If you had the idea that books were the only thing Australians over paid for (I know, none of you believe that) check this out from Nintendo. The new Super Mario Bros. has an RRP in the US of $49 USD which is $50.235 AUD. You can buy it on Amazon. According to EBGames, the RRP for the Australian version is $98 AUD, for a markup of almost 100% of the US price.
Via The Age
Check it out: http://blog.booko.com.au/?p=319
Over on the Booko Blog.
If so, a friend of mine is running an art prize. Check it out: http://www.therealartprize.com/
Entry is free and there’s a cash prize. Nothing to loose!
I’m selling my last one on Ebay right now!
Get yourself a bargain!
Went out to race my RC car on the weekend. It broke inside two laps. See Marshall Banana’s posts for pics / details.
This is from 2006 – wonder what they’ve done since.
I’ve been playing with Twitter lately – I created a Booko Twitter account to reserve the account name while I consider using it. I’ve got my own Twitter account and I had a bit of a play around with it, but honestly using Twitter via the web seems like a drag. Yet another page to watch. Plus, I subscribed to the MelbTransport guy’s page and all I could think was “Can’t I filter this to show me only the updates I’m interested in?” – apparently no, you can’t.
I had a look at the applications out there to manage your tweets but all I could think was “Man, another app to run, another distraction.”. I’ve already got email and IM, I don’t really want another app bouncing in the Dock to tell me someone’s posted a message. So, I got to thinking, maybe there’s a way to get Twitter messages to be sent to me via IM? Had a brief look around but didn’t immediately find anything suitable. A quick Google however netted two interesting Ruby Gems – twitter and xmpp4r-simple, which give you a nice Ruby interface to Twitter and Jabber. So, after a couple of hours of hacking around, getting my Twitter account temporarily rate limited and creating Jabber accounts, I’ve got a very simple Twitter <-> Jabber gateway going.
It will post tweets to your Jabber account & you can reply! Your reply will get posted to Twitter. As an added bonus I added filtering so I can see only what I want from MelbTransport guy’s updates. You can easily add your own filters in there – hopefully it’s pretty straight forward.
Now, I know this isn’t beautiful, elegant Ruby code – feel free to leave constructive criticism in the comments.
[sourcecode language='ruby']
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require ‘rubygems’
require ‘twitter’
require ‘xmpp4r-simple’
require ‘benchmark’
jabber_user=”sendinguser@jabber.org.au”
jabber_pass=”"
$receiving_jabber = “receivinguser@jabber.org.au”
twitter_user=”twitteruser”
twitter_pass=”"
jabber = twitter = nil
cj = Benchmark.realtime {jabber = Jabber::Simple.new(jabber_user, jabber_pass)}
puts “Connecting to Jabber: #{cj}”
ct = Benchmark.realtime {twitter = Twitter::Base.new(twitter_user, twitter_pass) }
puts “Connecting to Twitter: #{ct}”
def filters(status)
if status.user.name == “MelbTransport”
yield if status.text =~ /Craigieburn|Broadmeadows|Upfield/
else
yield
end
end
def get_tweets(twitter, tweets, jabber)
begin
twitter.timeline.reverse.each do |s|
if tweets[s.id].nil?
filters(s) { jabber.deliver($receiving_jabber, “#{s.user.name} says: #{s.text}”) }
tweets[s.id] = “Sent”
end
end
rescue Twitter::CantConnect
puts “Can’t connect. Sleeping.”
sleep 120
retry
end
end
def post_tweets(twitter, jabber)
jabber.received_messages { |msg| twitter.post(msg.body) if msg.type == :chat }
end
def main(twitter, jabber)
tweets = {}
while true
puts “Action!”
get_tweets(twitter, tweets, jabber)
post_tweets(twitter, jabber)
sleep 60
end
end
main(twitter, jabber)
[/sourcecode]
Edits:Reversed the order of the timeline to match how they should show up in IM (IE – oldest at the top, newest at the bottom.