Lego Construction Factory makes Lego Cars

I used to teach a bit of robotics to schoolkids using Lego Mindstorms and built fully operational machines like photocopiers, vending machines etc but I’ve never seen anything as complicated as the Lego Production Line that builds lego cars. Awesome.

A Frog Puking up it’s own Stomach

I think the title pretty much sums it up, here’s a video of a frog regurgitating it’s own stomach – it’s pretty gross but I found it interesting as it’s an evolved way of overcoming indigestion or getting rid of food that doesn’t agree with you apparently. Don’t fancy trying it myself though.

Digging deep

If I dug down I’d miss New Zealand where will you end up? (I know we’ve done similar ones to this before but I liked the way this is coded – and no points if you say that if you dug down you’d be a duck fancier either!)

Caravaneer

I’m sure most of our readers are old enough to have wasted far too many precious childhood hours on Elite for the BBC Micro. This game, Caravaneer, is practically identical from a concept perspective – buy goods, sell goods, get attacked on the way between towns etc. but with a bit of a Mad Max edge to it. I’ve already had a couple of consecutive late nights thanks to this game! Do yourself a favour and read the documentation (at least skim it) before playing.

Neon Graveyard

Here’s a great Flickr account that I’m positive JC will love, what with his penchant for old neon paraphernalia. Some chap called Carl has collected images of scrap yard where old Las Vegas neon signs go to die. Quite a few of them are a little too tightly cropped for my liking but it’s good work nevertheless. Cheers Sputnik

BioShock

I’ve not played any pc games for a while now but I found myself wanting a blast of something the other day, just in time to hear that the pc demo of BioShock has just been released. Gonna test it soon – anyone tried it yet?

Fill in the Blank Homer Simpson

I did woefully badly at the Fill in the Blank Homer Simpson quotation game. I didn’t get any of the first 6 right and then had a run of right answers.

If Business Meetings Were Like Internet Comments

This is pretty much like our meetings here at pri.me Towers. There’s more suits in this clip though,

co.mments

I don’t need another site to sign up to but co.mments is a good idea to help you track conversations in comment threads across any site you visit – it’s basically a bookmark for comments. If anyone does try it, feel free to let us know how well it works.

ZXSpectrum.net

Using the wonders of Java, recreate the many games of your (well, mine at least) youth with ZXSpectrum.net – click a year and see the Spectrum games for that year and play them in your browser. Who could ask for more?

The software awards scam

Proof, if any was needed, of the software awards scam. I’ve come across this before but the previous twist was from site owners demanding money to award the software/shareware a higher score irregardless of the quality. I do like Andy’s idea of submitting a text file with the words ‘this program does nothing at all’ repeated a few times and then renamed as an .exe.

Anonymous

OMFG WTF – LULZ to the Anonymous. This news report is the biggest piece of scaremongering rubbish I’ve seen for a while (mind you, it’s on FUX News which, like any reasonable person I avoid and leave to the people who like others to do their thinking for them).

Geekup & OpenCoffee

Doh! Typical, I totally forgot that last night was the Leeds GeekUp meet organised by the ever-friendly Robl & Deb. I know quite a few of our more local readers were planning on going along so you might want to check out some of the photos to spot who did turn up. There are also a few images from the last OpenCoffee on there too (the next one is Sept 4th). Please do support these events if you’re in the area, there’s lots of coffee/beer around and they’re normally a good laugh and an excellent place to network.

Remember Latawnya, the Naughty Horse? We’ve got another one for ya

We posted the incredible (in so many ways) story ‘Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Leans to Say “No” to Drugs‘ a while back and now I’m pleased to bring you another highly incomprehensibly disturbing children’s book featuring Peter – the original Uncle Fcuka.

Spock – evil web 2.0 site

Let me say right from the start that I’m NOT a fan of Spock. Apart from the lame name, it’s a highly unintelligent use of web 2.0 technologies. The idea sounds simple enough – it’s a people-based search engine, simply type in someones name and see their spock profile made up of a collection of data sourced from social networking sites (facebook, myspace, linkedin etc). What I find particularly disturbing is the way they’ve implemented tagging. I’ve already heard of people being tagged with undesirable terms (such as the ever-present modern day bogeyman ‘paedophile’) just because they wrote articles about it or even worse because someone added it as a tag to their profile. It’s not a bad idea, just implemented poorly with little intelligence but just goes to further reinforce why I prefer to keep my online identity as seperate to real life as possible, not because I have anything at all to hide, purely because I like my privacy and don’t want my different interests tied together – my work is my work, my family life is private but I’m happy to share things of interest via my site, which I control, I don’t like other sites creating an impression on me by collecting information in a manner I don’t control.

startup schwag

Some of you will remember the nice idea (that proved abortive mostly due to its popularity) that was Valleyschwag. The site allowed you to sign up for a schwag of the month club – you paid a fairly small amount (think it was about $15 a month) and you received a care package full of goodies from Silicon Valley start-ups, many of which (like Flickr and Upcoming.org) went on to be very famous sites. One of the people involved is about to launch startup schwag – this time based purely on t-shirts from new start-ups. You all know I’m a confirmed geek and a t-shirt addict so this will be something I’m keeping an eye on and as long as it’s cheap enough, will be subscribing to when it launches.

Women In Film

A lovely morphing animation of the many beautiful faces of Women In Film through the ages from Lillian Gish through Lauren Bacll, Audrey Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot to Halle Berry.

I’m With Stupid

A highly effective counter-protest.

How To Make A Wi-Fi Extender for pennies

This is a very simple idea for an extremely cheap Wi-Fi Extender which does work – it’s not too dissimilar to the Pringles Cantenna extender. (Caution, UK viewers are guaranteed to scream at their monitors at the pronunciation of both ‘router’ – it’s roo-ter, not row-ter, a row-ter is a machine for cutting wood at angles and the old ‘aloominum’ vs ‘alyouminium’ debate).
cheers Si

Exit ? Entrance

How on earth did we manage to miss the 75th anniversary of An4l S3x M0nth.
cheers KD – mrs grom was particularly mirthless about me receiving a mail advocating this ;o)

OOTTINLTO – tourist information sign

I expect a few comments about how this isn’t strictly allowable but I still think the GIS for tourist information sign is firmly in the spirit of things.
cheers Al

Toilet Paper Wedding Dresses

It seems that making wedding dresses out of bog roll is such a common thing now, there is an annual Toilet Paper Wedding Dress Contest!
cheers KD

Virtual PSP Modder

The Virtual PSP Modder lets you try before you hack. Neat idea but do note – it’s based on hardware hacking, not emulation, still a very nice idea and essential for anyone who fancies trying to mod their PSP (hopefully other consoles will be added in the same way in the future).

Lifted

Apologies if this is a re-post , I certainly meant to post it before but don’t think I have and I know you’ll love the Pixar short – Lifted.

Wall Tapings

Since Solomon, Carloz and I are all ex-roadies, I hope they agree with me that gaffa tape is the best but despite that, I will acknowledge the greatness that is Duct Tape – I feel a wall taping coming on at work…

PDF mag’s mag

We’ve put a few sites up in the past that hosted pdf copies of dead-tree periodicals, none of which were particularly legal or lasted long but pdf-mags seems to be covering legal, mostly independent and design-biased magazines which are created purely in the pdf format – sort of like the modern version of fanzines for designer buffs. I’m definitely going to grab a few of these for my next long train journey to pass the time. Let me know if you find any particularly good ones.

5555

This happens to be post #5555. Here’s a couple of interesting 5555 related facts:
1) Daft Punk released a bunch of tunes with Anime style videos which when strung together formed a film called 5555
2) The sequence of digits “5555″ appears 5 times in the first 55555 decimal places of pi*

* This is not strictly true – it’s actually 6 times in the first 50,000 places but that doesn’t make as good a story.

Caffeine O.D.

May this be a warning to all of us!

RedandJonny – StormTroopers in Love

I just love the photos of RedandJonny – young stormtroopers in love. The idea is so simple but amazingly effective.

The ButterKnife player

How sweet is the Butter Knife shaped mp3 player which also splits open and converts into a cd player and this is the genius part – a cd ripper too. Not only a highly useful thing to take round to your mates house but also immensely cool in a very geeky way. Unfortunately it’s only a concept so far but we can dream.