Stormcaller.net: The Colour is Out & About

[ Previous entry ] [ Main Index ] [ Next entry ]

Sunday, July 10, 2005 - "The Colour is Out & About"
Thanks to the many friends, offline and on, who got in contact the day of the London bombings to check that I was okay - it was touching that myself and Londoners in general were in so many people's thoughts. My family, friends and I were unaffected, thankfully.
> Science/Tech

The Mars rover Opportunity ran into some problems a while back, getting stuck in a dust dune for over a month, but has now broken free - see some animations. [Details]
In fact, Opportunity and its sister rover Spirit have now been running for a year and a half now. Their initial mission brief was for three months. Not bad, eh?
More possible Earth-annihilation scenarios - this time it's a comet. Ho hum. [Details]
Curiousity created the dog. [Details]
Some overpaid waste of space at Hitachi's marketing department thought it would be a good use of time and resources to create this ghastly animation, supposedly explaining the concept behind the company's latest idea for increasing the storage density of hard drives. Someone needs to get fired. [Destroy]
> Geek

"Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV". A great article on how "hyperdistribution" will revolutionise the media - and how it's already happening. [Details]
This goon mods Xboxes. Pretty! [Details]
Sadly, the BBC are closing down their Cult website - despite 700,000 users last month and second place after News in a recent major BBC online survey. They'd already cut it back pretty heavily in the last year. [Details]
Geek social fallacies: actually, these apply to any social groups, not just geeks. Pretty true. I'm probably guilty of GSF4 and maybe a bit of GSF5, but I counter that by completely subverting GSF1. [Details]
New version of PeerGuardian (PG2 beta 6). You'll be wanting to grab that. [Download]
I'm getting a hell of a lot of hits referred from various bits of myspace.com in the last month or so - enough to make a noticable increase on my bandwidth usage, actually, which is probably going to push me over my threshhold and cost me another hosting account upgrade - but can't trace the links. Any ideas? Did you get here from MySpace? Let me know what the deal is (email address on the left).
Wikiquote is fun. Original title for this post, before this week's bombings: "Let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end they'll beg us to save them." Obviously now inappropriate.
> Stuff

Mark Steyn's right, of course, yet again. About everything, actually, but specifically in his thoughts about the London bombings, Live8 and the whole lefty anti-capitalist, politically correct namby-pamby state of Western society today. A lot of his good articles are in the subscribers-only section of the Spectator website, but read what you can on his website and the links to his Telegraph articles. [Details]
Whatever you say about Live8, though, the music was fantastic. Pink Floyd were worth the wait, of course, but I actually think The Who stole the show with a flawless set just before.
Banksy is brilliant. [Display]
Oliver Stone is set to make the first major film about 911, starring Nicholas Cage. Is that really such a good idea, or will he distort and lefty it up as he's done in the past? [Details]
Google Maps is fun. Here, have hundreds of U.S. Air Force planes. [Display]
The Lawnchairs are an amateur band offering all their music for (free, legal) download on their website. Go listen! "An Asteroid At Any Time" is my favourite track. [Details]
Joel Veitch of rathergood.com is the lead singer of an exciting new band! See a couple of their (unique) music videos on the website. [Details]
Some wonderful people made Spongmonkey costumes! This is from last Halloween but I missed them then. [Display]
While I'm at it: Goon bands worth listening to: The Colour (hence post title) and The Miasmics (ska!).
...But not quite as good a ska band as 360, the University of Birmingham favourite band - official! [Details]
Finally, someone is trying to shut the Crazy Frog down. Maybe there is justice in this world... [Details]