Robogames report

We went to the robogames today:

Download the Robogames movie here.
QuickTime 7, iTunes 6 or VLC 0.84 will play the file.

Technorati Tags: lego, movie, Robogames, robot, soccer, video

Review of Casablanca's Cafe

0.2

Casablanca's Cafe is extraordinary

Jun 10, 2006 by Andrew Marks business

Casablanca's Café

1185 Lincoln Ave

San José, CA 95125

(408) 993 8636

★★★★☆ Casablanca's Café is an extraordinary Persian restaurant in down town Willow Glen. I had the Hummus sampler and a Gyro Sandwich (lamb, red cabbage, lettuce, cucumber, tzatziki in lavosh bread) which was very nice Although the food is grade-A the actual environment is slightly drab with only four ornamental fish on the wall and two nice paintings that look like a window in a beach hut. What I think made it special is that you can buy assorted Persian delicacies on a shelf near the counter. I strongly recommend Casablanca's Café.

Apple is holding my data hostage

When my boys' videos started getting some interest via their podcast and the Make film festival, I got 2 emails in a row from Apple's mac.com service saying I was exceeding bandwidth limits, and then I was cut off.

Back when I worked for Apple, they launched mac.com as a free service, and I bagged our family names in their namespace. The integration of iDisk into the OS made it a simple way to post files to the web, and I used it for both work-related sample code and personal bits and pieces.

Later on, Apple did a bait and switch, and started charging for mac.com. I decided the cost wasn't too onerous, and we could keep the email addresses and the hosting. It costs $100 a year, and $10 for each extra email address, but the switching cost seemed high, as we have a lot of friends who use those email addresses, and the hosting integreation is handy.

Later on, I kept getting 'your email account is full' crap, and pointed out that gmail offered 100 times as much storage for free, and they later relaxed the terms a bit.

Then came this, from noreply@apple.com:

Dear .Mac Member,

Please be aware that you have reached 100% of your .Mac data transfer quota for this two-week period and we have turned off external access to your site(s). Attempts to visit there will produce a page explaining that your site has gone over data transfer quota and the material requested cannot be displayed.

You can still publish to your site(s), but you will not be able to view any changes on the Internet until your site is reactivated. Reactivation will happen on the 1st or 16th of the month, whichever comes first. To review your data transfer usage, click here. To increase your data transfer quota by purchasing additional storage space, click here.* For more information see Help.

I thought 'OK, I'll move my stuff to other hosting, and redirect my links' - but the iDisk 'Sites' folder is also disabled on my machine, so I can't get at my files to move them.

So, if some of my posts here are missing movies or images, that's why.
Amazon's S3 service is looking interesting, both Google and Microsoft are preparing hosting services, and there are a plethora of video hosting sites like blip.tv.

Apple's terms are uncompetitive, and stopping me from accessing my own files until I pay is a nasty kind of blackmail.

Technorati Tags: Apple, hosting, mac.com, podcasting, politics

Andrew and Christopher won the Make Movie Festival

Andrew and Christopher
Originally uploaded by Kevin Marks.

Bre Pettis writes:

With so many great entries it was hard to pick a winner, but the Marks Brothers' Fun with Dry Ice shined through. Their top notch explanations of how to have fun with dry ice was really great. The grand prize is a box set of Make Magazines signed by the Make Magazine staff, a Make: t-shirt for each brother, and Make: license plate covers, which they'll have to wait until they can drive to use!

The boys, Rosie and I are dead chuffed.

The Magic Hamburger

A magical claymation:

Download the Magic Hamburger movie here.
QuickTime 7, iTunes 6 or VLC 0.84 will play the file.

Fun with Dry Ice

Andrew and Christopher demonstrate fun things to do with dry ice:

Download the Dry Ice movie here.
QuickTime 7, iTunes 6 or VLC 0.84 will play the file.

Bacon Bacon Bacon Movie

Andrew and Kevin made a movie while cooking breakfast:

Download Bacon movie here.
It's in homage to the badger movie

Technorati Tags: bacon, breakfast, creative commons, egg, movie, mushroom

mistake on mum's blog

Well as some of you may know my mum has started blogging. Anyway I read her blog and wrote a comment on it. I wrote "I can tell that you take good care of your children but since I am your child I live it". I made two mistakes and my mum got it rid of it on the site.


P.S. Maybe I should check my comments more carefully.


Written in Andrew Marks' own hand

Almost Dead Andrew

1. I almost break my rib cage
2. I almost break my wrist
3. I cut my foot badly
4. I faint from overdose of helium and almost broke my skull



MORAL: that which does not kill me makes me stronger (Dad told me that)

Donate to Rupert - the True Survivor

Mummy and I were so cross that the others threw Rupert off Survivor last week that we asked Daddy to set up a website for him. Here it is:
Donate to Rupert - the True Survivor
I drew the picture.

We made a t-shirt too.

Apple Camp

I went to Apple Camp with Christopher - here we are

Confusing the Barber

One day my dad went to the hairdressers. My brother went inside and got a lollipop from the barber. So, I went in in and the barber gave me a book.
Then my brother came in again.
The barber looked around, very surprised, and said "OH! There's two of them!"

20 questions

While driving in the car, we play a game called '20 questions'. One player thinks of something, and the others have 20 yes/no questions to guess what it is (20 bits of information is over 1 million separate entities). Typically, the first two questions asked are 'Is it alive or dead?' and, if the answer is 'Dead', the next question was 'Was it once alive?'

Andrew thought of something.
Christopher asked 'Is it alive or dead?'
'Alive'
'Was it once dead?'
'Yes'
'Is it Jesus?'
'Yes'

Christopher explains Santa

Christopher saw an advert where a little girl makes (brand name) cookies for Santa and she says "If we give him these cookies we'll get lots of presents."
"It doesn't work like that." he said. "It's whether you're good or bad."
"If you're bad and you make Santa lots of cookies, you won't get what you ask for, you'll get educational things."
He looked at me, then said:
"Educational things aren't bad though."

Back Garden Cricket

I've mentioned elsewhere that Andrew and Christopher are big fans of Humongous Entertainment's games. As a Kindergarten graduation present, Christopher got a triple-pack of Backyard Baseball, Backyard Soccer and Backyard Football.
They loved the games, but on the Mac they use, running OS 9, the games will freeze up every now and then, and they have to reboot. Andrew asked if he could use my white computer (iBook running OS X) to play it on, so I let him, and it worked fine. But I had to take the iBook with me to work.
When I got home Andrew was playing Backyard Baseball again.
'How did you stop it crashing, Andrew?'
'I ran it using Virtual PC'.

After this exchange I looked in the back garden, and saw by the stumps that they had been paying Cricket - sounds like a new product line for Humongous.