Thursday, June 30, 2011

The best fidget toys ever : Tangle Jr. and Tangle Therapy

I first came across this toy when I went to a friend's place. She works with autistic kids and it works wonders to calm them down. So I started playing with hers when I was at her place and I just couldn't put it down. I loved it so much that when I came back home, I ordered 5 of them! I think I am going to develop a tangle addiction and obsession... I feel like ordering a ton more.

Notes to myself : Things to remember for future uses.

Sometimes people use sharp expressions to describe things which particularly nail down those things.
However, I never remember them once the time comes to use them. So I am going to write them here.


- Thank you for your unsolicited opinion.
- It's ______'s wishful definition (when someone gets all wannabe deep thinker and redefines something to give it a definition that is utter crap that doesn't even make any sense in an attempt do dissociate themselves from the original and real meaning and totally believe the crap they say, which makes you think "You wish that was what it is")
- What is a group if not a physical manifestation of the qualities and opinions of the humans in it.

This list will be edited to add more things.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Old arcane Grand-Ma treatment for sunburns and other types of burns.

It's a shame that this trick is not more widely known, really. It almost makes getting sunburns pleasant.

When you get a sunburn, take a bowl, pour white vinegar in it. Take a washcloth, damp it in vinegar, wring it but not too much and apply it on your sunburns.

OH
MY
GOD.
INSTANT RELIEF.

No no, screw aloe, screw that little fancy sunburn lotion, those don't really provide relief. They don't help as much in taking out the fire and preventing peeling as vinegar does. Not anywhere near. I know, I'm as white as one could be (almost green) and because of my meds, I get sunburns, a lot. Very bad ones. I can't go in the sun unprotected and I don't tan, I burn.



Bad experience with Coppertone (which is actually a very good brand) spray sunscreen.

Apparently you actually need to rub in the spray sunscreen anyway, which I didn't. I thought the point of spray sunscreen was that you don't actually need to rub it in and get your hands all greasy and ew, well apparently it's not since you still need to rub it in. So you might as well just stick with regular sunscreen lotion ; spray sunscreen is a scam.


Imagine the redness above, everywhere my body was exposed to the sun. That's what I get if I spend a few hours in the sun without sunscreen. Actually, I had even used FPS 30 sunscreen lotion the first time as a base then renewed with spray sunscreen and it burned anyway. The places that aren't burnt are where I rubbed in the spray sunscreen. Anyway, I digress...

I have always used the vinegar trick. Every summer, for my whole life, I had sunburns. Many sunburns per summer. I always put vinegar on them. It never ever ever ever ever went bad, ever. It always always always always only did good. Holy motherfucking good. This trick is a gift from gods.
I say that because if you google about using vinegar on sunburns, there are some clueless people saying it's a bad idea. Clueless people who have no clue and never tried it. It's a shame, because they probably drove a lot of people away from trying this Holy trick which is the best thing since getting out of the sun when you get burned.

I could not praise this trick enough. Get it? Do it. Just do it.

DO IT.


Aloe and other sunburn creams are only good after you have first treated yourself with vinegar, which seems to help stopping the process that actually makes the skin cells die (which should come first before trying to heal them).

The relief is instantaneous and almost orgasmic. Let yourself get a small sunburn and try it... No I kid... but it's almost worth it.

It goes like the saying "God made balls so we can scratch them" ; "God made sunburns so we can put vinegar on them".

It works for all other kinds of burns too. It takes out the heat and soreness right away.

I am not sure why it works. The Internet suggests that it helps to re-equilibrate the pH of your skin, but I'm not sure about that. Your skin having the wrong pH would not make it hurt when you move/press/stretch it.
I think it works for the same reason as gargling with salt water helps with sore throats, because it takes out the excess water in the cells that builds up when an inflammation occurs, which is what actually causes soreness.
How is it called? Astringent? Yeah.


Anyway, the next time you get sunburned, run for your life to a gallon of white vinegar. You will never be so happy of having found a new trick.

List of default Supybot plugins along with their description

(Note : there is a tutorial on how to setup Supybot on Windows here.)

During the setup process, supybot proposes to add a list of plugins. However, I haven't found any kind of online documentation on what these individual plugins do, besides the wayback machine which can't be googled. Otherwise, the only information about them is contained in the setup itself ; You have to type every plugin name to see what they do, then say whether or not you want to add it and then whether or not you want to add another plugin. It's a rather long process, so here is the list of all supybot's default plugins along with their description from the setup file.

* Be careful when installing plugins marked with a * as the wizard has some questions to ask you after you said yes to installing it. So if you go "y enter y enter", it will make you enter "y" at the first information asked.

Alias : Allows aliases for other commands.

Anonymous : Allows talking through the bot anonymously.

AutoMode : Automatically gives op, halfop, voice or bans people when they join a channel, according to their capabilities. If you want your bot to automatically voice users when they join you channel, this is the plugin to load.

BadWords : Filters bad words on outgoing messages from the bot, so the bot can't be made to say bad words.

ChannelLogger : Logs the channel to its own individual logfile.

ChannelStats : Silently listens to every message received on a channel and keeps statistics concerning joins, parts and various other commands in addition to tracking statistics about smileys, actions, characters and words.

Conditional : Allows different responses depending on input conditions. Mostly just useful in aliases/regexp triggers to make decisions about what to do at output time.

CTCP : Handles standard CTCP responses to PING, SOURCE, VERSION, USERINFO, and FINGER.

Dict : Commands that use the dictd protocol to define words.

Dunno : The dunno module is used to spice up the reply when given an invalid command with random "I dunno"-like responses. If you want something spicier than "[x] is not a valid command"-like responses, use this plugin.

Factoids (requires PySQLite available here) : Stores various factoids which can be listed and displayed on the channel. This is very useful to store answers to frequently asked questions or various protips.

Filter : Provides numerous filters and a command [outfilter] to set them as filters on the output of the bot.

Format : Provides simple commands for formatting text on IRC.

Games : Provides various game-related commands : 8ball, flipping a coin, rolling a dice, russian roulette and monologue, which tells you for how many lines you've been talking to yourself.

Google : Brings google services to your bot :
  • Google search
  • Google "I'm feeling lucky"
  • Google cache
  • Google fight
  • Google translate (soon to be dropped by google)
  • Google groups
  • Google calc
  • Google phonebook
No, no Google image or Google video.


Herald : Greets users who join the channel with a recognized hostmask with a nice little greeting.

Internet : Provides Internet-related commands :
  • DNS lookup
  • Whois
  • Returning the hexadecimal form of a decimal IP address

Karma : Plugin for handling Karma stuff on the channel.

Lart : Short for "Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool". This plugin keeps a database of Larts and Larts with it.

Later : Based entirely on nicks, it's an easy way to leave messages to users to be sent in private when they arrive later.

Limiter : This plugin handles channel limits (MODE +l).

Math : Provides various math-related commands :
  • Base to base conversion
  • Calculations
  • Returning the value of an RPN expression
  • Unit conversion

MessageParser : Allows to set regexp triggers for IRC messages. This enables the bot to respond even if the IRC message was not a command directly addressed to the bot. This enhances the usefulness of the bot in a number of ways. You can use this to create custom commands for your bot.

MoobotFactoids : Moobot factoid compatibility module. Moobot's factoids were originally designed to emulate Blootbot's factoids, so in either case, you should find this plugin comfortable.

Network : Includes commands for connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting to multiple networks, as well as several other utility functions related to IRC networks.

News : A module to allow each channel to have "news". News item may have expiration dates.

NickCapture : This module attempts to capture the bot's nick, watching for an opportunity to switch to that nick.

Nickometer : A port of Infobot's nickometer command from Perl. This plugin provides one command (called nickometer) which tells you how "lame" an IRC nick is. It's an elitist hacker thing, but quite fun.

Note : A complete messaging system that allows users to leave "notes" for other users that can be retrieved later.

Plugin : This plugin handles various plugin-related things, such as getting help for a plugin, getting a list of the loaded plugins and searching and downloading plugins from supybot.com.

Praise : Hand out praise to IRC denizens with this plugin.

Protector : Defends a channel against actions by people who don't have the proper capabilities.

Quote : Maintains a Quotes database for each channel. The quotes are randomly selected from message said in the channel. Note that with this plugin, you don't get to manually add quotes. If that is what you want to do (which is probably the case) what you need is the next plugin.

QuoteGrabs : Quotegrabs are like IRC sound bites. When someone says something funny, incriminating, stupid, outrageous, anything that might be worth remembering, you can grab that quote for that person. With this plugin, you can store many quotes per person and display their most recent quote as well as see who "grabbed" the quote in the first place.

RSS : Provides basic functionality for handling RSS/RDF feeds.

Relay : Handles relaying between networks.

Reply : Basically echoes in private message, notice or action the text you send to the bot.

Scheduler : Gives this user the ability to schedule commands to run at a particular time or repeatedly run at a particular interval.

Seen : Keeps track of the last time a user was seen on a channel.

Services* : Handles management of nicks with Nickserv and ops with Chanserv.

ShrinkUrl* : Shrinks URLs using TinyURL or ln-s.net.

Status : A simple module to handle various informational commands querying the bot's current status and statistics.

String : Provides various string-related commands :
  • Returning the 8-bit value of a character
  • Returning the character associated to an 8-bit value
  • Encoding and decoding text using all the standard encodings supported by the Python codecs module
  • Returning the levenshtein distance between 2 strings
  • Returning the length of a string
  • Returning the MD5 of a string
  • Returning the soundex hash of a string
  • Returning the portion of a string that matches a regular expression
  • Returning the XOR encryption of a string with a password
  • Returning an SHA hash.

Success : Spices up success replies just like Dunno spices up "No such command" replies.

Time : A plugin for time-related functions :
  • Returning the number of seconds in a number of years, weeks, days, hours, or minutes
  • Returning the number of seconds that have passed since a certain epoch
  • Returning the number of seconds until a time
  • Returning the ctime of a number of seconds since an epoch
  • Returning the current time
  • Returning the amount of time that a number of seconds represent

Todo : Allows registered users to keep their own personal list of tasks to do, with an optional priority for each.

Topic : Provides commands for manipulating channel topics.

Unix : Provides Unix-related functions. (Will not work on Windows)

URL : Keeps track of URLs posted to a channel, along with relevant context. Allows searching for URLs and returning random URLs. Also provides statistics on the URLs in the database.

Utilities : Various utility commands, mostly useful for manipulating nested commands.

Web : Includes various web-related commands.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Rant on the variability of keywords across different programming languages.

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
WHYYYYYYYYYY?!???!?!?!?!
WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY


That's about it.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Misleading keychain and the power of conditionning.


When I went to my dad's place 2 weeks ago, I went through everything I left at his place when I moved back with my mom when I was 13, to throw some shit away and put away things I wanted to keep.

I found this little thing.

Of course it's supposed to look like two cute little dogs playing together... which is the only thing that would come to my mind when I was 13 years old.

It shocked me how the first thing that came to my mind this time was



"TWO DOGS HUMPING"



I was much purer back then... rofl.

Windows 8 - First peek video



Okay it may be just me, but this shit makes me feel claustrophobic. Tiles.. tiles surrounding you... pan... pan.... cannot see the outer edges of it... can never get out of it... GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

These full screen panning things make me feel like I'm trapped inside the computer and can't do shit. They make me feel totally powerless and helpless. It makes me feel like I'm trapped in an aperture science research center room. I'm serious. It's exactly the same : They put you in a tiny and very limited environment and you can't see not access what's outside... nor can you get out of it to gain the full control of it.

That's how it makes me feel and I HATE it.

It just makes me want to smash my screen, break my computer open and break out.

I like seeing everything on my screen, feeling in control of my computer. Being OUTSIDE looking in and having everything withing reach. Not trapped INSIDE looking out.

-- When I played Portal 2, I had to play it all in one shot... because I was anxious to get the fuck out of there.

Would they have the same interface but windowed, it would be okay.


Thanks god at least they're going to leave the normal GUI - which frankly, removing it would be the dumbest thing to do ever and I think they know it.

Stereo Mix not appearing in your recording devices?

A friend had this issue last night where he couldn't find Stereo Mix in his recording devices. It's an issue I also had about a year ago and at that time, it took me some good googling before I could find the solution which turned out to be easy. Here it is.

This works on Vista and Windows 7. For XP, you have to make a registry tweak which I know nothing about (sorry!).

Right click the sound icon in the task bar > Recording devices > In the list, right click and select "Show Disabled Devices".


Voilà! If your computer supports it, you should now see "Stereo Mix" appear in your list!

Saturday, June 18, 2011

OMG LOOK AT THIS! - Totally entry-worthy

LOOK AT THE PROGRESS BAR!


IT'S A NYAN CAT!!!





OMGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

Edit : They took it off, fuckers.

Twin souls, reclaiming the self

It describes what twin souls should experience when they meet. It explains the kundalini rising and the issues that may arise between them amongst other things.
I want to post this here, even if I meh this kind of things now, to prevent it from disappearing from the Internet. For if what it says is true, then it is an important piece of information that must NOT disappear.

Warning... What follows is going to be an epic wall of text.

Friday, June 17, 2011

Halo Reach OST

Martin O'Donnell did it again. He made me cream my panties. The Halo Reach OST is bloody epic.

Even for you, non-halo fan. If you like epic orchestral music like I do and you tend to be very picky ( = you think that most movie OSTs are shit and don't provide enough emotional rush), you will be served.

If you are a Halo fan and haven't listened to it yet, go ahead and do. Please. Listen to it in HD for the best quality.

Don't go read the comments if you haven't played the game yet, they are full of spoilers.



I haven't bought a single OST yet... but as soon as I have enough spare money, I am going to buy the whole damn collection of Halo OSTs because they are ALL epic.

Martin O'Donnell is a GOD.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

I feel like posting this - Hotel California



The guy on the right is Le sex.




Sungha Jung is so good it's unbelievable.

:)

Busyyyyy.. Hmmm.. Arduino. :)

I've been busy with stuff since I came back from Montréal.

Well not *that* busy but I didn't have time to be bored yet... and I cannot foresee such time in the near future.

First, I have received my Arduino experimenter kit from SolarRobotics.
Listen, this kit is awesome.

But before, let me tell you about the Arduino.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Back from Montréal! :D

I've been away for a week, on a trip to Montréal!



It was so awesome! I got to spend 3 days with an e-friend I had for over 9 years who I had met only 2 times prior to that and her boyfriend who was a +1 year old e-friend met on Tinychat. I also met one of her lovely RL friend who I had also met on Tinychat before.

We had an awesome time!

Thursday, June 02, 2011

Mandatory implantation of RFID chips in the United States by 2013

Many blogs have been spinning this one, however they fail to provide credible sources along with legit quotations.

So here it goes. The American government plans in the HR 3200 bill to establish a national medical device registry a.k.a. database of implantable RFID chips.

Yes, THIS thing which gives animals implanted MOTHERFUCKING MALIGNANT TUMORS. Pictured is a VeriChip in a tumor. Yummy.


According to the bill, this will start being implemented "by not later than the date that is 36 months after the date of the enactment of this Act, without regard to whether or not final regulations to establish and operate the registry have been promulgated by such date". 36 months from October 14 2009 is October 14 2012 or more exactly, 16 months and 12 days from today.

These chips represents not only a risk of cancer, but also a risk of computer virus propagation. A hacked chip could infect other devices like RFID chips, pacemakers and full informatics systems.

If you don't want to have it implanted, you might want to start thinking of moving somewhere else if you can.

I am very worried for my fellow American friends...

You can see the bill here and search for the quotation above for more informations.
Implantable Radiofrequency Transponder System for Patient Identification and Health Information