eBay Negs – a must-have browser add-on
I’m aware that this is a repeat post but I’ve mentioned this to several people over the past couple of weeks whohave all thanked me greatly for showing them this tip. If you use eBay then you need to grab either the Firefox Extension or the IE add-in for eBay Negs. Quite simply, this adds an item to your right-click menu that, when clicked on an eBay username, will open a new window/tab showing that users Negative and Neutral feedback because let’s face it, if someone has 2000 transactions, you really don’t want to scroll through pages and pages of positives, you just want to know about the negatives. It works superbly and is a genius idea – I think it also works using Firefox on a Mac.
IE7 – currently blowing goats
I’ve just had to install IE7 on my work pc to do some testing and was rather p155ed off to find that the RSS autodetection that was much vaunted (and works perfectly in Firefox) won’t detect the feed for this site despite being able to render it fine if you click on the link in the right hand bar and despite me having the correct code (as far as I can tell from wading through hundreds of pages to try to work out what the issue is). There are many other things I’m hating about it right now and I’m not usually an MS hater. Luckily Firefox 2 is due out any day now so it looks like I’ll have to run that as default browser (with the addition of IE Tab to allow me to still use sites that ‘require’ IE – mostly banking sites that short-sightedly use ActiveX components).
Space Shuttle Launch as seen from the ISS
Comic dude Warren Ellis has posted a couple of gorgeous shots on his blog of the launch of the space shuttle as seen from the International Space Station. Not a view I expected to ever see and stunning – makes me feel very small indeed.
Weapons of mass decoration
Whilst I deplore most forms of violence (especially against me), I am a sucker for ‘playing’ war games like paintball so imagine how excited I was to hear about the new extreme version – Tank paintball using real tanks!
Sorry Blockbuster
We obviously don’t condone flagrant breaches of copyright at prime towers, but I like this graffiti on a closed down videostore.
The Leia Hat
Now that the winter nights are drawing in, why not knit your favourite girl geek a new hat – one hat that fulfills every geek’s fantasy is the Leia Hat and here’s the free pattern.
The Evolution of Games
I’m old enough to have been playing games on home computers since my first computer – the ZX81. I’m still playing games now and realised, thanks to Monkeon’s great Game Evolution page that I’m still playing the same games, they just look a little different.
Why We Love B3ta
B3tan Cyriak has collected a load of the animations he’s done for the b3ta site and munged them together with some (pretty awful) music. It demonstrates pretty well why we love B3ta (Terry Gilliam is somewhere out there laughing at legacy).
Smoking Case Mod
Ok, so the page is in Polish but you get the idea just from the small picture. This 17 yr old kid from Poland has just been busted by the police for growing cannabis in his pc case. Considering I was having a conversation with a friend about uses for the heat and light wasted by pcs only this weekend, this seems very timely indeed.
Fraggletastic
Woo and indeed Yay! The Fraggles are set to return in a movie! Let’s see how they manage to screw up another childhood favourite of mine. Incidentally, I didn’t know that the bits with humans in were different depending on which country they were shown in so we had Fulton MacKay as the lighthouse keeper but other countries had ‘Doc’ an inventor.
Lords of Logistics
You know how it is, you need to get some stuff from A to B but don’t have a truck – why not take some inspiration from the Lords of Logistics. I bow down before these guys.
CNN – Bloatware
What happened to CNN? It used to be an ok site but now I never bother to visit the website unless I get a drunken desire to laugh at images of Lindsay Lohan (which so far has never happened). The Daily Kos has done some comparison of the content vs bloat on the current site – it’s shocking. Stick with us folks – we’re all about the content and guaranteed no adverts (unfortunately that also means no money to smarten our little site up but them’s the breaks).
Lady Sovereign & iFilm
Two reasons for posting this music video – one is to muse out loud on the fact that British ‘grime’ artist Lady Sovereign has just become the first British artist to get to be the #1 most requested video on MTV’s TRL chart (which is actually quite an acheivement even though it’s really just a payola scam. I mean, she’s decent enough and quite endearingley funny with it but I can’t understand why she’s the one to break through instead of so many other people (Lily Allen, Gorillaz etc). The second reason is to show you iFilm’s new beta site which uses a Flash player – it’s fast, neat and works pretty well – certainly a lot better than the old iFilm site.
(We previously covered America’s obsession with ‘the Sov’ with a post about the guy desperate for a date with the pint-sized hairdresser’s nightmare).
Wallpapr – Paper your PC
Brighten up your pc by dumping your dull old wallpaper and use Wallpapr to grab images from Flickr’s Wallpaper group.
Physics Games
Stuck for some games to play? Why not try some of these Physics-based Games?
BF2/Topgear mashup
Here’s a funny mashup – take an incredibly popular game and an incredibly popular tv show and blend them together. The original Top Gear clip can be seen here.
That reminds me – did anyone else catch the ridiculously powerful Vauxhall Victor on 5th gear the other night? It’s the world’s fastest street legal car and does 1-60 in less than a second – that’s faster than a Maclaren F-1!!
Don’t Sneeze!
Standing 10,000 of your Great British pounds on end to make Coin dominoes would make you quite nervous about sneezing. Good idea for an advert. (That’s about $18,000 worth of coinage).
Scarlett Johansson sings Tom Waits
I still can’t think of a more unlikely cover album than Scarlett Johansson sings Tom Waits but apparently it’s happening. I love Tom Waits and I think Scarlett’s not only beautiful but a great actor – I just can’t stand her when she opens her mouth and talks (when she’s not acting) – she always shows quite how young and naive she is, I can’t bear to watch interviews with her anymore so let’s hope the album is good.
Jet Set Willy Online
I’ve been hearing rumours for a while now but it seems that Jet Set Willy Online is nearing completion – check out the YouTube clip for what a multiplayer retro game looks like (pretty awful to be honest but that won’t stop me playing!). More discussion here.
Muppet Show meets Vampire Hunter D
The most annoying thing about most video mash-ups I see is that they make no attempt to get the lip-sync right. Luckily the Muppet Show meets Vampire Hunter D mash-up is pretty much spot on. I never usually need any reason to post the Mnah-mnah song again anyway.
cheers ted.
One Easy Piece
What with my current facial hair (think ‘My Name is Earl’) I really should buy the Big Zip to complete the image.
thanks Kim
Color Palette Generator
If you work in design then you’ll love this handy tool – it’s a Color Palette Generator. Simply point it at an online image and it’ll give you the key colours to use. Nice.
Videogame T-Shirts
Yes, I know it’s geeky of me but I’m loving both the Never Mind the Blocks and Sabrewulf t-shirts (anyone else remember Sabrewulf – I ran it on my BBC Micro all those years ago)
Slowmotion slap in the face
Today, I’m mostly feeling like the guy getting his face slapped in slow motion in this video. (Nice wobbly nose BTW).
String Avoider DeLuxe
We haven’t had any games on here for a while so feel free to go and waste some time playing String Avoider DeLuxe – I’m sure you can work out the instructions yourself.
earFeeder
I’ve got high hopes for earFeeder, a new service that provides customised RSS feeds for you favourite music artists based on what music you own. Basically, a java applet scans your machine for tunes (would like some more info/source for this to allay secuirty worries) and then lets you filter what it finds, then creates a unique RSS feed for you which contains new song info from iTunes, tour dates, tickets news etc from a variety of sources (although I’d like to have less info from iTunes, Rolling Stone etc and more from NME, pitchfork etc).
All in all, a very nice idea indeed – they’ve even got scalbility built-in – the money comes from affiliate payments if you use the links from the RSS feed to buy tracks in iTunes or gig tickets. See an interesting presentation from the creator, David Cohen, here.
(Earfeeder is still scanning my machine so I haven’t got past the first stage yet – after 20 mins, it’s about halfway through but I do have over 100Gbs of music on this machine currently so that’s no fault of the software, just my addiction to music).
My Workwear
Sometimes I think I must have pulled on this costume instead of my normal jeans and t-shirt to wear to work. How else can you explain the amount of people who seem to be trying to sh1t on me?
Celebrity Skin
I can only hope that the Celebrity Skin is a spoof (and judging by the fact that the shopping cart seems broken it may well be). Buy fecal matter, urine, bacteria, skin cells from all of your favourite celebrities (favourite being a very loose term indeed). I was particularly amused by the ‘overstock sale’ of poo from ‘Dr. Drew, TV Health Advisor’ – did they really overestimate how much interest there would be in his caca?
Titanic: The Sequel
Don’t worry, they wouldn’t really make a sequel of Titanic…or would they? I’ve linked to the original website, not to the youtube version doing the rounds as this site has a director’s commentary version so you can spot the references.
