Sunday, October 31

bush is a muppet

a NASA image analysist has looked at the bulge on bush's back and stated that it's more than "bad tailoring".

"I am willing to stake my scientific reputation to the statement that Bush was wearing something under his jacket during the debate,"

this guy has been analysing images for NASA for 30 years. BOOYAH!

can't bush just come out with a statement that basically says:

"yeah, sure, i had some folks tellin' me what to say durin' the debate, the rumors on the internets are true. but if i'm elected as president again, them same folks are gonna be tellin' me how to president, so y'all dun have to worry none."

OMG i love the internets

ok, i was just about to blog how i didn't get a response from tired.com. so i googled for pages that have linked to tired.com to try and find out more about it, and the first link was to a page titled "l33t tshirt folding skillz", so i had to have a look. it's a video, with someone talking in japanese (i think), showing how to fold a tshirt with such amazing quickness and simplicity, it takes literally under a second. try to fold a tshirt the regular way in under a second, i will bet you a dollar that you wouldn't be able to do it with this much ease. i took my tshirt off straight away just to try it. here's a link to the site i found it on, but i know you probably won't bother downloading the video, even thought it's only 2MB. so here's an image sequence. i really want everyone to know about this, because i'm just a benevolent kind of guy.

















Saturday, October 30

nesmania

these guys have made a lego robot that plays SMB on the NES. boingboing and /. have been posting a lot of robot lego stuff recently, i LOVE it. (cube, cube solver)

grandtheftendo is a remake of Grand Theft Auto III for the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It is Grand Theft Auto III running on an 8 bit, 256x240 resolution, 2 bit colour x 2 bit palette, 1.79 Mhz system, written entirely in 6502 Assembly Language! It includes the entire Portland city!

awesome! i wonder if someone will code a robot to play it, that would be fantastic. so ironic it hurts.

post-folio

well, after a week of a "denial-of-service" attack from my faculty (ie no you can't use the internet, you have too much work to do), my folio is in and i was entirely displeased with it but it's finished now so i'm happy. steve's afterwards was fun, one of my lecturers was telling me how cheap smack is. and a crowd of people, incidentally.

i have some blogging to catch up on:

at the request of one of my readers, who shall remain anonymous as i don't want to go through any more legal problems, one of the photos from the set of "matt's launch party" has been censored. wow, i've only been blogging less than a month and i've already got my first "cease and desist" nastygram! it's even from a person who will someday have a law degree. who shall remain anonymous. not that he (or she) has a legal leg to stand on.

Wednesday, October 27

new ipods

just as everyone predicted, there's two new ipods out, a 40GB and 60GB model. they look pretty much the same as the 4G ipods, but have a 65k colour screen. check the apple site for details. iTunes 4.7 is also out. and ipod SE, the black and red version that comes pre-loaded with U2 songs.

the photo-viewing capabilites of the new 'pods are great, but not groundbreaking. not worth an upgrade just yet, methinks. a possible killer app would be if you could make a slideshow with transitions and set backing music to it, and display that on a tv or projector. i imagine they'll do this. then it'd make it a full presentation device, not just a viewer.

slog (sleep web log) update: no rest yet.

in other news, the wired cd that's released under a creative commons licence has been posted as a torrent. i listened to some of it on the bus this morning, it's pretty good. stuff from beastie boys, chuck d and more.

Tuesday, October 26

sleepog 2

went to bed shortly after the last sleepog, at about 6.30 am. got up at 12. it's tuesday, my plan is to work all night tonight, have my drawings finished by 10am tomorrow, send them to get copied, start my model, go home and get a nap till i have to go to work at 6. then i'll go back into uni, work till about 5, go home and sleep till about midday again. then i can stay awake till all my stuff is finished and handed in on friday arvo.

then i'm going to steve's to get sloppy-drunk, very cheaply!

i went to tired.com, go there and tell them why you're tired. if you're tired, that is. i don't know what it is, and i haven't got a response yet.

this blog post comes to you from tiamo, a cafe near architecture that has free wifi for half an hour when you buy something. it's only 256k, but the coffee is very good.

another good wifi hotspot is in cloister's arcade in the city, there's a big seating area and a couple of cafes/lunchspots. i think they've got a 384 or 512k connection.

sleepog

i will be blogging my startup/shutdown times this week, for fun.
monday, wake up 11am.
tuesday 6am - still going
stay tuned

Monday, October 25

hahaha

There was an old Iraqi man who had lived 40 years in the USA (Chicago) and who wanted to plant potatoes in his garden. However he was a little too old and frail to till the soil before planting so he wrote an e-mail to his only son who was in Paris studying at the time, explaining his problem.


Dear Ahmed,
I am feeling very sad because I will be unable to plant my potatoes this year. I am far too old for such heavy work. If only you were here my problems would disappear, for you are young and strong and could till and turn the soil without any bother.
Love Papa.


A couple of days later he received a mail from his son.


Dear Papa,
Whatever you do don’t touch the earth in our garden. That is where I have the ‘you know what’ hidden.
Love Ahmed.


That night at 4am, the garden is invaded by the local police, the FBI, the CIA, a SWAT team, the Rangers, the Marines, Steven Seagal, Silvester Stallone and a few more of the Pentagon’s elite. They dig for hours looking for bomb making equipment, anthrax etc. but find nothing and eventually leave discretely.


The next day the old man receives another mail from his son:


Dear Papa,
I am sure by now the earth is perfect for planting your potatoes. It’s the best I could do under the circumstances.
Love Ahmed.

this guy...

... is FUNNY. i award him with the best blog ever award.

UPDATE: it's a collective blog. i award them all with the best blog ever.

market forces and DRM

i'm just going to copy this entire boingboing post, because its so right.

Advocates of DRM talk about the ability of the market to find a balance between features and restrictions, because people whose freedom has been unduly restricted will make future purchase decisions that will put the overly draconian DRM systems out of business. But check out this cautionary tale of a guy who bought a home-media centre, started recording his favorite shows to DVD, and then:
Turns out that a couple of days ago, HBO started encrypting all of its programs with CGMS-A. They allow you to "copy" a program that you record from their signal once. The trouble is that they consider that one-time copy to be recording the program onto your hard drive, not taking it from the hard drive to a DVD. THAT SUCKS OUT LOUD and I am extremely angry, as you can imagine. The files are HUGE and, even though I have a 200 gb hard drive, I can't keep them there forever. MediaCenter records tv shows with a dvr.ms extension.
When he bought the media centre, it did the thing he wanted it to do with the shows he wanted to do it to: it's like buying a VCR to record the World Series, taking it home and satisfying yourself that it works. It worked.

Then, months later, it stopped working. He could no longer record his favorite shows. Why? Well, because the cablecaster decided to remove a right from him. And because Gateway, the company who sold him the equipment, decided to collaborate with the cablecaster in screwing him out of that right.

When this guy goes back to the store, what should he do to protect his next investment? Say he buys an HP device next, having concluded that Gateway won't look out for his interests. He takes it home and finds that it works fine for his purposes (maybe HP has a "better" deal with HBO that will let him burn more-restricted DVDs from his HP media-centre), then, a couple months later, the cablecaster switches on another flag and suddenly his video won't work.

Where's the market-force here? Should he stop being an HBO customer? A cable customer? A customer for no PCs except those that he builds himself and installs a copy of GNU/Linux on?

What purchase-decision can he make or avoid in order to signal to the market that this kind of restrictiveness is unduly harsh and he won't pay for it any longer?


the only answer is to aggressively break every drm system that comes out, and flaunt that it's been done. like t-shirts with the code that dvd-jon created to break dvd encryption. then, companies might start to realise that consumers won't be told how to use the product they've paid money for.

follow the link to the boingboing post to see the original article in the inquirer. props to cory and the EFF.

it's not what you think

go on, click on one of the images. do it at work, while your boss is watching. you'll have a laugh.

allofmp3.com

just listening to phillip torrone's podcast, he talks about allofmp3.com, a russian mp3 download site, he gives it a thumbs-up. i first heard about it ages ago through bOINGbOING, and there was a melbourne lawyer that claimed that even if this site was grossly flaunting copyright and was acting completely illegally, even in russia, the party downloading songs, if they believe that there is no infringement (and looking at the website, it looks legit), are not breaking any laws. so download away, ignorance is bliss. US$0.01/MB, works out to about 6c australian per song, an album for about $1. choose your encoding format (mp3|aac|flac|ogg) and bitrate, vbr as well, zero drm. awesome. they take paypal if you don't want to give your credit card to some russian website.

The EcoEDGE


there's an architecture conference in melbourne in february that shigeru ban is speaking at, one of my favourite architects. if you want to see some really cool stuff, google for "shigeru ban" "curtain wall house".

cat-tossing

quicktime movie of some people throwing a live cat around in zero gravity on a "vomit comet.". the cat doesn't look too pleased.
(via bOINGbOING)

the launch party anniversary

matt had a party on friday night to commemorate the one year anniversary of the first launch party. here are some photos...


zak, alaina, and someone on the floor


fred or matt and someone's foot


liz and fred


matt and soya crisp


fred ("make love to the camera")

Sunday, October 24

folio week

it's folio week at architecture (folio is due at 4pm friday), so everyone is getting a bit stressed. you can tell its folio week easily: the carpark is full at midnight on a sunday night, so are the computer labs, and the amount of smoking increases exponentially. the ashtray (which was just a plate) was replaced by a milo tin, which has now been superceded by a 22-litre paint tin. there's a note on the balcony complaining about all the cigarette butts left out there, which has now been burnt. other random notes pop up around the building as well.


serialbox

need mac serials? "the worlds onliest collection of serial-numbers"

UPDATE: oh, i thought that was funny. i read onlinest, as in most online.

audioscrobbler

Audioscrobbler builds a profile of your musical taste using a plugin for your media player (Winamp, iTunes, XMMS etc..). Plugins send the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler server, which updates your musical profile with the new song. Every person with a plugin has their own page on this site which shows their listening statistics. The system automatically matches you to people with a similar music taste, and generates personalised recommendations.

have a look at my taste

kinda similar to musicplasma, but different.

get your war on

when you think about it, really, the war in iraq is pretty funny. especially on the telephone.

Lego Rubik's Cube

most awesome project ever. i don't really understand the mechanics of a rubik's cube (i can't even solve one), but i understand enough to know that building it out of lego would be extremely hard.
(via /.)
another /. link: this guy built a rubik's cube solver out of lego. oh how i want the two combined. unfortunately the links to the videos seem to be broken.
the guy who built the lego rubik's solver also does other cool stuff with lego.

Saturday, October 23

capital letters

you may have noticed i follow the bauhaus school of thought when it comes to typography.

what i've been listening to recently

the kleptones - a night at the hip-hopera
mashups of queen songs with hiphop and rap accapellas, sounds really good
the .torrent is one long mp3 with a .cue file, but when i tried to use toast to split it, it said there was no .bin file. screwing around didn't help. so i used a utility called cue-splitter to ipod-friendlierize it.

dj shadow - in tune and on time
absolutely awesome, love to get the dvd

a lot of bjork

always ousiders, never outdone
remix of the prodigy's always outnumbered, never outgunned along the lines of parkspliced

SOS Band - Just Be Good To Me

mind control

these people are using a dish of rat brain they grew to pilot a flight simulator. i had no idea that this kind of technology was so advanced. next they're working on training the rat brain to KILL SARAH CONNER
(via bOING bOING)

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" / 20 GOTO 10

I've finally jumped on the bandwagon and started a blog, pretty much because I'm always finding interesting stuff on the internets, and I want to be able to email my friends with a link to my blog rather than telling them about it in an email. It's just more efficient. Plus I need something to do over summer, and a means to tell people what I'm doing over summer. Blogger seems like the easiest way to get one up and running, we'll see how it goes and decide what to do after a while. Leave comments!