BrokenRobot

According to the (awesomely-named) International Earth Rotation Society, tomorrow night the minute 23:59 will be 61 seconds long, instead of the normal boring 60 seconds. This is called a leap second, and last occurred in 1998. Leap seconds are required to align the world's atomic and other super-accurate reference clocks with solar time, which varies slightly due to the earth's rotation not being perfectly constant. So instead of 23:59:59 followed by 00:00:00, tomorrow night (One Night Only!) the world's reference clocks will tick 23:59:59, 23:59:60, 00:00:00. Neat!

More details in the IERS's official bulletin. (via JWZ)

Posted by Brian at 10:40 PM | Permalink

I'm not the world's biggest Tony Robbins fan, but he occasionally has some interesting things to say that aren't bogged down with his psychological mumbo jumbo. He's just posted a PDF document to his web site containing some useful self-examination questions for those of us making (and hoping to stick to) 2006 New Year's resolutions.

Momentum 2006 (note: PDF file. Via Steve Pavlina)

Posted by Brian at 10:32 PM | Permalink

Aleph One is an open-source version of Bungie's amazing Marathon engine for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. Since Marathon the game is no longer for-sale, Bungie has released the engine to the open-source community, but (unlike other companies like id Software that have done similarly) they have also released the full set of assets (graphics, sounds, maps, etc.) for all three Marathon games (Marathon, Marathon 2, Marathon Infinity). This means you can download and play the game today! I spent many, many, hours playing Marathon on my old Power Mac 7200/75 in college, back when it was pretty much the cutting-edge FPS. Even today, the trilogy stands out for its incredibly-detailed story line and mythology and its vast library of user-created content. Very highly-recommended.

Posted by Brian at 10:25 PM | Permalink

HP has a new high-definition (1080i) rear-projection TV out with a pretty neat feature I haven't seen anywhere else. The "patch panel" of input jacks faces the front of the TV (and is normally covered by a removable panel). It looks like you'd still need to get behind the TV to feed the cables through the bottom, I could definitely see this coming in handy as compared to the usual hassle of crawling behind and fumbling blindly for the right jacks.

(via 37signals)

Posted by Brian at 10:15 PM | Permalink