Okay, just to warn, this a 100% geek post.

I was reading my RSS feeds today to catch up on the news and I came across this really interesting program called Weather Cal that puts the weather forecast on your iCal with these cool little icons that show what the weather is.

Neat huh?

So, I began to wonder… how do they actually get that little icon in the calendar?  It has to be some kind of a character that is supported by unicode (the standard that correlates a character like ‘a’ to the number ’97′, as well as Chinese characters and all that).  I went looking and did find it in unicode.  So for example, here are a few for weather (using two different fonts to show you that each font will display something different):

Now, being as cheap as I am, I was wondering if I could get around paying the stupid $10 to get the program that actually does this for you.  The answer, really, is yes… but I don’t have THAT much time to waste.  Basically, if you go to the page for http://www.wunderground.com/US/CA/Yosemite_National_Park.html, you will find a little icon.  If you right click on that icon and copy the link/URL, go into your iCal program (or some Microsoft rip-off), go into the “Calendar” menu and select “Subscribe”, and paste the URL into the field, you will effectively get the same thing (sans icons).

If you really want to have the little icons, well, find a nice programmer who has spare time on their hands to write a simple parser for you that will find the strings like “sunny,” “cloudy,” etc., and prepend the little sun icon or cloud icon.  However, if you are REALLY going to do that, might as well pay the stupid $10.

UPDATE: Upon further investigation, somebody actually did it for FREE!  Check out http://www.smashin.com/weather.

Yup.  I didn’t believe it.  But when Bert told me you could get the ESV Bible for free on the iPod Touch or iPhone with Kindle, I went online today to check it out.  And yes, it is true.  It is not the prettiest interface for the Bible, but hey, it is free and it is the full version of a solid, present-day translation.

So here’s what you do:

1. Download and install Kindle from the iTunes App Store.
2. Launch the app and login with your Amazon account (I hear it is only doable with a US account).
3. Go to the ESV page on Amazon.com, and you will see a buy option (for the low low price of $0.00) allowing it to send directly to your iPod Touch or iPhone.
4. Relaunch the Kindle app and it should be in your book list.

That’s it!  Enjoy.  :)

First was the barrage of “Hail to the Gates!” articles I came across on Gizmodo.  Today, of course, marks the day of retirement for the Microsoft founder.  Though he is a lot less hip than Steve Jobs and has led a company whose products were just not as cool, you gotta give props to a guy that puts his fortune towards the world.  This is the parable of the 58 billion talents.  Though, if I were him, I would not name the foundation after myself…

Then there was this great article I came across about Legos!  Of course, some people know I have a childhood love for Legos.  But check out a few of these random tidbits from this article:

• Why is there a hole in the head of the mini-figs now? We added this hole on the top of the head just in case any kids got one of the heads stuck on their throat. That way they would be able to keep breathing.
• Why there are no black minifigs? When the minifigure was first introduced 30 years ago, it was given the iconic yellow skin tone to reflect the non-specific and transcendental quality of a child’s imagination. In 2002, as more licensed properties were added to the assortment, the decision was made to introduce ethnic and skin tones more in keeping with the actual characters and personalities who were being replicated. This included the introduction of black minifigures. However, these ethnic minifigures are only used in our licensed sets, all Lego playthemes continue to use the generic yellow face.
• What happens to all the bad pieces? Is there a Lego heaven? Do they recycle them? Due to the precision of the brick molding machines, there are very few “bad” pieces—only 18 elements in every million produced fail to meet the company’s high standards. Extra pieces or pieces from boxes that are caught on the line and identified as missing pieces or have boxes that are slightly damaged are used for donation boxes that are distributed to underprivileged children’s organizations around the world.

But finally I came across a great article that fell closer to my heart than technology or Legos.  It was written by a man named Jim Wallis, the president of Sojourners, a magazine with a mission “to articulate the biblical call to social justice, inspiring hope and building a movement to transform individuals, communities, the church, and the world.”  His article was about the North Campus of New York Theological Seminary located in the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York.  Yes, in prison.  The article and some of the feedback he received is quite inspiring.  It gives a new meaning to “setting the captives free.”  About 70 inmates were getting a full seminary education while in jail.  One prisoner told Jim Wallis,

“Jim, most of us at Sing Sing come from just about four or five neighborhoods in New York City. It’s like a train. You get on the train in my neighborhood when you are nine or ten years old, and the train ends up here….at Sing Sing.” But this young man had experienced a spiritual conversion inside of that prison, and was now enrolled in the New York Seminary program training pastors to work inside the prison system and to go back and work in those neighborhoods from which they had come. After the session that night, the young man came up to me to say goodbye, looked me in the eye, and said, “When I get out, I am going to go back and stop that train.”

This is the message of the gospel: that lives enraptured by God may burst with a contagious hope to impact this world.