IP Address Locator

Nice geek tool to bookmark – the IP Address Locator lets you enter an IP address to find its location – Lookup Country Region City etc. A lot of people use it to trace – I use it because I’m nosy.

(If you want a more professional tool then I’d recommend Visualroute).

Bootleg Retro Arcade Games

I never realised quite how prevalent the problem of bootleg arcade games was back in the 80′s. You gotta admire the cheek of the makers of ‘Hangley Man’ – a 99% straight copy of Pac Man.

EvilLyrics – Winamp Lyrics plug-in

Stop embarrassing Mis-heard lyric faux-pas with EvilLyrics, the Winamp lyrics search plug-in. It downloads the lyrics for your songs as your play them. Neat!

Eloquent 404

Edgar Allen Poe would sue over this 404 if he were still alive.

Gum Blondes

Gum Blondes are Jason Kronenwald’s idea of art. He has a dedicated team who chew up gum for him. He then sticks the gum to a piece of board and creates images of (fairly retarded-looking) blond girls. Can’t see why myself.

Microsoft’s Tokyo offices raided

What goes around, comes around – it seems that Microsoft’s Tokyo officeshave just been raided. Whilst I can understand this issue over monopolies – I believe I have a right to buy a pc with no operating system installed – I’m more dubious about RealNetworks case against MS regarding the bundling of Media Player in Windows.

The Revels Experiment

Our friends over at Funjunkie have done some outstanding scientific research into a problem that’s been worrying me for a long time now – the distribution of Revels in each pack. I think I’m like the rest of the world in hating the coffee ones. So much so that Mrs grom & I play Revel Roulette (although in our version the loser in the one who gets a coffee flavour one). The latest research suggests that quite rightly, coffee accounts for a lower amount whilst Malteser & Orange ones are more prevalent. Good work guys!

Windows XP case mod

We haven’t featured any case mods recently so I thought it was time for a new one. The windows xp box mod is fairly self-explanatory – it’s a computer inside the retail box for XP. Very neat.

Green is the new white

After the ground breaking news (albeit a couple of years ago) of the incredible green kitten the good old BBC brings you the worlds first green polar bear. They say it’s something to do with algae… I just think there’s been a nasty cold going round and they can’t use tissues (well – they don’t have thumbs!)

What are your favourite on-line shops?

I’m aware that I’m asking for trouble if my comments systems is as unreliable as ever but I’m intrigued to know what my readers favourite online shops are – please tell me in the comments below or drop me an email.

Some that I wholeheartedly recommend are

Blankdiscshop for blank DVDs and CD-Rs

aquarterof for sweets (I order about £100 of sweets for my office every month!)

Amazon goes without saying – still the best but I do prefer to use the excellentAmazon Light for speed.

tunes.co.uk for some of my music.

Easynews for downloads (not really a shop but one of the best sites on the web).

Scan for computer component pricing – the Today Only section is a must-view

I used to use Dabs.com, thinkgeek.com and many others like that but they’ve lost their appeal mostly (all for differing reasons).

I’m sure I’ll think of many more but I want to hear from you guys.

MI5 job application – wanna be a spy?

odd snippets from this MI5 job description;

“…able to blend into the background. We are looking for average height, build, appearance etc.

…assessment includes a two hour long drive to evaluate the candidate’s current standard of driving

…able to remain alert during long periods of inactivity and then increase their pace appropriately when necessary”

So not your normal job then.

Toy Fair’s Top 10 Strangest Products

Ugo’s Report from the recent Toy Fair features the Top 10 Strangest Products they found there – my favourite is the ‘Real’ Shrunken heads which ar a novel twist of the Cabbage Patch Kid idea. The updated pogostick that is the Flybar just looks deadly (literally!).

The penguin bashing gets sillier

The penguin bashing game gets sillier and sillier. After the low-gravity, low-friction version that took about an hour for one penguin to stop and the Steroids version, comes the gory penguin bashing version*

*now with added gore.

Classic Video Game History

We’re old farts at pri.me.uk towers and we love old, retro computer games – the older the better. They don’t come much older than the staring point of this Classic Video Game History – games played on oscillascopes and without monitors all the way through to the early 1980′s arcade games – they’re all here in glorious technicolour.

Animals on the Underground

Everyone knows the London Underground map – it’s a design classic. About 15 yrs ago Paul Middlewick spotted the shape of an elephant staring at him from the map. Since then he’s ‘discovered’ a few moreAnimals on the Underground and made a site about them.

Today is Grey Tuesday – Take a stand for the Right to Sample

Got this mail yesterday;

Hi,

We noticed you linked to a story about the Grey Album. It seems like copies of the Grey Album are definitely making their way to people who want them, but we thought it was vitally important that we *insist* on sample-based musicians’ right to create, and on the public’s right to hear the amazing music they make. EMI wasn’t just trying to stop DJ DM from selling the album, they sent cease and desist letters to some websites that were making it available for free. EMI acted to stop people from hearing this piece of fun and inventive music, and that’s just not right.

So we’re organizing an online-protest of sorts–called “Grey Tuesday”–to take a stand and pretend, even if only for 24 hours, that we don’t live in a culture where the legal environment ensnares musicians. The idea is that this Tuesday, February 24th, as many sites as possible mirror the Grey Album and/or turn their page “grayscale” (i.e. no color) for the day. We’re also calling for people connected to independent radio stations (college, commercial, internet) to get the entire Grey Album played at some point on Tuesday (possibly along with the Beatles and Jay-Z sources).

We’ve been pretty successful so far with our attempts to provoke debate about sampling and copyright. Check out this article from Wired that we got going: or have a look at our press page. We’re pretty confident that, if there’s a reasonable level of participation, we can translate this “online event” into some serious coverage in mainstream press that tons of regular people will read.

And what regular people think about sampling and copyright matters, especially when the future of the music industry is almost entirely up for grabs.

So please, check it out: http://greytuesday.org

and email us to join: greytuesday@downhillbattle.org

Please support these guys – I’ll be getting me a Home Taping is Killing music T-shirt

Feel da beat

Hear ye, hear ye, drumkits to be installed in all places of work – or at least they will be if the latest research is true

Best eBay item ever.

You might have to be British to fully appreciate this eBay auction for A nice cup of tea. I reckon it’s worth $20 of anyone’s money – why pay more for cheap liquor when you can have a perfect cup of ‘Yorkshire Champagne’. If this up your street then you might want to check out nicecupofteaandasitdown.com – a classic website – now with award-winning goodness.

GW Bush / Chimpanzee comparisons

Does ‘Gee-Dubbya’ Bush look like a chimpanzee? Surely not!
Whilst we’re at it… let’s laugh at him some more… and one more time for good measure. (you may have seen these but, hey… this is for those who haven’t)

Mailing List working again

Big Apologies to everyone who gets gromblog sent to them by email (using the sign-up box on the right-hand side –> ). I know it’s not been working for over a week now but it turns out that it wasn’t anything to do with me screwing up for once – there was a change in the Blogger api code. Luckily, Monsur, who runs the excellent bloglet has sorted it now – cheers Monsur!

Genuinely Useful XP Tweaking tips

If you use Windows XP then you’ll benefit from having a look at these XP tweaking guides – they contain a lot of simple to follow advice and many good ideas to improve your system.

‘The Man Behind The Motion’

Here’s a cool short film called ‘The Man Behind The Motion’ – it’s a ‘mockumentary’ about the artistes who perform motion capture for computer games. If you’re not on a 56k modem then get yer ass over to watch it – it’s very funny.

Sh(l)ock Photography

More discussion point than creative artworks, ashkan sahihi takes on some very odd themes in his photography. Most controversial are his series entitled ‘cumshots‘ and ‘Drug Series‘ both of which are fairly self-explanatory.

Cynical about the music industry?

Mike Peters and his band (remember ‘The Alarm’ from the 1980s?) have reformed and released a single under the name ‘The Poppyfields’. Having young handsome stand-ins for their vid-shoot, and pretending they have a combined age of 13 – they have shot up the charts! Proving image is everything in the shallow world of pop!

More Financial Pr()n

Not sure what it is with people hiding pr()n in financial websites but here’s another one.

Check the links down the left hand side. Handy stuff for people looking for…

secured credit card, student credit card, credit card application, bad credit credit card, visa credit card, credit card debt, discover credit card, capital one credit card, credit card processing … and so on…

But wait!

One of these links is not like the others…. can you find it?

hint: search for “apply for credit card online” look below

thanks again to

Ol for this one.

My mother is insane – a true story

I first saw this the other day but we’ve been posting so much stuff recently that this was put to one side for a quieter time but I’ve been sent it again by one of our readers which has prompted me to finally post it.

My mother is insane is a thread from the Something Awful forums which is gob-smacking when you see it. This guys mom hoards more pointless trash than anyone I’ve ever seen before – she buys things from eBay for no reason and has filled her house – and I DO mean filled – several times over, so much so that there is only one room that’s still vaguely habitable! Not worth visiting on a 56k modem as there are over 5Mb of photos to see.

thanks to Gary from digimask

Top Flash animation

Rockstar games (of Grand Theft Auto fame) hold an annual multimedia competition. One outstanding entry this year is Drew Cope’s Japanese drum Machine which was only a runner-up which just goes to show the high quality of the competition.

cheersOl

A touch of genius

I had to giggle when I heard this. A New Jersey mother is sueing, current bad-guy flavour of the month, the RIAA under federal racketeering laws.

After reading what the FBI considers “organised crime” and thier definition of racketeering, it would seem that the RIAA falls neatly into those catagories.

Mums rock.

Unfortunaly, I doubt it’ll ever reach the courts as violence was never threatend.

Another fiendishly dificult web game

As a follow on from the Crimson Room blogged yesterday, I thought I would share another mind twistingly difficult web game. Not as polished, but with an outstanding soundtrack, Quest for the crown.

Turn up the sound and let’er rip.

Ring Of Fire

Such a traversty!! In homage to the late, great Johnny Cash – an advertising company has attempted to use the song ‘Ring Of Fire’ to advertise….. well – I’ll let you guess. Unfortunately (depending on which way you look at it) the attempts have been blocked by some of Mr. Cash’s family members.