Author: Otto

40 years of X-Men

x-menCheck this out.

Yeah, thatÂ’s all forty years of X-Men, on DVD, in a printable format, for only $40. (Update: $33 now!)
485 comics. 17,500 pages.

How freakinÂ’ awesome is that?

There’s also a version that comes with the Ultimate X-Men on DVD as well. It’s $50 for the bundle of both of them. Here’s a link to the bundle.

Seems like a hell of a good deal, for an X-Men fan (like everybody should be!).

Whole body pain

Is this some sort of consequence of being 30 again? This post-drinking weekend whole body pain thing? Because if it is, then I’m going to have to start researching high quality medications again. My ankle is hurt, the muscles in my back are strained, I can’t turn my neck… all because of the music festival.

To make it even more fun, my A/C and icemaker both chose this weekend to stop working for no appearant reason. So it was like 85 in my apartment all weekend. That tended to drive us outside and drink, though, so in that respect it wasn’t so bad. I’ve fixed the icemaker now, they’re fixing the A/C today.

Anyway, it was a good show. I enjoyed Cake and Blues Traveller a lot. Yellowcard was surprisingly good when they did a Weezer cover. I sat around the Blues Tent for a few hours on Sunday and enjoyed some beer and blues from several artists as well. Also ate a lot of BBQ. So it was good weekend in that respect. Beale Street was fun and had a lot of interesting characters. One dude we saw walking around dressed up as Gene Simmons ended up on the front page of the Sunday paper. )

So it was fun. But I still need to find drugs.

Wolfgang Puck is pissed!

Heh. I blogged about those Wolfgang Puck self-heating coffee things about a year ago. Well, now it seems that they’re being recalled due to reports of some of them exploding and such. I’ve gotten them a few times since then, and never had any problems with them, but still, I can see how one in a thousand might have an issue. The things get very, very hot, and if you don’t open the can when it does get hot enough, it’s possible that it could overheat. Or possibly poor manufacturing and quality control is the cause. Whatever, the point is that they’re appearantly dangerous. )

Brewing: Father’s Day Cream Ale

I bottled my latest brew the other day, a Cream Ale. Basically it’s a Canadian Draft mix with some Northern Brewer Hops. I also have a Vienna Lager maturing and which I plan to drink next weekend.

The only reason I’m posting about it is that after I was done bottling, I tried some of the yeasty flat leftovers at the bottom of the keg. By god, that stuff was delicious. It’s going to be a quality beer. I just hope I didn’t screw up the carbonation like I think I did. I keep waiting to hear a loud popping sound from one of the bottles exploding. Fortunately, I use a cooler for the storage, so it won’t hurt anything if it does blow.

My next brew is going to be a Dopplebock. I’ve already got the ingredients, I just need to make bottle room. It looks to be a hell of a beverage, with three different kinds of malt extracts, a whole ounce of hops (instead of 1/4 ounce as per usual), and my first attempt at using liquid yeast. It also takes 6 months to bottle condition, so I’ll have it around October or November. But it’ll be about 9.2% ABV, so at least it’ll have a good kick to it. )

Some inventions are just pure genius…

Check this one out: The Lazydrinker

It’s a modified portable cooler that is designed to hold, cool, and mix up to 16 bottles of beverages. Basically it pressurizes the bottles and uses that to pump the liqour out, which then goes into your drink. It therefore produces whatever drink you want on command. The mixer device is reprogrammable via a PC to put in your favorite mixed drinks, and the thing uses a CO2 tank to pump out the sweet, sweet candy.

Some pictures:

Lazydrinker interior Lazydrinker mixing output

At $750, it’s a bit too expensive for my tastes. However, they offer a $550 DIY kit, which seems like it would be an excellent addition to a home bar. )

30boxes Widget

Narendra Rocherolle asked me to convert the Google Calendar widget into a 30boxes capable widget. No problem, it only took like 10 minutes.

So if you use 30boxes and want a nice and simple WordPress Widget for displaying events on your calendar, well, here you go: 30boxes Widget

This is, of course, a first stab at it only. I can and probably will add more functionality to it (like start and end dates). But that can wait until later. Right now I need BBQ! D

Coastr Widget

Ran across Coastr yesterday while I was reading some blogs about beer. It’s kinda nifty. Very simple app. It lets you put what beers you like to drink and where you like to drink them and tells you other people who have similar tastes. The idea being that maybe you can find some new beers by looking at what other people who are similar to you like.

I made a post on the guys blog about adding RSS feeds for the individual users, and to my surprise, he had it up and going the next morning. Very cool.

So naturally, I made a widget for it. You can see it in my ever-growing sidebars somewhere (bottom right, at the moment).

And so here it is: The Coastr Widget.

Update: Version 1.1 adds some code to handle the beer names and such properly, so it won’t cause validation errors on your blog anymore.

Google Calendar Widget

Note: This widget does NOT work with WordPress 2.1 and up. Don’t bother trying.

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I created a new widget for my blog. It’s a simple little thing that shows stuff from my Google Calendar. You can find it as my “Upcoming Events” sidebar, bottom left. Okay, so it doesn’t have much there yet, I need to add stuff to the calendar. )

Anyway, here’s a link to it: gcalendar

If anybody has any suggestions on improving it, I’d love to hear ‘em.

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Note: I’ve updated the widget to use Google’s Calendar API properly. But in order to do that, I had to modify WordPress’s built in MagpieRSS functions rather heavily. So read the readme.txt file for installation instructions before attempting to use it. Failure to install correctly will break your blog. Heck, it might do that anyway. So read carefully. )

iTunes Explicit Lyrics tagging

Over in the comments of my EvilLyrics post, somebody asked for this script. It seems like people might find it handy, so here you go: explicit.txt

It will search the lyrics of all the songs in iTunes for “bad words” and flag those tracks as Explicit by adding the word “Explicit” to the end of the comments in the track.

Now, I have no use for this personally, but I can see where some people might. One thing you will have to do in order to use it is to edit it and define what you consider to be a “bad word”. Just after halfway through the script, there’s a section that looks like this:

badword1|badword2|badword3

Change that to define everything you consider to be a bad word. To use George Carlin’s famous example: shit|piss|fuck|cunt|cocksucker|motherfucker|tits

Just add as many words as you like, then run it like all the rest of these iTunes Javascripts. It’s reasonably smart and won’t tag a track as Explicit if the word Explicit is already in the comments.

You could use this for Smart Playlists, to make “clean” playlists, or to make “not so clean” playlists. Whatever you like. You could do that without this script too, but this makes it a bit easier.

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