last.fm Shoutbox Pages

I was somewhat interested in seeing what people were saying about the new Boris albums on last.fm, but reloading that page is so 1993.  I wanted to read it through Gwene, but there’s no RSS feeds on last.fm.  So I whipped one up (in Perl!  *sob*) and put the service on Quimby.

Feel free to use it or rewrite the Perl script to be less doubleplusungood.

Square McSweeney’s

The fun people at McSweeney’s have done a lot of amusingly formatted issues of their Quarterly Concern (a shaving kit, an advertising folder, etc), but this one is certainly the bulkiest one:

It’s a 15x15x15cm box, and when you crack open his forehead, you find lots of neat litte pamphlets inside instead of brains:

And how are the pamphlets?  Er… you expect me to read them? Now? Look at the box!  Just look at it!

Gmane On Github

I’ve started putting the various Gmane things on github. If I get around to it, I’ll probably put most of the programs and scripts up there eventually, but first out are weft and weaverd.

Oh, and I also added the source code for the defunct we:search search engine. It’s no longer used, since Gmane switched to Xapian for searching, but it might have historical interest… for somebody who’s interested in… history…

It’s all C! Oh, the humanity.