Fozbaca tweeted about Video for Everybody, a very cool system for embedding video on web pages. It uses a cool system of fallbacks from the HTML5 <video> to flash to quicktime and so on, all without Javascript. It claims to work in pretty much every situation in every OS, even iPhone. Sadly, the iPhone version for me just shows the 'there is a movie here but we won't let you view it' broken icon. Still, very cool.

Just a quick note to say a happy 4th of July to my friends and readers in the good 'ol USA!

I do like EverNote as I've mentioned before, now someone has modified the evernote web clipping bookmarklet so it works with the Readability bookmarklet I previously mentioned to create a Bookmarklet to reformat text for reading and Clipping.

After the cool Giving up my iPod for a Walkman that was passed around a bunch in the last couple of days, Forever Geek has posted a bunch of other cool walkman photos of hacks, sculptures, old ads, etc.

I found what I want for my birthday this year... the Cute penguin robot has motion sensors and can connect up to facebook for various interesting things. How cool! Thanks Cali over at Geekbrief.tv.

Holy crap this is the coolest thing ever!!! If you have a moderately recent macbook or other laptop with a multi-touch trackpad you can set up multi-touch tab switching in Firefox! Basically you can set it so that if you twist two fingers on the trackpad it'll switch tabs left and right. Awesome!

Mapping the Internet is a cool project that Uses the Tokyo Metro as a guide to create a map of the world's most influential websites as a virtual subway system.

Think you're bored and have time on your hands? This guy made a working 1/6th Scale Chevrolet V8.

Neat little app for the iPhone called 3D Camera. Linked not so much for the app as for the concept of the 'cross your eyes and see 3D' thing.

Vinyl Rain Gutter Cable Management, a set on flickr from Iambe via Fozbaca.... Another good looking solution to cable clutter.

Random linkage on Reddit led me to this Crazy Baseball Swing. Is that 'shopped? Fake? physically possible?

The Simple Fitness Rules is just that, stupidly simple... Not as simple as "eat less, exercise more", but close. Worth a read anyway.

A while back we heard that Opera was going to change the web with some special new feature. Looks like that feature has dropped, and it is Opera Unite.

The description is this:

Opera Unite is a unique technology that turns any computer or device running Opera into a Web server. In other words, your computer (running Opera Unite) is truly part of the fabric of the Web, rather than just interacting with it, and it’s something anyone can use.

Doesn't really say what it really is though. Basically the idea is fairly simple, code in the browser runs a small server, which then uses technologies like uPnP and DNS CNAME records to allow users at large to get right to your browser. So if you enable the 'music player' application the browser runs a little webserver that lists music on the computer (in a directory you point it to) and then points <yourusername>.operaunite.com/music to your routers external IP. Combine this with password protection and you can now listen to your music from work. Fairly simple, still fairly revolutionary.

Guess we'll see if it catches on (and if Opera's past has shown, this means "this feature will appear in Firefox 5.0 and IE 11 :)

Some more good analysis over here. Pay attention to the pictures illustrating how things all fit together.

Anything for the Perfect Shot! is part 3 of a series of sets of amusing images of people making images. Some hilarious.

Incredible Rubik’s Cube stop-motion animation. Nothing more to say but "yes, it is".

CodeWeavers announced version 8 of their software for Linux and Mac. Crossover is software that allows you to run windows apps on non-windows platforms (if you didn't already know). The new version boasts a bunch of new apps available out of the box, plus lots of improvements in the ones there already (ie: office, outlook, IE7, etc).

Sadly I think the need for Crossover isn't nearly as great anymore. With things like Evolution's Exchange connector and OpenOffice.org out there for free, dealing with an emulation layer just isn't as imperative. Course, there are some apps that have nothing like them in the non-windows world that put Crossover in a good spot.

Sorry for the lack of linkage all day, been out on the job hunt. Anyway, as mac fanboys and iPhone lovers know, tomorrow is iPhone OS 3.0 day. Looks like iPhone 3.0 Update for iPod Touch Page Appeared in iTunes, but then was quickly pulled. I believe things should all be up sometime tomorrow. Looking forward to the update myself, as long as I don't see any "3.0 nuked my phone" posts :)

Fotopedia describes itself as the first collaborative photo encyclopedia. You can contribute, rate, etc. Pretty cool stuff, check it out!

Lifehacker has a list of The Web's Most Dangerous Search Terms in terms of Malware results.

DEATH METAL PARROT. No more needs to be said, this is awesome.

For the SoFoBoMo (Solo Photo Book Month) project, the most talented Neil Creek has put a great looking free eBook called A Roadtrop Through SE Australia out for the world. Great work Neil!

Speaking of Google..... they've made the new iGoogle for Android and iPhone nicer. More support for the widgets, fully ajaxified, etc.

Wanna see Inside a Blue Angel Cockpit during a show? Now you can. Barf bag not included.

Looking for a easy URL to send people to like facebook.com/userfriendly ? Well, tonight at 9pm (your time zone) you can go to Facebook.com/Username and sign up for your own. Currently it's only a countdown though. See the facebook blog for some more details.

Do you want your own facebook.com/username URL? Well, hit Facebook.com/Username to see a countdown until you can use it to grab your own!

In case you were wondering about him, Bigfoot is on twitter at @TheBigfoot.

Having yard sale today. Selling entire stock of terrified children. Prices so low, Bigfoot must be crazy.

And they say the internet isn't good for anything....

Lifehacker has a nice article with lots of links to various Desktop Tweaks, from wallpaper to encourages productivity to fancy schmancy GeekTool setups and everything in between.

SimilarSites.com finds sites like other sites. Nice and simple :)

I didn't know anything about this, but here are some details about the Astalavista.com hack, including details. More reason to a) secure your site and b) learn to use the tools that the blackhats use to ensure that you're secure. Fascinating read (the pastbin link is where you want to go for the good stuff).

Don't despair job-seekers, most of those ridiculously high requirements in job ads are all bunk.

Andy Ihnatko, of TWIT fame, has a great look at Google Wave.

As one of the nation's bespectacled folks, seeing a story entitled Stem Cell Contact Lenses Cure Blindness in Less Than a Month, got me excited. It's not quite so cut and dry of course, but it's a potential huge leap forward.

Great little site that is a Post-Credits Scene Database, showing which movies have extra scenes, pictures, etc. Very cool, especially combined with RunPee.com, the "when can I pee" movie database.

Watching this Cool Chameleon video I have to wonder if it's fake or if they really do change that quickly and just because someone stuffs some colored sunglasses under them? Is this 'shopped, or are they that awesome?

The video of the Google Wave keynote is now online, Andy Wibbels has it, but it's also up at wave.google.com.

Any Panasonic LX3 owners will be happy to know there's a new firmware update (1.3) available just around the corner. DPReview has the details and the link that'll work on the first of June. Minor changes it sounds like, white balance and "general performance" improvements.

Basement Lamborghini Hits The Road - update about the story from a couple of days ago. Thanks Aryk.

Google today announced Google Waves, a new social collaboration, email, twitter, something or other. :) The webmonkey article has a decent description of it though.

As the new user is leaving a comment, everyone involved in the wave can see the comments being typed in, in real time, letter by letter. Edits can be made concurrently, so two or more users can see one anothers’ changes flowing in, even as they’re leaving their comments, making edits or uploading images.

It'll be interesting to see how this does or where it competes when it comes out, that's for sure! Hit wave.google.com for a video and signup page.

Lifehacker is highlighting The OS X Alpha Geek Desktop. It's full of hardcore nerdery. Want!

Found an article on the typekit blog today Introducing Typekit. Looks like they are working on a way to solve the "font problem" that web designers have been facing. An excerpt:

As a Typekit user, you’ll have access to our library of high-quality fonts. Just add a line of JavaScript to your markup, tell us what fonts you want to use, and then craft your pages the way you always have. Except now you’ll be able to use real fonts. This really is going to change web design.

Building a lamborghini for dummies, if you have, you know, a few years to spare :)

LyricWiki is a fairly reliable source of lyrics for songs (without the crap that goes along with other sites). So far it's passed the "Arcterex search" test (Johnny Cash and U2), and the quick glance at the lyrics seemed reasonable.

Slow Loris Update is the cutest video of something eating grubs you'll see all day :)

Hows this for a horrifying gun? The AA-12, World's deadliest shotgun! shows why you do not want to be a bad guy on the other end of this!

Via forgetfoo.

Wordpress (the blog system) has launched Videopress, their New Video Sharing Service. Features include automatic sd/dvd/hd quality conversions, automatic video podcast conversions, and other goodness. Very sexy looking little system. The only fail I found so far was hitting the 'hd' button doesn't continue on from the current location in HD (like youtube) but rather restarts the video in HD.

Still, a very minor thing, and a very cool looking service.

Wolfram Alpha is live and going. Neat to play with, with very cool visual representation of some things (ie: a number has a "visual representation" display, tides show a curvy graph, etc). It's not like google fore searching for information about something, but about pure information. There are exceptions though, such as when you ask it what is the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything for example.

Passed on from Dave B, check out debris, a PC demo which is amazing, not only in content, but in the fact it fits in 200k and has a better framerate and content than most games you see today. Truly spectacular!

Holy crap... this stuff is amazing. This mom let her child ride the subway alone! What's amazing you ask? Well, how about the media sh-t storm that has come up about it, calling her (among other things), "America's Worst Mom". Some of her article is below:

A day later, there across from me was Ann Curry looking outrageously pretty and slightly alarmed, because her next guest (the one right before George Clooney) just might be criminally insane. By way of introduction, she turned to the camera and asked, “Is she an enlightened mom or a really bad one?”

"[...] he was safe! That’s why I let him go, you fear-mongering hypocrite, preaching independence while warning against it!”

The Wolfram Alpha search engine, a new concept in fact based searching will be launching tonight. Link has video and more information.

Reach, The Story of a Robot With a Very Short Power Cable is a very sweet little video done by animator Luke Randall. Via Laughing Squid.

Via Boing Boing is a story about a Nine-year-old playing Ozzy on the guitar. Now ignoring the fact he's on the Ellen show, playing guitar is going to get this kid all the chicks he can handle (well, when he gets interested in them of course, I mean, he's only 9).

Well, it's not the pizza delivery system found in Snow Crash, but The Pizza Box of the Future is actually really inventive and even gave me a "wow, that is cool" after I watched the 45 second video.

Twitshirt is another one found via Daring Fireball. Get your favorite tweets printed on a shirt, and the author of the tweet gets a cut. Cool idea, neat business model. Hope it takes off!

Gizmodo has a story on How the F-35 Demon Helmet Looks Inside. If you're a plane geek of any kind, this'll rock your socks off. The story has some other background information and links for you too.

Via IO9: NASA Astronaut Mark Polansky Will Be Posting To Twitter Live From The Space Shuttle. Follow @Astro_127 for the twitter goodness.

Joshua Hoffine has created some terrifying imagery. You may not want to watch if you plan on getting sleep tonight :)

Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance On Just One Page has a free eBook with simple financial advice. Good read, good advice, download it now :)

DevSnippets is a cool site for CSS and Javascript snippets for doing cool things on websites.

Snuzzy.com has it's own live stream where you can Watch 7 Week Old Kittens On Their Kitten Cam . For all your daily cuteness needs!

A very awesome and gorgeous looking Aerial Virtual tour of New York. Found via Forgetfoo.

Saw this subject on Fark: You don't need to search any longer, the creepiest person on the internet has been found (possible Not safe for work language).

This intrigued me of course, and I had the compulsion to watch. Currently I'm only about 2 minutes in and I have three words for you.

Horri-fucking-fying.

I kid you not. You must watch this. I only really feel sorry for the guy and anyone in his family. Please watch with caution. I do these things for you, the audience :)

Via Reddit... Pixel City, a completely procedurally drawn city. If you're interested in how it was done, you can get all the details :)

Aryk pointed me to Gizmodo's story on some homemade Crazy Dangerous Retractable Wolverine Claws. All I can really say is... WANT.

Foxkeh's Blog has a nice (very cute) set of wallpapers with calendar in them.

This goes under the "Random Awesomeness" category.... check out Still Alive in Typography.

Related: Jarratt Moody's excellent (and NSFW audio) Say What Again (from Pulp Fiction).

The official Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen trailer is out on Yahoo's movie site. Holy crap that looks awesome. Recommend watching the HD version of this as well :)

Very cool stuff found on TUAW: Controlling radio control aircraft with an iPhone. Fairly complex, and not something for the everyman, but very cool to see.

Links this morning from Aryk and Len.

• First up are 4 Star Trek clips.
  
• Next are some details of Motorola's Calgary Android based phone. Looks actually sexy enough that I don't immediately scoff it for not being an iphone! :)
  
• Last but no least are some details on requirements for Windows 7's XP mode. Short story, VT based chip and 2G of ram. Rumors and conjecture of course, and lets be honest, if you've bought a computer in the last 2 years it probably has these specs already! Update WinSupersite has more details on XP Mode.
  

Into the lifehack, GTD, productivity lifestyle? Check out Productive! Magazine. Free PDF downloads which not a huge amount of ads in amidst the content. Worth checking out for sure.

The Apple Blog has a neat article onPhoto Editing Options When iPhoto Isn’t Enough. Basically non-photoshop solutions for the mac for when you need something a bit above what iPhoto gives you. Personally I'm a lightroom guy, though I will whip out the GIMP when I need something quick and dirty.

‘Star Wars’ Retro-Inspired Travel Posters. Awesome, I need these in my home :)

Gizmodo has pictures and video of the 36-Foot Saturn V Model Launch. Very cool looking.

Hancock Wildlife has a live streaming webcam of an eagles next, with fairly newly hatched babies.

Via reddit comes a set of 25 images entitled Brutus and Me, a photographic story of a man and his bear, Brutus, a bear raised from a cub. My favorite pics are six and nine for their pure surrealness :)

Of course, I really expected to read something about the man mysteriously being mauled and eaten! Sounds like this story has a happy ending though.

Sent to me from Darren is a great quote, found here in the comments of a Chuck story on io9 from "LittleBigSteve".

Smart people know Jobs and Gates are BOTH evil. Just different flavors. Microsoft is vanilla evil, and Apple is chocolate evil. Rich, CREAMY chocolate! But still evil.

That's awesome.

Two new services were announced by google today. First check out Google Similar Images (which is pretty much what it sounds like) and then Google News Timeline, which displays google news in a... uhm... timeline, to help you visualize how news has happened in relation to the rest of the day/week.

Wanna see a video of a guy jumping out of a plane with no parachute on and surviving? There you go. Holy crap the size of that guys balls must make it really hard to walk!

Very hard to describe video done in the stopped-action motif that a couple of the Halo 3 videos was done in. Very cool. Go watch it now.

Next time you think your camera is too heavy, or you don't want to go on your photo walk with that heavy 18-250 zoom lens, check this monster out and count yourself lucky. Course, a 600mm/2.8 might not be a good walkaround lens come to think of it....

Saw this morning on Lifehacker, Gordon Ramsay Demonstrates the Perfect Scrambled Egg Breakfast. Tasty looking, except for the mushrooms of course!

Creativity stuff all around us. Amazing stuff. Anyone want to send me one of each of these?

Scenes from the zoo from Aryk. Great cute pics for you if it's Friday and you just got knocked in the gibblies by the economy!

A fascinating look Inside the precision hack that the 4chan folks set up a bit ago. Details and history in the link.

Lego battleship Yamato. Holy crap!

Looks like 10 years later, the real story behind Columbine is coming out. Turns out pretty much everything you know, thought you know, and were told about it was mostly wrong. Hell, complete books were written about incidents that simply never happened. Isn't modern communications and information dissemination awesome? :)

Speaking of twitter and trends, found out about Susan Boyle on Britains Got Talent 2009. It's reminiscent of Paul Potts (the opera guy) from a couple of years ago. It's one of those unexpected things that it is pretty awesome to watch/listen to, if for nothing more than to see the look on the judges faces just before she starts singing... the looks of "what is this old bat doing" followed quickly by "WTF she's awesome" is great to see.

The first comment says it all "Sweet. Now I won't have to wear pants to work. " ... Gizmodo - A Wearable Robot Chariot - Chariot

Sweet. Now I won't have to wear pants to work.

Now you too can wear a Slurm shirt thanks to Thinkgeek.

Nice article on Joshua's blog on url shorteners.

The worst problem is that shortening services add another layer of indirection to an already creaky system. A regular hyperlink implicates a browser, its DNS resolver, the publisher's DNS server, and the publisher's website. With a shortening service, you're adding something that acts like a third DNS resolver, except one that is assembled out of unvetted PHP and MySQL...

Joshua goes through a bunch of other issues that exists, both for the user and the publisher of the page that you're going to. Well worth a read.

Adam Savage Answers Your Questions over at reddit's blog.

Remeber that cool mod that surfaced a couple of weeks ago where a guy hacked a macbook to replace the apple logo on the back with a full LCD screen? Well, if you're wanting to try it out yourself, a tutorial has been posted with parts needed, etc. This isn't a simple change mind you, and it's very possible you're going to void your warranty ;)

Digg released their new DiggBar product, another URL shortening service which additionally gives you "digg stuff" in a toolbar when you go to the page with the short URL form.

Likes for me is as a digg user, it might make things more convenient. Dis-likes is that it keeps you "in" digg when you might not want it. URL shortening services should (IMHO) just do that, shorten the URL for easier twittering or facebooking, and when you click on the short URL, it takes you to the normal URL. This keeps you in the short URL and puts extra stuff on top that you might object to or you might not.

Interesting to see if the size of digg will give this more traction than the tons of other short-url services out there.

Great info in the form of 50 Totally Free Lessons in Graphic Design Theory via Curtis.

MythBusters: MythBusters ' Adam Savage Talks Tech, Obsessions, and Science in a lifehacker interview.

The Map Room: ‘Dead Pixel in Google Earth’.

Edit (Arcterex): Sadly this piece of conceptual art is not actually visible on google earth, as it is just ... conceptual art.

Pic of a very pillowy pooch.

Iotd: The Las Vegas Strip, Before and During Earth Hour

And not in the "not seen for a decade" sort of way. The Duke is Back site is looking for someone to play Duke for ..... well, some reason anyway.

We're reaching out to the fans with a 3 city nationwide search to find the next real life Duke Nukem.

As Darren says, Vaporware awards don't win themselves!

Holy crap! Check out these "Landscape Aquariums". How the hell does that survive after you put the water in is what I want to know!

Super-cute pics of two baby Leopards born: Rare Cubs Born Against the Odds is the title. Seems that in captivity the mothers often do damage to their cubs, which I wonder is an instinctual thing based on being in an undesirable place to have offspring (ie: a zoo) or if it's something that "just happens". Regardless of this, those babys are damn cute!

Found a series of pics via Reddit of the coolest Star Wars Car you will see this week. I promise.

Now to do this to my car......... :) (I wish!)

Spacebat: "Spacebat Tribute" Video Will Make You Cry Like "We Are the World"

"Spacebat Tribute" Video Will Make You Cry Like "We Are the World"

Another case of putting a camera in a big-ass balloon and sending it to the edge of space.

GMail has announced a new feature in their "Labs" area - Undo Send. Basically it doesn't send your mail for 5 seconds, giving you a chance to reconsider it :)

Photography: Teens Capture Amazing Shots 20 Miles from Earth's Surface With a Balloon

BSG's United Nations Summit: The Night Battlestar Galactica Took Over The U.N.

Space Eulogies: Shuttle-Riding Bat Dies The Most Glorious Death Imaginable

Via Paul Thurrott at the WinSupersite I found a UI changes from Windows 7 beta to build 7057. Mostly tweaking and filling out it looks like, but some other interesting changes.

According to the updates on the Google Earth Blog, there is now Live Imagery from Another Planet. According to the update there is a layer available on the mars imagery that contains the latest data from satellites which can be as fresh as a few hours. Not quite live, but close!

Now we need that on earth, for all our non-alien stalking needs.

How cool are these pics.... the Shuttle Launch Seen From ISS a Plane. You may remember a similar view from a plane a while back.

I've been an advocate of something like The Technical Support Secret Handshake for ages now.

Fizzbin.

Dystopia: The Gorgeous Terror of Global Warming

Dystopia: The Gorgeous Terror of Global Warming

Cool visual look at Operating System Interface Design Between 1981-2009. From Xerox PARC to Vista.

Some cool Animal themed Wallpaper images.

The trippiest set of Paper Sculptures you'll see today.

Best Music Albums Ever, well, at least according to Esquire. Thankfully not an album-a-page, but it's flash, with ads inserted randomly. Interesting list though.

To get around the ads every 5 albums, hit the back button (the one in the page, not the browser back button) and then forward again, and you can continue.

Sadly the list is a FAIL as there's no inclusion of any U2 (ie: Achtung Baby or Joshua Tree). At least they included a Johnny Cash album, which got a tiny bit of cred back....

Adam Savage, or MythBusters fame, will answer reddit.com questions.

Via my buddy Fozbaca is a very cool bookmarket system called Readability.

The concept is super-simple, setup how you want to read things (font size, style, margins), and then when you go to a page that's filled with crap that interferes with the content (ie: 99% of the webpages out there, except UFies.org of course), hit the bookmarklet button, and boom, perfectly readable with no crap around it. Pretty awesome stuff. Another blog entry about it here on if:else.

Bookmarking for myself: Greg Rutter's Definitive List of The 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You're a Loser or Old or Something.

Lifehacker has pics of a Barren Attic to Programmer's Paradise conversion.

Great article on The unrecognizable Internet of 1996. Story via slashdot. Man, 1996 I was in University, was probably working in my first tech job doing tech support, and may have heard of that free unix "linux" thingy. My time was probably more likely spent putting in dirty domain names into the web browsers on campus during class and seeing if "bigboobs.com" was a real site or not. If only then I'd thought of buying up domain names!

A comment on slashdot posted links to some Safari 4 demos of uses for the new HTML5 support it has. The second comment has direct links to a bunch of very cool things. Sadly I doubt you'll see any of these in the wild simply due to the small Safari market share.

As the article says, sweet merciful crap - Man Vs Machine: Boy Killed Anally When Office Chair Explodes. I'm sitting on the front edge of my chair from now on. Or finding something safe.

Star Wars: AT-AT Walker Boombox Is So Awesome I Want to Cry

Perfectly timed.... a review of Replacement iPhone earphones. I tried out the TuneBuds myself, but the chord somehow managed to fray at the plugin connection and I lost my left earphone :( Too bad too, they were pretty nice.

Very cool Article Skimmer concept from the NYT. Via Daring Fireball.

OK, here's the story. Lowlife scum fucktards video tape themselves abusing a cat. Lowlife scum fucktards post to Youtube. Story is picked up by various news websites (reddit, digg, etc). Internet has outcry over abuse to cat by lowlife scum sucking bastard fucktards. Then the power of the Internet is harnessed away from porn and Internet memes and it's power is used for good.

Lowlife scum sucking loser bastard fucktards have their youtube video Zaprudered to hell and back, their identities connected through various social networking sites, their likenesses compared, backgrounds in the video are compared to other images they've posted, (think of this as a 2 minute montage of hackers working away desperately) and then the evidence all compiled and authorities, PETA, and local news are contacted.

Happy ending Fucktard loser lowlife scum sucking animal abusing bastards are caught.

The better news is the cat (Dusty) is alive and has been put in the care of the animal shelter and away from the aforementioned fucktards. Sadly the abusers were released to their parents custody instead of being in jail with some nice men who can give them a bit of abuse to see what it's like to be helpless and being picked on by someone 100x their size. Please note that the video is a newscast but still does show some disturbing images and audio (even though it's edited for TV) which personally I had to fast forward through. I'm very glad that this had a happy ending.

Here's a great comment on reddit about how the people at 4chan.org tracked these guys down, as well as some of the early findings. It's also nice to know that anytime anyone does any sort of checking on these two (Kenny Glenn Cat Abuser and Weston Glenn to help with the google juice... someone put up kenny-glenn.com but it's down now, you can check google cache for it though) the first Internet hits will (hopefully) be about senseless animal abuse.

Nice quote from quote from 4chan about how on the Internet you do not screw around with cats.

Crazy Albertans and their crazy SABLE-3 Balloons. Who things of sending a camera attached to a balloon up to 121,000 feet? This is a bit old, August of 2007, still very cool (and it showed up while I was surfing reddit this morning).

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 released. This one is "Lenny", and comes with Gnome 2.22, KDE 3.5.10, Xen 3.2.1 for virtualization, and a bunch of other stuff. Download, upgrade, enjoy.

I have no idea why, as I'm not a vodka drinker (unless it's mixed with orange juice), but this Skittles Vodka Tutorial screams "do this!" to me for some reason. How would you drink this? Just plain vodka? Is that kosher?

Adblock plus, the adblock extension for Firefox, makes a case for themselves in their anatomy of ads.

Personally I very rarely use a browser without adblock installed on it, and when I do (or use something that's not Firefox) I always have a feeling of "oh gads, is this what normal people have to deal with?" I realize I'm stealing from the pockets of web developers and the little guy (hey, I run google adsense on this site, and notice a decrease in the meager return I get from it over the last year or so (hint hint)), but the arms race of the advertisers adding more and more ads to pages has just made a non-adblocked Internet unbearable.

Sidenote: please support the sponsors of UFies.org :)

Kem Meyer on Less Clutter & Noise: New logos after the financial crisis...

See where your friends are with Google Latitude. Sadly no iPhone version yet :( Great for real time stalking though!

Very cool interactive twitter Map of Popular Super Bowl Words.

How cool is this, and how good of a grade do you think these guys are going to get? Students call space station with home-built radio. How long before I can buy a ISS radio at Radio Shack and bug the astronauts too, or they start getting peppered with penis enlargement spam messages?!

Amazing shots of London from above, at night found via @wilharris on twitter.

The Cutest Cylon Centurion In The Galaxy link has a awesome knitted tuque, including link to pattern. I want one!

Youtube video of some Insane feats of strength. Holy crap is all I have to say.... he has big muscles...

Why exactly am I bothering to lurch through 20 minutes on the treadmill tonight again?

Pretty incredible Flight Simulation of the Hudson River Waterlanding.

Via reddit comes Bow and Literacy, an article on a Chimp who can spell words. Freaky.

Film: The Real Raw is the latest from Ken Rockwell, much loved (and ranted against) photographer. He has some good points on the longevity of film vs RAW, actually anything digital will not be as long lived as an analog object if for no other reason than something like film doesn't go away if the power is off :) A good read for the photogs out there anyway, taken as always with a grain of salt.

Got raw files shot in 2002 on your then state-of-the-art $5,000 Nikon D1H? Enjoy going back to your 2.7 megapixel files! You may as well delete them now.

With Season "4.5" of Battlestar Galactica almost upon us, io9 has a metric frak-ton of their Favorite BSG Fan Theories. Some doozies in there too...

Not exactly the normal fare of ufies, but I thought this was pretty interesting. ABC has a story about a guy Spending a Year Living Like Jesus.

"I decided since I had read through the gospels at that point over 30 times, I wanted to know who best represented the fundamental teachings of Jesus, and I felt that he more than any other candidate represented the teachings of Jesus, so I voted for him," Dobson said.

Lifehacker notes that JPG Magazine Archives are Available for Free. JPG magazine made a lot of news lately by closing down.

Here's a cute little hack from Jeremy Zawodny.... using Twitter as a Dynamic DNS Service.

Majel Barrett-Roddenberry has Died | /Film

A happy birthday message to the beautiful and talented Milla Jovovich.... exactly one month younger than I. Milla, if you see this, you're welcome to come by Vancouver and say hi anytime, ok?

I think I need to add a nerd category here for myself ;)

TrekWeb.com - Majel Barrett-Roddenberry to Play Computer Voice in New Star Trek Movie

From Darren comes: Multikill Vehicle Hover Test. How much will it take to get one of these for myself to keep those damn kids off my lawn?

In this ikea hacker post I saw something I don't know why I hadn't thought of... putting the powerbar in the cable tray! Will have to do that when I get home.

Passed on from an ex-coworker, as I'd missed it in my travels: Amazing Digital Surround Sound demo using a virtual haircut. Definitely need headphones for it to have the full effect of course. Actually a little freaky when it first starts up. Guess I'm used to really crappy sound coming out of my headset :)

Lightning Review: Uncle Milton Pet's Eye View Camera Lightning Review

Cuckoo: Speaker Cuckoo Clock Blasts You Out of Bed

Techdirt: If You Worked At Mattel And Thought About Making A Non-Barbie Doll, You Can't

Five words. Chainsaw Strapped to AR-15 Rifle. Hells yes, zombie apocalypse come get some!

Now this is nice.... one of the big deficiencies that the Canadian version of Amazon.com has had is that they don't carry all the electronics goodies that the main dot com one has. However, this has changed, as they now have electronics. If for nothing else you get a nice place to track the differences in Canadian vs Us prices :)

Image-Space has a new Lightroom 2 eBook available for DL on the DL, if ya know what I mean. If not, it means click the link and get a nice eBook on how to make Lightroom 2 faster quicker and with less calories.

Cool Stuff: Custom Iron Man Costume | /Film

Canceled Cartoons: Skin Cream Has Killed The Mutant Ninja Turtles

Civic Literacy Report - Civics Quiz

Check out the second clip for the eep....
Space Porn: Watch a Fiery Meteorite Burn Up the Sky

Triviagasm: Why You Can’t Travel Back in Time and Kill Hitler

Via Daring Fireball comes Deconstructing Google Mobile's Voice Search on the iPhone on waxy.org.

According to the GMail blog, you can now Spice up your inbox with colors and themes. Sadly it's a rolling release, and it's not available everywhere (ie: to me), but the screenshots look pretty sexy. Looking forward to being able to play with this.

Ok, this has got to be the coolest video of a Walrus breakdancing you will see all week. When was the last time you heard that challenge?

Take it from a mall security guard, it's TRUE. Mad Science: Does the Full Moon Really Make People Crazy?

Gizmodo has a First Look At the New USS Enterprise. Not sure how I feel about it.... it's got an 'old-new' look which is cool, but being that it's supposed to be pre-TOS, it's got a little bit too much 'new' in the mix.

That said, can't wait for the movie :) The trailer is supposed to be attached to the new Bond movie coming out this Friday which I'm going to see.... woo!

Neat article by H3RALD on 10 Reasons to Learn Ruby. Nice and non-judgmental of other languages (for the most part) and a well written little ditty on some of the high points of Ruby.

Geeks of doom point out that you can now Read ‘Ender’s Game: Battle School #1′ Online For Free Right Now! Of course, as with all things on the world wide web, there is a delineation of what country you live in and you're asked twice if you live in the US or not, but I (stating truthfully I'm not in the US) still got the comic (you have to click the 'open' button to the right of the text on the marvel page). The artwork is great and it follows closely to what I remember from reading the first in the Ender's Game series a bunch of years ago.

Sad news from my buddy Brian... Best-Selling Author Michael Crichton Died of cancer.

I've seen some pretty interesting halloween costumes this year, but this army man has a great mix of f-n cool, f-n original, and just awesome.

Now these are impressive: The 7 Most Impressive (And Depressing) Geek Collections. Pikachu lady scares the f@ck out of me.

Amazing Lego Starship: OSS Pontbriand. Not much more to say about this. Via Reddit.

Very cool visualization of how a chess computer thinks over here. However, it also makes me realize how woefully inadequate my brain is to deal with playing a computer at chess :)

Darren pointed out this very hot Battlestar Galactica case mod. Again, my birthday is coming up..... someone? Anyone?

So it looks like Stefan Didak (previously) is re-doing his office and has posted some pictures of his Home Office Overhaul Nearing Completion project. Very sexy, very extreme multi-monitor mojo. Looking forward to the new tour!

And you thought your camera had a long exposure time.... check out these Solargraphy images which are 6 month exposures.

So I saw an announcement for an iPhone VOIP client named fring..... looks like it's multi-im + skype + other stuff in an iPhone app. Not available in the canada store yet though :(

Some amazing pics of Light Art Performance Photography (not modem friendly link... lots of pics).

Gizmodo brings Fantastic Patchwork Panoramas Using Just the iPhone Camera. Thanks to PeeJay for the link.

I just found a great place you guys can go for my birthday and Christmas! Check out /Film's great pointer to Marc Ecko’s Star Wars Collection... some fantastically nifty star wars shirts. Just remember to get 'em in XL for me k? :)

For Google's 10th birthday they have released the Google timeline, all interactive and googly.

Thanks to /film comes Tim Goddard’s Star Wars LEGO Diorama. All I can say is "wow.

The apple-ness of this office aside, it makes me feel funny in the pants. That's a lot of monitors!

The next time someone questions my choice in pets, or number of pets, or accuses me of being a crazy old cat man, I'm going to point them over to this guy and his anteater. OK?

The mythtv mailing list pointed to the FLOSS Media Center State of the Art, a document with charts and graphics of all the various FLOSS PVR solutions out there.

Google has got a feature available now from the settings -> labs area called the Google Attachment Detector Feature. This is similar to the feature in Evolution which will warn you if you say something in your email about attaching something and then don't. Great feature for forgetful people like me :)

TUAW points to the very cool project that lets you run OS X on an even smaller portable than the Air. More details are at http://www.maceee.com/.

Course, when you're looking at a $700 cost for a 40GB eeepc 901, you're only about $400 from a full MacBook with better specs and all legal and everything...

Some amazing pics from the World Body Painting Festival 2008 in South Korea. Kinda semi-NSFW in a way, as there are boobies, but they're all painted over and disguised (mostly).

Via Digg.... 50 Excellent Body Enhancement Photoshop Tutorials. Good stuff to go through for the photo-geeks out there.

Another good lifehacker post (especially for someone who just lost their laptop) is How to Set Up a Laptop Security System, ranging from physical security, monitoring, and retrieval. Good stuff!

There was a piece of software that I heard of or saw ages ago for (I believe) macs, which would capture a picture of you when you login or open the laptop and compare it to how it knows you look. If you look similar enough, no problem, if not, it would either ask for a password, start tracking, or something like that.

Anyone know what that was? Or was this just a dream?

Hows this for random.... Google to launch Web browser tomorrow. Paul has a screenshot up as well.

More on the Blogscoped Blog.

Dial A Human! gives you the numbers and codes to get to a human being while dialing one of many 1-800 numbers. Of course, these days a lot of times the annoying automated systems actually help you get to someone who can help you, instead of getting you to a person who you can talk to, but will have to send you through to multiple other departments to get your issue fixed. Nice to know it's there though!

I'm all for nice clean cars and when I occassionally clean mine, I have taken multiple hours to do it properly. However, without a Lamborghini I don't think I'd be quite as extreme as the guy who put out the pictures of Polished Bliss: Lamborghini Gallardo. Wow, now that's dedication!

Sure you can use CVGadget to search for references to check for people's online presence for HR purposes, but really, lets just call it your new favorite tool for stalking ex-girlfriends.

A bit late, but here's a gallery of Geek Ink: Comics Fans Show Off Tattoos from Comic-Con.

Was doing a bit of reading up tonight and found out all about compilations in iTunes. Turns out this features will solve one of my biggest organizational pet peeves about iTunes, that is random artists from albums with many artists in them (ie: best country of 1974, a favorite of mine) showing up in the regular browsing list of artists. So my Del Reeves album collections now won't be "infected" by random Del Reeves songs from the VA collections.

Cool huh?

Well, in theory of course, that sounds like how it's supposed to work anyway...

Now this has got to be the coolest thing I've seen in ages! Mozilla Labs Announced Ubiquity, which is sadly a bit hard to describe, but once used I'm sure it'll be hard to go back. Mac users can think of it as quicksilver for the web, linux users think gnome-do for the web on steroids.

Basically it allows you to hit a hotkey combination and then type natural(ish) language into the window that pops up. So if you're writing an email in gmail and want to include a map to an address, you'd hit alt-space (or whatever key combo you set up) and type 'map 1234 main street, vancouver, bc' and hit enter. The resulting map will be put into your email. If you're not in an email it'll go to that url.

Ubiquity isn't limited to maps of course, searching, calendar (google calendar currently), bugzilla, calculator, tabs, translation, highlighting..... lots of really cool stuff. It also operates either "alone" or on text / images you've highlighted on a webpage. Very cool stuff, I've had it for about 5 minutes now (it's a firefox plugin) and I can see this changing my browsing very very easily.

I'm not really sure what this is for or from, but as a Duel of SU-27 and F-15 it looks fairly cool :)

Free book with Free shipping? Found by me on coding horror is Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review which claims to be a free book with free shipping. Is there a catch? Will I start getting Obama-spam if I believe there's such thing as a free lunch? Anyone else seen this or heard of it? Or maybe I'm just too paranoid.

From the 'wow they do weird stuff in Japan' comes Double-wide anime look for your eyeballs.

Anime eyes?
What could be freakier (and more desired by Japanese girls)?

Laughing Squid points to George Orwell's diaries publish in blog form.

I'm glad that I'm not the only one who thinks Nancy Grace is Dangerous. Not only to her audience's sanity, but to the people she's talking about as well.

Internet Memes all the way back to 1976. Sweet!

I didn't know AIR apps worked on linux, so this story: 8 Useful Adobe AIR Applications That Work In Linux may help others like me. The RSS reader Snackr sounds especially interesting.

Accordion Guy has a nice retrospective on the death of the Cassette tape. Ah.... mix tapes... it's just not the same anymore now is it?

Google is awesome for mail, shared docs, your RSS reader, family photos, etc, but what happens if you lose your account? When Google Owns You is a story of just that, with follow up. It's an excellent point to remember that as awesome as google is, and as "where would they go?" as you think they might be, if one party has all the keys to the kingdom, you aren't free. I was actually thinking at one point about moving some mail services to the google hosted system, and while their webmail is the bees knees, losing that control is just too much, especially after reading this!

Two points of random awesomeness this morning. The first is a street painting Turning River Street into a river via Darren. I've seen great street painting examples before, not this good though. Click on it to see in process images. Second is a Melbourne car park which uses signs painted on the wall that are perfectly visible if viewed from the right angle to show visitors where to go. Great practical application of the technique.

How f-n cool is this: Space Shuttle launch as seen from a plane (Air Canada flight) over at 37 signals. That's a lucky flight to be on!

Holy crap!! Delicious 2.0. At a real domain name too! Wow!

Very cool story about the Media Defender hack told by the guy who did it.

Apparently Vancouver is a leg in the world wide photo walk. Very cool! My fellow Vancouverite photo-geeks should check out the Vancouver Photo Walk. I'm totally going to do this.

TUAW notes that VMWare Fusion 2 Beta 2 available now. Lots of new goodies for those nutty Apple people who run windows programs on their systems.

Awesome mentalist at TED: Keith Barry does brain magic. I love these guys.

Star Wars nerds, your fantasies have come true! Behold the gaggle (troop? harem?) of Leia's at some convention somewhere.

Possibly a repost, I'm sure I've seen this somewhere before.

Anyone remember back in the day when a bunch of linux geeks were going to rally to get the OS license fees back from Microsoft? If so, this story of a guy who got a Windows Vista refund from HP will warm the cochleas of your heart.

He came back on the line and again tried to convince me, by explaining that there would be technical difficulties with using a non-Windows-Vista operating system on this HP machine, to return the laptop and get a different one. I told him again that was not what I wanted, explained what I wanted, and reminded him that he just said HP would not offer tech support for other operating systems. I told him nicely that I would worry about the technical problems of using a non-Windows-Vista operating system but he should help me get my refund.

Fairly amazing story, even more so if you notice the call lengths for his calls. Good perseverance though! If you're wondering why someone would bother to do this (aside the obvious "no a fan of microsoft" answer), think about the discounted prices you can get a laptop for these days, and then subtract the $200 Microsoft tax. Good enough? Especially if you are exercising rights given to you by the EULA displayed when the computer is first turned on.

Great list on cracked.com of 7 People Who Cheated Death (Then Kicked It In The Balls). Some amazing stories in there.

So you used to watch X-Files back in the day, but kinda left it towards the end.... then watched the movie, and it was good, but that was also 6 years ago. You want to bone up to make sure you're fully engaged for the new movie.... Enter The X-Files Time Line, most complete history of the universe and the show.

Very cool article on Reconstructing Apple I BASIC from a Cassette Tape. This is an interesting problem that we're only seeing in the last 30 years or so, having storage media that you may not be able to access in the next 2 or 10 years. I have the same issue, with some old LS-120 disks that I have no way of accessing anymore. I doubt they have anything of use on them, and if they did I haven't needed it in the last 11 years anyway.

Joss Whedeon's new show Dr. Horrible Is Anything But apparently. Course, the show website is down right now, so I can't do anything about it anyway.

Reddit has a video of a Portable Autonomous Sentry demonstration. Note the portal sound effect when it starts up ("I see you").

Screw the iPhone, I want one of these!

This isn't up on the ruinediphone.com blog yet, but according to MacRumors, the following announcement was made: Rogers Canada Offers 6GB Data Plan for $30/Month. The actual press release is fairly long and boring and I have to admit I haven't read it yet.

This looks to be decent though... basically if you're already a customer with a voice plan you pay $30 more and get 6Gb of data transfer, plain and simple.

Now the things I don't know about are the hidden 'gotchas', if any. IE: will texting, visual voicemail and caller ID be included here? With the original $60/115 plans these were bundled in with the latter 2 being unlimited, now that the data plan is separate will these suddenly become $10 addons? Can you put this on the other iPhone bundle plans? Etc, etc.

While I want one I already have the iPhone Touch, so it's hard to justify, but also the stores are going to be crazy (56,000+ signatures on a petition aside), so I'll probably avoid doing anything for a week. That'll also let the Rogers customer service people work out all the questions so I can just get the right info :)

Now of course the other question is about the 3G coverage... and if it'll degrade to something else if you're out of range, and if I'll be able to get it in the fraser valley or not.

Stephen Fosket posts on How To Buy Discount Apple Computers. Maybe not what you were really hoping for (ie: the newest stuff at discounted prices), but lots of good tips nonetheless. I'm particularly going to be looking at the MBP 320G upgrade post he has.

Argh, just after agonizing over, and finally breaking down and getting a drobo, it seems that Data Robotics, Inc. has released a new version with Firewire800 and improved USB performance (3x what they had before).

*sigh*

I wonder if there's any sort of customer protection out there as the speed was the one thing I didn't like about the device, and I bought it less than a month before the version that fixes everything comes out. I wonder if Cali Lewis can help me?

Another Darren-link is Pimp My Code, Part 15: The Greatest Bug of All, an epic tale of an epic bug and the effort needed to resolve it.

Boing Boing Gagets points to what has to be the coolest motorbike conversion ever.... the Star Trike at the 1982 San Diego Comic Con.

A full page dedicated to saying what I have been saying for years, without the right words! Over is Right, Under is Wrong.

Kinda a cool video about a 14 month in the making project do (as far as I can tell) dance in a lot of different places! Check out Where the Hell is Matt? Very cool. Thanks for the video Vince. More info at WhereTheHellIsMatt.

Slashfilm points to a Star Wars USB Hub which is almost as cool as the R2D2 beanie. It beepbles when you plug things in, I want one!

This is kinda a cool idea, taking the "dear interweb"/groupthink idea to coding. RefactorMyCode.com lets you submit code and have people look at it and refactor it for you. Very cool idea.

Rogers Announces iPhone Plans in Canada.... well, I'm waffling between not hugely impressed and thinking "this might be ok". Us canucks are definitely getting the shaft compared to the US in terms of data plans though, that's for sure. No unlimited data, and a minimum cost of $60 for the base 150 minutes / 400mb data / 75 sms sent seems unreasonable to me. Maybe they'll get enough kickback to change it?

Now that's a lot of Leia! Bonus: pillow fight!

Very interesting look at a new paradigm for computer use, or rather, an examination of how we (or the author anyway) tends to use a computer. Check out On Documents vs. Streams over at Infinite knots.

Video of Still Alive on Carillon..... just awesome!

The site calls it the Most Expensive Home Entertainment System. I call it @#$@#$Q!@$% amazing!

Saw this over at digg.com.... Top 13 Sci-Fi Babes. I don't know if I 100% agree with their order (though it totally depends on your own personal preferences) but it's still a very nice list, bringing back some fond memories of babes of sci-fi days of yore....

R2-d2 Server Monitor via slashdot.... what you get when you cross the R2D2 projector with a bunch of nerds needing to monitor servers.

I don't normally go ga-ga over car videos, but this one has been making the rounds. Hit this BMW's fascinating GINA Light Visionary Model design study over at 37 signals.

The Girl Who Silenced the World at the UN, video from 1992 of a Vancouver born girl's speech at the UN.

Born and raised in Vancouver, Severn Suzuki has been working on environmental and social justice issues since kindergarten.

Very powerful IMHO, the most being the random shots around the UN of the delegates from around the world sitting and listening, I can only hope in rapt attention. I'd love to see her speak today and see if she thinks anything has changed.

Holy crap... this guy from the TED Talks who did a presentation on mathamagics is amazing..... good speaker too! Worth the watch. Thanks Robert for the forward.

Great post about Star Wars: 25 Glorious Years of Loving the Ewoks, pay particular attention to the song at the bottom :)

Youtube video which shows the 1st F-35B switches to hover mode (while tied down). Not hugely exciting, but cool to see the next generation of jet fighters.

Yea, I know there are a million USM tutorials around, but this one (found via a photo board) Unsharp Mask: How Do You Actually Use That Thing? is nice as it seems to show more the application of it in the form of "slide X to value Y, look for property P, move slider back to Y-10" type instructions. Very good for slow people like me :)

Not computer related, but this video of Dan Osman - Speedclimbing is awesome, even ignoring the fact he's doing it without rope or any protection at all! It is from (I believe) Masters of Stone 2 (anyone got a copy of this btw?). Dan is the man, may he rest in peace.

Robert passed on this video of Britain's Got Talent Seaon 2 Kate and Gin Dog Act... that is definitely not another set of dog tricks :) Even Simon seems impressed!

So in this day and age we have no only things like twitter updates on the landing on Mars, but also a full Phoenix Mars Mission website with widgets, updates, pictures, etc.

Buddy Grizzled found a video of Photographer Joe McNally talking at Google... apparently totally awesome, currently using TubeTV to convert it for watching on the way home tonight.

Spore Creature Phase Trailer.

All I can say is.... wow. Doctor Who series 4 mid season trailer.

Worth1000 has a D&D Photoshop contest.

Wikipedia for iPhone is out.... shexy!

MUST WATCH: Animatronic WALL-E Spotted in LA - Wow, now that's cool!

Found a great article on Capturing Delicate Wisps of Smoke complete with setup, pictures, and video. Good for the photo buffs out there.

IO9 has a nice ditty on how you could Now You Can Have the Real Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy using simple and easily available parts.

Random post of a list from another site: The 11 Best Songs from Geek-Movie Soundtracks. Geek + movie + music sounds good to me :)

I'm not 100% sure what kuler is.... it appears to be a way to design and share and rate color mixes. Hard to describe, hit the link (you may need a flash upgrade) and check it out. Interesting stuff from Adobe for sure!

See the R2-D2 Projector in Action from slashfilm. Oh. My. God. I want one!

Kinda creepy.... check out /Film's Batman vs The Dark Knight Trailer, a side by side comparison of the new Dark Knight trailer and the original Tim Burton's Batman trailers.

DIY Photography, one of my daily reads, has a list of Six and Two Halves Must-Read Free Digital Photography eBooks.

Update: Fixed title.... six, not sex...

Pointed out from a coworker: Photoshop tutorial: Tonal range and the Curves tool. This is a free tutorial from Chromasia.com, which has a bunch of other for-pay tutorials. If they are up to the quality of this one.... that's good stuff. Note that this particular one could easily be translated to other programs with curves and layers.

So not only is this Spiderman Tattoo amazing from an artwork perspective, but from a dedication perspective. This guy is apparently way into spidey, and has no worries about what this will look like in another 40 years or so....

Very cool video of a hacked up POV cam (viewing from a head mounted tracking camera)..... check it out.

There's even a DIY site for the project.

Save Baby Gorilla has the video (for now anyway) of Artie Lange Quitting the Howard Stern Show. Thankfully for us Stern fans, Artie was back on Monday.

Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press (Pt. 1of6) passed on from Darren. Very cool, the awesome Stephen Fry works to create his own Gutenberg printing press.

Sure to insult someone..... hit the Gallery of Motivational Posters at FreeThoughtPedia.

I don't like just blatently re-posting stuff from websites I'm sure you read anyway.... However the title cutest kitten in the world over at Cute Overload seems to be fully accurate.

Over the weekend I found the site for Designing Interfaces, the O'Reilly book which has a bunch of free content / chapter summaries / useful info. Interesting read for app and web devs alike.

Google has a Movie Showtimes Search system? Who knew!? (not me obviously). Works for Canadian postal codes too!

When Cute Overload says gem of cuteness they aren't kidding!

Pointed to this Dangerous Path video this morning. My first thought was "a harness? pussies!" and then after watching the rest of the video... yea, good call. What crackhead thought that that path was a good idea?!?

Via digg is 9 mind tricks to get what you want .... little subtle things to incline other people to do or act how you want, nothing nasty, just a few subtle little tricks to get a bit of an edge up.

Here's a video of a rare asiatic lion cub recently born at a japanese zoo. Due to the rarity (300 in existance :( ) they have been raising the cub by hand. Very cute big kittycat!

So cool, Baltar is My Homeboy shirts. Someone, for my birthday? Please!

Combine the Red Army Choir (the Solviet official army choir), the Leningrad Cowboys, a Finnish rock band, and you get Sweet Home Alabama. Actually sounds pretty damn good, though as they said on Reddit, my WTF meter is going off the scale!

Not only has Capria, the Battlestar Galactica prequel series been approved, but io9 has new details.

Tutorial found via Fozbaca on How to create HDR Photos in Photomatix.... very simple, with a nice simple explanation of some of the tone mapping settings.... I like simple.

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!).

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 :)

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

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 :)

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 :)

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

Very cool video of a F15 Eagle Dog Fight.

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

A few links for everyone....

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

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! :)

Via Scoble is the WorldWide Telescope intro talk from the TED conference. I'm not entirely convinced, this looks fairly close to a combination of google sky (or whatever it's called) and Cellestia. However, I'll have to wait till it's available to the world before I can make any judgement. Anything that increases learning and awareness of the world and the universe is a good thing though, right?

Just a few bits for the morning that have been in my queue....

• 
  A Second Shot: Windows Vista SP1
  
• Kevin Goodchild exhibition (what a great picture)
  
• Clamp-on Surge protectors from Belkin.... much better idea than my solution which requires things to be drilled into the back of my desk
  
• 37 Signals guys interview in wired
  
• 3D room design via lifehacker.
  

Here's the first "awwwwwhhhh" for the morning... check this video of a Lion reunited with his rescuer. Super-cute. Here's the reddit thread where I found it. I love the first comment.... where do you "find" a lion? :)

The Bender Brewer Project is a must for all true futurama fans. Someone want to get me a christmas present? :)

Stephen Fry's Podgram is up and available via RSS and on iTunes.

What appears to be the latest in a really lame attempt from Microsoft at marketing, or connecting with the cool kids is Source Fource.

Can someone please explain this to me? Is this just a "buzz" creator? A legitimate product of some sort (obviously aimed at confusing "open source")? A cross-promotion with Lego?

The only thing I can gather from the site is maybe this is a new qualification system of some sort.... though I'm unsure the reaction of a fortune 500 company to hiring a "ISV Super Gal".

Dear Microsoft friends of mine, you know who you are, please explain this stuff to me.... :)

Coding Horror points that Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book is now available online for free from Byte (they're still around?). This is a tome of a book which I picked up many years ago at one of those super-cheap computer book sales and have only glanced through, as it's fairly intimidating. Jeff makes it sound like a must-read for any programmer though.

Twelve Important Rules for Photography has the sunny 16 rule and 11 others. Good to have all nicely condensed! (Hhehehe, moony 11 rule..... )

Now You Too Can Frag Frakkin Toasters, with your own viper pilots license. Way cool!

WWTDD has a good scoop on Lindsay Lohan's re-creation of Marilyn Monroe's last nude photoshoot, with gazongas fully engaged where needed. It's honestly fairly "meh", but hey, naked pics of celebs? Bring it on! Link is mostly SFW (photoshopped out boobages, with links to non-edited versions).

Inspired by a post from Scoble, someone put up an Obsolete Skils wiki.

Star Trek Phaser With Blu-Ray Laser... I would love one of these! Wonder how the transit cops would react to me "stunning" loud talking commuters though... ?

Lifehacker has a good post of Top 10 Free Wallpaper, Fonts and Icon Sources. All the goodness needed to pimp out your desktop.

Pentrix - Pen Spinning Revolution.

Laughing Squid points to a Time Lapse Video of San Francisco Fog. Best part for me is the planes zipping overhead...

Darren Barefoot posts a link to Five Gorgeous Minutes of Dance, Set to the Lyrics of Lou Reed. I normally would have passed it by, being the uncultured slob that I am, but it features a version of "Waiting for the Man" by the Velvet Underground, one of my favorite heroin songs (about, not to do it to!)

From Fozbaca's daily link roundup comes 15 Exercises for Learning a new Programming Language... something I'm going through right now in my learning of Ruby. Very cool stuff.

Interesting and amusing presentation by Zed Shaw called Mongrel, 2500 Lines, and Economics in which he talks about how the tiny little program called Mongrel (the server used in Rails) became sucessful. You may remember Zed from his rant a bit ago :)

How a BitTorrent Tracker Owner Hides from the MPAA/RIAA is a fascinating article over at torrentfreak about how to fly under the radar online.

Found out about the Rarindra style workflow from these comments over at reddit.com which pointed to this photoset at photo.net. Very cool look, though overdone (IMHO) if done all the time. Still, an impressive use of photoshop for sure!

7 Viral Videos You Didn't Know Were Staged (and How They Did It) from cracked.com via Digg.

The Ukulele Orchestra of GB - Smells Like Teen Spirit... coolest version of Smells Like Teen Spirit you'll see all evening :)

Ed Bott says that Windows Vista SP1 is done and will be arriving mid-March. It looks like SP1 will not be automatically installed if there are known driver conflicts, which is an interesting (and good) way to do it. I hope that SP1 will deliver the improvements for Vista that people have been talking about and asking for.

How Dr. Gregory House is like Sherlock Holmes.

Ar'alani's photos and his favorites, suggested by Thomas Hawk.

Flow|State has a really good article on how he's Looking forward to seeing Facebook apps drop their pointless mystery. Lots of screenshots and a nice explanation of the crappy user interface that 99% of the facebook apps out there have.

Interview with Nitesh Dhanjani and Billy Rios, Spies in the Phishing Underground. Via BoingBoing and /.

Found iVideosongs.com via an article on TechCrunch, free and pay video tutorials for learning to play the guitar, and what looks like a fairly "ok" library of songs to learn (only 2-10 songs per section it seems.... it is still beta though. Pretty cool stuff!

Blast Off Fat (Way) Faster from Health.com. Standard type tips I think, nothing magic (not that there's anything magic about improving your fitness), still good to read through.

A Rookie Guide to Digital SLR Cameras is a great article that is going around which gives you the ups and downs for new, or potentially new DSLR owners. A bit slanted towards Nikon it seems, but as a Pentax user I couldn't care less, and quite frankly, it really doesn't matter for 99% of the users out there. My philosophy has always been to tell people to go and handle the cameras and make sure you feel comfortable with the feel, controls, and weight, as if you're not comfortable you're going to tend towards not using your new $1000 toy and it'll be a moot point anyway!

That said, Pentax is the only way to go. That and VIM. And OS/X. Oh, and your favorite band sucks.

:)

Robert Capa - Lost Negatives is an interesting article over at the NYTimes about a cache of about 3500 photographs that were presumed lost, but resurfaced years later.

Youtube has a video introducing the Pentax K20D with some nice details in the 7 and a half minute presentation. For those who don't know, Pentax introduced the K20D and K200D DSLRs recently.

Great article by Andrew Chen on Does Facebook reflect your true friendships?

Ever wonder exactly what your geek and/or designer friends are talking about when they rant about some law by a guy named Fitts? Well Visualizing Fitts’s Law has a nice look at exactly what "infinite target area" and such terms are all about.

Shaved Bumblebee. Not much more to be said, other than a hilarious, disturbing, and fantastic 3d creation!

This one's for Raskal..... Jeep Vs Tree :)

Why is Apple Launching New Gear a Week Before Macworld? is the question asked (and possibly answered) by the linked image over at Gizmodo. Some cool (though probably impractical) mockups of a potential Macbook Touch were sent over to me as well.

Thanks Darren!

WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier is a "BLOG" written from letters and notes from an English soldier in the trenches during WW1. Interesting concept and an interesting read. There was a similar project a few years ago recreating diary entries from..... something else that was really old... Anyone remember what that was?

Coding Horror has a good article on Understanding User and Kernel Mode, and what the difference is between the green and red lines in your task manager.

Yo! You SETI@Home users who turned off your client and forgot about it (like I did)... according to a slashdot story there's a 500-fold Increase in Data Flow from SETI Telescope, so re-install the clients, log in and start chugging through that data!

AVSIM Online has a review of Jon Patchs excellent Vancouver+ addon for Microsoft Flight Simulator/X. I was on the beta team for Vancouver+ and must say, it's a very cool thing to "fly" over your own hometown and have it not as a random generic set of random building textures, but what you're used to driving through every day.

The review has lots of screenshots to show what you're going to get, including some not 100% desirable effects.

Now the guys Winter Surfing in Toronto... they're hardcore!

Thanks to Robert for the link!

Blizzard posts a really good roundup of how Firefox 3 is rocking on Linux.

I have to say I agree with him. The performance improvements, memory leaks plugged, and great visual integration make it more and more of a joy to use on my linux development machine. Be sure to check out his visual comparisons of version 2 and 3.

I've always thought of myself as more a "Jedi" kinda guy, but with posters like these, or this, or this (full gallery with a few more here, I'd be happy to wear the stormtrooper white!

This picture of fireworks over Oslo is most impressive.

Found a good article on something I've always suspected about.... the HDMI cable scam:

Let's begin by going back in history to the birth of really expensive cables. It started with speaker wire. When you connect a normal speaker to a normal stereo system, you are sending both a signal (in the form of an oscillating wave) and a lot of power (potentially hundreds of watts) through the speaker cable. Someone realized that to send a lot of power, a thick cable would cause less distortion. Thus, mega cables were born. And they were expensive.

Now run, hurry to take back those $200 Monster Cables you got at Christmas and replace them with cheaper versions!

Via BoingBoing comes a Colormation Screen Test video from the 60s which is creepy and cool all at the same time.

Impressive photography over at AOL Visions site.

Remember the SU-27 back in the day (well, I do). Anyway, check out the pics and videos of the Su-30MK and how amazingly maneuverable it is.... man, you can't do those stunts!

Coding Horror has a nice little article onCard Shuffling for all the coding geeks out there.

Laughing Squid reminded me that Pretend To Be A Time Traveler Day is incoming quickly. More info here.

Now this is just a super-cool use of technology. Cellphone's slosh and rattle reveal its contents is basically using shaking a cell phone of PDA with an accelerometer can produce sounds / images to indicate things like power level, number of emails, email senders, etc. Similar and different to the color based feedback that was proposed and partially implemented under the GNOME desktop (can't seem to find a link to anything specific about it right now, but it was proposing to use things like a green color in a download icon to represent good speed or orange or red for stalled downloads, stuff like that).

• Wil Weaton pointed out some Watchmen production pictures.
  
• Have your own weighted companion cube (Portal geeks only).
  
• Cat with security system (lolcat pic... I love these, so sue me)
  

Some good tips (all of which I'm sure I violated in my contract work) at the Freelance Blog. 10 Absolute "No's!" for Freelancers... something good to keep beside your phone for the next call that comes in :)

Jeffrey has published some Lightroom export-to plugins for Flickr, Smugmug and Zenfolio.

I'm not sure what Sarah Michelle Gellar did to deserve the title "Maxim's Woman of the year", but lets be honest, who really cares? Maxim + Buffy = Hawt!

Some amazing photoshop work (check out the 'making of' slideshows) from Christophe Huet. Found via LaughingSquid.

Quick video from youtube of a Supra From Hell.... looks very benign and boring till the last few seconds..... those guys definitely didn't expect that :)

Parkour, The Art of Moving From Point A to Point B in Vancouver, BC.

Man I wish I was as fit as those guys! Maybe there's an overweight-computer-geek version I can try....

How to Win at Monopoly - some interesting tactics.

YouTube - HALF LIFE IN 60 SECONDS is pretty much exactly what the title says. Thanks Darren!

Bummed about your caffeine curve? Here's a good primer on how to give it up (coffee and / or caffeine that is).

Foose Fooled is a short video on youtube of a prank pulled on Chip Foose of Overaulin'

A selection of greate wildlife photos from Nick Brandt. I love the use of Black and White personally. Definitely inspiring work for anyone with access to African wildlife and photography :)

The iPod Death Clock displays how long your iPod (based on serial number and a few usage questions) will be in this world.

Thanks today (tonight) to Oneiros (again) for the last few tips and tricks getting Portal finished, probably the first game I've completed in single player since.... quake 2. Anyway he pointed me to Half-Life 2: Portal, a hack to allow you to use the portal gun in other Source based games (ie: HL2, HL2:Eposide 1,2, etc).

Gizmodo has their Google Phone Wishlist and some great ideas about how google can integrate their various services into a cell phone.

Ubuntu has released the Gutsy Gibbon into the wild, stories, torrent links, screenshots, and reviews are everywhere.

Found 10 Reasons to Learn Ruby, and even if Ruby isn't your can of beans, it's got some nice and simple introductions to some of the more powerful features of the language (which I've read a couple of books on but have yet to really dig into.

The 10 Most Asinine Movie Twist Endings, for all your quick-and-dirty list material.

Interesting project... Brian Auer asked people to edit his photo. He got back 28 Ways To Interpret A Photo.

You think you're passionite to your hobby? This guy makes his own swords.... from scratch. Scratch!. Like, from the ore scratch. Smelting it himself from scratch.

Now that's cool

Found another nice little article with 10 dirty little secrets you should know about working in IT. Everything from the insanity of management to the pain of babysitting ancient, unmanageable servers years out of date and out of support but still running business critical services. :)

Interesting look at how to Double Your Salary* (*Without A Second Job) from Men's Health. It's not a get rich quick thing, just an interesting avenue to pursue for some extra money. I almost didn't post it except for this line:

He simply found capitalism's G-spot and started rubbing away.

Found this through reddit.... the The Right Brain vs Left Brain. Displays an animation and depending if you see it moving one way or the other shows you are left or right brained. I was surprised, turns out that (at least according to this test) I'm right brained, which does not include things like logic and detail oriented (ie: coder qualities) but instead I fall into the "uses feeling, 'big picture' oriented, and fantasy based" category. Very.... odd. I'm interested to see how other people I know react to it, and if they fall into the category they think they do.

Remember a while back there was some buzz about a big-ass X-Wing model rocket (where "big-ass" is like, 21' long). Anyway, it got launched and flying! Well... kinda. Check the video :)

Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently Serialized on BBC Radio. Link in the story is for RM only (bleah) but there are links to more useful file types in the comments.

Some great tips for business writing. #2 is my favorite, my biggest bitch to a buddy of mine who occasionally asks me for my opinion for written business material is he's too verbose and wordy. Maybe this will help convince him! :)

Very interesting, and scary is "Stupid In America" - Full 20/20 Documentary. Basically it's flame bait to some, and no doubt lots will be screaming about it. However, taken at face value, it is not a bright look at a) schools in the US and b) teachers unions.

Interesting look anyway.

Just saw the best catdoor hacking project ever, where the catdoor won't open if the cat has a mouse in it's mouth.

Photoshop Insider has a nice roundup of blogs.

Nice article on EBays Billion Lesson in the Value of Hype, talking about how they paid $3b (that's with a 'b' as in 'bbbbbbillion') for skype, and discovered, unsurprisingly, it wasn't worth quite that much.

It’s almost impossible to pay for a deal through “synergies.”

Mutating Pictures is a project to see if random images are interpreted as faces. There is a 'hot or not' style rating system to allow the system to know how good or bad the results are.

Some good and profound (and always amusing) advice from jwz on backups.

"OMG, three drives is so expensive! That sounds like a hassle!" Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway.

Too cute to be legal: Orphaned hedgehogs adopt cleaning brush as their mother.

Via OSNews is a look at What's new in Mandriva 2008.0. Glad to see Mandrake is still around.

Holy crap! A LEGO's Ultimate Collectors Millennium Falcon. Many pounds of lego here!

The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a quick review of the new Amazon music store.

Great find by Accordion Guy.... a collection of “Simpsons” Scenes and their Reference Movies. Reference frames from the simpsons and the classic movies they reference.

Update: As per the commenter, credit goes to www.actualidadsimpson.com.

Someone told me about seeing eye ponies ages ago, and I didn't believe them. This link proved me wrong.

Two great links from Coding Horror:

• SexyLCD Monitor Arms. Gotta get me some of those.
  
• A nice look at Why Flip3D sucks and alternatives that far better emulate the simplicity and usability of Expose under windows.
  

Yup, Alicia Silverstone got naked for the crazy Peta people... here's the ad and high res pic. Yay batgirl!

Here's some more women of PETA.

Funny Sewer Art in San Paulo.

No one better forget that tomorrow is Talk Like a Pirate Day, so make sure you celebrate, maties! Arrrrr!!!!

Holy spare time batman..... check out pics of this City of toothpicks which is a city, uhmmm... built of toothpicks.

Via Reddit: pictures from the last space mission. Great shots.

Stormtroopers blast through gender barrier! Thank god for a world where hot femtroopers have equality.

I heard the guys on the Howard Stern show blasting on Britney for her VMA performance, so I had to see it. After a bit of ferreting I found some info and a video of her (horrible) performance. I only hope this marks the end of her "comeback".

• MTV Video Music Awards bounce back after Britney bombs in performance on the Canadian Press
  
• Britney Spears MTV VMA Mess!
  
• VMA performance video (until it gets taken down as well I guess).
  

What everyone needs.... the Nabaztag Wifi Smart Rabbit. Who wouldn't want a bunny that is a wifi access point, alarm clock, will give you news and weather forecast, but will also (and I need this) tell you when to go to bed :)

In a fit of cuteness, check out this slideshow of some pics of a polar bear playing with huskies. Very trippy and cool to see, great pics. Wonder how common this is if there aren't any people nearby.

The Matrix Goggles allow the user to view the world in real time giving the world viewed various effects like you'd get from photoshop. Via Slashdot (I think).

Great video on youtube of some Hand Shadow show by Raymond Crowe.

Holy crap, this is awesome! Wish it was higher res though, I'd definitely put that on my wall.

Rolling Stone’s Top 25 Songs With a Secret. Found while composing a playlist composed of songs about drugs. Also found:

• Songs about Heroin
  
• What is the best song about heroin
  
• Heroin Songs
  

Cool video of a 360 degree light field display, showing some pretty cool stuff.

Make Blog has a great video of Stupid (yet cool) pen tricks. I learnt the first one a year or so back, finally some good instructions on how to drive myself crazy some more!

Sweet! Boing Boing points out that The IT Crowd -- season two, episode one has aired and is around for upload. Links in BB story.

For anyone who is a geek and who hasn't seen The IT Crowd before, it's an absolutely hilarious show about a bunch of nerds/geeks/sysadmins. I'm interested to see if the US adaption is anywhere near as funny as the original UK version. I'd say go and download season 1 first and then watch season 2, if you haven't seen it before.

Saw on shacknews that a World in Conflict Demo was released.

Developed by Massive Entertainment, and published by Sierra, the alternate history action strategy game World in Conflict will be in stores September 18.

Very cool pics of the making of a CPU Desk.... basically the top of a desk with CPUs in it. I actually had this same idea 15 years ago or so, putting old electronics on a desk and then filling it with epoxy to create a cool tabletop. Well, maybe not the same idea, but still cool. I could do this as well, just need about 800 more spare CPUs :)

Looks super-cool though.

Mental note: Make one of thesedesktop biospheres for work.

Note for self, for new projects, the new Yahoo! UI Library: Rich Text Editor looks really sexy.

I wish I had this Beginners Guide To Lock Picking the other week when someone here at work locked their laptop in their desk drawer without knowing where the key was.

Well, maybe not 101, but cassette tape culture has a good start!

More sexy stormtroopers via boingboing.

Turn Your Old CRT Computer Moniter Into A Fish Tank. I have a couple of 19" monitors I can use this on....

Well, not "parents" per-se, but the people who reared it before it being let go to the wild. The video will give you a good portion of your "awwww" requirements for the day. Note: no goring involved (luckily)!

And the Bad Astronomy Blog has the 12 things you need to watch it!

When I see this report from FOX NEWS on UFO Disclosure it really makes me understand why the US is absolutely insane. What other reasonable news organization would put the leader of the UFO political action party (or whatever the hell it is) on TV and act as if he's not completely insane.

I for one welcome our new UFO overlords.

X Games Skater Somehow Doesn't Die seemed a bit of a silly title, till I watched the video. Yowza!

Yokohama at night trippy panorama from the Landmark tower. Cooooool!

How cool is this!? Kevin Smith at Comic-con talks about how he'll be directing episode one of 'Origins', a 'Heroes' spin off series.

Got a geek that works extra hard for you, or you think would love a bit of extra recognition? Head over and nominate them for the 2007 Sysadmin of the Year. It not only makes you feel really great to be nominated (thanks keth!) but the prizes are pretty kick ass too!

Oscar the Cat Predicts Patients' Deaths. Sad and cool at the same time.

Yahoo's YSlow Plug-in Tells You Why Your Site is Slow, it's a plugin for firebug, and is now available for the masses. Here's the YSlow plugin page.

A list of the porn sites of web 2.0.

I so love Top Gear.... here they are doing a video of a Bugatti Veyron at top speed, which incidentally, is over 400km/h. I think I've seen / posted this before, but I really don't care. We all love watching videos of cars with, you know, 10 radiators and who go that fast.

Video demonstrations of The 12 Kinds of Ads and ad formats.

Wow, this 11 year old drummer is amazing! Helps he's been playing since he was 2!

It's just one pic, but yea, Lucy is hot now.

Very cool picture of storm clouds and lightning approaching the coast.

I really want about 10 of these to begin my takeover of the world.

Cool video of the latest not-for-kids project, the Rocket Powered Matchbox Car.

Some great animal photos via reddit. I particularly like the one of the lions drinking at the same watering hole as the elephant. Bit slow to load though.

Hindu Prayer Shouted Down in US Senate. Truly a grand victory for freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and of course, that separation of church and state! Great job everyone!
</sarcasm>

I knew a couple of these Nine Brain Quirks You Didn’t Realize You Had. Cool list.

#9 - You have an instant playback feature.

Not to be outdone by (IMHO) google earth's superior sat photos, here comes Microsoft Virtual Earth: 26 Terabytes Published to Virtual Earth – Biggest Update Yet.

Nope, still no good sat photography of my house :(

Yowza! You really don't want to Mess with this Dog! Remember those dogs from the Hulk movie? Mirror image!

Who needs sit-ups? Especially when you know what a hot potato is (hint: it's not something super-kinky that you would be afraid to ask your wife for :)

If this story where a Former Chinese Restaurant Employee Tells All is even half true, I will never look at Chinese food the same again.

I found 5 Obscure Facts About the Declaration of Independence which is pretty interesting, even to a northerner like me.

Happy Fourth of July to my American friends and fiends!

If I came home and saw this I think I'd just move. No packing, just pick up my keys and leave forever.

Found this via a few different places, but check out this 22 minute (and well worth it) talk from David Pogue from a conference in 2006. He starts with a musical number (not kidding) and then talks about UI design and technology and how we deal with technology these days.

Your Best Body in One Hour from body and fitness. Ideas and suggestions for your workouts. Obviously that's not 1 session of 1 hour, but 1 hour at a time :)

I figured that I had an idea of what was on the list of 25 Sites We Can't Live Without, and I was a bit right. Lots of ones on there that I never knew before and that look very useful.

Interesting look at Life at Google from a Microsoft perspective. Nice look for any prospective Google hires as well :)

Sort of a neat photography bit, spherical panoramic images flattened out. The Astronomical Observatories of Jai Singh II has an odd title, but some cool imagery.

I ended up going through the top links on a blog and found a few interesting ones:

• Psychedelic Furniture Showcase
  
• Office Pranks
  
• Reading women's facial expressions
  
• Extreme offroading.
  
• Male rules (humor).
  

How to Get Rid of Your Junk. Man I need to do this.

What you don't know about sushi. Be sure to hit the how to eat sushi link as well.

Some random historic facts that either go against, or perpendicular to what you learned about them in school (if you learned about them at all of course). Of course, I have no idea how true the page is on it's facts, but it definitely is interesting if true.

Officespam (almost as good as Darren for keeping me amused first thing in the morning) poses some Tough Questions with some interesting answers. Definitely a good read.

Coding horror has a nice article on How to Clean Up a Windows Spyware Infestation. Now, this is the 'by-hand' way of doing things, I personally prefer to use AdAware / SpyBot / HijackThis and friends. However, this is a nice article on how to know what is going on behind the scenes.

I think this is a new set of Cats and Mice armor. Very cool even if it is a dupe :)

Never knew that there was a freely downloadable version of Adobe Magazine. You have to sign up and it's in PDF format though (no rss sadly).

If you have a VW and out in the lower mainland, you might be interested in the DGLVK Westcoast Showdown 2007.

istartedsomething proclaims that Windows Ultimate Extras is a sham, and asks where the responsibility for selling the uber-expensive version of Vista for the extras, then having no movement on those extras (aside from the 4 (fairly lame) ones it was released with) is. Interesting discussion, some good links in there as well to other people asking the same question. More here (in the comments).

Very interesting article on Sexual predators online on Boing Boing.

Kids do get preyed upon, but not in the way that it's depicted in the media, and none of the cell-phone-tracking, spyware-installing fear-based parenting does squat to protect them.

The gravity bookshelf is similar to the gravity gun, but more useful around the house.

Have a Leica sitting around and want to create a little chaos through change? Check out the mod that DrLeoB did over at rangefinder forums..... a Digital Back for the M3. Via the online photographer.

Via Darren again, my morning supply of distractions.... check out this stuff. If he's not careful he's going to paralyze himself! :) Very cool to see people so completely ignoring the fact that they have different circumstances than the rest of us.

Wow, check out this clip from Britain's got talent. This opera singing mechanic gives the audience and the judges an amazing performance. Very nice scene... amazing reaction from the audience for a massively talented dude.

Hmm.... found 50 Things You Need to Know by 50 over at reddit, has some interesting and funny stuff on there.

11. We're all really, really small, in the grand scheme of things.

Darren (again) passed on a link to a fun lip syncing video from the folks over at Threadless.

This Public Transport Map is super-cool..... it's a google maps mashup with GPS feeds from buses in Helsinki, showing you a real time view of where the buses are. Now all we need is real-time satellite view to compliment this. Found on reddit.

Found a fun little flash based physics game called Blueprint.

Now this is a worthwhile project for any cat-loving, photography-loving geek. The Cat Cam! A modified tiny camera attached to the cat collar, which takes pics to show a day in the life of a cat from the cats perspective. Very cool! Sadly if I did this to any of mine 99% of the pictures would be of the side of the couch where they lounge 18 hours a day :)

RVBurke points to a link on how to argue in a constructive way.

Boing Boing points to a WiFi slurper that grabs up to six open networks and makes one connection. Very cool, similar to what pfsense does, but on a way larger scale (and in the other direction :)

Another nice link for photographers.... Tamron has a Focal length comparison tool, a flash based app that lets you basically see the effects of different focal lengths of lenses. Nice to see what you are getting when you're not familiar with the lens, or are getting a DSLR and coming from the "N-times zoom" digicam world.

Darren sent me a link to The Myth Of Salads: Why Why Fast Food Salads Aren't Necessarily Going To Help You Lose Weight. I know this, but it's nice to see it in black and white (as it were). Finally, justification to get that burger! :)

What if we told you that a Wendy's Garden Sensations Mandarin Chicken Salad had more calories, more fat, more carbs and more sugar than a Double Stack? Would that surprise you? It shouldn't.

Neat article with some trivia about why Mr. Rogers was awesome that I'll bet you didn't know. Course, it also reveals he was a bit of a nutter as well :)

More information on Mr. Rogers over at wikipedia.

For you photographers out there check out PopPhotos Landscape Cheat Sheet.

Princess Leia slave girl convention pics. My brain just exploded.

Lifehacker pointed to 15 Best Diet Tips Ever. Interesting stuff for us out of shape geeks.

Whenever you feel like eating, look for physical signs of hunger, suggests Michelle May, MD, author of Am I Hungry?

"Hunger is your body’s way of telling you that you need fuel, so when a craving doesn’t come from hunger, eating will never satisfy it," she says.

For some reason the hardest one (for me) and the most obvious is left for absolute last, the "be active" one.

Cool map of the federation of planets via Digg.

Lifehacker has a cool post of the Coolest Workspace Contest, with some nifty results.

Oooooh! High-Resolution Widescreen Wallpaper.

Ahhh..... back in 1998 3dfx was king and GLIDE was it's queen (and crowning achievement). A quick trip back to the games back in the day :)

Cool balloon art via digg. "Make me an optimus prime!"

Great gallery of frozen object, pictures taken of bullets doing various things shot at 1/50,000 of a second and thereabouts.

Supercool surf video (no bikinis, sorry) off of youtube...... wow, this guy had one hell of a ride!

Why has no one told me about this before! Using fboweb.com you can do live flight tracking with google earth. I'm not sure how 100% "live" it is, cause the planes don't move for me, but it's super cool (and it is supposed to be live I'm told). It'll also make your computer scream a bit if you load a large airport like LAX.

I know sites have gone through issues of barrier to entry on websites, but this is ridiculous. The site for I Know Who Killed Me requires not only your zip code, first and last name, and birthdate to enter a site. The "site" you're entring is a movie trailer of sorts in the form of a lame fake video blog (I'm soooo glad this sort of viral marketing has caught on....). Seriously, there is no good reason for this. The site requires a valid zip code (no postal codes allowed!) and you have to be 18 to "sign up" (even though you don't submit an email address anywhere).

Course, I suppose if you're interested in a Lindsay Lohan movie you probably deserve it. The only reason I was at it was for research purposes as apparently she gets naked on film.

On movie film that is. On purpose. And not doing coke.

Random cuteness after downtime (someone snipped a fiber optic cable)... cuteoverload has a great video of mother cat and bunny babies. Only minor chewing involved :)

Found somewhere, a video of the last 10 seconds of everyStar Trek: TNG episode. Over 6 minutes, I watched about a minute before getting bored, but it's still interesting to watch.

One Year of Stock Photography! is a really interesting review from someone's adventures selling images to various micro and regular stock agencies.

flickrvision is pretty cool, a mashup with google earth / maps (in a browser) showing new Flickr photo posts. There is the 3d view and the classic view.

Saw today over on Jon Patch that Flight Simulator X Service Pack 1 was released.

Rediscovering the Button Element has been going around since yesterday, but I finally got around to looking through it today, but it does show how to make some sexy cross platform HTML buttons.

Great find on Digg.... .The Essential Guide to Piracy. Not only about, but a semi-howto as well.

If it’s a digital file, you can pirate it. But the sake of my fingers and your eyes, I’m going to stick to the top three pirated filetypes: music, movies, and software. This is a guide on how to pirate properly with specific applications.

[...]


As you probably guessed, piracy is illegal. Getting caught can land you some serious fines or even jail-time depending on the offense. Those of you in college should probably stay the hell away from piracy. I personally know about three people who have been caught downloading via Bit Torrent or P2P. The only safe way to pirate is to not do it at all.

While I would never pirate anything, (honest! no, really! hey, why are you laughin?!), I do understand both sides of the coin. How many say, Photoshop experts are there out there that started out by spending $600 and then learned the ins and outs of the software? A few I'm sure, but I'm also going to guess that a lot of the PS users started with a pirated copy of PS 5 or 6 that they found on some warez site or BBS and thought it was nifty keen, then kept at it and are now buying it legally. Ditto with a host of other software packages out there, with a questioning glance over to some of the larger software/OS makers who at one time made their stuff very easy to pirate and also very popular. I'm not sayin' the two are related, I'm just sayin'....

I'm glad that they included Usenet in there too, that great bastion of diverse pornography. alt.binaries.nazi.lesbian.midgets anyone?

Anyway, so yea, good read, go to it.

From the "scary and cool at the same time" department here is Zunker Bot, a control panel for the zombie bot hoards that we get to clean off our friends and families windows computers. Nicely designed...... for eeeeeeeevil.

Well, model rocket launching anyway. I'm glad to see the Austin Scouts' model rocket launching record on video, however I do want to ask, are they running out of world records? I mean, when did 'number of bottle rockets launched within 5 seconds' become something to aspire to? And is there a sub-record where it's withing 10 seconds, or 2? I guess people found that beating the "real" records (time to ascend everest, that sort of thing, were really hard to beat and just started making stuff up. I personally plan to enter the nose goblin flicking world record, I'm pretty sure I'll be the winner (and only entrant), assuring me a place in the sun for at least one year.

Side note, I'm not sure how they chose ads to go before (and after) these videos, but seeing a horribly depressing ad about surviving rape is not what I want to see before a video of boy scouts launching model rockets.

Cool, Forever Geek (you rock dude) sends off that NBC Orders up Second “Heroes” Series. The second series will be only 6 episodes and entitled "Heroes: Origins". Cool!

Interesting reading for the webheads out there is 14 rules for fast web pages:

Steve Souders of Yahoo's "Exceptional Performance Team" gave an insanely great presentation at Web 2.0 about optimizing website performance by focusing on front end issues. Unfortunately I didn't get to see it in person but the Web 2.0 talks have just been put up and the ppt is fascinating and absolutely a must-read for anyone involved in web products.

Forgetfoo has a great video on Photoshop Weight Loss, or rather, the power of digital editing. Wow.

This is kinda cool, Superman Returns(TM): Stop! Press! Game lets you play Jimmy Olsen and get a good picture of superman flying by.

Cool article on detecting photofakery.

Hilarious.... you "Lost" fans can now enjoy Found. Not sure if the entire thing is just to disseminate the HD-DVD key or not, but it's still pretty funny.

Seems like the latest patches for KVM (the linux Kernel Virtual Machine module) has Improved KVM Performance.

"The happy theme of today's kvm is the significant performance improvements, brought to you by a growing team of developers. I've clocked kbuild at within 25% of native. This release also introduces support for 32-bit Windows Vista."

No all I need is a VT compatible CPU in my linux box to play with this stuff!

Kitten performing shiatsu massage. Pure video cuteness.

This is cool, famous director and actor Kevin Smith asks Who wants to come to my birthday party? If you're in the New Jersey area, or want to go there, you have a great opportunity. Anyone want to spot me the cash to head down there from Vancouver? :)

The 25 Most Exquisitely Sad Songs in the Whole World (with the songs there to listen to), as chosen by some random website. Bonus is that you get the casualty count for each one :)

Debbie has a good take on the People Magazine "No makeup" issue. When I first heard about this I thought it was an interesting idea, but the chances of getting anything resembling a "real" person in the magazine is pretty minimal :)

Holy crap, I've seen some pics of the freeway collapse in Oakland, but this is the first video of it I've seen.

The Story of Mel is a long ago story in the geek community, it's featured in the hackers dictionary and has floated all around. Well worth the repost!

More great stories are in the same directory. If you've never read some of these in the hackers dictionary / jargon file, please do so, now, and you'll be able to talk about a scratch monkey and not worry you don't know what you're talking about :)

Decluttering, now with more detail and lots of pictures as you are shown how to control your desktop crap (or clutter as it were) a bit better. The before and after pics at the bottom of the page are impressive.

Hows that for a disjointed entry? :)

Wow, check it out as this Bad ass takes on 5 guys! Definately someone you want with you in a dark alley. Having "Eye of the Tiger" playing as the background music is a nice touch as well :)

I sort of ignored this when it first came out a couple of weeks ago, finally listened to it today. I really like it! The sound of the song anyway, the actual lyrics are kinda meh. I definitely prefer my fellow canuck's interpretation over the original. Alanis's whimsical sound makes the song sound far less pretentious or something...

Anyway, here's a story about the results from that video.

OMG, CuteOverload is the best, especially when they bring you yawning cuteness. This is exactly how I feel every morning before work, and how I look too, but without being so adorable and cuddly... same amount of hair though.

Yay! A distant planet judged possibly habitable was found by astronomers. Now when you want them to stop the planet to let you get off you know where to go!

Excellent article entitled Why I’m not a Sysadmin anymore.

My experience is that working as a sysadmin is, to me, interesting and fulfilling on a technical level, but ultimately disappointing and frustrating on a career and personal level.

As a sysadmin I can definately see where this guy is coming from.

Superniftycool is that there is new stuff on Google Earth from the AIA which is a bunch of new buildings. To enable it just load up google earth and check the red 'A' icon under featured content.

Heroes is finally coming back tonight after a long delay. Cultural Learnings shows us where we Last Left Our 'Heroes' with a wrap up of where everyone was and what they were doing.

The only big disappointment is I've gotten into both 24 and Drive, which conflict greatly with Heroes, meaning that I have to tape something and not be able to miss the other thing that's on at the same time. Fingers crossed that my MythTV box doesn't blow up :)

Hot and stupid both at the same time. What do you think?

Very interesting video from Joel Meyerowitz on Street Photography. Basically a howto, but more of a way of how to look for images, and how to get people to not notice you, also how to get over your fear of taking strangers pictures. Hint: Looks like no one really notices if you take their picture :) Linked from this thread in the DPReview forums.

Super-awesomeness cannot describe Nazi Robot Attack, a short animation made by Marco Spitoni.

I have no idea what to say about this Fox News story asking the question of if the Virginia Tech killer was possessed by the devil.

Was Cho Seung-Hui schizophrenic … psychotic … manic-depressive? Or were the shooting deaths of 32 people, including Cho himself, at Virginia Tech University part of the ongoing struggle between God and Satan … good against evil … lightness and darkness?

Could Cho have been possessed by the Devil? Could that explain the massacre at Virginia Tech?

Dr. Richard Roberts, president of Oral Roberts University, shouts an unequivocal “Yes!”

“Based on what I’ve seen in the news," Roberts said in an interview, "there’s no doubt that this act was Satanic in origin."

Excuse me? This story is on the pages of the website of a supposedly reputable news organization? I'm all for bitching about Fox and their (supposed) right wing, Bush loving bias, and I can understand Dr. Richard Roberts buying into it as he is a Christian....

Maybe I'm the crazy one, but doesn't it seem wrong for this "reporter" to even entertain the notion on a public webpage for a news organization? Or is this how far into the religious right that news media has fallen?

In the words of the fabulous Chris Rock, "whatever happened to 'crazy'"?

Interesting article on Room Color and How it Affects your Mood.

Crimson can make some people feel irritable. With red invoking feels of rage and hostility is a color that should be avoided as the main color of a room. Sitting for long periods of time in a room this color will likely breakdown any peace and harmony you are striving to create in your home. Ancient cultures used the color red to stimulate the body and mind and to increase circulation.

Interesting blog on losing weight, dedicated to the '300' workout and the exercises that the actors from 300 did.

Update:the page for the guy who did the 300 workout. Impressive pictures....

The 300 workout btw, is:
25x Pull-up +
50x Deadlift @ 135# +
50x Push-up +
50x Box Jump @ 24” box +
50x Floor Wiper @ 135# (one-count) +
50x KB Clean and Press @ 36# (KB must touch floor between reps) +
25x Pull-up
300 reps total

My response to that list? "Fuckin' hell." :)

Thanks dude, time to hit the gym again....

Boing Boing has a cool link to Stacking Obelisk chairs. Very cool, definately a space saver, nice to have for that family room that you don't have people over all the time, but don't want to dig extra chairs out of storage when people do come over. The integrated coffee table is a great touch as well. Definitely falls into the cool geek furniture category.

I posted about the Trojan suit a while back, but I think that was just pictures. Now there's a full video of the creator showing off the suit and all it's goodies.

You will remember the inventor from the grizzly bear suit, and the fire resistant paste.

Man, english cats are dedicated! I wish my cats would get jobs too. Course, we don't live on a bus route, so that's probably the main reason why they are so lazy. Slackers.

Interesting article on consumerist about How Much Does It Cost To Lose 30 lbs? The answers will surprise you, as they compare five of the most popular weight loss systems (think Jenny Craig). Course, there's also that silly "eat less, exercise more" method, but that's actual hard work! :) [Personal Note: especially when your fiance is a really good cook! -- arc]

Note: you may want to check out another way of losing weight the wii geek way!

Lifehacker found a neat site that allows you to Quickly embed an image without hotlinking. Basically to be polite and not link directly to an image on someone else's server when posting it on your blog or in a forum or something, prepend http://imgred.com/ to the start of the full URL. Nifty stuff, wonder how long it'll last though.

This service of course, is not loved by the professional photographers out there.

A bit of a writeup about the new Grand Canyon Skywalk. As always, it seems a bit of a letdown as they are up to making their own money from it, so you're charged $75 to walk (includes busride and a couple of other extras), and don't get to take cameras, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of it IMHO. Read the article for more info though.

Nice ScobleShow with a talk from Kris Krug at PhotoCamp.

Great article by Jeremy Allison on what he's learned as a computer programmer.

Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies. That is all.

A pic from today on CuteOverload has mittens, a cat with opposable thumbs. Freaky man, just freaky. How long before they evolve enough that they don't need people (as their slaves of course, I have no illusions that they "need" us right now for anything more than their amusement)?

Great business card design in a Business card for personal trainer. Almost as good as the lockpick set unique metal design that I saw a while ago :)

From Digg.... the Most exciting roller coaster. Uhm... wow, I'd have to say "no" if I got the chance to ride that, that's just a bit too crazy for me.

Scott Adams points to an offer from the X Foundation for $10m for someone who can design a commercially viable car that gets 100mpg. He notes though:

[...] something tells me that the winning car will weigh six pounds and seat one anorexic dwarf. If you put a grape in the trunk, the front wheels will come off the ground.

That boy certainly has a way with words :)

Compare the sizes of anything in the universe with Universcale. Good to see your place in things..... Nifty and addicting little app, similar in time suck to something like Google Earth. Hint: use the mouse scroll, took me a bit to figure that out.

Holy crap! Check out the video of a a Dodge Viper doing 220 MPH in 24.1 sec. I just love the sound as he pegs each gear.

Neat comparison of All (known) Bodies in the Solar System Larger than 200 Miles in Diameter. Is it just me or is the third from last one the death star?

Wow, forever geek found the Best. Transformers Costumes. Ever.. These guys have some a) serious time on their hands and b) serious nerd issues. Seriously, there has to be a pill or something you can take.

Combine high speed video and a samurai sword and what do you get? Sup er cool videos. Amazing how cleanly that thing slices.

Amazing pics of tattoos by Anil Gupta.

There are two new quizes on Battlestar Galactica site, one on Cylons and one on Starbuck. 10 out of 10 and 8 out of 10 respectively. Who can beat my awesomeness? :)

Nice post that I really need to take advantage of on how to de-clutter.

Links to pictures of 8 strange computer cases from drinking to Star Wars.

Via one of the photoblogs I read, an introduction to visual thinking, posted mostly so I remember to read it when I get home.

12 ways to pimp your office. I so want that aquarium desk!

Excellent post on Daring Fireball entitled Deal With It and looks at some of the stuff you deal with every day in terms of UI. IE: 4 steps to send an IM to someone, 10 to send an email message. Interesting read.

The video of The Oribi Gorge has some serious pucker factor. Thanks Darren.

Lifehacker has a good article on a subject dear to my heart, taming your cables and powercords. The Cordless workspace redux has some tips and equipment on how to get your desk area a bit cleaner. I'm using the wire tray myself, which works not badly, it at least moves the masses of cables up off the floor), though it's not 100%. I think I'll look for the long power strip this weekend and see if that makes things a bit easier.

Be sure to add the other article on the same subject.

Too scared for the "Herd" releases? Well, Ubuntu 7.04 Beta has now been officially released. Hopefully they've fixed the "root on raid / mdadm bug" that bit me when I was playing with Herd4 and Herd5. If not, it's a known bug and I'm sure it'll be released before the official release sometime in April. Now I have something to play with this weekend!

Supercool! How productive could you be with a Smart Mirror? I seem to remember seeing something like this in minority report or I, Robot or something. Still, nifty.

Neat step-by-step look at creating a logo from the designers perspective.

Speaking of logos, I really need to update the look of this page (for those of you without RSS).

You need a reason? If you think you do, check out Twenty Reasons to Have Sex When You Don’t Feel Like It.

"Don't feel like it"? Huh? What language is this written in?

:)

Heros Director/Producer Greg Beeman has updated with BLOG QUESTIONS - WEEK 2. Lost more good stuff!

Thrown up on reddit.com as The best unedited fight sequence ever. Read the blurb on YouTube about how and why. Or just watch Tony Jaa (remember Ong Bak?) kick complete and total ass for four minutes. Great way to perk up your Tuesday morning!

Most Interesting Pictures Of Seb Przd - very MC Escher-esque.

Forever Geek points to a great featurette on the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie.

Yup, it's 3/14, or as geeks would know, Pi Day! Remember to celebrate at 1:59 today k?

Here's the Official site.

Nice article on how to Parallelize applications for faster Linux booting. This deals with the chunk of time after the kernel boots and while the system is starting up. Goes through alternate startup script systems, benchmarking and the actual Linux init process.

Better Light Introduces 416-megapixel Scanning Back. Not much to say here..... other than "Ugh". Quick specs:

• 10,200 x 13,600 pixel images
  
• almost 800mb output files
  
• $22k
  

Oddly enough I don't think that the 20-30mp backs are that much cheaper.... 419 though, wow. Though according to my calculator it's 138.72 mp. Still, way more than I need right now for my galleries of cat pictures...

More cool questions on Beeman's Blog about the spring hiatus. Great inside info not so much on the storyline as the mechanics of it all.

I had a good laugh when I looked at the license plate of Mr. Nakamura's car (episode 14). I like those little jokes. Did you place it deliberately or was it just someone from the equipment staff having fun?

Believe it or not, none of the writers, directors or production team planned that. It was the idea of one of our prop people – a great, hard working guy named James Clark.

Remember back in the day when Windows 95 wasn't out yet, OS/2 had just come out and it was going to rule the world? The "Team OS/2" weirdos were out there evangelizing and life was good? Back before the dark times.... back before the empire? </obi-wan>. Anyway, via OSNews here's a trip down memory lane with a OS/2 2.1 tutorial. Cute pics...

Possibly not safe for the weak of stomach.... a fark discussion link has a long list of images of scary facial / head / body tattoos.

The Comic Reel has a good write up on our meeting with Linderman in the last episode of Heroes ("Parasite"). Also reveals the title and air time of the next episode.

“.07%,” the first of the final five episode of “Heroes’” first year, is scheduled to air on April 23rd on NBC.

Here's an Animated Stereogram to make your eyes go crossed this weekend. Hint, it's not a boat (or a yacht :)

No people, regardless of what you have read on digg and reddit google maps can't zoom in this far... at least not everywhere. In fact, it can only zoom in on a few areas that are covered by the national geographic projects that have their (small) strips of photos overlaid. It's cool, but there are only a few. Check Google Earth for them (they appear as the little airplane icons over Africa).

May I be the first to say.....

Neeeeeerds!

I went to the page entitled A Hundred Couples Having Sex In One Room wondering what the double entendre (or reverse double entendre) was. Well, apparently there is none. Caution, NSFW due to boobies and other pixelated girlie bits.

Ah, I love the crazy Japaneses!

Wow.... I love lego, but not this much. Whoever made this has some serious block skillz.

A very cool set of advertising images. Some of these I've seen before (the bag with the picture of a bikini bottom on it for example), but there are a lot of new ones.

If you are a BSG fan and watched last nights episode you might want to read this thread on the SCI FI Forums. If you haven't, don't read it, not even the title. Serious spoilers. Funny quote (again, only for those who want spoilers or who have seen the episode) after the jump.

Apollo: Kara...?
Starbuck: Lee....you must go to the Dagobah system.
Apollo: Karrraaaaa....

.... which don't need a degree. Check em out.

Robert send me a link to these Amazing Art Illusions - Optical Illusions. Some of them I didn't get until I took a second look, sometimes a harder look, other times I had to look at the images from the side to "get" them.

I've never heard of The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster before. Basically it's a blog written from the point of view of Anakin Skywalker and his ascension to being Darth Vader from Episode I to VI. It's stopped being written now, but it looks like it's still a really good chunk of writing to go through.

Why don't you people tell me about these things! :)

Pictures of some Incomprehensible Intersections. My favorite is this one in Russia, where you look like you have to go an extra couple of km just to turn left!

I'll bet this cat would be a great piano player.

How about saying that for your career you're cardstacker?

Hamad published a a collection of pics he took for Vista wallpapers that didn't make the cut. Some good stuff in there.

Robert pointed me to The Amazing Art of Jim Warren, who has some great stuff. Thing MC Escher meets Walt Disney.

Following up on my post from last year on OpenID, my buddy Fozbaca linked to Simon Willison's Six cool things you can build with OpenID which includes some cool slides from the Future of Webapps talk that Simon gave.

It's a interesting and cool idea, that has great potential, assuming that a) not much evilness is involved, and b) it gets to the critical mass needed to maintain new technology.

Digg pointed to funny fruit pics. The screaming orange is my favorite.

If you're going to get a geeky tattoo, here's a good idea.... a nifty math equation. If you're not a math / science geek he has some other ideas as well:

I've got plenty of ideas for other tattoos -- the "Jono" kanji, the "Aikido" kanji, the Enso logo, maybe some Python code... my body shall be a medium for expressing my ideas.

Personally I'm wondering if I should get DeCSS in perl tattooed on my butt?

Where do I get this guy to paint in my house?

I believe that one could say this is a lot of snow. Wow. When they bring out the army to help with the snow, it's bad. When they bring in the army and excavators, then you know it's really bad.

Any Lost fans out there (I'm not one... too much on TV to watch already) or Heroes fans (I am one) subscribe to the theory that LOST and HEROES are connected after last night? Definitely an interesting thought....

Here's the youtube link in question.

I don't think this is supposed to be really a "connection", more of a nod from one show to the other.

A great photoshop contest over at Worth1000.com.... a mashup of cartoon characters and renaissance paintings. Great stuff.

A cool photo story on the Online Photographer.... The Second-Worst Photographic Mistake I Ever Made.

[...] "be-prepared" photography says don't use that last frame of film. It's for that once-in-a-lifetime photo. Christ might decide to make a Second Coming at the press conference, and wouldn't you hate to be out of film?

Well guys.... we geeks are underpaid and the big V-Day is just a marketing ploy to make things more complicated. However, if you're lucky enough to have someone to love make sure you show her today. Flowers, chocolate, a card, a car, an iPod vibrator ("tune in and turn on winkwink), or dinner out (according to the paper this morning two thirds more ladies appreciate the dinner out) or even just a hug and kiss to tell them you appreciate them.

If you don't have a significant other, call up mom or dad and let them know you love them. Everyone appreciates random acts of kindness and appreciation.

Heck, just making sure you remember the day will go a long way!

Have a good one folks!

So sue me, I've never been to The Onion Store before. Some really great t-shirts and slogans there, I need to get a few of 'em :)

Holy crap! Video passed on from $boss at work of more Top Gear love... the Bugatti Veyron at top speed. The top speed by the way, is 407 km/h. Wow.

Can someone tell me where to apply for this guys job please?

8 Diseases That Give You Superhuman Powers. Title says it all. Video included.

An hilarious episode of Britain's Top Gear finds out what happens when you mess with the south. An experiment to see how decorating each others cars can draw the most attention, well, draws a lot of attention.

In the form of hillbillies with rocks.

"People have started to mate with vegetables"

Update: And a response from James May.

What's 3 Feet long, 5,000 pieces and $499? How about a Lego Millennium Falcon.

My ex-coworker pointed me to a very cute TigerCam at the Toronto Zoo.

Reddit found some hugely adorable pics of a Dog Hugging a baby. Too cute. Worth of Cute Overload.

Found on reddit is a nice article from Coding Horror on how Non-Native UI Sucks.

Safari is, of course, a completely competent browser that stands on its technical merits, very much unlike IE6. But if you ask Mac users why they chose Safari, and if you keep pressing them, you'll probably find the deciding factor was that Safari feels like a native Mac app.

Some very cool Cockpit Photos.

Very cool video on 3D morphable model face animation.

Yesterday Yahoo released Yahoo Pipes, a very cool, yet hard to explain, new site and idea. Who says innovation is dead!?

Pipes uses the 30+ year old concept of Unix Pipes to combine various different informational sources, mangle them, and output information. The uniqueness in my opinion, is that the combination is (mostly) completely arbitrary so that users can combine whatever they want without restrictions put on them by the application.

The way the system works is the user can create a new pipe through a visual editor which allows you to click and drag sources (ie: flickr, google, yahoo, news, etc) filters (ie: parse out location, combine one string with another) and then output the resulting mashup of information (with an RSS feed of course).

You can browse some Pipes, or create your own (with a yahoo account anyway). Some cool examples:

• Pet Friendly apartments search
  
• News websites combination
  
• And many more....
  

It'll be interesting to see if this a) catches on and b) what comes out of it as far as combining data. This seems like something from the future (a bit), a la Snow Crash or something.

What sort of data combinations would you want to do? Get naked pictures of people from news headlines? Pictures of breaking news in my area? A map of local sex offenders? News stories from nearby people on my RSS feed? Lots of possibilities out there....

Reading an interview Heroes Execs (the great TV show that's on Mondays) has confirmed that one of my greatest fears about the show being another Lost or Prison Break will not happen, and the season will have a proper conclusion.

The creators compared Heroes more to 24 than to LOST, and said that each season will conclude in a way. “The first season will come to a conclusion,” Co-executive producer and comic book guru Jeph Loeb told the audience. “Next season will be a brand new adventure.”

Darren threw me a video of a Rocket Fuel Plant Explosion. Wow, check out the ripple effects.

A nice writeup on Coding Horror on The Economics of Bandwidth, including some lovely statistics for upload and download on various connections. Can be handy to find out how fast that torrent could possibly finish....

Holy crap! This video of MUSHIHIMESAMA FUTARI Ver.1.5 stage 5 boss[ultra] shows how insane game developers can get if left to their own means.

For anyone out there that has a web forum, here's some Lessons Learned About Managing an Online Forum.

Someone with a lot of time on their hands set up a page on Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow (this coming from a convo at work here this morning).

Forgetfoo points to a video of Web 2.0 Explained.

Wow.... you think your car is beefed up? Your car sucks next to this suped up muscle car with the engine replaced with a WWII era sherman tank engine.

Here's a link to the original forum post.

Cool video from a couple of days ago that I just got around to watching. It nicely answers the age-old question that I know I've asked myself many times, but never have answered..... are grapes microwavable, and what cool light show will they create :)

Oh wow, I didn't realize that Kevin Smith has a blog! Cool stuff, and great name too. Actually has content too, unlike this one, with his Top Ten Films of 2006 picks.

Jeremy links to a video of a Boeing 777 Wing Test Video. One whole plane to be destroyed in the interests of science.

I was a bit disappointed that it was just a plane in a big hanger, I was hoping for seeing it dropped out of the air or something, still, the money shot at the end is well worth it (around 1:05 left :)

10 Shopping Tricks That Stores Hate.

Using Credit and Paying it Off on Time: Sometimes stores will offer a "6 months, no interest, no payments" offer on big ticket items. Pay it off on time, and you've used their money for free.

High Speed camera? Check.
Lighter? Check.
Golf club? Check.

Slow Motion Lighter Explosion? Total coolness!

A cool (and long) .gif image of various objects distances from earth. Definitely puts things in perspective :)

Kiri Davis created an 8 minute documentry that has left audiences stunned, showing just how little the perception of race has changed in the last 50 years. The short of it is that a group of young African American children were given two dolls, one white and one black, and asked to pick the "nice doll". Very disturbing results. I'd be interested to see the results of a similar experiment in other, less predominantly white, countries. Good video clip on the story anyway.

How come no one ever told me about Krugle the Code Search for Developers before Scoble did?

I've posted a few of these before, but this is a bit longer (almost 4 minutes) and super cool. It's a video of a Multi-Touch Computer, using multiple touches to control what is going on on a big screen in front of you. Similar to the demo that showed interacting with a map application and using your hands to move / zoom, spreading fingers or hands farther away to zoom in, of together to zoom out, but with so much more. Thanks to forgetfoo for posting.

Cool and scary at the same time. Check out this pic of Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-2H6/ER having some sort of engine "incident" on take off. Definitely a case of preferring to be on the ground than the air (via Reddit.com).

Super cool, check out this gallery of Coloured Smoke images. The main site is here, but seems to be down right now.

This is pretty cool.... Amazing Hand Painting Art. Via Digg.

Thanks to Darren Barefoot finding a neat link from some FlightSim users with way too much time on their hands. Basically someone took "photos" of their "flight" around the "world". Note how I use lots of "quotes" to indicate how the "words" are referring to "things" that are not "real" :)

I'm really impressed with the guy re-creating the details of Vancouver within the flight simulator world.

Ever feel desensitized to ads? Or why advertising is getting more and more? probably because we have so much already and still manage to ignore it. Check out Ironic Sans' view of Every ad in Times Square. Scary.

Hey all, I'm back! Didn't do any scuba diving while on vacation, but if I did, forget swimming with the dolphins, I want to dive with the cats! An old post I know, saw this some time ago, but the first time I've seen the full video of this.

A neat post in a similar photography vein... Mike Johnston talks about how he set up a reproduction of 'Migrant Mother' the famous photograph, starting with the original scan from the library of congress. Interesting way to do it anyway, wonder what other famous prints are available from the library of congress?

Via The Online Photographer.

Cool video of a demo of Hexafluorid, an invisible gas. Best way to show it? Float a tinfoil boat on it.

A nice step-by-step set of instructions on how to apply The Orton Technique to your photos. It's hard to describe the look it gives, sort of a glamor, glow, contrasty looking thing. It looks cool though, and if you're into retouching and post-processing your images, you might want to check this out.

Holy crap! A page with some amazing looking videos of explosions.

Yowza.

Cute set of pictures entitled The Volkswagen Lisp. Didn't realize that the Bug could do all that :)

Speaking of people with way too much time on their hands, here's someone who created a very impressive Eiffel Tower Made of Matches.

One for the divers out there.... a page with some cool 360 Degree Underwater Panoramas.

Fred threw me a link on USB Cooking. This is what you get when you combine 30 USB connections together.

Some people have way too much time on their hands...

... the Vietnam vet who saved a teenager by coving him with his body in between the subway tracks after the teen fell onto the tracks due to a seizure.

Wow. How does he lug those things around each day?

Random page of pictures of Incredible Huge Animals from moose to trees and everything in between.

A good analysis of the Cheesy TV Ads from companies like "12success.com" and the like, you know, the ones telling you how you can [fire your boss|make thousands|financial freedom|etc|etc|etc]. Anyway, a nice article from someone who did some research on this which tickled my fancy to read.

So if I said please look at the list below:

• Beautiful girl
  
• Mac user
  
• Skintight black lether body suit
  

A cool screencast done by Simon Willison all about How to use OpenID. I've never heard of it before, but it sounds like an interesting way to do identity management. Of course, it needs more sites to become "big". The principle is similar to that of Six Apart's TypeKey service, just not tied to a single site.

From what I can see, OpenID is basically allows sites that "talk" the openID protocol to delegate identity management back to the site. So in theory I can set up arcterex.net to delegate as the authoritative domain for the ID alan.arcterex.net, same as livejournal delegates identities for "username".livejournal.com.

Never knew the capacity was there, potentially very cool and useful.

Now go forth and update your blogs!

Something like this would come in handy for both web designers and programmers who do web development alike. 37 Signals has a nice ditty with An Introduction to Using Patterns in Web Design. Basically ideas on how to chunk information together and how and why to make the end user web experience easier and more logical.

Oh my god, I so know what I want for Christmas now! Check out this video of a Swiss man flying with wings and a jet pack. Unbelievably cool!

Please mom please!?

Argh! Apparently this game is called Distraction for a good reason.

Iambe just threw me a link to a gallery of armor for Cats & Mice. Truely cool! Aryk, please make some armor like this for my cats.

From the FAQ:

Q. Have you ever put a mouse into a suit of armour?

A. If there was one question that I have been asked the most, this is the one. I have not put a mouse into a suit of armour. I have, however, tried it with one of my cats, and have the scars to prove it. Yes, it can be done, but that's not the point.

You americans are insane sometimes you know that?

MythDora is similar to Knoppmyth, only based on Fedora instead of Debian. The main point that I like is the auther of the screencast has the same PVR card as I do (the PVR-350) so the setup that is described is a good model for people with the 350 card. This version also uses a slightly newer version of MythTV than (I think) the knoppmyth distro uses, so it might be a good way to upgrade. Be good to find out if my random MythTV freezes are caused by software or hardware as well.

Update: Updated Link

Apparently training a cat is easier than training programmers...

Super-cool case mods at Mod of the Year 2006. Check it out and vote for your favorite.

Need a wall and have some extra computers? Check out the Mauritian Sunset by Sandy Smith. I love this close up.

Think your spam box has gotten bigger recently? Well, you're right. Good article in the NY Times about it. I've heard other figures saying there's been an 80% increase lately. Not fun at all.

This is for my own use at work tomorrow.... a gallery of amazing flame fractals.

For the super-geeky among us, check out this map of the federation of planets.

Big collection of sci-fi babes. I can't disagree with any of their pics...

40 amazing facts about sleep

- A new baby typically results in 400-750 hours lost sleep for parents in the first year

When I first saw this video linked from reddit or digg, I just didn't get it (until I'd finished watching of course), and almost bailed out at the start. Best not to. When you watch The Truth know it's a political spot from Argentina and is possibly the best political ad I've seen yet. Of course, in these days of political ads being not much more than "my opponent is a beer swilling, hooker loving, wife beating, tax loving demon from hell hell who is going to get your daughter pregnant with the rest of his gang bang loving biker friends", that's not all that hard.

Just watch and enjoy. Like nothing I've seen before.

How are your logic solving skills? The Rope burning logic problem was posted up on kottke.org and I haven't the slightest idea where to start. You guys?

This is interesting, a list of the top 20 programming languages, and their up / down movement. Of course, it all completely depends on the environment, application, and use... the whole 'right tool for the toolbox' thing.

Perl rules!

Did you know that you should have your forks and spoons face up in the dishwasher? I didn't. This and more in dishwasher 101.

A nice site with some interesting blogging links on everything from how to make money with da blog, to how to make da blog look not like crap (what I need).

Other than when it's frozen of course? Answer, when it's a pool filled with non-newtonian fluid. This is a fluid that exhibits the properties of a solid when put under stress. Say, when running across it. Huge potential for fun and games of course, and I suppose, deadly traps!

Morning everyone, hope ya'll had a good weekend. So one day late for Halloween I find The Definitive How To for a Blaster Rifle. Step by step instructions on how to build a blaster a-la Star Wars.

Wow, and I thought my trip to work sucked....check out the Worlds Most Dangerous Tourist Route.

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!

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 :)

Very cool pics of a shuttle take off that jwz linked to.

... 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.

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 :)

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.

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.

Another great Halloween costume idea, this time Gordon Freeman of half life fame.

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!

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.

This is pretty cool, "sculptures" done in liquid. Check it out.

Uhmm.... "wow". Check the video of a dude on a mountain bike. Filmed in vancouver too!

Adobe announced today Adobe - Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0. Some funky new stuff, wonder if this has some stuff in prelude to Photoshop CS3?

Funny, I thought pogo sticks were something that went out of fashion long long ago. This video on youtube seems to indicate that they are coming back as an extreme sport. Or something like that. Crazy flips!

Saw this on reddit.... A comparison of the real Megatron to his version (based on the toy). I have been wondering how much hollywood would destroy my memory of my childhood enjoyment... First not using a VW for Bumblebee (I think that was it right?) and now this. When will the torture end!?!

Neat / funny video of the Evolution of Dance.

Think you or your marathon running buddy are tough? Check out what's required of these monks in the article titled Tendai Marathon Monks: The Run of A Lifetime

The first 300 days are basic training, during which the monks run 40km per day for 100 consecutive days. In the fourth and fifth years they run 40km each day for 200 consecutive days. That's more or less a full marathon every day for more than six months.

That's amazing almost to the unbelievable.

I've linked to videos of people solving rubik's cubes fast before.... how about one where it's solved fast and one handed.

Now this is pretty cool and amazing..... some guy trained his goldfish to swim synchronized. Using hand signals (or hand motions more accurately), he gets 4 goldfish to swim around in unison. Very neat.

Some stuff from the Aug 14 Con entitled Battlestar Galactica: Not for the Faint of Heart with some tidbits of BSG Season 3 and Caprica (the new series).

Wow, an amazing lego New York.

This guy has way too many Apple 30" displays. Way too many.

I hate him!

Pigs and Tigers, dogs and ducks, kittens and crows.... will the madness ever end?!?!

My cats and bird don't get along as well as the kitten and crow on this page. Watching the kitten and crow "playing" is pretty trippy. Much other cuteness and "awwww" on the page as well.

Pretty simple, buy $20+ with google checkout and get a Google T-Shirt.

This is hilarious..... an Obsessive complusive cat flushing the toilet. Mine just wait for me to flush it for them before they go and drink out of it.... wish I could teach them this trick (without the compulsiveness of flushing it over and over).

Remember the jet powered VW Bug that everyone said was a photoshop? Well my buddy Robert sent over an updated page on the Jet Beetle with more info, pictures, etc. Officially insane :)

A bit long, but check out this video of An F-15 Flying On Only One Wing. Impressive machine the Eagle....

Pardon me, I need a cute break. join me... you know you want to....

Click on the bottom links on the above linked page to get another 30 or so pages of cute animals.

Now this Quick Change Artists on America's Got Talent is amazing. Wish I knew how they did it, it'd make getting ready for work in the morning so much easier....

Two bizzare and cool videos for you today.

• Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain plays Teen Spirit
  
• While My Guitar Gently Weeps on the Ukele.
  

OK, I know this is almost two years old now, but this Ctrl Alt Del strip on Doom 3 is a) funny b) how I felt playing the game.

BTW, Prey demo kicks ass.

So my latest favorite website Digg.com released "Digg version 3" on Monday. I admit that I tend to assume that the three people that read this site also read slashdot and (now) digg, and don't repeat stories that I find there on here. Anyway, the new version of digg has some new things, some good, some bad, and some completely indifferent. I'll note these below with :-) :-( and :-| respectively.

• More ads :-( (though I don't see because I have the adblock extension running
  
• More division of topics, now there is a "video" section for example. I tend to read from the 'all' though. Each category/subcategory has it's own RSS feed as before. :-)
  
• Some new views such as Cloud view :-)
  
• More interesting cool visualizations of digging activity (not here yet though) :-|
  
• Tweaks to the buddy/friend management and features like stories that multiple friends have dugg (agreed upon). Cool, but no one is my friend on digg.... if I did have friends though I'd give it a :-)
  
• Redesigned and now 110% Web 2.0^tm/r/c compliant
  

The only real downside I see is the amount of stories that go onto the frontpage is going to double/triple/quadruple, meaning it'll be harder to catch up. Conversely, slashdot's story posting seems to have slowed down recently. It's still about a story an hour, it just "feels" slower compared to the rapid fire digg.com site activity.

I need to do about 10 of these suggestions!

Yet another hilarious and pretty accurate report on gaming and gamers and what the US congress is doing about them. Yay for election year grandstanding? :)

Here's a neat little home project.... know those clocks with the LEDs floating in the air? Here are the instructions to make your own. Needs a bit of electronics experience to make a board yourself it looks like, but if you do, or can rent an electronics nerd with some pizza and beer, could be a neat addition to your office :)

As seen on forgetfoo is this video.... YouTube - Zuiikin Gals II. I'm at 1:20 of the 3:52 and my ears are bleeding and I'm considering jamming a pen into my eyeball to make the pain stop. It's possibly the most screwed up thing I've ever seen, and yet it's so simple.... just hot oriential girls in bikinis (SFW) saying things. Well, except for the randomly interspersed old men on the street.

I recommend you watch it with the sound off and imagine the bikinis are much smaller.

3:05. OK, I'm bailing.

I watched the videos from the BumpTop Prototype site and it's definately ingenious.... making windows and files act very much like paper on a desk. However, I thought that we used computers because organization was easier than moving papers around on a desk? :) Watch the video to see what you think.

Another interesting Google maps/earth mashup is Where I Had My First Kiss . com which lets you tell and show the world where it was.

Jensen Harris has a neat post with some history on the close button entitled You Windows 3.1 Lovers! He also discusses some of the changes regarding the UI in the latest version of MS Office.

I know some friends of mine have the motorola RAZR cell phone, so this link might be interesting to them. Hack the Motorola RAZR V3 Tutorial covers software upgrades, changing logos, changing how the system works, etc.

Please let her 15 minutes be over soon (you have to log in to see a black and white video Paris Hilton singing and flouncing around). Tick, tock, tick...

Quite frankly I think the video that came up as suggested of two orange cats is far more amusing and cute :)

43 Folders has a nice review of Shaving tips.

This is neat, a couple of humans doing humans. Fake effects, real moves. Nifty.

It's like Digg, but for naked chicks. ForgetFoo unleashes NippleByte.

BoingBoing has a nice review of Coupland's JPod: the Anti-Microserfs.

Ok, it's not really flying, but it's pretty close. I've seen this before sometime ago, and it needed a repost. Here's a video of the Flying Dude. He's more like a flying squirrel though. Check it out though, very cool vid.

Check out this Google Spreadsheets - Sneak Peek. Personally I think this is cool. The technology is nothing hugely new, and the features of course don't match excel at all.... however, the number of users who use all of excels features, or really use anything more than basic spreadsheet capability, are probably pretty low. This, combined with the integration of google spreadsheets into gmail/gtalk/calendaring, etc etc, will make this something to watch anyway, especially with google's purchase of writely will make google something to (continue) watching.

This is pretty cool... the owner/writer/creator of pbase created what he calls The Photographer’s Screen Saver. Basically it displays image on your screen, but has a few nice tweaks for multiple monitors and image paths. Looks cool, check it out.

I had a big *blink* moment a second ago when I surfed to Slashdot and discovered they'd implemented the new look and feel. That's pretty big, seeing as they've had the same look for a good ... uhm.... well, forever. I think the new look is a bit more modern looking, a bit odd (that can be written off to the fact it's brand new), and still keeps the "slashdot look" which is what the requirement that CmdrTaco had.

Now this is an amazing demonstration of RC plane flying. This guy does just about anything you can imagine with a fair sized plane in a school gym. Makes it stand on it's head, balance in the air, and flip and flop around in amazingly tight quarters. Check out the video. Thanks Dana for the link.

Another random link sent to me during the day... check out the video of the iBar. I gotta figure out how to build one of these for my kitchen!

Wow, the guy who made this huge lego aircraft carrier definately has a lot of time on his hands. (via digg).

So if you're bored and enjoy scaring your servers, give this Spider project a try. Via Digg.

Here's some information on the features in the as-yet-unreleased Movable Type 3.3?. Highlights are tags (very web 2.0^{tm (c) (r)}, more ease of use and some nicer/better plugins. Oh, and no more Melody account by default (yay) :) Keep an eye out if you want to be a beta tester.

Very cool. The guys over at codeweavers have begun porting their excellent wine-based system for running windows apps seamlessly under Linux, to mac. Currently it requires X11, but they are working to remove this dependancy.

What this means is that there would be a potential for being able to click on a .xls file on your Mac-Intel desktop and have the windows version of Excel launch. Ok, maybe a bad example as office is available for Mac. A better example is Half Life 2, which is being worked on by codeweavers devs :)

Nothing is more fun than blowing things up, if you can't do that though, watching videos of things being blown up is pretty cool too. Case in point is the Trojan Nuclear Cooling Tower Implosion.

Story on digg points to a very cool site with some great art with an Escher-like feel.

Combine really cool english accents and very reactive chemicals. Check it out. "Imagine if you will, a hand grenade going off in a bathtub." :)

See, by not going to a college or university with dorm rooms, not only did I miss out on all the panty raids and drunken bashes, but also the geeky way of partying, such as MIDAS: Homemade Dorm Room Home Automation System. Check out the 'party mode' video :)

Now this is pretty cool... PawSense has software for windows that will:

PawSense analyzes keypress timings and combinations to distinguish cat typing from human typing. PawSense normally recognizes a cat on the keyboard within one or two pawsteps.

The software then locks keyboard input until you enter a human passphrase. This only works of course, if your can't doesn't know how to type.

Anyone out there want to check out the new Yahoo Mail Beta? Here are the instructions on how to get Yahoo Mail Beta. Basically you change your content to something like UK, go to mail, and you'll be prompted to join the Beta. Worked perfectly for me. Course, I don't use either yahoo mail or webmail, but it does look pretty neat.

Thanks Darren for the link to this Best home made lightsaber duel ever!. I have to say, it holds up to it's title :)

Chris points to the Internet Clipboard, which is a really simple way to share information, potentially avoid cut/paste issues between separate computers, avoiding firewalls, etc. Nifty stuff.

According to the information here, this scale model HIND took 8-10000 hours to build and is accurate down to the rivet separation. Apparently these guys made a business out of making models for clients. Man, I was doing that in my basement when I was a kid making some pretty cool stuff (I've won prizes I might add, I have cred!) and I never thought that people would buy 'em.

Regardless, it's a damn nice model :)