“Warp speed now, Mr Scott!”

Need to know how to get every little ounce of energy out of your warp engines? Well, the following article from howstuffworks.com explains the basics of the antimatter engine (this is real folks, no science fiction here).

Howstuffworks “How Antimatter Spacecraft Will Work”

It won’t help you break that warp 10 barrier, but hey, an interesting read nonetheless for the modern day space explorer in all of us.

Face lift

Take a good look. Because in several more days this house won’t look the same.

pre siding

A trailer with our new siding arrived yesterday. We’re excited to have our new exterior look, especially since we actually get to enjoy it for a little bit and we’re not doing it just to sell the house. A friend of our’s father is doing the work for us. He delivered all the goods and took down the gutters yesterday. Today he’s putting the new back door in. We’re thinking it will take a little more than a week to finish the whole thing.

So in the mean time, you all can take a look at the picture above, imagine what colors you would use, and leave a comment with your guess. Then when it’s all finished, I’ll post another picture of the exterior.

It’s going to look great when it’s all finished. Now maybe we won’t get anymore flyers in our screen door offering an estimate to paint or side the house for us.

Konfabulator

I was talking to Mom last night and she was mentioning her new eMac at the school. She said Matt was playing around on it and had really liked the Dashboard feature of Mac OS 10.4 (aka Tiger). Well, Dashboard was most likely born from a previous widget concept made popular by a program known as Konfabulator. I believe that Konfabulator used to be about $25. But it was recently bought by Yahoo and as a result is now free. It runs in Mac OS 10.2 or greater, Windows 2000, & Windows XP.

Konfabulator

Konfabulator ships with several useful widgets like Analog Clock, Calendar, and Weather. But here is a list of some other interesting/useful/fun widgets.

iPlayer
iTunes widget for Konfabulator based on iPod shuffle design.

Sing that iTune!
A lyric fetcher Widget for iTunes which can also handle radio streaming titles. The lyrics are saved in “Documents/Sing that iTune!” folder and you can also add your self-made lyrics in there. Sync the folder with iPod’s Notes folder to bring it.

NCAA Football liveSchedule
An updating desktop football schedule for NCAA division 1A schools. Schedule will update as game-times and scores become available.

mini iTunes Remote
The eighth Widget in the mini Widget series. mini iTunes Remote is a complete redesign and coding effort of the iTunes Remote that ships with Konfabulator. This version features a compact design, the ability to change your ratings, and and set your iChat status to your current playing track.

HAL9000
A novel Widget where HAL9000 periodically speaks.

Stack ‘Em!
A classic time waster is now available for Konfabulator! Can you keep pace with the falling blocks? Good luck! (Basically it’s Tetris as a widget)

Finally, get more useless and useful widgets from the Konfabulator Widget Gallery.

Chewing On Mindfulness

Parents of the world will cringe as they read the following article. It looks like there just might be something to chewing gum. I personally can’t last much more than 15-20 minutes with the stuff.

Gum Is Your Secret

However, despite the positive affects, it’s still pretty tough to get out of hair.

World at Night

So it’s been a few days since the last update, but what do you expect. HS football started on Monday, and it’s kept myself and Becky pretty busy.

Anyway, here is a cool animation of the world as it is seen at night, and it’s even in 3D!

Globe at night

It’s still surprising how little lights there are in Africa.