Stormcaller.net

Sunday, March 30, 2003 - "Mayoral Tip #32: Build a big friggin' statue of yourself"

> Science/Tech

The European Space Agency's Rosetta mission has found a new comet to aim for, to launch probably early next year. [Details]
Pulsars the size of "beachballs" might be the smallest objects detected so far in space. [Details]
Amazing ultra-high definition images and animations of the Earth created from data from various sources, mainly NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). [Details]
...and some lovely close-up images. [Display]
I went to a lecture at the Royal Institution last night on the quantum - was so interesting and well-explained that I even bought the speaker's book. Anyway - I'm going to (slightly dubiously) link that to the following page. [Details]
> Military

The intelligent gun of the future - shame it's butt ugly. Still, the further applications are an interesting prospect. [Details]
I want one! One what? Well, any of it, really. That lovely looking "Lightweight Forward Entry Device" would be nice, for a start. Military technology is so much fun. [Details]
The M1A1/A2 Abrams tank is not only a pretty mean machine but also incorporates a lot of new technology. [Details]
We prefer good ol' British Challenger 2 tanks, though. [Details]
"Hey, check out our new TOW missile!". [Details]
> Geek

Jenna's highly amusing live commentary on the Oscars. [Details]
Want a free cup holder? [Details]
UK information technology sucks. [Details]
Microsoft publically told that its software is full of holes and ordered to pull this ad. [Details]
We like the Dopefish. [Details]
Quite right too. If you download music, read this. [Details]
> Stuff

It's so true. [Details]
I'd really like to believe this guy's story. Why not? [Details]
Ok, I'll stop using sarcasm. [Details]
The best dad in the world - he built his son a driveable 1/5th scale Sherman tank! [Details]
These guys do it for a living, and have instructions. [Details]
Hell, while I'm on the subject... [Details]
This bloke wins hands down, I'm afraid. This is the ultimate RC vehicle. [Details]

Posted by Stormcaller at 3:54 PM GMT [Link]

Wednesday, March 26, 2003 - "Let the Wookie win"

Well, since there's so much going on at the moment regarding the War on Iraq, I thought I'd do a special, smaller links update. Expect a post as normal on Saturday, though it'll be smaller than usual since there's not much else happening of any interest. I might do more of these special war-related updates at some point. I'm not going to be posting news and reports on how the war is progressing and related stories - there are countless hundreds of other sites where you can get that stuff.
> War on Iraq

No worries - we're sending in the Autobots Transformers to sort Iraq out. [Details]
I disagree with the pacifist bollocks implied, but this is kinda funny. [Destroy]
The alternative terror alert system. Much better. [Details]
Give Blood - Join the Army. Genius. [Details]
Copies of all the leaflets dropped by allied forces into Iraq. [Details]
I've got a new respect for the Patriot missile system. Well, yes, it shot down an RAF Tornado, but the system is fantastic. In the first day of the conflict it shot down five out of five Iraqi missiles inbound to Kuwait that were on target. That's a big improvement since it failed miserably during the first Gulf war. [Details]
Update: Silly trigger happy Patriots. [Details]
It's not as good as the new Israeli Arrows II system, though. [Details]
Idiots have started defacing hundreds of websites a day, including the US Navy site and other military related websites. Some of them are quoting the Koran or plastering crude political messages on front pages. Then again, most are still just saying "OMG UrE bEiNg HaX3d!!!11 WE ARE 1337 haXl0r3s!!!1!". [Details]
Hardcore military-grade laptops. The specs are secondary. [Details]
The Earthviewer system that you may have seen used on several news channels to show detailed information of the Iraqi landscape. [Details]
How [not] to protect your home from terrorist attacks. [Display]

Posted by Stormcaller at 6:24 PM GMT [Link]

Sunday, March 23, 2003 - "People are stupid. Groups of people are stupider than the sum of their parts."

> Science/Tech

Wired's innovative and brilliant article on Hydrogen power. It envisions an "Apollo scale" campaign by the U.S. government and oil and automobile companies to bring about a new hydrogen-based economy within ten years, which even sounds plausible once you've read this article. [Details]
The universe as a doughnut - mmmm... astrolicious. [Details]
SETI@home to bear some fruits, maybe? Surely not. But they've found a few possibilities. [Details]
They found Columbia's flight data recorder. [Details]
Never mind Jupiter's great red spot - there's a new sheriff in town. [Details]
IBM have got this pretty funky new text-to-speech technology which uses real recorded phonemes to create sentences. Test it here. [Details]
I asked an ALICE bot if it could see itself as an electronic fridge. It said "Perhaps". [Details]
Never mind weapons of mass destruction - we should beware of Saddam's flying saucers. [Details]
A new technology that can embed a "super-watermark", ordinary text/pictures/video, inside an audio file, which will survive compression, analog recording or anything else you care to do to it. RIAA already planning evilness with it. [Details]
> Geek

Email is baaaad. [Details]
Email is gooood. [Details]
I'd definitely apply for this, if I lived in America. [Details]
I wish I'd heard about this - £7 for an HP Pocket PC I can afford. [Details]
Mmmm... pi. A truly geek link. I know pi to ten decimal places - 3.1415926545 - and with the help of this site, I remembered the next three for about five minutes. [Details]
And as we all know, there is no honour without pi[e]! [Details]
Supposedly a real screenshot from Microsoft's new "extremely secure" system, "Longhorn". [Display]
Dell will now pick up your old computer for $15 and make sure it gets safely recycled. [Details]
Salon.com asks if Farscape fans can really "reinvent TV". Perhaps not reinvent, but the campaign and the newly established Viewer Consortium certainly hope to shake it up a little. On a side note, please do watch the ad to access the rest of the article or even subscribe to Salon.com - they are highly respected and a good quality news website, but in pretty big financial trouble. [Details]
Evil X-Box players. We are the real gamers! [Details]
Someone logged the top quotes on the now dead QDB (Quote Database). [Details]
A more detailed insight into the inner workings of Weta Digital, Peter Jackson's company who are currently working on the visual effects for The Return of the King, than we've had so far. [Details]
> Stuff

One of the greatest true life stories you will ever read. I won't explain now - just find half an hour and read this amazing story. [Details]
Good old Rockstar Games have updated the original Grand Theft Auto to work with newer computers and are releasing it free for download online! You'll be lucky getting through to actually download it thanks to a Slashdotting, but by the time I post this update that will have been a week ago. [Details]
For thirty quid, I'm really very tempted to buy one of these. [Details]
I was looking at the US's new terrorism readiness website, ready.gov, earlier this week. Stupid American scaremongering, but it can be quite funny too. [Display]
Officially licensed replicas of some of the swords in Lord Of The Rings. Exceedingly shiny. Harry's getting Sting for his birthday, and I'm very jealous. [Details]
More here, plus swords from other films. These guys have an Uruk-Hai scimitar! [Details]
No wonder people have such a low opinion of hardcore religious groups these days. [Details]
This lot are almost as bad, but at least they've got a workable idea. [Details]
Look! No war commentary! I think there's enough of it flying around already.

Posted by Stormcaller at 6:47 PM GMT [Link]

Saturday, March 15, 2003 - "When religion and politics ride in the same cart, the whirlwind follows."

> Science/Tech

The BBC have a fantastic site on the future of spaceflight, covering all the proposed methods of travel up to orbit and out into deeper space. [Details]
Motorola's very cool new range of wearable Bluetooth devices. [Details]
Why hasn't Europe put a man in space yet? [Details]
Because we're busy sending unmanned missions to the moon! Hooray! [Details]
The latest "water on Mars" story. Expect "waterpark found on Mars" article next month. [Details]
...and high-res images here. [Display]
This 3G thing looks like it could be quite sweet. If it ever arrives, of course, though supposedly it'll be ready by the end of March. Handsets start at £399 though, so screw that. [Details]
One day I will own one of these. [Destroy]
Uh, some kind of magic bicycle. Update: This site appears to have died. Deal with it. [Details]
> Geek

The typical kinds of people to be found at any given LAN party. Pretty much true, actually. Nice header on this site. [Details]
This would fix my storage problem for the next ten years. I want one! [Details]
The return of Pigeon Rank! [Display]
Everything sucks. I'm in an anti-technology mood this week, which is very unusual for me. [Display]
In fact, I might even switch connection. Anyone know the monthly cost of one of these? [Details]
Pringles cans work better. [Details]
New high capacity CDs condemned because they make piracy easier. And fast computers and broadband connections are bad things because they make hacking easier. In fact, so are keyboards. [Details]
I think Stormcaller.net is feng-shui compliant. Maybe more so than XHTML. [Details]
I think we've all had similar urges in the past. Redneck American Mac (l)users have an annual event where they shoot up and generally abuse Windoze machines, I recall. [Details]
> Stuff

Take the TFX-Soft personality test. Used by lots of major corporations to find out what kind of people their employees are, apparently. Certainly analysed me pretty accurately. I got a 39 - to find out what that means, go do the test already. [Details]
As much as we all love fried fish, sometimes you just have to save the little buggers. [Destroy]
A wave of melancholy. [Details]
A free sci-fi convention in Milton Keynes, with guests such as Darth Vader, two Boba Fetts, Zhaan, Gollum, Pippin, Sauron and R2-D2. Well, the actors. [Details]
A little cheeky, but the money is going to charity, and you have to admit that it's an intriguing idea. [Details]
Hard day? Sport journalism's a terrible job. [Details]
They could use this on the M25 around London. [Display]
Dunno what these guys are doing, but... wow. [Display]
No additional satire necessary. [Details]
I would laugh hysterically at this if three people hadn't died. [Details]

Posted by Stormcaller at 6:28 PM GMT [Link]

Saturday, March 15, 2003 - "Sidebar Leetage"

Well, I'm back online. Evil BT. After a week of denying that it was their fault, they found a problem with the ADSL service on my line and managed to fix it. They get an earful, and we get a tenner. Bastards.
In more positive news, I finally got round to "finishing off" this site, in that it's now at least navigable. The rather neat new sidebar was pretty easy to create (mostly while I had no internet connection and sod all else to do). In fact, the hard bit wasn't even getting it to align nicely with the rest of the site. No - the difficult thing was getting Internet Explorer, Opera and Mozilla to agree on how it should look and line up. If IE would start supporting CSS correctly, web design would be much easier. They can throw in PNG transparency support while they're at it, but that's another rant.
Anyway - cue lots of div id and div class, with various bits of padding, a float: left; and the odd dirty hack. With a little (much appreciated) help from C and other #tfxsoft types, the sidebar, some rearranging and a few odd tweaks are done.
While we're at it, there are some new pics up in the photo gallery, and you'll find a link on the sidebar to a whole bunch of animations I made of friends pratting about in front of a webcam. I'm sure you'll forgive me for the current lack of design on that page.
Sidebar links: I'll put up buttons for any friends who'd like me to link to their site. 90 x 30 graphic (or flash thing - rah Kam) required, though if you ask nicely I can probably be persuaded to make one. Link/button/banner exchange would be cool.

Posted by Stormcaller at 1:43 AM GMT [Link]

Sunday, March 9, 2003 - "I wasn't born with enough middle fingers"

Well, this is going to have to be the first weekend since before I started this site where I haven't done a links update. Blame BT.
I haven't had an internet connection since Wednesday. Worked Tuesday night, then suddenly wasn't working the next day. Tried everything I could - fiddling with settings, changing phone sockets, using a different computer, using my router, updating the router's firmware, using a modem, trying BT test ADSL accounts. No joy. BT say it's my ISP, and claim that they've checked the line and nothing is wrong. Eclipse say there's nothing wrong at their end, and it's BT's fault. After waiting for half an hour - twice - to speak to Netgear, the manufacturer of my router, they said it's nothing to do with them. And, of course, all the tech support lines are closed for the weekend.
Well, basically I'm screwed for the moment. If I haven't figured it out by later on in the week, we'll have a BT engineer round. If he finds the problem and it turns out it wasn't their fault, we get charged £50 for the first hour and £55 for every subsequent hour. Bastards. See you next weekend, or hopefully later on this week.

Posted by Stormcaller at 7:25 PM GMT [Link]

Sunday, March 2, 2003 - "MegaTokyo"

Finished reading my MegaTokyo graphic novel this morning. I have to say that even though I'd read all of the comics in the novel ("Chapter 0") online before, and have read all that has subsequently been done so far, I really enjoyed going back to the start and reading through the first 'lot' of this great webcomic. Having it in a physical format, with some new content and extra material as well as a little writing from Piro and co., is nicer than browsing through it on the website. The slip cover is really nice, too.
They originally planned to do a print of 5,000. They received 4,718 pre-orders. The first print ended up being 11,000 copies, and those sold out by the end of January. Bearing in mind that the book only shipped at the beginning of January, and there has been no external publicity other than at the MegaTokyo and I.C. Entertainment sites, that's pretty phenomenal! Publishers Weekly even did an article on MT and the novel.
Seriously - go buy the book. It's only a fiver from Amazon, plus a couple of quid postage. I'll be pre-ordering the second one as soon as I can from IC or as soon as Amazon get it up on their site.
- Order from Amazon UK
- Order from Amazon US
- Order from Thinkgeek
- Order direct from I.C. Entertainment
Anyway - either way, MegaTokyo is definitely worth reading online, plus it's free there. Hell, I'll even give you a direct link back to the first comic. I've been reading it for a couple of years, have bought two t-shirts and a novel, and I'm definitely not planning to stop.
* @FunBoy slaps SC|Sleep damn u uve got me addicted to mega tokyo =D
<@Wormy> pah, like it's hard to be addicted to mega tokyo

Posted by Stormcaller at 6:13 PM GMT [Link]

Sunday, March 2, 2003 - "A Deeper Gravity"

"The point of the matter is: every time you buy a CD from the companies that make up the RIAA, you are funding the war on your privacy and freedom. So stop. Music is everywhere. Find it where it is free. Do not circumvent, just find something else to listen to. If you will just open your ears, you will discover the world is full of music and we do not need the RIAA to feed it to us."
-- jasonbrown, /.
Thanks for the quote, MC.

Posted by Stormcaller at 5:00 PM GMT [Link]

Saturday, March 1, 2003 - "Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a pool"

> Science/Tech

Spectacular pictures of a comet passing our sun just one fourth of Mercury's orbit away. [Details]
...and a 480kb GIF animation of the comet swinging around the sun. [Display]
Flashy weaponry type stuff. [Details]
An intriguing conspiracy. Hardly worthy of the SciTech category - blatantly a load of rubbish, especially since they chose to spam MORAT support with it. [Details]
Poor Pioneer 10. You served us well. [Details]
Internet to die on Monday (03/03/03) - it's the Y2k3 bug! Or something. [Details]
Light propulsion - one of the most über technologies ever. [Details]
"Richard: you could do so much damage with those". Yes, we all love gigawatt lasers. [Details]
Microscopic little DNA computers - a trillion of them could fit in one drop of water. [Details]
> Geek

My Megatokyo graphic novel arrived today (Tuesday)! I'm so excited! [Details]
An email sent out by a guy who attended the World Economic Forum. Some interesting insights into what discussed, what the major problems are, what's going on in the world and who runs it. [Details]
Random linkage for C's site, because it looks awesome, even though he hasn't updated it for months. I've been taking a look at PNG transparency and CSS backgrounds, and have concluded that it's a complete bitch and since Internet Explorer doesn't support it properly anyway, not worth doing. [Details]
NTK regularly include screenshots of funny or inappropriate banner ads in their weekly newsletter, but this is going too far. [Details]
School's are only just realising the dangers posed by PHP use by students. I've certainly informed my school's network administrator. [Details]
Sci-Fi magazine's Farscape über sum-up article. [Details]
An interesting look at how the Bulletin Board System really started. [Details]
Someone found a use for handheld GPS units. Who'da thunk it? [Details]
In terms of hardcoreness, nothing even comes close. [Details]
"London: "Anti-War Protest just happened to be Scheduled on same day as Save Farscape Rally", claims fan. A local Farscape fan club claims that 2 million people took to the streets in a last minute attempt to save the show last week."
Can't believe they haven't patented it before. Don't hold your breath for a PigeonRank patent. [Details]
If I had £39.99 going spare, this is what I'd spend it on. Without question. [Details]
Brilliant! Google take mail order catalogues, scan them in high res and stick them up in an online database. You can even search the text within the catalogue. Couldn't possibly think of any uses for this, of course. [Details]
I'm going to see Macbeth this evening in London, with Sean Bean and Samantha Bond. Should be really good - but actually, I'd rather see Makb3th. [Details]
> Stuff

Jonti went off track for a while, getting bogged down in the whole Bob's Week In France thing, but Weebl's back on track with a couple of great new animations. [Destroy][Destroy]
Stubborn Tetris blocks. [Destroy]
Aww, it's true love. Download this. [Download]
Mint gets on TV. About time too. [Destroy]
Rather clever little flash psychic thingy sent to me by Tal. Took a couple of tries to work it out. [Destroy]
Political correctness reaches a new and bizarre high - in America? [Details]
...so they probably wouldn't like this one. [Display]
Everybody likes penguins. [Destroy]
British government encourages teenage oral sex. I'm not even going to try to think of a clever headline for this link. [Details]
Buffy will live on! Cue "makers stake their hopes in new Buffy" headlines. [Details]
Buffy over, but will return! Cue "makers put stakes into Buffy spinoffs" headlines. [Details]
Buffy cancelled! Cue "makers drive stake through Buffy" headlines. [Details]
Not as good as the fantastic Icon Wars, but Traffic Wars is still pretty funny. [Details]
Make a snow gun - it's easy! All you need is a compressor, a pneumatic hose, adapters, lots of plumbing parts... oh, and a sprinkler tower. [Details]

Posted by Stormcaller at 5:01 PM GMT [Link]