This is definately the coolest thing I've seen so far today. This guy has created a fully functional Transforming Transformer Costume! Full video of transform to and from a car. Complete with original transformers TV series soundtrack!
Wow, now this Matrix - For Real video really makes me feel out of shape. Course, I think it makes pretty much anyone feel out of shape compared to this gymnast showing off.
An impressive look at a crash test of a 4x4 vs. Honda Civic Coup 92. Maybe those "I buy it for the safety" people are right after all. Course, when everyone has a tank like SUV, there won't be anymore little cars to smoosh up.
November is almost here and Macenstein has it's “Mac Chick of the Month” up. I link to this because of her great music, nothing to do with her other obvious assets or computer preferences :)
Really, I swear!
Aaron Bockover writes up a cool entry on Cracking down on heap abuse in Mono, telling how he did optimization work in TagLib-Sharp (a mono library for MP3 tagging) and moved memory allocation down from (for example) 103mb to 16mb! I honestly don't 100% understand a lot of what is actually going on, but seeing optimization work like this really is cool to me. Keep up the good work!
Greatest car stunt ever attempted, a rocket powered Lincoln with wings trying to jump across a river. Via Digg. The results are pretty much as you'd expect :)
Pets in Tights - lots of pics of dogs dressed up in silly costumes by their owners, all in one place. Also another collection here on CuteOverload.
So right on schedule, two days after I order my first dual core computer, quad cores are released (or at least announced to release early November. Luckily, quad-core is overkill!
Well that makes me feel better!
Hilarious page with Six Word Stories about Programming Languages.... well, funny for programmers anyway :)
Great video of 2 Kung-Fu guys going after a Yoga guy. Entitled simply: KungFu vs. Yoga.
Oh noes! Someone has done something really wrong with Brokeback Galactica. Guess it's a Battlestar Galactica sorta day.....
So what Rules do men have to live by? Here are 28 Man Laws:
It is OK for a man to cry ONLY under the following circumstances: (a) When a heroic dog dies to save its master. (b) The moment Angelina Jolie starts unbuttoning her blouse. (c) After wrecking your boss's car. (d) One hour, 12 minutes, 37 seconds into "The Crying Game".(e) When she is using her teeth.
For everyone who watches Battlestar Galactica, here's the Atmospheric Jump portion from the last episode, possibly the most awesome 2 minutes in TV memory IMHO. If you're not watching BSG, you really need to! Hurry up now, while there's only 2 seasons to catch up with!
Roland D. Moore's Podcast Commentary is fantastic as well.
Random interesting link for Battlestar Galactica fans, a page with some of the Season 1 shooting locations. More interesting of course for the Vancouverites of course :)
Gizmodo has a fondle of the GeForce 8800GTX. What a monster this thing is. A Direct-X 10 (Vista) based car. They say they aren't sure if the pics are faked or not, but the specs say 768mb of DDR4 RAM, water/fan cooler, and what looks like 4 separate power connectors. Oh, and about 3 feet long (ok, maybe only one).
A new Trailer for the movie Eragon is out in all sizes from small whopping 1080p HD. If you haven't heard about this movie before, well, I haven't either :) However, it looks like a non-sucky, non-cheesy version of Dungeons & Dragons. Dragons, fireballs, wizards and magic, oh my!
Or rather, Kwotes. Hilarious and similar to Bash.org.
The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
Hit the site for more.
Ah, it is bash.org, or at least, their database. From the frontpage:
First off, Bash.org sucks... but not their content. They're privately moderated, and not OpenSource, that's not cool. Kwotes is the complete opposite, and excels in more ways than one over Bash.org. It's free and OpenSource, publicly moderated, and 100 times more functional. This site uses Kwotes for those reasons. This database is basically the Bash.org database. Every quote on it (virtually) was taken from the bash.org website.
Ooooh! A nice long movie from the up-coming, hardware-obsoleting, pixel-pumping Crysis game. The graphics and physics look great, as a few commenters in the threads note, the story (super advanced technology, evil alien enemy, one lone soldier to save the world, blah blah blah) isn't anything new.
Anyone have any experience with upstart - event-based init daemon? The program was developed for Ubuntu (who released 6.10 today).
It sounds pretty interesting, from this page on the Gentoo forums:
Upstart brings the concept of an event-driven init system, taking benefit from hotplug to decide when to start processes. Eventualy upstart should even replace crond and inetd (InitNG has similar plans to cron). Besides a dependency awareness (like the current gentoo initscripts), parallel startup (idem) and better hardware utilization (like InitNG and others), Upstart is supposed to bring response to ACPI events, avaliability of network connections and so on.
Here are some getting started docs which has some more specifics.
Super cool.... a Battlestar Galactica music video. Hard to describe, just go watch.
Linux.com has a nice first look at Gaim 2.0. For those who don't know, GAIM is a trillian-like instant messanger client for GNOME which does MSN, ICQ, Jabber, and just about everything under the sun. The 2.0 version is the first major update in quite a while and looks good!
Philip shows off some of the work he's been doing on Tinymail, a stripped down, PDA oriented mail library based off of camel, what evolution (AKA a memory hungry pig) uses. Anyway, his patches and graphs show what happens when a group of people are dedicated to optimization. I'm pretty sure that you'll be hard pressed to find a mail client/library that uses under 12mb of memory when downloading 30,000 imap headers, much less 8mb! (8-ish, can't read the graph exactly).
Glad to see this stuff happening, hope some of it makes it back to Evolution so I can start using that again instead of always falling back to good 'ol Mutt for performance / convenience reasons.
Very cool pics of a shuttle take off that jwz linked to.
Just so you know I'm not all anti-microsoft (though I do go on a tear sometimes), I'm pretty impressed with this Zune review.
All in all, any reservations I had about the device melted away after I had a few moments with the Zune. Yes, it is a first-generation product but I really like the direction Microsoft is taking with the Zune. Regardless of either the Zune or the iPod, the consumer will be the winner of this new front in the battle for our entertainment lifestyle.
I'm still not convinced it's an iPod killer, but it does sound like it's a pretty cohesive app / service and of course MS is going to leverage whatever they have to make sure it integrates with your OS, console system, etc. Lets say that I am hitting the point where I wouldn't mind checking one out at least.
... on this site, about zero. However, you'd think that on a real news site, say I don't know, CNN for example, a fair amount of their content would be real news right? lokiloki did a bit of a look and found this wasn't so. I don't totally agree with his asertion, and of course it does depend on your definition of "real content", but at the same time, it's hard to argue looking at the front page that there's not a lot of content there.
Even clicking 'full story' for the frontpage news (currently some crazy dear leader guy sending mixed messages.... what, did he not kiss us on the lips the morning after or somethign?), the actual content is presented squeezed between video links, related stories, and skyscraper ads. I don't disagree with ads, or at least, as much as I used to. Hell, you guys help me keep this site up and running by doing you-know-what on the you-know-whats! When your focus is supposed to be the "must trusted name in news", shouldn't your focus be the news, not having it jammed in the center of a bunch of other stuff?
Course, it's a relection of society today. Epilepsy-inducing myspace pages, digg/reddit oriented "top X reasons to Y" type "stories", news / link blogs like this one, video games, billboards with flashy lights and animated whatzits all seem to be ways that are needed lately to keep our attention, hell, to catch our attention in our ADD type attitudes. Time to take time off from the computer, news on TV with it's 18 different scrolling banners, and just sit and read a good book.
This is very cool. Lured in by this reddit story about what Sam and Frodo really saw on the set of LoTR:TTT, I checked out the rest of the site, which has lots of really cool visuals from movies, both matte paintings and pre-visualization artwork.
If you're a Folding @ Home user, you may want to check out this review of the GPU client. Long story short, doing the calculations in your graphics card's processor looks to be way more efficient (though a bit more power hungry).
The downside? Only the ATI Radeon X1900 is supported :(
They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.
Never heard of the movie before, the trailer for Hot Fuzz looks great though.
The boys over at Songbirdsnest have released Songbird 0.2 onto the world. This is not the 0.02 release from last month.... nope, we dropped a whole zero! Songbird is a Firefox based music player/library/everything. From their page:
"It’s like taking iTunes, ripping out the music store, and replacing it with the rest of the internet."
Speaking of the iTunes store, if the GNOME Music player Banshee has a plugin to allow you to access the iTunes music store, I'm sure that can be plugged into this app.
One thing that I'd like to know is can I sync podcasts to an iPod (or other music player) with it? I presume something like that will show up before release though, this is version 0.2 only of course. As far as the idea it's pretty cool, scraping for media, etc etc. Anyone using this yet?
Ugh :( Just when I was thinking that the BF2142 that I wrote about a couple of times with the ads in it might not be that bad I saw a post with a shot of an in-game ad.
Is it just me or is that really, really offensive offensive? Especially with the game running on the same engine as BF2 and the cost being the same? With things like this and the previous story about Vista licensing, is it just me or are companies (and the government, but that's another story) taking more and more liberties away from the end users?
Wendy has a nice article on how Windows licensing disserves the user. Apparently Microsoft doesn't realize that users actually should matter, instead of extra money.
2. Vanishing functionality through invalidation. "The software will from time to time validate the software, update or require download of the validation feature of the software. … [if validation fails] you may not be able to use or continue to use some of the features of the software." Again, your computer must make periodic (period unspecified) contact with the Microsoft mothership if you want to continue to enjoy what you thought you paid for. Microsoft, of course, disclaims any liability for the consequences if their servers fail or mistakenly deny you validation.
How many of these just look like really bad ideas? (via digg).
Congrats to the IE7 team for releasing Internet Explorer 7, the first release for... well lets just say a while. Commentary as well as fixes and ways to get this installed if the standard WGA-infested way doesn't work for you is here.
Update: First vulnerability found. 'Nuff said.
With the controversy about Battlefield 2142 and it's built in spyware and ads (possible fix here), some videos of ET: Quake Wars have come out and wow it looks awesome. Hopefully this game is as cool as it looks, and the results will dissuade EA from bundling non-opt-out spyware and ads into their games (and not giving users a choice, and not even reducing the price for the ad infected version).
As an aside, anyone found any images of the ads in the BF2142?
Darren pointed me to this very funny (I'm told) reading by John Hodgman at Codys San Francisco. This is the PC guy from the Apple ads and includes musical accompaniment. From the first 2 minutes it's definitely a must see :)
Gizmodo brings news of the first North American PlayStation 3 commercial, found here. Sadly they forgot to include anything in the ad to about the PS3 or to indicate what it was about (well, except for the last 3 seconds of footage, and even then it's just a date).
Interesting response from Steve Jobs regarding the ear. Basically says that Apple clients get the girl.
Personally I'm not all that interested in the Zune. Just like the other 30 "iPod Killers" on the market right now with similar and in some cases higher specs / more features, they just don't make me frunny in the pants if you know what I mean. I'm sure that MS will continue their grassroots / astroturfing campaign to show how so many people just love the Zune and might even gain some foothold in the market. However, since they are still being compared to the iPod still, and since music/media players are still referred to as "iPod Killers", we know who is on top. When we're looking at the top 32 Zune killers some Christmas, then things will have changed.
What I am looking for for myself (and I doubt such a thing exists):
A list of the Top 46 Things To Do When Your ISP Is Down.
Darren threw me a collection of cat pics with titles.... that about says it all. Most funny and most cute.
An article on The easiest way to get rich. Nothing glamorous like becoming a famous photographer, novelist, or .com billionaire, however, the advice here is probably more realistic :)
Apparently there were some power issues last night at the colo, which were resolved around 11am this morning. Appolagies to all.
And now you can go back to your daily Halloween bad costume linkage :)
I haven't kept up on my Pure Pwnage videos, looks like they have some cool new stuff though. First of all, a store with some cool stuff (going on a shopping spree soon, need more t-shirts). They are also doing episode screenings, nov 2 in Vancouver just down the road! Wh00t! I'll be going methinks.
"Don't do Witchcraft.... do your homework!
I love Chick tracts...
Without comment I present this image thanks to my buddy Brian.
The first video is long, but this guy is good. Basically a Japanese version of David Blaine, before he went crazy. Videos (and note the related videos) here.
No idea what "Motion Wave" is, but they have a really cool popup ad. You'll have to allow it with your pop up blocker, and make sure you have your browser set to allow window resizing (the pop up with change size). Very cool and interesting use. Course, if it just popped up on me without being directed to it through internet buzz, it'd be closed right quick :) Also has sound.
Not to be outdone by sponsored research from Microsoft coming to the conclusion that Microsoft is better/faster/more productive and uses less calories, Apple has recommended that 30" monitors increase worker productivity compared to 17" or 19" monitors. Todd Weiss writes about it here.
You don't think that it's a coincidence that Apple has some 30" displays? No, couldn't be.
As an aside I checked out an Apple 30" display in the local Apple store last weekend. Gads the thing was massive, I felt like I'd have to sit on the other side of the room to not have to move my head looking at it. Still a bit pricey for my pocketbook (unless of course you use Scoble Finances, which involves just putting big expensive things on your credit card... :)
Here's something cool / funky for all you flight sim geeks out there. A side by side comparison of -a landing in real life compared to Flight Sim X.
Very cool video from a former North Korean Bodyguard talking about his training. I definitely wouldn't want to piss one of these guys off!
As if I didn't have enough to do today, Darren pointed me to Heroes graphic novel online. Heroes is the new (and IMHO very cool) TV show about ordinary people discovering they have super powers. Think X-Men meets Unbreakable.
Check out this sweet gaming desk. I love the first comment :)
Another great Halloween costume idea, this time Gordon Freeman of half life fame.
Darren (of StaticRed fame, threw me a link to the Limbo teaser page. Looks like a fun game. Anyone know any details about it?
Something funky like a GhostBusters Proton Pack, Wand, and Trap will certainly get the other kids attention! Well, those over 20 anyway, the rest of those youngsters will just go "huh?" and go back to customizing their myspace pages with more annoying animated whatzits and thingamabobbles. Damn kids get off my lawn!
Title says it all. Well, there goes my weekend!
Hilarious video of a jeep, NOX, and a lake. You do the math.
Most of the time, man overrides nature. Every once and a while, nature gets it's own.
A very cool movie I've seen on a couple of link sites entitled Spin and resisted watching. Something about two turntables and a time machine sounded lame/odd. I broke down and watched it and it's great, must see, and you can trust me :)
Dave passes on that the "real" 300 Trailer is up and online.
This is a pretty trippy flash page graphically displaying infinity (well, kinda). Just check it out.
Cool video of a Su-27 Crash via Digg. An amazing perspective from a ballsy cameraman.
OK, combine propane, open flame and science, and you get a cool video showing what sound waves do. "Real life visualizations"! Very cool. Now I need to hook one of those up above my monitor :)
Via reddit.
A collection of really stupid Superman comic book covers.
