Moving

I’ve decided to move on.

WordPress just doesn’t give me enough customization.

You can find the new design at the usual address.

http://www.osmanjunaid.co.uk

Wolfram Alpha: First Look

This is just a quick look at a couple of searches types I found interesting in the newly unleashed Wolfram Alpha. This is my first video using ScreenFlow and I must say, I’m impressed.

Happy Hacking Keyboard

Anyone who’s anyone in the IT community has heard of the notoriously rare Happy Hacking Keyboard. It features a compact design, shedding weight by omitting the mostly unnecessary numpad keys and condensing the casing to the size of half a sheet of A4.

Want one? Be prepared to fork out a hefty £99 for this one, now on sale through the auction site eBay. Check it out here!

Not content with this version? Try its biggest, baddest brother – The Happy Hacking Keyboard Pro. They’re sold on eBay for a staggering £220 a pop. No, that’s not including postage from Japan, either. Proof!

Smoking

I recently gave up smoking. I’ve been mostly “clean” for about eight days and four hours. I say mostly because I’ve been puffing some shisha, which doesn’t count as cigarettes in my book. I lost my best buddy, Marlboro Red, because she was quite literally killing me.

The first few days are of course the hardest, as I was told many times over a cigarette by my fellow smokers, while enjoying a puff or two of the finest tobacco courtesy of Altria - the parent company of Marlboro. Some of the best bloody conversations are had over cigarettes, and that’s a fact.

One smokeless day (probably yesterday), I wondered what had happend to all those cigarette dispensing machines that I used to see in the boys toilets at my primary school (yeah, I told you I was hardcore) and although I hadn’t found out why they had disapeared, I had found its newer, sexier cousin – the Marijuana dispenser. Howard Marks would be dancing in his grave, if he were dead, that is.

Currently, eleven US states allow the consumption of Marijuana for medicinal purposes. The state of California is about to introduce the Marijuana dispenser – for patients for whom it is deemed necessary to acquire the drug. Apparently, there will be a series of checks that are compulsary before someone can make regular use of these dispensors, to prevent abuse.

This sounds like a stupid idea. BBC News reports :

Vince Mehdizadeh, owner of the Herbal Nutrition Centre in Los Angeles, where one of the two first machines is based, said it would “allow patients to buy extra supplies whenever needed.”

Buy extra supplies whenever needed?! Supply is higher, demand is the same – prices go down. Let the good times roll.

BBC News article on Weed-machines can be seen here.

If you’re an idiot and don’t know who Howard Marks aka Mr Nice is, please shut your face and watch this series via Youtube.