Legoland Pictures And you thought your lego was cool? Think again. Via fark.

XFMail 1.5.3 RC1 Yup, my buddy cfreeze has been doing awsome work with XFMail and has released 1.5.3RC1, which has some new stuff, including tip of the day, bug fixes, some icon fixes, xforms 1.0 support, gcc 3.1 support, and various other fixes and improvements.

Daniel Robbins (Gentoo) Interview Tinyminds has a good interview with Daniel Robbins, of gentoo fame. It goes into the future, installers, spin-offs gcc-3.1, and the compile slowdows. An excellent article.

Spoof Sites CynicalBastards.com has some great spoofs of places like Ikea, and has perfected the wankometer (on which ufies.org ranks only .29). Surf, enjoy, repeat.

Mozilla Wallpaper My buddy LIMOS threw me a pretty funky Mozilla wallpaper. I think it's been making the rounds, but this is the first I've seen of it. Tis good, and a nice high res as well.

GNOME2 for Debian Woody Debianplanet.org has a story with the sources.list lines for GNOME2 for Woody in it. Unlike the last post about this, these packages don't seem to completely conflict with all your GNOME1 packages.

GNOME-o-Phone Gnome-o-Phone is a project to allow users to call each other via a sound card and network connection. Anyone tried this or other similar software? I know phone type software is built into the Windows version of ICQ, but I've never had a chance to use it.

Jokes Couple of amusing jokes that have passed through my way in the last little while, and figured I'd share 'em with ya'll. Click on the read more.... Joke #1 (via LIMOS)

A lawyer opened the door of his BMW, when suddenly a car came along and hit the door, ripping it off completely. When the police arrived at the scene, the lawyer was complaining bitterly about the damage to his precious BMW. "Officer, look what they've done to my Beeeeemer!" he whined."You lawyers are so materialistic, you make me sick!" retorted the officer. "You're so worried about your stupid BMW, that you didn't even notice that your left arm was ripped off!""Oh my God," replied the lawyer, finally noticing the bloody left shoulder where his arm once was. "Where's my Rolex?!?"

Joke #2 (via Shawn)

I was in the VIP lounge last week en route to Seattle, when I noticed Bill Gates sitting on the couch enjoying a drink. I was meeting a very important client that was also flying to Seattle with me, but she was running a bit late.

Being the fairly forward person I am, I approached Mr. Gates and introduced myself. I explained to him that I was conducting some very important business, and how I would appreciate it if he could throw a quick "Hello Chris" at me while I was with my client. He agreed.

Ten minutes later when I was conversing with my client, I felt a tap on my shoulder.It was Bill Gates. I turned around and looked up at him.

He said "Hey Chris, what's happening?" I replied, "Beat it Gates! I'm in a meeting!"

Free Online Workout Plan Now this is pretty cool! Workoutplan.com is a free online workout planner. It seems pretty complete, and allows you to check which goals you want (loose weight, add weight, add bulk, etc), generates a plan for the week for you, and allows you to update your (weight|muscle circumference|whatever) and track progress. Very nifty!

How to Weightlift Another good one over on K5 is this article on lifting weights. It's part 2, and part 1 is good as well, though not as "nitty gritty" as part 2. Anyone who is thinking of going to the gym, or is and wants to make sure they are doing it right, this is a good read.

C++ Tips and Tricks K5 has a great article detailing some c++ bag of tricks. In there are some tools and programs that will make your c++ programming (and some work for just C as well of course) faster and quicker (or at least better :)

New Dpkg Format Debianplant has a neat article and link on a new debian packaging format. This will support some pretty nifty stuff. Something interesting to follow...

XP Warez Beware Looks like Microsoft is doing a good attempt to shut down the XP pirates who use the XP Professional edition. Included with SP1, this shiny new feature is included. Rumor has it that the way it will work is report it's unique IP to MS upon installation, to ensure that the number of installations doesn't exceed the corporate license. Still rumors at the moment, but interesting nonetheless.

Facial Flounders in Boston The Register has a good article on the failings of the US's latest and greatest attempts to eliminate freedom^w"terra" from the world at large... facial recognition at the Boston airport. My dear American readers, please pardon my sarcasm, but there's only so much that one can do with no results before people start to become exasperated.

IIRC a similar scheme involving using thumbprints to buy groceries (MIT? something like that... anyone got a link?).... this can be foiled 95% of the time I'm told, with about $5 worth of easy to obtain materials, used to create a gummy "fake" thumbprint.

GnomeStuff Reviews LinuxOrbit.com has some good reviews on some new GNOME stuff. This includes Rox Filer, quite possibly the coolest and fastest file manager around!

The Damian Spake... Headed down to seattle last night to the Seattle Perl Users Group meeting to see a talk by The Damian. Damian Conway is well known for his many cool ass perl modules, as well as his book Object Oriented Perl. The talk was not on perl so much as other things, which (as the talk was a warm up for the YAPC) I'm not at liberty to reveal. However, The Damian was a fantastic speaker, as well as a damn interesting one. He is a better teacher than my high school physics teachers as well. If you get a chance to go to YAPC, or see Damian speak anywhere, I heartily suggest you do so. If you're in the pacific northwest and have the opportunity to head down to Seattle for the SPUG meetings, head down there, it's worth the drive!

B5 Quote Generator For all the Babylon 5 people out there, Mithrandir has found a cool B5 Quote generator, spitting a new B5 quote out on reload. Tres cool!

Halo for Mac Nose Rubbing Found an article off bluesnews about the mac release of halo, with words of wisdom to those who thought it would never come. I still say the proof is when you lay the game down in front of me, but we have to wait for 2003 before that happens, for both PC and Mac. It's really too bad this couldn't have happened back when it was announced in 1999, when Halo would have been just that cool a game, before the rest of the clones of FPS and 3rd PS came along. I still have yet to play it, but I am filled with far less awe now adays than I was a few years ago. But as the old adage goes, "blame microsoft"

New Kevin Smith Movie in the works Well, sounds like after Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Kevin Smith is working on a new movie called "Jersey Girl". He's got a diary set up for the inside scoop.

Halo for PC Oh happy day! Halo for the PC is here! Finally....

Wiki Support for Debian Cool! Someone has set up a wiki for a Debian support forum. This will allow users to freely add and modify documentation about the debian project.

Logos A neat site with logos, for the purpose of inspiring others. The site was found originally by tig.

Controlling RL With Computers K5 has a neat article tucked away in their technology section about controlling a light with your Personal Computer. It's a rather long and involved article, but definately neat.

Twenty Don'ts for ASP Programmers Should you be a writer of ASP, securityfocus has a list of some Don'ts for ASP Developers.

How to screw the artist In the /. story about a k5 story on audiogalaxy, there's a good link to an atricle called Major Labels: the problem with music. It has a lot of the elements from Courtney Love does the Math article, with an interesting breakdown of the numbers at the bottom of the page.

Mmmm.... climbing..... Yummy, some sweet Yosemite rock climbing pictures.

Blender Tutorial Not sure if you've seen the Blender news on /., but I found this tutorial on using Blender linked somewhere or other.

Secure Programming Nice HOWTO on Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO.

Cool Search Thingy The TouchGraph GoogleBrowser is the coolest search engine thing I've seen all week (or more)! It uses google to create a cool ass graph-thingy (in java, cause java rocks), for a selected URL. Hard to describe, best to try out.

On that note, check out the full story on geeknews. I'd give you the url, but you have to be a member to even view a story (and post/read comments), and that offends me. Just scroll down a bit and look for the "graphical searching" story, which points to googlebrowser, amazon vista, google set vista and kartoo. Hmm... maybe you don't have to read the GN story after all!

Tripping the Rift News Just got an email from Harry, a regular reader (yay! a reader!) and he passed on some big news from TrippingTheRift.com!

Well, BIG NEWS from http://www.trippingtherift.com/

Cin�Groupe and Film Roman to Produce SCI FI Animated Series

The newly formed alliance of Canadian production company Cin�Groupe and animation producer Film Roman Studios has begun production on SCI FI Channel's first-ever animated series TRIPPING THE RIFT. The CG-animated series is based on the short film of the same name, with thirteen half-hour episodes slated to debut in first quarter 2003 as part of SCI FI's regular Friday primetime line-up of original series. Created by Chuck Austen and Chris Moeller, TRIPPING THE RIFT follows the adventures of The Free Enterprise, a smuggling vessel led by a purple alien called Chode who, along with his misfit shipmates, battles enemies and new obstacles in space each week.

Pretty damn cool.

Pretty damn cool is right.... tripping the rift (esp the high quality 200meg version) has graced my hard drive for ages now, and a new one is lfantastic news!!

Happy July 4th! Just wanted to wish all the 'merkins out there a happy July 4^th. Don't blow too many fingers off with those fireworks eh? :-)

The Right to Read The Right to Read is a paranoid look at the future by RMS. A bit over the top, but looking at some of the stuff people are trying to pull (MS's Palladium for example, and all the privacy-stealing policies brought forth in the war on terra), perhaps not too far off the mark.

Toilet or Aquarium Via ICQ from Iambe comes the Aquarium Toilet. I gotta get me one of these!

How to Take down the Record Industry How to Take Down the Music Industry is an open letter to artists and musicians posted on k5.

Two Towers Trailer Via shacknews comes a nice high res version of the Two Towers Trailer. Quicktime required still sadly, so break out the windows box or crossover plugin.