30/06/04
29/06/04
Marcus:
The Sega Mega Drive 6-in-1 Plug 'n' Play beats the hell out of those Pac Man and Space Invaders all-in-one jobs. Play Sonic the Hedgehog and Golden Axe from a mini Mega Drive! Although as Dave points out, it seems to be one player only, and genuine original Mega Drives are cheap as chips. Still tempts me, though.
Dave:
I've always liked Star Wars but I've never tried to recreate the entire film using Acsii characters. This guy however, does. Looks like he's got to the point where Chewbacca breaks loose on the Death Star.
22/06/04
Marcus:
Off to Glastonbury. Expecting to be covered head to toe in mud. Updates unlikely for the next week - but if you want to laugh at my probable muddy misfortune, I'll be trying to blog from the festival.
Marcus:
Ben Affleck wins the California State Poker Championship. In related trivia, his mate Matt Damon was in a movie about poker.
dave: I like that film. It's about Poker.
dave: Wow, Affleck is pretty good. Would he beat Jac Arama though? Probably.
21/06/04
Marcus:
musicplasma takes the name of your favourite music artist, then builds up a Flash-based visual web thing of other music artists related to your original entry. Cool! (Via Geeklink)
Marcus:
Gmail invites are being blocked by Hotmail and Yahoo. Bad e-mail companies! BAD! (I now have Gmail thanks to my good buddy Bryan sending me an invite.)
Marcus:
A new recording of the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series is going to feature the late Douglas Adams' voice as Agrajag.
Dave:
Is Emotion Eric the funniest looking man on the web? In a word... yes. My personal favourites are "Who's your Daddy?" and "Just locked your keys in the car".
Marcus: "Getting a great idea... while falling to your doom" and "Eric discovers his inner child" are my favourites.
Dave:
Adverts suck, but sometimes they use good tunes. Check out this site for a comprehensive ad-break playlist.
Marcus:
BBC News: "A single gene can turn the Don Juan of voles into an attentive home-loving husband, Nature magazine has reported."
Marcus:
The Guardian: "Al-Qaida may 'reward' American president with strike aimed at keeping him in office, senior intelligence man says"
20/06/04
Marcus:
Only of interest to web designers, but incredibly cool and useful to those who are: a free PHP/JavaScript solution that enables you to dynamically replace website text with images containing the same text in the TrueType font of your choice.
19/06/04
Marcus:
Fun Junkie is running something called The Summer Burn. Burn two CDs of your favourite summer music, sign up with their mailing list, and send your CDs on to two fellow members. Then hopefully you'll get two CDs of summer music from other people!
Marcus:
"I like Bukkake". Bizarre shouty Flash animation. I'm assured that bukkake is an unpleasant Japanese sexual practice but whatever it is, it isn't shown here. Luckily.
Marcus:
Google's "In The News" sidebar tracked in real time and visualised in Flash. It seems the idea is to track and contrast the prominence in the news of certain topics, such as "George Bush" or "European Parliament". File this one under Futuristically Mind-Bending.
Marcus:
Why you shouldn't use Internet Explorer. No, really, you shouldn't. It smells funny and it leaves you open to 25,000 different pieces of spyware. I use Opera. Lurvely.
18/06/04
Marcus:
linkbunnies.org site news: the "fixed" design option has been tweaked so it will centre in resolutions bigger than 800x600. That's an evening well spent, then.
Marcus:
Argy-bargy in the Big Brother house has elevated its website into the top 20 most popular UK internet destinations. In related news, a predictably disingenuous press release by the Big Brother producers claims that the evening's scheduled "eviction" of a housemate has been postponed "to give [the housemates] sufficient time to come to a resolution as a group." Rather than it (for instance) increasing the likelihood of further violent outbursts and thus ensuring high ratings.
Dave:
Bored at work? Not got a life? Like funny videos? Got a decent internet connection? Try punching babies.
Marcus: At first, I wasn't sure if that was a generalised suggestion or the name of a website. What on earth is Flat Eric doing on there?
17/06/04
Marcus:
"Hi Paul, this is Beth. We have an emergency. Apparently you gave the courier a six-foot fridge to be delivered to BBC Bristol instead of the tape we need in the studio today."
16/06/04
Marcus:
How To Play iTunes Music Store AAC Files On Winamp. I am a bad self-linking person and I am going straight to weblog hell (along with Dave Winer).
Marcus:
Find amusing place names close to where you live. I'm a mere 23.6 miles away from Herbert's Hole.
AndyB: I work near 'Penistone' (20.9 miles)
or even better 'Shafton Two Gates'(17.8)
Marcus:
Bill Bryson wins the 2004 Aventis Prize for "A Short History Of Nearly Everything". I've just started to re-read it. Highly recommended if you're a curious but unscientific person who appreciates the well-written and humorous.
Marcus:
A new trailer for Aliens Vs Predator is out. As an Aliens and Predator fan, I'm not sure I'm going to like this much. Although I liked the same director's Event Horizon.
Marcus:
The BBC is releasing thousands of three minute nature video clips into the public domain in autumn. The Creative Archive will hopefully come to contain all sorts of other things too. Some guy from the "Union for the Public Domain" wins the Soundbite of the Week Award: "We want to make sure that the archive is more than just shagging marmots."
Marcus:
Could certain more "exotic" branches of the online porn industry be screwed by America's widespread Damascean conversion to puritanical values viz-a-viz naked flesh?
Marcus:
Sony's new car GPS system displays navigation information as a cool 3D visualisation. It's like GTA intersecting with reality! Though it's probably best not to gun down innocent civilians or take hookers to secluded areas in order to increase your health.
Marcus:
Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11 is loved by Fox News' film critic who calls it "a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail." For anybody who knows what Fox News' political agenda is (ie support Bush at all costs), your brain is probably melting due to the logic conflicts. I know mine is.
Marcus:
Paul McCartney only took heroin once but was doing a lot of cocaine around the time of the Sgt. Pepper album. In other shock news, "Got to Get You Into My Life" is about pot and "Day Tripper" was about LSD.
15/06/04
:
so a symbol of peace becomes a symbol of death - in an absurdly superstitious country! no 'returning olive branches' for you!
Justin: That must be what it sounds like when doves cry.
Marcus:
All hail the UK iTunes Music Store. Although I have reservations. Like the fact that you have to use a 3rd party plugin to play iTunes Store music on Winamp (and you don't get visualisations either). Also, indy record labels are far from impressed with Apple's business tactics.
Justin:
Man this is the type of weapon we need. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3720613.stm - Invented by that bird off of Dungeons and Dragons.
AndyB: She was a fox.....
Marcus: Ahh, invisibility cloaks. That must be Sheila. I also just found out that you could buy Dungeons and Dragons toy figures in the 1980s. If you were Spanish.
14/06/04
Marcus:
America's new nuclear programme is put back - for now. Which is a shame, because I think it's important to have enough firepower to blow the world up another fifty times more than it can already be blown up. Just to make sure.
Justin: I think you'll find there's a little bit more to anuclear programme than simply making more bombs.
Marcus: Well, maybe, but it does kind of make you hanker for the good old days of Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty abidance.
Marcus:
A brief clip of the new Blade: Trinity action flick, and a Japanese I:Robot trailer (both in Quicktime format - ngh). (Via Ain't It Cool News.)
Marcus:
Buy a villa in Iraq, complete with "big basement designed also as anti-aircraft bunker with water facilities", for a mere $665,000. A safe investment there!
Dave: This might be a good buy. I hear there's a housing BOOM in Iraq at the moment.
Marcus: Boom. Boom.
13/06/04
Marcus:
An MPEG video of that classic 1980s Kia-ora TV advert. "It's too orangey for crows! It's just for me and my dog."
Marcus:
The Suicide Journalist - a compilation of some spoof columns arch satirist Chris Morris wrote for The Observer back in the late 1990s.
Marcus:
Plastic Balls is a Flash-based game best described as "Arkanoid meets the black hole from Space Wars".
Marcus:
An irritating new London-based arty "movement", ala flashmobs, "involves mobilising people with Walkmans to a busy commuter station at rush hour. By dancing alone to their favourite tunes in an unlikely environment, the event aims to challenge perceptions of public space while inspiring people to let their hair down." Tossers.
Marcus:
Apple is slapped on the wrist by the UK advertising watchdog for claiming its G5 is the fastest personal computer on Earth, but gets away with a couple of other contested claims.
Marcus:
From BBC News: "The Chinese authorities have begun a new website for people to report on what officials describe as illegal or unhealthy information on the internet." This is, of course, in no way sinister.
Marcus:
If everybody took the time to do it for five minutes every day, could you power the earth with hand cranks?
Marcus:
In the 1980s some vinyl albums had Sinclair Spectrum games on them which you could record on to tape and play. Ahh, it was a golden age.
Marcus:
Concrete infused with fibreglass paves the way for a building that has its inhabitants' shadows moving across its front at night.
Marcus:
From Aiwa, a very strange but very impressive Flash animation featuring creatures that William S. Burroughs would have designed if he'd been into Pokemon.
Marcus:
A dog has been taught a 200 word vocabulary. Apparently Rico the Border collie "can learn the names of unfamiliar toys after just one exposure to the new word-toy combination" with a "retrieval rate comparable to the performance of three-year-old toddlers".
Justin:
Sometimes Glastonbury happens. http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/glastonbury/lineup_fri.shtml
Marcus: And I've only just finished my chai tea rehab from last year...
Justin:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/cassini/flybyscience/
Keep up to date with what goes on with the Cassini probe around Jupiter. It's nuclear powerd so when we are done we can blow something up.
12/06/04
Marcus:
"Of the world's 100 largest economic entities, 51 are now corporations and 49 are countries." General Motors has more economic power than Denmark, and Wal-Mart is significantly richer than Greece. Frightening.
Marcus:
Ad Muncher is a Windows web advert removal program. It works with pretty much any browser (IE, Mozilla, Opera), and after testing it for five minutes I can officially declare that it rocks.
Marcus: Er, apart from the fact that it thinks the linkbunnies.org mast is an ad. This seems to be because the logo is approximately the same size as a banner ad.
AndyB: I use a mad program called 'protowall' it uses minimal resources and blocks ip's rather than ad's so if you use kazaa and stuff, its good, very good. Just bloody hard to set up, if you know your net stuff properly, give it a try...
Marcus:
And so the world rejoiced - for here was Yet Another Collaberative Weblog soon to be full of bits and pieces of interesting web detritus.
And so too did Marcus rejoice - because at long last the toil of creating the website was over. Or at least over-ish.