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Online Banking With Konqueror — an exhaustive list of online banking systems, and whether or not they work with Konqueror. Since Konqueror uses a from-scratch implementation of Javascript, and is generally just not MSIE, this also acts as a good guide to online banks that Have A Clue How To Write Usable Web Apps. (Kudos go to AIB 24-hour Online Banking, who have run a clean, friendly, and very usable plain-HTML banking system since day 1.)

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Crummy.com:

We noticed various characteristic Muppet behaviors such as the Muppet Panic and the Muppet Walk (and the one I just realized, the Muppet Moment of Inner Turmoil That’s Actually a Hand Rearrangement).

ROFL! I’d always wondered what was going on there, now it all makes sense.

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George W. Hart is a sculptor who works with incredible geometric forms. “Classical forms are pushed in new directions, so viewers can take pleasure in their Platonic beauty yet recognize how they are updated for our complex high-tech times. I share with many artists the idea that a pure form is a worthy object, and select for each piece the materials that best carry that form.”

I like “ Gonads of the Rich and Famous“, a 3D printing. But what exactly is a 3D printing?

(Link from Forteana, via a discussion on edible trilobites. George has a recipe on his site ;)

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Good article at the Guardian, on what J. R. R. Tolkien would have made of the movie:

Why, he would have asked in despair, has his quintessentially English shire been turned into an outstation of Riverdance? “I do know Celtic things and feel for them a certain distaste. They are in fact ‘mad’,” he wrote in an untypically snotty letter in 1937. So why do the hobbits do Irish jigs at Bilbo Baggins’ birthday party?

Why are two of the hobbits in the fellowship, Merry and Pippin, cast as prat-falling Irish clowns? Why does Howard Shore’s music break into repeated Irish warbling? Because, as he would dolefully have guessed, James Cameron’s Titanic proved that dollops of Irishry play well with the US box office.

Well, I think I’ll be with JRR on that one then. begorrah.

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a mind-boggling tale of debauchery, supposedly regarding “Philip Murray, a glamorous wayward socialite son of the great classical scholar and Oxford don Gilbert Murray. In the final days of the Spanish Civil War, young Murray fils found himself in the beleaguered town of Valencia, then still under Republican rule. Murray had been on an extended binge and was reduced, in Delmer’s picturesque phrase, to a state of ‘phobic moodiness and mad romantic exaltation in which love, hunger for love, threw him into delusions and despair.”‘

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The Evil Gerald strikes again, with Mystery Arab warns commuter of possible attack:

We both got off the train at Shankill, and he took me aside in a mysterious fashion. Then he told me in a very hushed voice, “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but you’ve been so kind to me. I’ve had this briefcase for three years and I’ve never been able to open it. The sandwiches my wife made for me in 1998 have gone off, but that’s not the point. I’m going to give you a warning, but you must promise to not tell anyone unless you don’t want them to die, in which case it’s fine, I’ll understand that. Listen: Don’t eat so many fatty foods. You’ll clog up your arteries and run a greater risk of suffering a fatal heart attack later in life. It’s only common sense.”

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Forgotten History – Badshah Khan:

Pashtun warriors so impressed the British, including Indian born Rudyard Kipling, that in 1847 they created a separate Pashtun force, the Corps of Guides. But what is little known is that they also created one of the world’s great pacifist movements of the 20th century. Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan who was born in 1890 and died in 1988 led it. His life is heroic. He spent more than 25 years in British Indian and Pakistani jails.

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Adequacy.org: Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?:

Is your son obsessed with Lunix?

BSD, Lunix, Debian and Mandrake are all versions of an illegal hacker operation system, invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, before the Russians lost the Cold War.

Adequacy.org is pretty funny… but they really need to sort out some kind of comment voting system. They have some seriously humor-deficient readers.

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Live(ish)! New (unarguably)! Updated, er, whenever the laptop’s plugged in and online, and at most once an hour!! Presenting… jmcam!

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Yahoo:

With a defiant cry of “right on motherfuckers”, pop superstar Madonna has presented one of the world’s most famous art prizes to conceptual artist Martin Creed for his controversial creation of a bare room with a light that switches on and off.

Riight. If there was ever any doubt, I reckon it’s now clear that the Turner Prize is all about getting column inches instead of actually awarding new, interesting art.

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brrr. The weather here in Melbourne is pretty much exactly what the weather in Ireland would be — ie. cold:

Sure this was the second day of summer, but instead of worrying about bush fires, I decided to get the home fires burning again.

After all, it was a shivery 14 degrees – the average maximum of a day in June, not December.

I know that Melbourne’s weather is meant to be changeable, but could we be kidding ourselves when we say that December is summer?

Last December, when the average maximum was an unusually warm 26.2 degrees, there were no fewer than eight 30-degree days, while January turned out to be one of the hottest months ever experienced in Melbourne with 14 occurrences of above 30 degrees.

You have to go back to 1879 to find a December when the thermometer waited until the middle of the month before cracking 30 degrees.

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Pentagon: US military forces have in their control a … US citizen:

All along, Americans have known there were Taliban sympathisers and supporters in their midst: the FBI has been focusing on little else for the past three months. However, it expected they would be of Arab descent, part of the huge wave of immigration from Lebanon, Yemen and Palestine of the past 20 years, living in one of the big, ambivalent Islamic communities, perhaps round Detroit or New York.

No one bargained on a 20-year-old white kid with a Swedish name, Irish descent, a strict Catholic father and a Buddhist mother.

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Farting Shatner’s PR genius:

A rumour of William Shatner farting during an interview pushed sales of a Star Trek video beyond the final frontier. Mark Borkowski applauds stroke of PR genius …

The source of the story was the video company’s publicist, who applied a nifty bit of creativity to one of the most intractable problems in entertainment PR. … Getting coverage for a video release is well nigh impossible because the stars have already done the circuit and everything’s already been said.

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Slightly stale bits, but funny nonetheless:

Sevilla midfielder Francisco Gallardo has been charged by the Spanish soccer federation for an unusual goal celebration. Gallardo bit teammate Jose Antonio Reyes’ penis after he had scored in the 4-0 win over Valladolid. Reyes was besieged by ecstatic teammates after scoring and Gallardo was seen to bend down and nibble at the goalscorer’s genitalia.

He could face a fine or suspension for his actions, which may deemed to be an infringement of what is described in the federation’s rulebook as “sporting dignity and decorum”. “I felt a bit of a pinch but I didn’t realise what Gallardo had done until I saw the video. “The worst thing about it is the teasing I’m going to get from my teammates,” Reyes said.’

via Reuters.

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Club patron sues ‘reckless’ stripper:

Bonnett was in the New Westminster club on Nov. 29, 2000 when a female dancer swung around a pole and kicked him, fracturing his nose, according to the lawsuit filed on Tuesday in British Columbia Supreme Court.

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Another classic piece of Pravda translation. “ENDEAVOUR TO DELIVER 6,000 US FLAGS TO THE SPACE“, it seems, which will be handed over to “people who took part in de-mounting of hips on the spot of the tragedy.” Did that really just say “de-mounting of hips”?

Seriously though, I love Pravda’s english articles; it’s not just the iffy translation; sometimes you get some beautiful Russian turns of phrase thrown in — then mangled through the translation. ;)

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Wow. A truly neat, cross-platform, text entry widget in HTML that updates as you edit. Check it out (quick though — it’s a FilePile URL).

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MEMORANDUM

From: Bin Laden, Osama

Sent: Monday, October 22, 2001 8:17 AM

To: Cavemates

Subject: The Cave

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A salutary tale of getting ripped off writing games. Nightmare.

None of which has happened. Why? Because: For half a year now Bethesda has been delaying the 150000USD, which they ARE TO pay according to the contract, and moreover, it even refuse to give us the reason why. We have not been paid even for the beta.

But still, from some source we know that by now Bethesda has sold about 50000 boxes of Echelon in North America, which means that Bethesda has already made over a million on the game.

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http://www.uncontrol.com/ — a flash applet which provides a good collection of nature-imitating mathematical eye candy. Number 16 is beautiful.

I used to write graphics demos on the C-64, which used a lot of this kind of stuff (although a hell of a lot simpler for obvious reasons). It occurs to me that Flash makes writing demos a lot easier; it provides a decent language (scripting as opposed to 6502 assembly), it gives you a good set of drawing tools (anti-aliasing, alpha blending, and 24-bit colour), the hardware no longer limits what you can do in 2-D graphics, and you can even buy software which takes care of the text effects like zooms, scrolling, bouncing etc. In other words, all the cool tricks are done for you ;)

I wonder what demo writers are doing nowadays, as a result? One side seems to be what these guys have done — actually go for really interesting, good-looking effects, rather than just the “how did they do that” factor. I would imagine the other side of the demo “bleeding edge” is doing a hell of a lot of 3-D stuff. (By hand. In assembler. ;)

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A great idea for a blog — “who would buy that?” — featuring auction oddities from all over the web. There’s some absolutely horrific tat to be found out there…

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When Leonids attack!

Just as Laura walked toward the house to get her husband, Tom, a chunk of rock fell from the sky, slamming down to her left near where she had been standing just moments before.

via the forteana list.

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Nancy Banks-Smith on an ill-conceived method of reviewing, during her career as the Guardian’s TV critic:

Later, we all went to the BBC’s TV centre or various ITV offices, running after each other across town like a row of ducks. Then, programmes were shown in central viewing theatres such as at Bafta. This had the disadvantage that the actors were apt to show up, too, applauding their own performance. It was not a relaxed mix. It was at Bafta that Barbara Woodhouse snapped “Put that out at once!” with such dominance that the critic beside me swallowed her cigarette and had to be extinguished with water.

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The winner of the Second Annual SatireWire Spam Slam, courtesy of Kelley on FoRK:

ELECTRIGEL CREME

Brazen Teen Bitches, Take a serious look at your life. And allow me to introduce a powerful new substance from the Electri-Cellular Industry. Electrigel Creme

I wouldn’t have believed it myself, But now there is a better way. There is no catch. I have to get this off my chest before I explode!!!

Electrigel Creme

It’s true you can earn $50,000 in the next 90 days

You really can find out ANYTHING ABOUT ANYONE! A university diploma is waiting for you! But no product is more effective than, Electrigel Creme

What does it do? That’s right. It really really does.

And that, my friend, is the bargain of a lifetime.

I am faxing a check

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BillG recently claimed to have invented Open Source. As part of a discussion of this, his original open letter to computer hobbyists was uncovered. Makes interesting reading, in retrospect.

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I’ve just added weblogs.com support to taint.org. Been meaning to do it for a while, but plenty of other stuff got in the way in the meantime. :(

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“Please mind the closing doors…” The doors close…The doors reopen. “Passengers are reminded that the big red slidey things on the side of the train are called the doors. Let’s try it again. Please stand clear of the doors.” The doors close… “Thank you.”

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Due to a set of advocacy and plain show-off mails recently, regarding sub-pixel font rendering under Linux, my hand has been forced ;)

As a result, here’s a little HOWTO document I’ve written up for getting sub-pixel rendering working under Linux. Check it out if you’ve got a Linux laptop and want some sweet-looking fonts!

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Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing is on fire today. I was tempted to forward on an entry or two, but by the time I got to the end of today’s updates, I think the only thing a reader can do is just go there and read ’em: Quake players on drugs, Dance Dance Resurrection, and EMI uploading their own music to Gnutella…

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Hamlet vs. ISDN:

Technician 1: My name be John. What problem do you have?

Hamlet: A heart so full of woe to shame the gods.

My father dead. My mother newly wed

To mine own uncle who hath stole my crown.

But worst of all, like demon born of Hell,

Connection’s lost; I hath no ISDN.

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One to buy; a collection of J.G. Ballard’s short stories. I’m a big Ballard fan, so I’ll be keeping an eye out. Great review too:

The drowned worlds, scorched cities and overgrown jungles of his early fiction; his concentration on the new media landscape of celebrity and stylised catastrophe; his exploration of the connections between sex, eroticism and death; his fetishism of motorways, cars, technology and high-rise buildings – Ballard wrote about the twentieth century in its own idiom, at a time when most other literary writers were no more than grappling with the same old tired clichés of the English class system.

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a classic tale of in-flight mass hysteria, courtesy of 0xdeadbeef. Read on…