Amanda Palmer Performs The Popular Hits Of Radiohead On Her Magical Ukulele

Y’all know I have a thing for the exquisite Amanda F*cking Palmer by now and today she releases her latest affair – an album of Radiohead covers on the Ukulele. what’s even better is that the album is an instant download in pretty much any format you want from the Amanda Palmer bandcamp page for a minimum of 84cents for the whole album – it’s pay as much as you want but the 84 cents covers the fees she needs to pay Radiohead for licensing. I also picked up an album of alternate tracks from the ‘Who Killed Amanda Palmer’ lp.

10 Minor Star Wars Characters With Completely Unnecessary Backstories

I used to share a house with a Star Wars collector – every inch of space in his room was covered with those little figurines and he used to get up at 4 or 5am to travel to car boot sales & garage sales on the off-chance of finding a specimen to add to his collection. I couldn’t ever really take the p1ss out of him for it since I knew that some of his finds were worth amazingly large amounts of money. Undoubtedly he would already know these 10 Minor Star Wars Characters With Completely Unnecessary Backstories. Ice Cream Guy is the perfect example of how people go too far though – he should have stayed as Ice Cream Guy – it would have been much funnier.

David Lanham’s $50 digital portraits

The artist behind Ollie the Twitter bird has unfortunately broken his foot playing football, but rather than feeling sorry for himself, whilst he’s stuck at home he’s offering a personal portrait service to anyone who’s using Apple’s new Facetime software. He spends 10 minutes doing a sketch of you and then creates a digital version that he’ll email you. He’s rather good and I’m tempted by an updated avatar – link to Flickr gallery

Star Wars cereal packets

What if George Lucas made cornflakes…..

How quickly can your password be cracked?

I know this is pretty obvious stuff, but it’s always interesting to see how utterly vulnerable stuff is online. Your really looking at an 8 character password that’s a mixture of Upper and Lower case letters, before you even start approaching something secure. What do you all think of this chaps suggestion of using a password manager?

*grom edit* We use password managers at work as most people have to access several hundred servers each with different passwords so they are good as long as you use the right ones and do it properly.

As a side note – if you want to see how easy it is to crack your wifi password, get a packet sniffer (many available for free online) and send a few packets to WPA Cracker and see how quickly it is cracked.  quite disturbing!

8bit Sadnes

Love this 8bit cover of Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’
More of Sadnes on his myspace page

Bassoforte

Diego Stocco makes very cool instruments. His latest is the Bassoforte made made cutting up an old piano and making the keys hammer a bass guitar neck. Add a few extra bits and pieces and you get this great tune.

35mm

How many movies can you spot in the beautiful looking piece of design. It’s like a tribute to Saul Bass.  It’s by a team led by Felix Meyer.

thanks Dr Strangelove

Inside insides

Take a bunch of fruit and veg, place inside MRI scanner then animate the results. That’s basically the Inside insides blog. Studying the Watermelon one made me spend far too long trying to work out the most efficient method of cutting one leaving the optimum flesh vs seed ratio. Also amazing how fractal artichoke, kiwi and brocolli are.

Loops of Zen

The game Loops of Zen leads you into a false sense of tranquility before confounding you with some decent puzzling action. Possibly best to bring your own soundtrack!

Define: How Not to Give a F*ck

First, start the video below playing

Old Spice Custom Answerphone

You must have seen the US Old Spice adverts by now. I’ll just assume you all have. They’ve been doing some very amusing personalised ones for people at Reddit including this excellent answerphone message which you can cut up and edit yourself to make your very own message – even easier if you use it with the listen to youtube site to extract the audio.

Why I am not letting my son see “Dark Knight” yet

or buying him a Bat-costume

Awkward Family Pet Photos

We’ve posted the train wreck that is AwkwardFamilyPhotos.before but I’m indebted to Kim for pointing out that there’s also now Awkward Family Pet Photos too. Just as cringeworthy.

Supergrom

Big grom (also known as ‘our kid’ to my fellow Mancunians) is willing to do anything to gain superpowers in his bid to become a superhero (I don’t actually think he wants to be a superhero – he just likes wearing a cape and tights!). He’s just sent me this video tour of the ISIS Facility, a Synchrotron that he’s doing business with at the moment. The security guards there should be on alert for a large man trying to sneak into the unit to have protons fired at him in a bid to become Particle Accelerator Dude.

Star Wars re-enactment on subway train

The ImprovEverywhere team have uploaded a video of their latest piece where they re-enact the scene where Princess Leia is first captured by stormtroopers and taken to Darth Vader. I wish stuff like this would happen when I’m on the tube.

Beardyman and Dolby proudly present: DOLBYMAN

Give this guy whatever goddam caption he wants. This is GENIUS

Saved by a Poop Transplant

Having your partner’s stool inserted into your colon is certainly a novel treatment but the theory is sound.

Candwich

Candwich – it’s a sandwich in a can. Conspiracy theorists should stock up now for the forthcoming apocalypse.

xkcd on Homeopathy

xkcd nail homeopathy.

Garth Ennis’ The Pro Gets Animated – NSFW

Garth Ennis is my favourite Hollywood comic writer (that’s Hollywood, Northern Ireland – the original one). He’s the man responsible for some classic Judge Dredd and Hellblazer strips as well as True Faith and Preacher. Now there is a animated short of his The Pro comic which was a rude, coarse and hilarious skit on superhero comics about a young lady of the night given superhuman powers.
There a brief excerpt here and you can see all 8 minutes of NSFW hilarity
on Youtube but I guess you have to log in first. It’s well worth it though.

Google App Inventor

Google is launching a new application today which should make it ridiculously easy for anyone to make their own Android app. Google App Inventor lets you drag and drop predefined ‘blocks’ and set parameters. Ok, hardcore coders won’t be interested but it’s great for learning the basic principles of coding theory and for knocking up very quick and simple apps yourself. Compare this to Apple’s policy – total control vs no control whatsoever (I am still amazed that global corporations go through exactly the same process as script kiddies for acceptance into itunes – I know tons of companies who have not had apps approved despite spending vast amounts of money and resources for no reason!)

lovefre.sh

I will post more on this very soon but hold your breath for a brilliant new venture by a friend of mine, lovefre.sh. It’s gonna rock!

Organ Donor – Sort of

I think the idea was for DJ Shadow to play his infamous Organ Donor tune on the massive organ in Ulster Hall, Belfast but they’re not very easy things to play and I guess he didn’t get much practise beforehand.

F1 Introduces Driver Tracker

I can’t believe it’s taken so long to do this but I’m really happy that the Formula One has now got a livedriver tracker so you can see where each driver is on the track during the race. I’ll have this running on my pc while I watch the race on tv.

Busting!

mrs grom asked me to do some signs for toilets of the building she’s working in. Here are my first designs.
Once I’m happier with them I’ll stick them up on Flickr under the usual non-commercial creative commons license so anyone who wants them can grab them.

West Ashfield Tube Station

We’ve covered urban exploration before, and everyone has heard about London Underground’s Ghost Stations but here’s a tube station that is not on tube map, has no trains or passengers yet is fully kitted out with all the mod cons of a normal station. Welcome to West Ashfield, London Underground’s “secret” tube station

Computers are only as boring as the people who use them

Classic geek out dance scene from the 90′s movie Lambada

Levelling up the game of life

Epic Win is an RPG wrapper for your real life. It uses real-world ‘grind’ to allow players to level up, by remembering to buy birthday cards or doing the washing up. If someone could post a walkthrough then that would be ace.

Smooth Jazz vs Death Metal (with Bonus Pirates)

Bear has sent over some rather marvellous videos for your delectation;
Have a smooth jazz ‘Enter Sandman’ by Metallica