A radio station in Cincinnati is in hot water after dropping twenty live turkeys out of a helicopter. Rather than flying away as expected, the birds dropped “like sacks of wet cement.”
powered by performancing firefox
Pandora time-shifting program lets you capture streamed Pandora music
// May 26th, 2006I know a lot of my friends are bigtime Pandora users. Here’s a program that captures and saves the mp3s that Pandora streams to you. It even correctly ID3 tags them and downloads album art!
If you haven’t tried Pandora yet, it’s a music suggestion engine that finds music like that of artists or songs you enter. Sort of like an automated radio station that focusses on a super-narrow genre.
Pandora’s Jar - Fixed ! download - pandoras-jar-beta-patched-by-proge.zip
Stupid Cadbury Egg Tricks
// April 6th, 2006
What you know is, the above image contains two Cadbury Creme Eggs (better known in the Ray household as “Easter Crack”, or “Peep Garnish”). What you don’t know is which one contains standard Creme Egg goo, and which one contains BBQ sauce.
The First Church of Lindy Hop
// March 24th, 2006The Lord is my Rock…..step.
I will pray for your Spins.
The Lord is my lead.
I will go where thou Leadeth.
Satan made me do West Coast.
Swing out to the lord.
Bada-Beam Laser Cat Toy
// March 24th, 2006This cat toy projects a laser dot onto floors or walls–circling, then stopping. I can only imagine how exciting that would be for a few of the fuzzier members of our household.
Only $13! Jack needs one!
Multipet Bada Beam - TheKittyStore.com
How to destroy the Earth
// March 22nd, 2006The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.
How to destroy the Earth @ Things Of Interest
Exploding Liquid Nitrogen Tank
// March 16th, 2006
See those two liquid nitrogen tanks? The one on the right didn’t have its pressure valve welded shut, and as a result, failed to build up pressure over the course of several months until the bottom of the tank ruptured off under pressure of approximately 1200 psi, shattering the cement floor, punching a 20″ hole through the cement ceiling and launching it into the a lab on the floor above.
The one on the left? Less lucky.
How Not to Do It: Liquid Nitrogen Tanks. In the Pipeline:
DrankTank : The Beverage Blog
// February 18th, 2006
My buddy Derick (who keeps a personal blog linked from my left bar) has just started a new blog dedicated to beverages of all types and descriptions. I can’t think of anyone more into beverages than Derick.
He’s still in the shake-down period–the theme is different every time I go there–but the beverages are great! Go check him out!
KaleCoAuto, Hard to find automotive items!
// January 17th, 2006
Kale Co. Auto is your source for Knudson valves, 710 caps, blinker fluid, and all other hard-to-find automotive accessories. I don’t see any squeebo rotators there, though…
KaleCoAuto, Hard to find automotive items!
Song Search by Tapping - Search for music by tapping the rhythm of the song’s melody.
// January 11th, 2006
This is very impressive!
A flash application lets you tap the rhythm of any song on your space bar, then comes back with the name of the song you just tapped.
It totally nailed both of my tries (”Smoke on the Water” and Sinatra’s slinky rendering of “Fly me to the Moon”). Give it a shot!
Yahoo Pwns my Desktop
// December 28th, 2005Just now, Konfabulator popped up a window letting me know that a new version was out and would I like to download it. Nice little function, very politely willing to let me pass on this upgrade, or never be notified of such things again. I took it up on its offer.
If you don’t know from Konfabulator, it’s a formerly open-source program that puts little doodads (they call them widgets, but I prefer doodads) on your Windows desktop. Little things that DO stuff–like tell the weather forcast or give you live traffic photos from around town. Useful little toy.
I say “formerly” open-source because a couple months ago, Konfabulator became Yahoo! Widgets, having been snapped up by the Y-boys. But it looked like Yahoo! was going to let them stay true to their open roots and not do anything too evil with the Big K.
Until now. Along with the upgrade to Konfabulator, I have a new item in my Start->programs called “Yahoo! Central”. Worse, when I launched Firefox just now, guess what my home page was? And guess what engine my search bar was changed to search? Yep. No telling what other cruft they’ve installed for me.
Thanks, Yahoo!. Next time I’m looking for a third-rate search engine and portal, I’ll go straight to you. In the meantime, keep your mitts of my preferences, thank you very much.
Top Secret Tutorials
// December 28th, 2005Ever wondered how to tie every kind of knot? How to clean anything? How to be creative, become an early riser, prebuild a Li-Ion battery? Then this site is for you.
Scroll past the google-verts to the good stuff, btw…
Legend of the Green Dragon
// December 16th, 2005Back in the old BBS days, when I was in college and just after I graduated, I played a BBS “door game” called Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD) by Seth Able. Seth was 15 when he released the first version of LORD, and it sold 25,000 copies. Which kind of reminds me of what the online world was like back then…
It was a fun, challenging fantasy-adventure game that was designed to encourage daily login and play.
Now some crazy folks have re-created it under the name Legend of the Green Dragon (LOTGD). The new game is web-based, which changes the gameplay somewhat. They totally captured the spirit of the game—a huge, rich world, challenging battles, interaction between players including a player-vs-player system, lots (lots!) of paths for character development, etc.
To give you a sense of how creative and great this game is, right now it’s showing holiday-specific names for things. The Forest is called “The Winter Wonderland”. The “Boar’s Head Inn” is the “Boar’s Head Igloo”. The Gardens are “The Skating Rink”. It also knows about Talk Like a Pirate Day and April Fools day, AND it talks in l33t sp33k on the birthday of the main developer!
I’ve installed LOTGD at one of my servers here. Come play!
UPDATE: Willy pointed out a problem with email confirmation: it didn’t work. Don’t know why, but I turned email confirmation off. If you tried and failed to create a character, my apologies, and please try again.
A House full of insults
// December 11th, 2005Man, this is as funny as a 1st season episode of Are You Being Served! The Beeb has a great article up on the history of insults as used in British Parliament.
I’ve always loved watching film from Parliament. Somebody says something provacative and the whole house bursts into argument and yelling for a few seconds. Then their English gets the better of them and they calm down… Fun.
BBC NEWS | Politics | A House full of insults
OldeEnglish.org Photobooth
// December 10th, 2005
Olde Enlish is a HYSTERICAL online comedy troupe, doing really outrageous and surreal sketches.
OldeEnglish.org - Photobooth.mov
Baby Bush Toys
// December 6th, 2005
Cancellation great for ‘Arrested Development’
// November 17th, 2005
Wow, now HERE’s an idea.
Getting cancelled is the best possible thing that could have happened to Arrested Development. (Or “put on hiatus” or “cut back episode order” - whatever. It’s cancelled.) No longer shackled by the whim of a fickle network, “AD” can take advantage of all the technologies now available for video delivery and make more money. The model is just waiting to happen: AD, a pioneer in its style of comedy, should pioneer this, too.
Lost Remote: Cancellation great for ‘Arrested Development’
Aaaahhhh…..
// November 15th, 2005For the last several months, keeping this blog spam-free seemed like a full-time gig. Every time I logged into the admin page, there were a dozen or thirty new spams about prescription drugs, gambling, credit reports, or methods of enhancing elements of one’s physical person. And those are the ones that made it through my keyword blacklists! Cleaning them up took detective work, and that takes time.
Enter the Wordpress plugin “Spam Karma 2“, or SK2. SK2 is a brilliant piece of software–I half expect it to become intelligent and evolve into SkyNet and start sending robots back in time to install itself on Wordpress blogs throughout the blogosphere. In the three or so days I’ve had it installed, it’s stopped every single spam comment and correctly let through every single valid comment. Okay, okay… The one single valid comment.
Even more shocking than 100% perfect performance so far is this: it claims to have caught over 800 spam comments. First of all, I’m shocked that there were that many coming here (though, I admit, I’m also a bit flattered). Second, I’m stunned that the simple keyword blacklist function in Wordpress was as effective as it was–cutting 800 in three days down to a dozen to thirty twice a week.
Third (and most importantly to anyone who reads this), I can now get rid of that obnoxious captcha on the comment form–the thing that forces you enter the scarmabled text from the generated image. SK2 will pop up a captcha for you to fill in if it has concerns about your being human, but it saves that for fallback purposes.
Captcha stands for “Completely Automated Process for Telling Computers and Humans Apart”, by the way. That’s the technical term for those scarmabled text “I’m actually a person” thingies. It’s a proper acronym, like Scuba, not an initialism like NASA or The FBI.
Big Ad for Australian Beer
// November 5th, 2005
This is a very big ad for Carleton Draft, an Aussie beer. Brilliant.
load.mov (video/quicktime Object)
Things to do when you’re bored - a bumper list of pointless timewasters
// November 5th, 2005This is a really excellent list of things to do when you’re bored.
Have a water drinking contest
(Amusement Potential: 5-10 minutes)
While the competition is fun, you probably won’t feel too good afterward. To give your event an old western theme, slam the cups upside down on the tables after you have emptied them.Stare at the back of someone’s head until they turn around
(Amusement Potential: 2-5 minutes)
This works on the “I have the feeling I’m being watched” principle. Conduct an experiment-does this really work?Have a “Who is less competitive” competition
wonder (Amusement Potential: 1-3 minutes)
Trying to win at this will make you lose. Trying to lose makes you win which makes you lose. Not trying at all makes you lose which makes you win which makes you lose.
Things to do when you’re bored - a bumper list of pointless timewasters