The Scunthorpe Problem
I know I’ve blogged about this before but it was a major headache for me when I was a sysadmin in a school many years ago. The Scunthorpe Problem still exists despite having been around since people decided that there was a need to censor the interwebs. I can laugh now that it doesn’t directly affect me.
Hot Chicks with Stormtroopers
Some posts need no explanation. Hot Chicks with Stormtroopers is one of those (some NSFW).
Sushi Popper
The concept is probably far better than the reality but still, I’d love to try out these Sushi Poppers.
Animated Albums
Animated Albums is a dead simple idea done brilliantly. Take an album cover and turn it into an animated gif.
6 Degrees of Sabbath
Bear also highlighted the excellent 6 Degrees of Black Sabbath site. I managed to stump it a few times but you can’t fail to be impressed with a site that can find a link between GG Allin and Moondog via the Ramones and Sonic Youth or Sublime to Pink Floyd via Nirvana, The Swans, J.G.Thriwell, The The and Sinead O’Connor!
The Swinger
Big thanks to reader Bear for sending me the link to The Swinger. I saw it last night and then couldn’t remember the url this morning when I went to post it.
Anyway, The Swinger is a small piece of code that changes music to make it have that ‘swing’ feel by stretching the first beat in a bar and shrinking the second beat.
I particularly love the hypnotic White Rabbit
White Rabbit – The Swing Version by plamere
Une See Fights
Regular reader Temerity has sent in a link to a new webcomic written and drawn (rather coolly in crayon and then scanned) by his son. It’s called Une See Fights and is about the adventures of a superhero called Une See. I think this is my favourite so far.
Hello Worlds!
My head hurts enough already today without the additional hassle of trying to play a game where you play on two different worlds at the same time.Hello Worlds! is that game and it’s really rather good even though it makes my head hurt. There’s a very nice rewind feature as well which has saved me from throwing my monitor through the nearest window.
People free photos
Here’s a really neat trick for using Photoshop to simply remove people from your photographs of crowds.
Upgraded Search
Just tweaked a little bit so you can now search within comments and by author so you should now be able to search for a person’s name and see their comments. Still need to work out why old posts which have comments don’t show that there are comments.
8bit culture documentary
An 11 minute round up on where Pixel art, 8 bit gaming and Chip chune scene is in 2010.
Mr.B’s World Cup Song
You must know that we love Mr B – the Gentleman Rhymer so it give us great pleasure to play you Mr.B’s World Cup Song.
Bookmarks for real books
Geeky templates for bookmarks
Bug Hunt – help please!
Can some of our readers help answer a question before Carloz kills me – does this look any different to this in your browser. On some of my machines the font is getting messed up and look too large and blocky on the first link and the background image is getting stretched (look for where the man with the gun is on the right) but on other machines it looks fine.
Please let us know what browser and OS you’re using and if the two pages look any different?
Ta.
Bootsy Collins Launching Funk University
Kids today just don’t know their history. That’s the reasoning behind Bootsy Collins launching his own online Funk University. Guest professors will include the inevitable Flea and Les Claypool amongst others. Expect it to be a bit more polished than this. If you want to enroll then head over to Funk U.
It’s a dirty job
I’m currently enjoying the spoofed Twitter account of BP’s Global PR department who are blogging about their attempts to clean up the oil spill. It’s not much fun being at the messy end of an environmental disaster: ”Eating at a very expensive restaurant and spilled salad dressing on my pants. Not sure how to tackle this.”
TinEye Plugins
We’ve mentioned TinEye before – it’s a very handy site indeed. You can upload or paste the url of a picture and it searches the web for other copies of the picture – very helpful for finding where a picture came from, higher resolution versions or seeing what was cropped out of the version you saw – invaluable for hoax-busters or plain nosy people like me. I hadn’t realised until just now that there are a set of browser plugins for Firefox, chrome and even IE!
This week I are mostly playing…
I to know that a lot of the readers out there are going to hate me for this one… it combines Physics, Wallace and Gromit, sweet graphics, excellent gameplay, a large dose of frustration, and an awful lot of time p155ed up the wall!
PJ BoH TotD MSG
I like Pearl Jam, I like Band of Horses and I like Temple of the Dog so I couldn’t not post this version of Hunger Strike by Pearl Jam with BoH’s Ben Bridwell could I?
Gaiman on Who
Neil Gaiman has finished his script for Doctor Who – the proof is out there. There’s a little write-up on the BBC
Rammstein – Haifisch
Nice new video from Rammstein
If you need an explanation of the video then you might want to check out this page and watch out for Marilyn Manson in the vid.
Chupa Chups by Dali
Did anyone else know that Salvador Dali designed the Chupa Chups logo? Naturally I didn’t automatically trust wikipedia but it seems to be backed up by the Guardian as well.
Neal Stephenson News
I know many of our readers are fans of the author Neal Stephenson so I thought I’d share what could be some very cool news. If you’ve checked his Wikipedia page recently you’ll have seen a mention of a company called Subutai Corporation which is in ‘Stealth Mode‘. A simple, innocuous tweet was posted a few hours ago which simply said that they’re about to ‘de-stealth’. It seems to be some kind of publishing company based around an app for Android, iPhone, kindle etc and other than this there’s very little other information but I’ll try to keep you posted.
Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates
I can’t tell you all how much I’ve missed this site – if you’ve been a regular reader in the past then you must appreciate how hard it was for me to discover sites like Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates and not be able to share them with you all.
Spoiler Test
Whilst we’re trying to sort out the unobtrusive video posts I might as well attempt to put a temporary fix in place by using spoilers.
I was amazed when I saw this video
It turns out that the classic movie Airplane! is basically a remake of a serious movie called Zero Hour, so just to get that straight, they shot the movie pretty much with the same scenes and dialogue, adding a few visual jokes and a smattering of puns but otherwise it’s a straight(ish) remake – am I the only person who didn’t know that?
Videos and MP3s are finally here
No, we’re not going to go all web 2.1 on you but one frustration I’ve always had was the amount of times we’d link off to youtube. I still have some hesitation about embedding lots of stuff on the page but we’re working on a way of keeping the videos unobtrusive when you’re not actually watching them (if you’re a redditor then you’ll know how they do it – I like that expand to watch method). but as a test, here’s our first embedded video – like I say though, in the future you won’t see a large box taking up screen space for the video but until we have more hours in the day you’ll have to settle for this method.
Without further ado, here’s Elvis
and here’s Moondog (which you will recognise from Mr Scruff’s updating on this track but is one of my all-time favourite tunes)
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Cute
Baby Sloths ’nuff said
You Don’t See It Until…
Anyone know who is responsible for this superbly freaky grafitti? It’s rather Aphex Twin-like.
Out Damn Bugs
It’s fantastic to see so many people already back with us, we’ll start posting real posts/content any second now but in the meantime please leave comments and let us know what’s not working.
I’ve already realised that the comments are showing as white text on a white background and clicking on the top logo takes you to a random old post instead of back to the front page but please keep ‘em coming.
(I’ll also try to work out how to turn off comment moderation so you can post comments immediately)
