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Nunchucks

Fact: Kids love nunchucks! Sure, some kids are into swords or maybe even throwing stars, but all kids love nunchucks…

Now you’re saying “Hold on there Mr. Maniac! Nunchucks ain’t safe!” To which I say, you just need to make them safe. Oh sure, you could just go out an buy Rubber Foam Nunchucks from karatedepot.com, but what fun is that? Wouldn’t you rather spend time with your children making your own (safe) nunchucks? Of course you would! What parent wouldn’t?

Nunchucks Nunchucks

We can easily assemble kid-safe nunchucks out of some old cardboard tubes and some cord. The trickiest part is just tying the knot. Once you’ve got two pair put together, you’re ready for battle – I mean FUN! Let the kids solve their differences the way they do in kung-fu movies. Or get in on the game, and show the kids who the real martial arts master in the family is. These kid-safe nunchucks are just the answer to the often asked question: “How can I beat my sibling without hurting them too badly?”

(Disclaimer: Don’t be an idiot and hurt yourself or someone else…)

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Casual Gaming

Since just before BarCampMilwaukee, I talked with a few people about what I call the “casual gamer” which is pretty much the opposite of the “hardcore gamer” in terms of behavior.

Now that the Wii and the PlayStation 3 have (more or less) arrived, I’ll give you my thoughts on this, but remember, this is the view from a casual gamer, not someone who is completely obsessed with gaming, just someone who plays once in a while and/or wants a fun system for the whole family to play.

First of all, the casual gamer cares about bang for the buck, not about the lastest and greatest. For instance, we can often find GameCube games used for anywhere between $5 and $20. Brand new games for the GameCube seem to run about $20 to $40. Keep in mind that a year ago you could get a new GameCube with Mario Kart: Double Dash and 4 controllers for about $200, and today you can pick up a brand new GameCube for $99. So like I said, bang for the buck takes effect, and you could put together a complete gaming system for the whole family for well under $300.

Now, the Nintendo Wii appears to be priced at $250, and is backwards compatible with the GameCube games, so if I was buying today, this is what I would get. It would make sense to “move up” to the Wii from the GameCube. I’m also influenced by the Nintendo titles, which are more kid & family friendly. (I have two daughters who love gaming, and the GameCube is perfect for them.) As for the PlayStation 3, it comes in priced at $500, twice the price. Now, it does have some impressive technology in it, but for the casual gamer, this is lost. The new games for the PlayStation 3 seem to be priced at about $60, and the used (well, used PlayStation & PlayStation 2 games) seem to be priced cheap, well under $20.

Jus the other day I was taking with a friend of mine, and found out he too was a casual gamer (he has 3 kids) and I told him how we pick up used titles for cheap, and he said he’s gotten some good deals on ebay, like 10 games for $30. I think Nintendo realizes that there is a place for the casual gamer, and they’re looking to serve that market.

Thoughts…?





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Hummus Lessons of The Internet Chef

In which I attempt to make hummus… In the process I learned a few things. That’s what I love about baking/cooking/making food. There’s always something new to learn.

It should first be know that I am The Internet Chef! This is how I do it: In the kitchen we have the “Kitchen Mac” which is used to access our home wiki for recipes, and for finding things on Recipezaar. When I want to make something new, I do a search on Recipezaar, take a look at a few recipes, and then pick the one I like the best. (Now, “best” is determined by many factors: do I have the ingredients? which recipe looks easiest? etc.)

So, on to the hummus. What’s that, chickpeas are also known as garbanzo beans? Wow, I’m learning already! Of course I bought organic chickpeas, and they need to be cooked, so I look up how to cook chickpeas and quickly skim the results, learning that “soak overnight in cold water and boil for 40 minutes” should do it. Cool! Now, since I only live near crappy grocery stores, I could not find tahini. What is tahini anyway? Wikipedia says tahini is a paste made from ground sesame seeds. More learning! So, I need to substitute… what do I have that is paste-like? Hmmm, peanut butter is sort of paste-like. Substitute! I also used sesame oil, hoping that might fill in for the lack of tahini (which is ground sesame seeds you know.) Oh yeah, I also forgot to buy garlic, so garlic salt and garlic powder to the rescue! Ok, they really are a poor substitute for garlic, so in the future I will definitely get garlic. Duly noted. Toss it all into the Vita-Mix and see what happens…

Hummus So, did it all turn out ok? Yes. I mean, it’s not the most flavorful hummus I’ve ever had, but it’s ok. I learned how to cook chickpeas (also known as garbanzo beans) and I learned that tahini is a paste made from ground sesame seeds, and that peanut butter is a (poor) substitute for it, and real garlic doesn’t have a proper substitute. All in all it’s a learning process, and next time I’ll know what to do, and it’ll turn out better, and the legend of The Internet Chef will spread far and wide… like a fine hummus!



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Save Baby Gavin

My dear reader, it’s not often I ask you to do something, but I’m asking now…

Vinny, and old friend of mine (who taught me a lot about Linux, Perl, and Apache) is asking for help with something. See his Save Baby Gavin post for the full details, but the short version is that a relative of Vinny’s has a baby (Gavin) with end-stage renal failure. Which basically means that without a kidney transplant, Gavin will not survive.

So please check out the Save Baby Gavin site and help out if you can. Thanks…

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Hackathon: Summary…

Well, I myself didn’t do a ton of Perl hacking, at least in comparison to others in the room. (I did manage to fix up a bunch of my Perl-related bits and pieces for jEdit though.) Here’s a progress report from right before dinner.

Chicago Perl Hackathon Chicago Perl Hackathon Chicago Perl Hackathon Chicago Perl Hackathon

Perl::Critic was worked on, they wrote new policies and also added two new committers to the project. The Perl::Critic guys also talked with Ken from Krugle quite a bit…

The folks working on Parrot fixed a lot of tests, and configure.pl, and did a lot of general code cleaning. They also improved the Tcl compiler, checked in Forth, and introduced a bunch of new people to the project.

Pete Krawczyk did some work on the long-neglected HTML::Tree, making many miscellaneous fixes and improving Unicode support.

Andy Lester made updates to ack. He said his goal is to introduce more of the general public to ack, and make it so that people don’t even realize it’s Perl-based. He wants it to be something people can just drop into their ~/bin directory and use.

There was some work done on Jifty to make it work without requiring a database. Jifty is a RoR-like framework written in Perl (even if they don’t like it described like that.)

That’s it for me… Plenty of Perl folks will be here until tomorrow working on moving their projects forward, but I’m outta here. Thanks to The Perl Foundation for making it happen.