Nikko’s nerdtacular Star Wars R2-D2 gear
These are probably the greatest gadgets I’ve seen at all of CES. Massive high-def televisions and supercharged gaming PCs are great, but they can’t compare to products fashioned to look and act like the galaxy’s greatest astrodroid.
Electronics company Nikko, best known for its remote-controlled cars, have announced a DVD projection system and a wireless, networked Webcam, both based on Star Wars’ R2-D2. The nerd truly is strong in these ones.
via a forward at work.
Civil court judges prepare to cast aside their wigs after 300 years
· Review finds consensus that horsehair should go
· Criminal courts may retain traditional headgear
1) One from Friday: The Hippie Era Just Won’t Die via Mydd
2) An interesting question to applies to “progressive” 2008 candidates: “Who’s with us in a bar fight?” (the article is also posted on Mydd)
1) Fun with google suggest.
2) Good commentary on drug legalization.
Prohibition: a crippling habit
There is only one way to end the misery of addiction revealed by the investigation into the Ipswich murders: legalise the drugs.
…the comments are as much worth reading as the article.
3) Via RASSF: http://www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com/
4) Also via RASSF, alternate possibilities for the upcoming Hobbit film:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20061126
http://archive.gamespy.com/comics/dorktower/images/comics/dorktower537.gif
http://archive.gamespy.com/comics/dorktower/images/comics/dorktower538.gif
The “webmaster console” feature on Google is interesting.
In my earlier post “I’m simultaneously appalled and amused…“, I misspelled appalled as “apalled” and at least at one point I was averaging the 8th highest ranking use of the mispelling. I’ve just now fixed the title.
This is not my only misspelling that they seem to have caught; in “A keyboard, how quaint“, I seem to be a high-ranking (or should that be “hi-”?) bad speller for “transparant aluminum.” It’s got an “e” and is spelled properly in the article I quoted. (I’ve just fixed that one too.)
This one is going into Word for automatic spell-checking before I post it; I guess I’d better get into the habit of using Firefox rather than IE7 in the future, since that one HAS spell-check-on-the-fly.
Meanwhile, I am much abashed.
Update: errors continue, having included a link but no title for “A keyboard, how quaint”
Too strange not to post:
Ian’s Shoelace Site
Fun, fashion & science in this quirky site about shoelaces. Whether you want to learn to lace shoes, tie shoelaces, stop shoelaces from coming undone, calculate shoelace lengths or even repair aglets, Ian’s Shoelace Site has the answer!
First, saw Clerks 2 tonight. Best movie… ev… well, not quite, but certainly best comedy in quite a while and a truly fitting finale to the New Jersey saga.
Second, file under unclassifiable 100 Reasons Why I Hate My Husband; sad, but very funny.
Lastly, via RASSF, on MSNBC we get: Outer-space sex carries complications
Experts say new devices and data would be needed to hit the zero-G-spot
LAS VEGAS – Having sex in the weightlessness of outer space is the stuff of urban legends and romantic fantasy — but experts say that there would be definite downsides as well.
etc… it mentions briefly sex during Zero-G flights (such as on the “Vomit Comet”) – which has been done in an adult movie, Private’s The Uranus Experiment
And that’s all for today.
OK, if you looked in the last few hours, you could see that anyway.
If stories are true, WOO-HOO… via RASFW, we find that the best Sci-Fi TV Series since Babylon 5 is coming back…
BACK TO THE ‘FUTURAMA’
ANOTHER ‘TOON RESURRECTED
By DON KAPLAN
June 22, 2006 — ‘FUTURAMA” is officially back from the dead.
The quirky animated show from “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening was canceled by Fox about two years ago, but will return with at least 13 new episodes on Comedy Central by 2008.
This is only the second time in television history that a show sent to TV’s trash heap has been resurrected. Curiously, the first was “Family Guy,” also an animated Fox show.
The tale of “Futurama’s” dramatic revival roughly follows that same path that “Family Guy” did.
In both cases, the shows have been successfully airing on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim late-night programming block. They both also turned into hot-selling DVD box sets.
“Family Guy” returned to Fox earlier this year, while last fall, Comedy Central outbid Adult Swim for the license to air all 52 episodes of “Futurama” and whatever new episodes might one day be produced.
This week, deals were inked to secure all of the original voice talent and the production staff of “Futurama,” paving the way for the series’ return to TV.
Wondering why you see this message?
It’s because I’ve hit a problem lately with people hotlinking to this site. Most of the cute images you see here on the blog are redistributable things of questionable ownership to begin with, so do feel free to copy them. But when I say “copy” that means do a “Save As” and then upload them to your own blog/livejournal/myspace site, or whatever. DO NOT just copy the direct link and include that in an <img …> tag or similar, or do the same thing via one of the sites that hides the HTML from you.
This blog runs on my DSL line, and when a lot of people are all downloading images, that slows down everything else I do. Normally I don’t have tons of readers, and while hey, it’d be nice if that changed – though it would probably mean I’d have to WRITE more first, it would probably also mean it was time to move it to a real hosting provider who would then charge me for bandwidth overages 
. Either way, losing bandwidth to hotlinks to silly “forward” type images (the “Bible Warning” and the “Pancake Rabbit” in particular) is just a pain I’m not happy with.
We’ll see if that ugly link is sufficient to get people to stop. If not, I’ll just have to block them entirely, and then folks’ll just get the ugly “couldn’t load image” red x.
I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2. It seems to work with my old home-grown theme, and the default it offers is still the 1.5 one, so I’ve kept my custom one for now. So far it looks like most of my plugins work, and the new editor looks cool although may get annoying later. We’ll see.
Anything you viewers notice? Let me know… I may try playing with some alternate themes later.
Two quick notes:
1) WordPress 2.0 is out. I plan to upgrade when I get back to the states; I’m not convinced it’s really going to be an improvement, but I need to keep up to date with the security patches, so there’s not much choice. Hopefully my old style/theme will still work. If not, expect a very bland defauly style until I have more time…
2) ReiserFS sucks for news spools, even with “notail” on, at least on RAID1. I’d wondered if that was it, and it appears to be the case. My leafnode spool runs to about 1.5 million articles, and 9GB; when I put in the mirrored drives, I put it on it’s own file system and switched it from ext3 to ReiserFS. I noticed then that it took about 6 hours every day to run texpire, which seemed long – but I hadn’t been checking since it had been growing. Well, “notail” sped it up a bit but it still took several hours…. so I got fed up, and with the wireless here, migrated it back to ext3. On ext3? (with dir_index on, data=”ordered”, and commit=60) it took a whopping 12 minuts… or a 40:1 improvement.
