I want to move to Canada so I can see more PSAs like this. Freakin’ *AWESOME*!
XBox 360 adds native DiVX playback. Between this, Rock Band and Space Giraffe, the XBox 360 is slowly tipping from “If someone gave me a free one, I’d sell it on eBay” (where the PS3 still lives) to “Hmmm… If I could pick up a cheap one….”
I’m not yet at a stage where I care enough to work out what the differences between all the different models are, though. Perfect example of the Paradox of Choice, there.
Two “why weren’t these already implemented?” features finally added to Google Reader. Thank you Google interns!
“I really love the new Kylie album.”
826 Boston, or “The Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Institute”, is having an open day this weekend. I might pop down with a camera to see how the “institute” looks.
...and someone else decides to make himself comfortable.
Zoom in to see the greetings. “The Enrichment Center reminds you to Have a Happy Holiday until you are instructed by a supervisor to discontinue having a Happy Holiday.”
Greate article on “Rock Band” by Carrie Brownstein. “If you are going to play the game with a group of friends for more than a night, shouldn’t you just form a real band? There is something sad about the thought of four teenagers getting Rock Band for Christmas and spending all of their after-school time pretending to know how to play.”
Frosty & Jesus: Together at last! Completely great, and mildly sacrilegious gift-wrap.
Great blog analysing and documenting album cover design.
OK, time to Jailbreak my iPhone again…
A Slim Devices Squeezebox atop a new portable speaker which, depending on how you read my employer's new blogging policy, I don't think I'm allowed to tell you is bloody great.
But let's just say that the combination of the two is comparable to the combinations of cheese and pickle, hops and barley, or The Beatles and recreational drugs.
Back when I was a bloody layabout student, Wipeout 2097 on the Playstation was one of my favourite video games. My flatmate and I spent many hours happily zipping round the tracks, racing, shooting and quaking each other. Plus it had a stonking pounding electronica soundtrack that enveloped you as you played.
Flash forward to a couple of weeks ago, when I heard "Atom Bomb" by Fluke as I was driving to work. I was immediately transported back to our student dive on Dalry Road, and desperately wishing my car had weaponry.
And thanks to a quick search on Amazon, I was able to pick up the whole soundtrack on CD second-hand for less than a dollar. Hurrah!
PBS science show Nova has a Vodcast, sharing clips of recent and upcoming shows. Subscribed.
Work-in-progress project to keep database schemas in sync with changes made to Django models.
Best review I’ve seen of the Kindle so far. I’d be tempted to get one, but for the much-noted DRM restrictions. If I’m unable to “lend” or “borrow” e-books I’ve purchased, like I currently can with dead-tree, then it’s of no interest to me.
With the pups.
Joy and Mum walking with Bacon and Clyde.
A close-up of a friendly St Bernard we met while walking.
Clyde running along in the New England folliage.
Bacon and Clyde admire the beautiful autumnal colours a New England fall brings.
Wicked fast dictionary lookup — just that smidgen more useful than googling a word!
Excellent article on homeopathy by Ben Goldacre — not too ranty in an “all homeopathy is evil” way, rather a “homeopathy should be part of a discussion, if only for the benefits on the placebo effect, but we can’t get the homeopaths to talk”. Hopefully a rational-enough read to convince “believers”.
Automatically downloads, installs and runs the Windows versions of IE natively on OS X using Darwine.
“You know, there are infants who were born 18 days ago who don’t know what it’s like to see a Boston team win a championship in their lifetime”
Curmudgeon-par-excellence Bill Drummond promotes “No Music Day”, and BBC Radio Scotland is going along with it, playing no music at all for 24 hours.
Stewart Lee’s uploaded high-quality versions of “Fist of Fun” and TMWRNJ to Google Video. Some of it hasn’t aged well, but there’s some great stuff in there. Definitely shaped my sense-of-humour.
A slightly-more-successful shot from my exclusive series "Photos taken before I've read the camera's manual". Coming soon to a prestigious gallery near you.
My first shot with my new (second-hand) Digital Rebel camera.
The composure... the subject... the fact I've accidentally managed to turn off all the auto-focusing-smarts in the camera... A masterpiece!
Now to read the manual...
Danny outlines the achievements of the Open Rights Group in the political and media spheres in the UK. I’ve been proudly sending them my £5-a-month since they started, and consider it a bargain. You should join them too.
Analyzing the design details of the 2008 political campaign logos.
A brief history of Bejeweled and similar “casual” games.
We bought my mum a Webkinz as a gift a few months ago, because I knew she'd enjoy all the casual games.. Here she is showing us the garden her Webkinz is growing.
(And it should be said, when my mum told Joy that she had already earned a "Webkinz Crown of Wonder", Joy was shooting daggers at her for 5 minutes -- Joy's been trying for months to earn hers)
I completely forgot this was on tonight. Lovely little bit of Who geekery. Number 5 was “my” doctor too — the first one I remember watching.
Excellent infographic which certainly suggests that Barry Bonds’s alleged steroid use may have improved his batting skills.
Excellent (and lo-fi) video by some Daily Show writers on the current writers’ strike.
A consistent tactic for answering those stupid “What color was your first favourite pet?” type questions.
Nice infographics explaining the difference between a slider and a cutter.
Cunning — Amazon.com has been told it must start collecting sales tax from New York residents, because it has “salespeople” in NY. Those salespeople? New Yorkers with Amazon affiliate links on their website. Wonder if this will hold…
My Chumby, powered-up, and making my life approximately 65% better by displaying a live feed from the San Diego Zoo Pandacam.
I believe it can perform other tasks too, but who cares? PANDAS!
Sadly, this is the most interesting and innovative thing I’ve read about “Android” so far — that they’re getting around Sun’s “J2ME” trademark/patent/licensing beartrap by implementing their own VM.
“An aggregation of humorous, weird, inspiring, newsworthy or just plain cool random status updates from Twitter.”
Toys Backwards-R Us are giving away $25 gift cards when you buy Super Mario Galaxy from them. Since I was already planning on getting it, that makes me happy. (I’ll probably use the gift card to buy some Wii Points, so I can download Super Mario Bros 3 off of the Virtual Console. Woo!)
Great Rands article. It’s a bit hit-or-miss describing me, but the section “Nerds are fucking funny” sums me up perfectly. “Humor is an intellectual puzzle, “How can this particular set of esoteric trivia be constructed to maximize hilarity as quickly as possible?”“
From my Firefox bookmarks: The folder containing all the blogs I followed regularly by hand, in the days before I discovered RSS.
Of the lists, blogdex, daypop, Haddock, Aaron Swartz's "Google Weblog" and Sassypants are the ones which have completely died, and of the rest, bloggerheads and "Nifty News, Decent Deals" are the ones I don't still subscribe to in Google Reader.
Stephen Fry reviews the iPhone for The Grauniad. “In the end the iPhone is like some glorious early-60s sports car. Not as practical, reliable, economical, sensible or roomy as a family saloon but oh, the joy. The jouissance as Roland Barthes liked to say.”
Simple test OAuth server which has a predefined list of keys and tokens, so you can test your client implementations against it. Handy.
GMail’s new interface exposes an object with the specific intent of making it easier to write less-fragile GreaseMonkey scripts which interact with the application. Nice idea.
“All the News Feed that’s fit to print.’ (And features my chum Jill Bernard’s status in the crawl — clearly I’m a friend-in-law to the video’s makers.)
Apparently, the consumers of lottery scratch cards in the UK aren’t particularly good at maths. Whodvethunkit? “I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I’m not having it.”
Highlighting the best of the right-wing hystericals who post to the BBC News “Have Your Say” boards.
Clyde not *quite* getting into the spirit of Dance Dance Revolution
Lovely flowing Flash oddness from Orange.
Pac-man as interactive fiction.
> eat
You have eaten another glowing dot!
Interesting use of Facebook’s APIs: Allow internet access via your wireless router to anyone who is your friend on Facebook.
Nice looking Moo Card holders. Might get the leather one and clip it onto my backpack.
The temptation to print this on the architecture-paper-size plotter at work is great…
Hooray! The limited-run trial flavours of Kettle Chips are on sale, and this year, they’re SPICY!
Video of the modules in the Bug Labs platform — Interlockable modules which can be combined on an open-source Java-based platform. The idea seems wicked cool — it’s just the unknown of price that’s going to dictate whether I buy one or not.
MP3 of the full version of Tracy Jordan’s novelty single. “I nearly dropped the Torah when my hands turned into paws!”
I'm Rod Begbie -- A 32-year-old Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.
Fire Eagle thinks I'm currently in San Francisco, CA, and have been for around 2 months, 3 weeks.
