Amazon has added the ability to add third party items to wishlists, so I figured I could move back with little difficulty. One thing I quickly discovered was that I  couldn’t syndicate my list through RSS directly from Amazon. Some searching later, I found what appeared to be the answer: Ed’s Amazon RSS Wishlist. It looked to be exactly what I was looking for, except for one small problem – it didn’t work.

I had never used either Yahoo! Pipes or the Amazon Web Services API before, but this looked like a good opportunity. I cloned Ed’s pipe and began updating the calls to work with version 4.0 of Amazon’s ECommerce Service (ECS).

Working with Yahoo! Pipes turned out to be quite a bit of fun, and the Amazon API is well documented. Output from my modified pipe can be seen at the bottom of this post.

If you’d like to use my pipe to create an RSS feed for your own Amazon wishlists, you can find it here: http://pipes.yahoo.com/iamthechad/amazonrsswishlist

(Click for Larger)

Yup, they sent me a faceplate for my Wii guitar, along with a note explaining that the gift is a thanks for being patient and waiting to get my remastered GH3 disc.

While this probably isn’t the design I would have picked on my own, I have yet to find faceplates for the Wii guitars in stores yet, so beggars can’t be choosers.

This gesture is nice and aimed at keeping customers. I appreciate the gift, but I’d rather have an apology for the way they screwed up and shared a bunch of email addresses that should have been kept private. I guess customers have been more concerned about how many speakers their game’s music comes out of than who has their email address.

I’m a sucker for puzzles. The problem with most puzzle games is that they usually focus on one kind of puzzle and I lose interest. (Yeah, Brain Age. I’m looking at you. I enjoy Sudoku, but solving 85 jabillion Sudoku puzzles gets old fast.)

Professor Layton, luckily, does not suffer from this problem. Some of the puzzle themes are repeated, but there’s never more than four or five puzzles for each theme. For example, one of the themes is "Matchstick Puzzles", and there are half a dozen or so total matchstick related puzzles in the game. This variety really helps, as there will surely be some puzzle types that people like less than others. (For me, my bane is magic squares. Luckily, there are only a couple in the game.)

Professor Layton does a good job of wrapping the puzzle solving into an actual story. Where the developers could have easily thrown something simple around the puzzles, the story is actually quite entertaining. I was very near the end of the game before I figured out the village’s secret.

The game went quickly for me, taking about eleven and a half hours to finish. I intend to let it sit for a while and replay it to try to use as few hints as I can. I also need to make sure I have plenty of free time, because this game is very hard to put down.

Not only are there well over 100 puzzles in the game to solve, there are additional puzzles available weekly for download via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.

It’s garnered a fair amount of attention, and I’ve planned on making another one someday – especially since I didn’t capture any of the construction process when I made it.

Thanks to a recent post on Lifehacker, I’ve had a "slight" increase in the number of people who’ve seen the lamp.

(Click to Enlarge)

Looks like it’s time to dig out the materials and build another lamp, with full documentation this time. I’m hoping to be able to create a set of plans in SketchUp that I can distribute to others who might want to make the lamp. The first one took me a couple of months, but most of that was trying countless different ways to hold all of the CDs. Now that I’ve done it once, I’ll be able to measure what I’ve already made and have a head start.

(Click for Larger)

You’ll notice there are multiple addresses listed in the To: line. Yup, Activision sent out the update to a slew of people and included everyone’s email address. I’m already starting to get spam specifically targeting the fact that I have GH3.

So far there’s been no follow up from Activision. I have not called and made a nuisance of myself yet, but if Activision doesn’t own up to their error soon, I’m sure there will be a lot of people in addition to myself complaining.

iTunes 7.6 also fixed a nasty bug that would cause Smart Playlists created with a "Video Kind" rule to fail – sometimes horribly.

• Network shares. I’ve got a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, with shares for files, music, and photos. I spent the better part of an hour trying to get these shares remapped. I could do "Connect To Server.." in Finder and the share contents would be displayed, but I’d get no icon on the desktop or in the Finder window to show that the drive was actually mapped. For some reason, about 50% of the time, I couldn’t connect to the share anyway – I’d get a message saying that the device could not be found. Strange and annoying behavior.
• Backup. I have several backup jobs that run and archive to the NAS. Since the upgrade to Leopard, all of the backups that have run have failed. I had to go into the configuration for each backup job and make sure that the correct share was specified. This is where it got confusing – apparently there’s some subtle difference between smb://nas/files and smb://nas/files. The destination that was specified before the upgrade failed, while the destination created after the upgrade works. I have noticed that SMB shares now use a different icon, so there may be something happening behind the scenes that’s not obvious.
• Bootup. On my MacBook, Leopard takes about 3 times as long to boot as Tiger did. Not a big deal, considering I rarely reboot, but still annoying.
• The dock. I don’t have the issues with the updated dock that others have complained about. I do miss the little black arrow telling me which applications are running – the little white blob is much harder for me to see, so I can’t tell at a glance what’s open. I’m sure somebody will come out with a utility to fix this soon.
• Java. Where is Java 6? I had been under the impression that Java 6 was coming with Leopard, and was sorely disappointed when it was missing. This means that I’m still going to be stuck loading up a virtual machine to develop, since the apps I work on rely on Java 6. Not a show-stopper, but still a pain.

The only issue that is really a problem is the network drive issue. I’ve been able to get the shares to map on my notebook, but the shares absolutely refuse to show up on my mother-in-law’s Mac Mini. This means that her data isn’t getting backed up at all right now. Am I missing a setting somewhere to make mapped network shares visible/hidden? I looked but I couldn’t find anything that looked promising.

Here’s a shot of the aftermath:

Time to build a new one and see if I can get some nighttime video!

technorati tags:make, made, jam jar jet, pulse jet, diy

Blogged with Flock

And another shot showing the top of the jar better:

One thing that’s not mentioned in the instructions very well is how abso-freakin hot this thing gets. One of the troubleshooting tips is to put your thumb over the hole and shake the jar up to vaporize more of the methanol. I tried to light it once, got only a "whoof" and decided that the fuel needed to be vaporized again. That "whoof" was enough to make the lid hot enough that I got an immediate blister when I stuck my thumb on it. I guess I should have been wearing gloves like the instructions said.

This thing, when you get it working, is amazing. I haven’t had a chance to try it at night yet, so I can’t see the combustion, but the sound it makes is enough to make up for it. I’m going to try to get some video of it in action in the next day or so – you’ve got to hear it to believe it.

technorati tags:make, made, jam jar jet, pulse jet, diy

Blogged with Flock