Perhaps as a unique side dish for your next dinner party you would like to serve potatoes carved to resemble Dutch wooden shoes? Or maybe you’d like to serve some seafood in a premade pastry fish shell. NextDayGourmet.com is actually the retail website for US Foodservice, one of the top food service distributers in the US. You’ll find restaurant equipment in addition to foodstuffs like pasta, olives, and carved veggies.

Time has some bits of information about the upcoming Matrix sequels. It notes that Gloria Foster (the kindly Oracle) did finish shooting her scenes for the second film before she passed away. A trailer will be in movie theatres this month. I believe I saw a Star Wars trailer when I saw The Matrix, so perhaps this time it will be the other way around.

Powerpuff Girls: The Movie! July 3rd. (via BrainLog)

London company Shazam has created software that can listen to a song and match it up to one in their database. With the user interface of a mobile phone in front of this application, subscribers can call a special number when they hear a song they like, no matter if it’s in an elevator or on the radio, and be told the name and artist. Details about the tune can also be added to their online account so that users can easily make a purchase. The chief scientist for the music recognition algorithm is Avery Wang, formerly of Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music. The service will be launched in the UK this summer with a price of 50p a call. At the time of the demo for a Guardian article, the database had 300,000 songs and they hope to grow it to 1.6 million by August. Perhaps this is a technology that the music industry can finally get behind. But the privacy issues could be interesting. Combine it with GPS (or just a caller’s cell location) and you have a spy application for the music licensing folks. (via Jish)

Kevin Hoover brings the police logs of Arcata, CA to life with his prose and poetry (sometimes haiku). He is “celebrating the ridiculous.” Some items are too serious to warrant light-hearted exposition, but many incidents in the small town are brought to life with wry observations and a rhyme or two. Read for yourself. (via both sides of Jim Romenesko)

Coming in August, the Schoolhouse Rock Special Edition DVD! That’s right, all the Science Rock, Multiplication Rock, Money Rock, America Rock, and Grammar Rock plus extras on two DVDs. A set of 25 “best of” songs will be released on VHS, selected by your votes, so don’t let this democratic opportunity go to waste. (via NowThis)

Each floor in New York City’s Library Hotel is devoted to one of ten Dewey Decimal Classification categories, and the six rooms on each floor contain books from a specific topic in that category. The hotel is near the New York Public Library, where hotel management would probably prefer people to check their books out from. According to one article, book lovers are leaving with more than the towels from their rooms. Perhaps they need to have their 6,000 books catalogued into the honor bar system. (thanks for the tip Mark!)

Every October I try to stop by the Bay Area Glass Institute‘s Glass Pumpkin Patch. It’s a fun event with glass pumpkins of all sizes and colors scattered about the grass. I wasn’t entirely surprised to find, as I was going through the MIT Glass Lab‘s pages, a link to their own Glass Pumpkin Patch. It’s a great fund raising idea for a glass shop, after all. But I was surprised to find that the connection was tight. BAGI was founded by an MIT alum and glass blowers from the Bay Area traveled to MIT to work on pumpkins for a September sale. It’s not just computer engineering that links the two locations together. (MIT link via Bifurcated Rivets)

If you’ve met a lot of stereotypical computer geeks, you’ve probably met your share of Leathermans. I see them attached to belts everywhere in the Sili Valley. Brand Channel has a feature on this versatile tool. Written by a writer based in South Africa, it gives a unique perspective on how Leatherman grew its business in that country by forming personal relationships with retailers and providing over-the-top customer repair services. It was a trip in an ailing Fiat devoid of tools that spurred engineer Tim Leatherman to spend seven years creating the popular multi-tool.

The first laptop I used regularly was a GRiD, not surprising since I was working there. I don’t recall the exact model, but I remember I loved its pointing device which was an Isobar. I haven’t seen one since and I have difficulty describing it to people. A web search revealed that the Outbound Notebook, a Macintosh portable “clone” (they could not legally sell the Mac ROMS so they were somewhat doomed), also featured this device. You can see the Isobar in the photos and there’s a description: “a metal tube located just below the keyboard. It can roll forwards and back, or slide left and right.” Because of the length of the tube, you could use either (or both) thumbs to control the movement, and you could press down for a mouse click. I became very accustomed to it and struggled with all subsequent portable pointing devices with the exception of IBM’s Trackpoint.