March 31, 2008
Hand Painting

Hands, plus paint, equals... ? How about this set of pictures. Numbers 12 and 17 are my favorites... very creative (though I hope this isn't his only skill!).

Posted by Arcterex at 12:55 PM
March 30, 2008
Shaving with a Straight Razor

Just as a note, when you put out a video on how to Learn to Shave with a Straight Razor, noting that you cut your face badly enough to leave a scar probably isn't the best idea. However, still a cool video on how to do a badass thing :)

Posted by Arcterex at 09:26 AM
March 28, 2008
LOLCat Filk

LOL Together--a lolcat filk of the Beatles' "Come Together". I'm really not sure if there's anything else to say.... it's hilarious and surreal at the same time.

Posted by Arcterex at 02:37 PM
X-Files 2 Trailer and Poster

‘X-Files 2’ Second Trailer and Official Poster over at Geeks of Doom.

Posted by Arcterex at 02:24 PM
March 27, 2008
Doctor Who Season 4 Trailer

Doctor Who Season 4 trailer!! Not actually high quality, youtube only.... man, I can't wait!

Posted by Arcterex at 10:29 PM
Photoshop Express / Tutorials Released

Photoshop Express - Getting Started is a set of videos for the Photoshop Express beta that was just released.

Posted by Arcterex at 01:37 PM
Public Build of Acid3 Compliant Webkit Available

To match up with Opera getting 100% in Acid3 on an internal build yesterday, WebKit achieves Acid3 100/100 in public build. Of course, it's apple only AFAIK, so we still have the "first public windows build to pass Acid3" award :)

Posted by Arcterex at 10:33 AM
March 26, 2008
Opera Passes Acid3 Test

Seems an internal build of Opera is the first browser to pass Acid3 test. Good to hear.... though these days 100% compliance doesn't really mean anything, depending on who you talk to. Still, 100% compliant browsers can't be all that bad, can it?

Posted by Arcterex at 02:43 PM
Battlefield: Bad Company First Impressions

The guy from Ctrl-Alt-Delete has some words on the Battlefield: Bad Company beta. I think I'm most looking forward to the destructable-ness of the environment, hopefully this one won't require the hardware that Crysis needs.

Posted by Arcterex at 02:30 PM
Reasons You May Need a Girlfriend

Ten Reasons Why I Need A Girlfriend at Duane Storey.

Posted by Arcterex at 01:25 PM
The Internet Strikes Back at Bell Canada Bandwidth Throttling

Ars Technica has the goods on how Canadian ISPs furious about Bell Canada's traffic throttling. As a sysadmin of a canadian ISP who does resell from Bell I can relate. On one hand bandwidth throttling isn't a terrible thing, on another it's a slippery slope from restricting P2P traffic to other services.

Posted by Arcterex at 09:31 AM
March 25, 2008
Food Packages And Reality

From the "No shit, Sherlock" department comes PUNDO3000.com which (in German) shows what the packages of food look like compared to the actual contents. Unsurprisingly, there's a fairly wide gap between the two.

Posted by Arcterex at 01:23 PM
Unreal Engine 3 Tech Demo

Shacknews reports: Epic Releases High-def Unreal Engine 3 Tech Trailer. Fairly cool show, some very sexy next-get graphical goodness (especially the destructable environmental elements!).

Posted by Arcterex at 01:09 PM
March 24, 2008
Best and Worst Puns

The Best Pun list via Digg.


I tried to come up with a pun about famous German philosophers, but I Kant.

Very punny.

Thankyou, thankyou, I'll be here all night.

Posted by Arcterex at 03:53 PM
Porta and Companion Cube Spotted

Seems that the companion cube has been spotted in the wild!

Posted by Arcterex at 03:50 PM
March 23, 2008
One Sweet PC Setup

Pictures and details of a very sweet Tri-Monitor Rackmount Computer Build.

Posted by Arcterex at 09:37 PM
March 20, 2008
Book Autopsies

Brian Dettmer's insanely creative Book Autopsies - super cool.... not 100% sure what sort of brain you need to come up with this stuff, but I'm glad someone does!

Posted by Arcterex at 11:34 AM
1-900 Nerd Girl

1-900-NERD-GIRL = Slander and Lies! - pointed to me by someone, the argument that there are sexy nerd girls. The host is quite hot too, I will have to peruse some of the other videos. Just wish I could subscribe to youtube via itunes like other video podcasts.... oh well, soon enough.

Posted by Arcterex at 07:54 AM
March 19, 2008
Rails 2.0 Performance

There's been some benchmarking doing a Performance comparison: Rails 1.2.6 vs 2.0.2. According to the blog entry rails 2.0 gives about a 30-50% speed increase. Good to see that things are getting faster as they mature!

Posted by Arcterex at 03:20 PM
Early Look at OpenOffice 3.0

Slashdot pointed to OpenOffice.org 3.0's new features, an early look. Highlights - some visual improvements, notes in margin (looks cool), office 2007 compatibility (wonder if MS opening up the API documentation helped with this), charts and tables improvements, and more.

Posted by Arcterex at 02:49 PM
Coming Soon: Facebook Chat

Valleywag has a Demo video of Facebook Chat. Looks fairly well implemented, not obtrusive and fairly usable. We'll see how it goes when it actually comes out.

Posted by Arcterex at 02:32 PM
Zero Punctuation Reviews Turok

The Escapist : Zero Punctuation: Turok is out today.... awesome review as usual.

Posted by Arcterex at 10:04 AM
March 18, 2008
Lightroom Plugin for HDR-like Images

Timothy Armes Photography has released a plugin for Lightroom called LR/Enfuse, a lightroom plugin for the Enfuse program, which is HDR (kinda).

Posted by Arcterex at 11:32 AM
Vista SP1 Now Available

Just saw the word on WinSupersite that Vista SP1 is available to the world.

Of course, it's not showing up on my windows update..... oh well. Anyone out there have things asplode because of this?

Update: Why you might not see SP1 in Windows Update.

Posted by Arcterex at 10:56 AM
Rickrolling IRL

Found via reddit is a video of a live rickroll pulled off by rocketboom.

Posted by Arcterex at 07:46 AM
March 17, 2008
Ars Looks at File Systems

Ars Technica has a good look at the past, present, and future of file systems.

Posted by Arcterex at 01:31 PM
Perl Myths

Cool slideshow about Perl Myths such as "perl is dead" and whatnot.

Posted by Arcterex at 12:20 PM
March 14, 2008
Top 15 "Pump Up Songs"

Nice list from ploomy.com via Fozbaca, a list of The Top 15 Songs to Get You Pumped Up. I'll have to see how well these work next time I'm at the gym.

Posted by Arcterex at 10:31 PM
Awesome 2001 Lego Model

Wow, this is amazing, check out the Discovery from 2001.

Posted by Arcterex at 06:44 PM
Space Movie Physics Chart

Bad Movie Physics: A Report Card - nice view of how good or bad space movies are :)

Posted by Arcterex at 06:33 PM
Banshee 1.0 Alpha 1 Released

Banshee 1.0 Alpha 1 has been let loose.... Looks like the main media player for the suse platform has gotten some nice tweaks... looking forward to playing with this when I get home.

Posted by Arcterex at 03:13 PM
March 12, 2008
GNOME 2.22 Released

Yup, after (another) 6 months of work the latest in GNOME is out... check out the GNOME 2.22 Release Notes for all the details.

Posted by Arcterex at 02:23 PM
For Your Underwear Shopping Needs

KnickerPicker - online dressing room. Pick your model, pick your undies, watch the girls walk out... turn 'em around, move them closer, farther away... I'm so happy for technology :)

Posted by Arcterex at 12:14 PM
New Wall-E Trailer (#3)

Apple has the latest trailer for WALL•E up. I'm looking more and more towards this movie all the time. Make sure you watch up to the end of the trailer, cute and funny.

Posted by Arcterex at 11:46 AM
Hulk Teaser Trailer Teaser

So the new Hulk movie is coming out in a few months and tonight there is going to be a teaser for it on TV, and there is a teaser for that online now.

Posted by Arcterex at 11:39 AM
March 11, 2008
Flow Chart of The Nerdiness

Valleywag is right, this Flowchart needs no explanation. Well, other than how to get it poster sized to hang over me while I play D&D on the internets with the google.

Posted by Arcterex at 06:38 PM
MythBusters' Kari Looking HOT in FHM

Kari Byron from Mythbusters in FHM. Oh yea... giggy-giggy!

Posted by Arcterex at 06:30 PM
F-15 Dog Fight Practice

Very cool video of a F15 Eagle Dog Fight.

Posted by Arcterex at 03:11 PM
Zerg Starcraft 2 Trailer in HD

StarCraft 2 Zerg HD Trailer - official trailer now in HD (to registered shacknews users of course :)

Posted by Arcterex at 12:27 PM
Music is All The Same

Hilarious rant from Rob Paravonian on how all music is all the same... funny, and with examples.

Posted by Arcterex at 10:22 AM
March 10, 2008
Starcraft II Zerg Trailer

You Starcraft folks may be interested in a First Look at StarCraft II Zerg.

Posted by Arcterex at 01:47 PM
Two New Speed Racer Trailers

Firstshowing.net has the Dual International Speed Racer Trailers Launch. At first I was a bit unsure about this movie, but it does look like a very fun and visually cool looking comic-book-y show.... kinda like the early batman movies, but not taking themselves as seriously (and sucking so much (other than the first one of course)).

Guess we'll get to see when it comes out May 9th.

Posted by Arcterex at 10:18 AM
March 07, 2008
BSG Battleship Game

Bryan pointed out this BATTLESTAR GALLACTICA themed battleship game for the Season 3 release from amazon.

Posted by Arcterex at 11:27 AM
March 05, 2008
Various Tuesday links

A few links for everyone....

  • Aging Security Vulnerability Still Allows PC Takeover
  • Gopher Broke - great little animation
  • Phun - a 2D physics sim... think crayon physics, but a bit more sophisticated looking. Downloads for windows and linux, videos and pics
  • Vista SP1 delayed for Ultimate - due to the language packs
  • The Dave Hill Look - photoshop plugin
  • DIY camera hand strap

    Posted by Arcterex at 08:37 AM
  • March 03, 2008
    Ruby on Rails in Leopard

    An article I've been waiting for, on Developing Rails Applications on Mac OS X Leopard. Most important is that it has "official" update commands... myself being a total rails newbie I was glad to see this:


    Out of the box, you get Ruby version 1.8.6 and Rails version 1.2.6, the latest stable releases at the time Leopard shipped. Ruby releases are few and far between (it's still at 1.8.6), but Rails has frequent new releases. In fact, the application we'll build requires Rails 2.0.2. The good news is it's easy to upgrade Rails and RubyGems. Make sure your system is up to date now by running these commands:

    Instead of just hoping that running random commands would make it work. Coming from a Linux world of package managers where doing something "outside" the package world potentially pollutes the filesystem with outside code.

    Posted by Arcterex at 10:24 PM
    Photography Inspiration

    Hit the Dan (Dano) Steinhardt Archive for some truly awesome work.

    Posted by Arcterex at 07:31 PM
    Rejected Family Channel Cartoons

    Rejected Cartoons, passed on from a coworker.

    Posted by Arcterex at 12:33 PM
    Mouse Driven Etch-a-Sketch

    Very cool project from Make is a Serial-mouse-driven Etch-a-Sketch, via Boing-Boing.

    Posted by Arcterex at 09:13 AM
    Apple SDK News

    The Unofficial Apple Weblog asks some questions to Cory about What do you expect from the upcoming iPhone SDK, which is scheduled to launch Thursday March 3rd. Not all questions answered, and some guesses in there, but still, bit of news.

    Glad my iPod Touch is on it's way back home to me!

    Posted by Arcterex at 08:43 AM
    FastCompany.TV Launches (Scoble News)

    Robert Scoble's latest endeavor, FastCompany.TV has launched. This is, as far as I can tell, more of what Robert was doing at his previous jobs, interviewing folks in the tech industry, and putting it all on video. No subscribe on iTunes link though, you have to click on 'more episodes' and there's a RSS link there (though it doesn't seem to work if you put that into iTunes :( ).

    Hey Robert, congrats on the new gig.... ICANHAZITUNESLINKPLZ? KTHXBAI! :)

    Posted by Arcterex at 08:39 AM
    March 02, 2008
    Solaris + ZFS + USB Sticks = Nerdvana

    Cooking up a Poor Man's RAID-Z with ZFS, USB Memory Sticks, Solaris, and VMware Fusion from over at the VMWare Fusion Blog.

    Posted by Arcterex at 02:23 PM