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Element 112 is being added to the Periodic Chart. Awesome! Now lets get to work on that “Island of Stability” guys!

Being a relatively new fan to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, I’m happy to find a trailer for their newest game. It looks interesting but I’m not sure about the whole Falcor thing. Chances are I’ll still buy it and love it though.

I just posted the latest update to the KitcheNET software over at the PivotLabs open source site. You can see a list of all the changes under Change Log.

KitcheNET 0.1 Beta 2 with Software Keyboard

Over the past week since my KitcheNET project got posted on LifeHacker, I’ve been busy tweaking the software adding new features and fixing bugs I’ve found in the process of testing it out.

Once I get it packaged up I’ll post the new version to download on our PivotLabs Open Source section.

Some new features include:

• Software keyboard for VERY simple textual input
• Added page buffering so dialing through configured web sites seems quicker
• Added right-click reset to automatically go back to home page when navigating away
• Added snazzy splash screen
• Switched from <browser> to <iframe> elements.
• Fixed links that would otherwise open in a new browser to open in current one
• Fixed up styles

The online response from readers has been very supportive and inspiring.

One reader, James Tandy, sent me a picture of an inspired setup sporting Windows Media Center and a wireless mouse.

Another reader pointed out another similar project on TechRepublic and others had great ideas for other methods of input such as the Wiimote.

I also learned about the Linux From Scratch project which might be my ticket to finally diving head first into the barebones mechanics of Linux instead of letting Ubuntu take care of everything for me.

Either way i definitely have a list of new ideas to take from this whole experience and plan to keep going with it.

A laptop mounted to my cupboards, spiderman style.

Over the weekend I started working on a new project I dubbed KitcheNET (named after the browser software) aimed at reusing an old laptop and turning it into a kind of kitchen kiosk or Internet Appliance.

For the longest time I was trying to think of a neat way to at least listen to music while I cooked or did the dishes. The radio was out, however, since all of the music stations in my area are terrible. Wearing an MP3 player seemed cumbersome. Hooking up a whole networked desktop was overkill.

It wasn’t until i read this article on LifeHacker I even considered my laptop as a viable option.

This solved my music issue perfectly since I’ve spent countless hours teaching Pandora what i liked. And this gave me a good reason to develop a minimalistic linux distro and XUL-based internet browser (KitcheNET) to power the whole thing.

So far it’s running pretty well considering it’s a very hacked together prototype. I have it setup so i can see the local weather, local news, recipes tagged in my Delicious account, weekly Google calendar and a Picasa photo album that’s connected to my G1 phone.

I’m hoping to bag a couple more old cheap laptops to see how low processing-wise I can go with these.

After much meticulous code combing and optimization, I think I’ve got a good portion of the redundent code out of Xootools as well as started on some pretty useful libraries and plugins. I also moved it out of my projects section and into my software section.

There’s a new Native in the plugins section named “Unit” when  takes the work out of dealing with standard units of measurement such as time, weight, mass, etc.

Got some nice Fs updates and other interesting ideas for dealing with 2-dimensional arrays and the elusive “Thread” in xul.

Stay tuned!

Friday the folks at boxee announced an update to the their software which integrates video play into their rss reader allowing for the traversal and viewing of Hulu feeds.

Yay!

Less then a day later, it was reported Hulu blocked the boxee browser from accessing their site at all….

Now the first thing that popped into my head was, just spoof the user agent being sent in the browser. This would obviously work around Hulu’s block attempts. I realize boxee is trying to play fair by accessing the service in the same manner as a normal browser. However it’s apparent that that’s clearly not the problem in Hulu’s eyes.

The simple fact you’re watching Hulu on a TV is what is freaking everyone out.

However, short of blocking everything, Hulu can’t really do much to stop people from putting it on their TV. They’re just delaying the inevitable.

Yesterday Hulu asked Boxee to remove their channel from their software…

This makes NO sense from a business standpoint. How does a busniess make money buy making their products harder to get? The reality is people are moving to their computer-connect TV’s instead of cable boxes. It’s cheaper, more conveinent and less commercials but with the potential advantage of commericals being highly targeted since they’re delivered on a per user basis.

I just don’t get big media companies sometimes.

Being a long time ex-fan of the Myst Series, I was particularly happy to hear about this bit of news. Myst Online is going to be released as open source as a last ditch effort to keep it alive. I’m glad they decided to do this instead of letting it fade into obscurity while maintaining strict ownership over it.