This looks entirely too awesome! I’ve been toying with Gallery2, and obviously already have WordPress going. The combination of the two will be a lot of fun, assuming setting it up isn’t too great a headache. :)

WordPress Gallery2 – WPG2 Main Page
WPG2 is a WordPress Plug-in that embeds Gallery2 within WordPress to share photos, videos and any other Gallery2 content seamlessly into the WordPress Sidebar and Blog entries. The current version of WPG2 is RC2, released on August 22nd, 2005.

Have I mentioned lately how awesome the Creating Passionate Users blog is, in particular how much I agree with their teaching/learning methodologies? They rock, man.

Excerpt:

Creating Passionate Users: Foo Camp: ad-hoc learning
A lot of adult learning environments (including colleges) do have scenarios in which the students/learners are asked to help evolve the course itself… including taking turns presenting some of the material, but these kinds of activities are the exception, when they should be a key component. I’ve argued with instructors for years over this–as they claim, “Students didn’t come here to be taught by other students who don’t know anything–they came here to get the facts from ME, the expert.”

Oh really? If you drill down, you’d find that most of the students/learners are there to learn. They may have been conditioned through tradition that this means the student listens (and does the occasional “lab exercise”) while the expert dispenses facts and knowledge, but that doesn’t mean it’s truly what most learners want. They want to learn.

And surprisingly little real, deep learning comes from sitting in a chair listening. Think about it… you often learn best (or at least, most memorably) when you’re suddenly thrown in the deep end of a situation where you must figure something out in order to keep going or fix a problem. We learn from doing, and we learn from interacting and discussing with others.

But we often learn best that which we have to teach.
It’s only when you have to explain something to someone else that you really find out how little you understand. And that realization motivates you and points to the right direction for getting the rest of the story.

Via Boing Boing:

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things
Sam Cohen might have remained relatively unknown, troubled by ethical lapses in government and the military but unable to do anything about them, if he had not visited Seoul in 1951, during the Korean war. In the aftermath of bombing sorties he witnessed scenes of intolerable devastation. Civilians wandered like zombies through the ruins of a city in which all services had ceased. Children were drinking water from gutters that were being used as sewers. “I’d seen countless pictures of Hiroshima by then,” Cohen recalls, “and what I saw in Seoul was precious little different. . . . The question I asked of myself was something like: If we’re going to go on fighting these damned fool wars in the future, shelling and bombing cities to smithereens and wrecking the lives of their surviving inhabitants, might there be some kind of nuclear weapon that could avoid all this?”

Here was a singularly odd idea: To re-engineer the most inhumane and destructive weapon of all time, so that it would _reduce_ human suffering. Cohen’s unique achievement was to prove that this could in fact be done.

His first requirement was that wars should be fought as they had been historically, confining their damage to military combatants while towns and cities remained undamaged and their civilian inhabitants remained unscathed. This concept seemed quaint in a new era where everyone and everything was at risk of being vaporized in a nuclear exchange, but Cohen saw no reason why nukes had to be massively destructive. Technology existed to make them so small, they could cause less damage than even some conventional weapons.

Ideally he wanted to reduce blast damage to zero, to eliminate the wholesale demolition of civilian housing, services, and amenities that he had witnessed in Seoul. He saw a way to achieve this if a fusion reaction released almost all of its energy as radiation. Moreover, if this radiation consisted of neutrons, which carry no charge, it would not poison the environment with residual radioactivity.

The bomb would still kill people–but this was the purpose of all weapons. _If_ wars were liable to recur (which Cohen thought was probable), soldiers were going to use weapons of some kind against each other, and everyone would benefit if the weapons minimized pain and suffering while ending the conflict as rapidly as possible.

Cohen came up with a design for a warhead about one-tenth as powerful as the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. If it was detonated at 3,000 feet above ground level, its blast effects would be negligible while its neutron radiation would be powerful enough to cause death within a circle about one mile in diameter. This was the battlefield weapon that came to be known as the neutron bomb.

Via 101reviews.com…:

DigitalCamera@101reviews � New patented lens made of liquid paves way for slimmer digital cameras
Named Fluidlens, this lens is made of liquid and is no bigger than a contact lens, but can achieve an optical zoom of up to 10 times, matching the zoom capabilities of lenses found on mid-range and high-end digital cameras and superior than most cellphone cameras which use digital zoom that relies on software rather than the lens to zoom in on an object.

Via The Register:

Brits steal carloads of F**king Austrian roadsigns | The Register
An Austrian village called Fucking will not change its name despite sniggering Brits making off with its roadsigns.

Mayor Siegfried Hauppl has asked visitors to lay off the signs which began to attract outside attention after British and US soldiers passing through in 1945 illuminated the locals as to the English meaning of Fucking, Ananova reports.

Star Trek Business Cards on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
I bought a set of business cards for the characters of Star Trek (The Original Series) in the 1980′s at a Sci-Fi Convention. UnfortunatelyI don’t know who the original manufacturer is or how to get more. I found them today whilst digging for some old photos.

If you want to know how to make divine espresso, click the link below. Via boingboing (excerpt):

Boing Boing: Espresso crema shots
Crema is the wonderful tan colored foam that appears on the top of a well-shot espresso. High quality espresso joints have a saying: “No crema, no serva.”

I recently got a Rancilio Silvia espresso maker, generally considered the best consumer espresso model available. Trouble is, I can’t seem to get it to make a shot with crema. It’s shooting blanks, so to speak. The next issue of Make magazine is going to feature a couple of coffee hacks that should help espresso fanatics produce precious crema. I’m going to give them a try.

In the meantime, I’ll just drool over these photos over at espressoporn.com…. The photo here shows a machine using a “crotchless” portafilter. Some people might consider that a cheater’s way to get creama, but I’ll take it any way I can get it.
Link (thanks, Kate!)

Excerpt:

TheDamnBlog.com…
“The designers of some elevators include a hidden feature that is very handy if you’re in a hurry
or it’s a busy time in the building (like check-out time in a hotel). While some elevators require
a key, others can be put into “Express” mode by pressing the “Door Close” and “Floor” buttons at
the same time. This sweeps the car to the floor of your choice and avoids stops at any other floor.
This seems to work on Most elevators that I have tried! Most elevators have the option for this to work,
but on some of them the option is turned off by whoever runs them. This is a rather fun hack, so the next time you are on an elevator, give it a try, you have nothing to lose, And this concludes Hacking Elevators 101!