Turtle Platform

I was recently given a very adorable red eared slider named Fluffy.  For those of you who don’t know what a red eared slider is check out this Wikipedia entry. Unfortunately, he was having a very hard time getting up on his floating platform to bask under the UV lamp. It was incredibly funny watching Fluffy climb up on top of the platform only to flip over and fall back into the water. However, I’m sure Fluffy wasn’t having a very good time of it. So, I decided to build a better platform. Plywood, dowel rods, drill, glue, and screws – now Fluffy is able to climb out of the water and bask to his heart’s content.

Theme for Nokia N80

I was getting really bored of the limited number of themes I had on my Nokia N80, but I really didn’t want to pay one of those download sites for a new theme. So, I did some poking around and discovered that Nokia is nice enough to provide a theme editor called Carbide UI. It even integrates with the Nokia PC Suite to install the theme on the phone. But wait, it gets even better, the entire application runs in Eclipse – my most favorite IDE for just about everything – Java, PHP, HTML, JSP, Perl, Cold Fusion, and so on. Oh happy, happy, joy, joy! :0)

Anyway, I started out by reading through a pretty decent tutorial, but since the interface was easy enough to just play around with, that’s exactly what I did.

The end result: My own personalized geekopolis theme.

Granted, I had to resort to using paint to develop new graphics and reusing some of the sample graphics that were provided with Carbide UI. So, my theme isn’t the prettiest. However, for a first attempt, it’s not too bad. In any case, I’ll probably spend more time tweaking my theme and learning how to properly use all the features when I get some more time.