SlideScreen is a home screen replacement for mobiles and handsets running on Android. After being pretty used to HTC’s Sense UI on my (still unrooted) HTC Hero, I downloaded SlideScreen just for the fun of it.

I was completely blown away. SlideScreen is beautifully designed, with a restrained aesthetic and succinct information display. In fact, it is one of those rare Android apps that is slick and functional at the same time. No surprise then that the creators, Larva Labs, also make iPhone apps.

SlideScreen is being continually developed and I can’t recommend it enough to anyone with an Android handset. It is a great example of why I think Android can go far with quality developers in an open ecosystem. You will never see a re-imagined interface on something as tightly controlled as the iPhone unless it’s jailbroken.

My only frustration has nothing to do with the app itself: I can’t buy the Pro version (which is reasonably priced at US$7) because paid apps on the Android Market are not available in Singapore yet.

This Venn diagram comic may be a subset of this Venn diagram.

PR2 is a laundry-folding robot, who currently specialises in folding towels after much deep thought. This laundro-bot (whose task in life is officially described as “Cloth Grasp Detection based on multiple-view Geometric Cues with Application to Towel Folding”) can only fold towels for now and very slowly at that, but it’s a great start at finding the perfect companion for my washing machine.

[Via PopSci]

A mistress of perfect consistency, the computer rejects all but the flawless, offering no explanation. When the acceptable is finally offered, the machine’s acceptance is total, unwavering and eternal.

›› Paul Lutus articulates why programmers are societal misfits

That’s some seriously insane (but totally valid) CSS by Román Cortés.

And now I’m feeling thirsty.

In the last year or so, with a growing baby who is so much fun to be with, going to the movies has been a rare event. So nowadays, I find myself watching a lot of movies on HBO.

That’s how I caught Wanted. It was one of those movies that I wanted to watch on the big screen but never found the time to. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, who also did Nightwatch and Daywatch, Wanted is quite a visual spectacle (and I am including Angelina Jolie in that). A dead-end office worker who turns into a deadly assasin, James McAvoy’s Wesley Gibson realises he can bend bullets like Beckham. It was a fun movie, though I thought James McAvoy’s baby-faced assasin look could have been grunged-up a bit.

This is good programming shit, made with good ASCII art shit.

Speaking of which, have you noticed the Google logo when you search for ascii art?

XML is a specialized alphabet that can capture any kind of computer file as a regular text.

›› USA Today really know their shit, don’t they

Let’s say we have a pizza. It has a radius of z and it has a height of a. That would mean it has a volume of

pi * z * z * a.

Thank you reddit. (And yeah, my computer science background makes me define this as a formula, not an algorithm.)

Damn, I’m hungry.

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Brainfuck is so bad it’s good! There is also a JavaScript Brainfuck interpreter if you are so inclined.

Wired has some awesome pictures of computer equipment and parts awaiting their end at an electronics scrap recycling factory in the United States.