Author: Jere

Konfabulator

I was talking to Mom last night and she was mentioning her new eMac at the school. She said Matt was playing around on it and had really liked the Dashboard feature of Mac OS 10.4 (aka Tiger). Well, Dashboard was most likely born from a previous widget concept made popular by a program known as Konfabulator. I believe that Konfabulator used to be about $25. But it was recently bought by Yahoo and as a result is now free. It runs in Mac OS 10.2 or greater, Windows 2000, & Windows XP.

Konfabulator

Konfabulator ships with several useful widgets like Analog Clock, Calendar, and Weather. But here is a list of some other interesting/useful/fun widgets.

iPlayer
iTunes widget for Konfabulator based on iPod shuffle design.

Sing that iTune!
A lyric fetcher Widget for iTunes which can also handle radio streaming titles. The lyrics are saved in “Documents/Sing that iTune!” folder and you can also add your self-made lyrics in there. Sync the folder with iPod’s Notes folder to bring it.

NCAA Football liveSchedule
An updating desktop football schedule for NCAA division 1A schools. Schedule will update as game-times and scores become available.

mini iTunes Remote
The eighth Widget in the mini Widget series. mini iTunes Remote is a complete redesign and coding effort of the iTunes Remote that ships with Konfabulator. This version features a compact design, the ability to change your ratings, and and set your iChat status to your current playing track.

HAL9000
A novel Widget where HAL9000 periodically speaks.

Stack ‘Em!
A classic time waster is now available for Konfabulator! Can you keep pace with the falling blocks? Good luck! (Basically it’s Tetris as a widget)

Finally, get more useless and useful widgets from the Konfabulator Widget Gallery.

Chewing On Mindfulness

Parents of the world will cringe as they read the following article. It looks like there just might be something to chewing gum. I personally can’t last much more than 15-20 minutes with the stuff.

Gum Is Your Secret

However, despite the positive affects, it’s still pretty tough to get out of hair.

World at Night

So it’s been a few days since the last update, but what do you expect. HS football started on Monday, and it’s kept myself and Becky pretty busy.

Anyway, here is a cool animation of the world as it is seen at night, and it’s even in 3D!

Globe at night

It’s still surprising how little lights there are in Africa.

Mountain West Icons

I am on some kind of roll today. Maybe it’s because I’ve been limited this week in the time I could just surf the internet and read about interesting things. But, I found some nice BYU icons as part of a whole Moutain West collection. You can grab the set from ResExcellence, or download the set directly via this link.

Alternately, you can download icons from just about every major conference by browsing the Pop Culture section on the page listed above.

Some interesting science/tech news

I ran across three very interesting (to me at least) articles on the science and technology front while surfing BBC World news. Here are the links to the BBC articles:

Astronomers detect ’10th planet’
This is really more of a confirmation of a suspected discovery from 2003. I believe it may have also been referred to as Planet X in the media back then.

Ice lake found on the Red Planet
The first water not associated with Mars’ polar caps. From the description it seems to be relatively large. I’m a little surprised this hasn’t been discovered before. But what do I know, I’m no astronomer. The picture is very detailed though.

Japanese develop ‘female’ android
So this android can only sit and do a few gestures right now. I couldn’t help but think about Data from Star Trek The Next Generation when reading this article. It’s pretty remarkable I think.