Drunk Babies: Applebees Serves Toddler Margarita In A Sippy Cup - Consumerist

Applebees in the San Francisco Bay area, until last Monday, kept the pre-made margaritas in a jug that was identical to the one where they kept the apple juice. No more. Why? Because they served a margarita to a toddler, complete with sippy cup …

GM announces new 4.5L V8 Duramax diesel for half-ton trucks and HUMMER H2 - Autoblog 

Mark your calendars, because we’re calling today a watershed moment for the advancement of diesel’s acceptance in the U.S. General Motors has just announced a new 4.5L V8 Duramax turbo-diesel powerplant it plans to use in the Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra half-ton pickups, as well as the HUMMER H2. The new oil burner is expected to produce at least 310 horsepower and 520 ft-lbs. of torque. It features dual-overhead cams, four valves per cylinder, a variable-vane turbocharger and aluminum cylinder heads with integrated manifolding that helps keep the overall package small enough to fit in the same space as the automaker’s small-block gas V8s.

This is a picture of my desk. Depressing, isn’t it? I have so many loose documents lying around, it’s just about impossible to find anything. In the old days (i.e.: Windows), I’d just use some nifty scanning software to scan, OCR, and save the documents as PDFs on my hard drive. Then, using nifty desktop searching tools (such as Google Desktop Search), it’d be easy to find what I need. Where’s that invoice to Widgets Corp from November? Search "Widgets Corp invoice November" and most likely it’d be the first result. Nifty, huh? Ah, organizational nirvana for disorganized people like me …

However, since switching almost exclusively to Ubuntu, I haven’t found any good scanning and archiving software. Yes, there are programs such as Xsane for scanning, and other programs such as gocr for optical character recognition, but nothing that’s even close to integrated. Therefore, the mess on the desk just keeps getting taller and taller.

Till now. I found gscan2pdf, a great little utility written by Jeffrey Ratcliffe (ra28145 at users dot sf dot net). Basically, it’s a nice GUI shell surrounding a variety of different UNIX programs allowing someone just press a button to scan a document, OCR it, and save it. Plus, it embeds the OCR text into the file’s meta data which, in english, allows existing indexing tools (such as Beagle or, my personal favorite, Tracker) to search. It also supports an optional program called unpaper which can clean up your document scans.

It’s not perfect yet. My main complaint is that you can’t control the level of compression for PDF files, so sometimes the files get fairly large. However, it’s being worked on as we speak.

If you have a scanner, and you need to archive your paper documents, check it out. Better yet, if you like the program, give Jeff a little donation. It’s well worth it.

Blogged with Flock

Verdict: It’s not disgusting!

It’s a colossal project to transport an entire race team from Michigan to Le Mans. Planning for this year’s event began more than a year ago. The team shipped an entire 18-wheeler packed with tools and equipment to Le Mans on an ocean freighter two months ago. Then the race cars were flown to Europe two weeks ago, accompanied by crates filled with engines and spare parts. When there’s an ocean between a race team and its shop, the crew has to bring everything but the kitchen sink.

http://fyi.gmblogs.com/2007/06/from_michigan_to_le_mans.html

Blogged with Flock

Publick Nuisance - Together Again for the First Time…

So I got up at 4am on Friday to fly to Los Angeles (having missed my Thursday evening flight like a jackass), and I’ve just returned home. The mission? To record Patrick Warburton for the first five episodes of season 3 of The Venture Bros. But of course, now that James Urbaniak has moved there (and flying in the face of rumors about his departure from the show), I was there to record him for episodes 30 and 31 as well. Which meant…Dr. Venture and Brock Samson were, for the first time in the history of the series, in the same room at the same time. Obviously, the photo opportunity was not to be missed, and the location (NYAV Post’s Western adjunct) provided a lovely backdrop

Yeah, but in San Francisco, a hotel room would cost less than a parking spot anyway …

MAKE: Blog: Tent camping for the city dweller

Base Camp - The Altitude Everest Expedition 2007

As an IT professional, I rarely get out of the office. I have worked from home and telecommuted for the last few years so my long office hours are tolerable. So it was more of a surprise to me than anyone else when I was recruited by Altitude Films to go on an expedition to Mount Everest of all places. We were tasked with an enormous challenge - to produce constantly refreshed content for a vast multi-media web portal, and to do this while climbing the world’s highest mountain. I would join up with an elite crew of climbers, cameramen and production personnel and we would attempt to climb the worlds highest peak, film it and bring it to the world live on the web.

It’s hard for us motor freaks to get into those Bike to Work or Walk to Work days. Sure, save the planet and all, but where’s the fun? Here’s the fun. Drive Your Corvette to Work Day. June 29, gas up that curvy Chevy and get down to the job site in style.

Don’t forget, June 29 is Drive Your Vette to Work Day - Autoblog