Feeling lost in our galaxy ? Take the Milky Way transit authority map and find the nearest exit to Sagittarius A !

Sweet ! I was about to install drivers in a Windows7 virtualbox for my el-cheapo Lexmark X1250 printer/scanner, when the Sane dialog popped up on my Linux desktop when I switched on the power. I decided to have a quick look if it was supported under Linux (without much hope, I must say), when I stumbled on this page with detailled instructions. I didn't had to copy the libsane shared lib, so eventually, the scanner was supported with the following instructions :

• Download and install z600cups and z600llpddk
• Copy dll.conf and lexmark.conf to /etc/sane.d/
• Restart Sane with
  

  /etc/init.d/saned restart

and voila ! Scanning time...

Redshift. Cause a monitor at night is no fun.

Is your knowledge of science getting a bit rusty ? Having troubles following your kids with their matrix multiplications ? Head over to the Khan Academy and brush things up, ranging from chemistry over biology to linear algebra.

I've allways had a knack for wrist watches. They are cheap little devices packed with technology. Just as our mobile phones are, albeit in a less cheaper form. Unfortunately, lots of the watch functionality has been taken over by our mobile phones, cause the watch has a screen that can hardly be expanded, and having limited input functionalities. Which left the watch with basic hour-telling functionalities.

Watch makers have responded to this trend by creating watches in specific designs, giving the watch some sort of exclusivity, targeting specific end user groups. Tokyo Flash is a Japanese shop which creates wrist watches with the purpose of making hour-reading seemingly as daunting as possible. This resulted in handless wrist watches, including LED based watches which tell the time in binary form, having a form factor raising from a metallic plate with drilled holes in it, to metallic cylinders with moving LEDs.

I bought myself the Pimp Star Performer, a 44LED based watch with 4 columns each indicating a portion of the time. The watch lights up one number in each column in a Matrix like animation to tell the time. For example: 1-2-5-3 would be 12:53. Some fun stuff is present like a PM indicator in the shape of a martini glass, as PM stands for drinking time.