I'm not entirely sure why but there is a function in Ubiquity that allows you to edit the content of any webpage that you are currently accessing. Obviously this is only stored on your machine but there is some potential for fun and pranks to be had with it. (Be wary though, it has made the page a little buggy).
In essence, it allows you to open a small window in your browser window like this and type in a few words to perform a whole range of functions.
So far I've been able to:
get instant translations of selected text
search websites like Flickr, wikipedia, youtube, googlemaps and more
send emails
perform calculations
edit the text on webpages
convert a webpage to a pdf file
check email addresses in my contact list by typing a persons name
highlight text on a page
add maps to email (though not yet to this blog post)
send a message to my twitter account
get a word-count of text selected on a page (148 words up to this point)
check the weather
zoom in and out of the page
All by just pressing ctrl-space and entering a few logical words
I already feel like my computer use has changed forever.
I will say this, it's not yet a perfect system - it's only in alpha (a step or so before beta) and a few of the things that I've tried haven't quite worked as they should. A meeting I tried to add to google calender didn't appear and some of the emails I sent had a little bit of html code in them - but seriously, everything else has worked astoundingly well.
This video showcases some of it - it's about 6 minutes.
I'll spare you the toilet humour, particularly considering that I missed the boat on that one by a few years.
Even though a number of friends have told me that the Nintendo Wii is quite the fun games system, I've been a little meh about it - none of the games that I've seen for it have leapt out at me yet and with a growing list of PS3 and 360 games to get through (as well as doing real world things), it's not a must have.
Mad World might just change this though - it's a highly stylised (think Sin City) mostly black and white fighting game from Japan that looks utterly, gratuitously over the top with the violence and therefore potentially quite entertaining. (For how long is another question though)
Sucker as I am for an HBO series (think Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Curb Your Enthusiasm), I'm not really sure why it took me so long to get around to watching their show about the days of Julius Caesar, Rome.
By the time I got to the final disc in Season 1, I was a little gutted to realise that it wasn't two more episodes but a "special features" dvd. It wasn't that I was unhappy with where the story had left off (and there is a season 2 pack coming out soon) - just that I didn't want it to end.
Rome takes a number of perspectives in telling the tale of city around the period from 52BC to 44BC - that of the major players - Pompey, Caesar, Brutus, Marc Anthony - but where it comes to life is in the everyday characters - a couple of soldiers (who form the heart of the show), their wives/girlfriends/slaves and some of the patrician/plebians of the city.
As we've come to expect from the quality adult content that HBO is known for, there's the requisite sex, drugs, violence, swearing and rock'n'roll uh lute playing. Given that they pretty well just have swords to work with, the violence has its graphic moments but looks oh so cool.
But the show is more than these thrills and spills - it has fine writing and direction, some stellar performances and a fantastic look and sound. Mercifully it seems to be a largely British production as well (though filmed in Italy as far as I can tell) meaning that the accents just seemed slightly less incongruous than the New Jersey drawls we might have had.
