Aparantly the both the German Nazi party and Stalin’s Communist party used to encourage children to become informants. Kids were encouraged to report anything suspicious looking to the authorities, who would send men with sharp sticks and guns to investigate. This (fortunately fictional) invention allows kids to tattle on suspicious looking Arab types (Just look at him wandering around YOUR city with his beard). Only slightly less sinister are their plans for The ID Sniper- A gun that can shoot an RFID tag and permanently identify it’s victim.
Monthly Archive for April, 2004
I recently bought an iRiver iHP-140 pocket jukebox. It’s much like an Apple iPod except that it has both digital and line inputs and outputs, a built in microphone, FM reciever and can play Ogg Vorbis files. The 40Gb version of the iRiver is quite a bit cheaper than Apple’s iPod, and unlike Apple’s machine it does not depend on any fancy-shmancy software like iTunes to make it work. Read on to find out how I made it work with Linux. If you want to know how I made it synchronize with linux check on my Wiki.
All this talk of sassafrass, but nobody mentioned this amazing video (Hot Smoke and Sassafrass by ‘The Bubble Puppy’), a feature of perhaps the most demented site on the Internet: paperrad.
There is no end of good suff on this website, but may I draw your attention to my favourite features:
‘Howard the Duck‘ - not to be confused in any way with the film by george lucas… this is an illustrated comic about a duck who for some reason is both a singer and a stand-up commedian and appears to be having a relationship with a dog in a top-hat.
SNO BITS - Produced entirely on graph paper, is a story of robotic beings made only from binary-digits who transform into bird-faced beings and then back to their original form.
Last night I had a dream in which I was helping Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer run their cafe/restaurant. Unpaid, I might add.
One of the drinks we were trying to sell was Sarsparilla. This stuck in my mind upon waking, and shouldered out a lot of other interesting stuff, so to avoid it happening again I decided to find out what Sarsparilla is. Thanks to The Straight Dope I found that “it was originally made (artificial flavors have taken over now, of course) from a blend of birch oil and sassafras, the dried root bark of the sassafras tea”.
Apparently, it is still available, although only in the US, which is no good for me anytime soon.
This evening I re-encountered a problem I came across a while back. It all happened when I was trying to get some comprehensively-named choons by Liberation Jumpsuit from my Gentoo box onto my Powerbook via Netatalk.
Despite having 10 tracks in the folder on the Gentoo box, the finder in OSX displayed the folder as empty. This is because AFP versions below 3 support a maximum filename length of 32 characters, and Netatalk 1.6.4 on my Gentoo box implements one of these older versions. The implementation in OSX has no such problems, so an OSX to OSX AFP connection should have no problems.
I gather from various postings on the web that there is a hack option to enable long filename support which breaks the protocol but works fine with OSX. I’ve yet to find it though.
Last week I downloaded a bit-torrent of the complete series of ‘Mysterious Cities of Gold‘, an epic Japanise / French animation series from the 1980s. As a child, I allways regretted that when I was a child and this series was first broadcast my poor sense of timing meant that I missed most of the episodes. This weekend I dedicated myself to watching all 36 episodes of this cartoon, but now it’s getting late on Sunday night, I dont think my brain can take any more.
In case you do not remember, are too young to know, this series tells the story of three orphans, Estaban, Zia and Tao who are acompanied accompanied by Spanish Navigator Mendoza and his sailors Pedro and Sancho. Cities of Gold is approximately based on the historical novel The King’s Fifth by Scott O’Dell.
Having watched 28 episodes, that amonts to approximately 560 minutes of animated action:
Assuming that these cartoons are produced at a quarter of normal frame-rate (1 frame of animation for every 4 screen refresh at 25hz ), I have now gazed bleary-eyd at just over two-million frames of animation.
Guessing that each frame took at least five minutes to draw, composite and photograph, and animators work an approximately 9 hour day, then I have just binged my way through five man-years worth of animation.
Approximately 29 years ago, a child was born, that one day grew up to be me. As a celebration of this coincidence, I have been showered with gifts aplenty (despite my insistance that 29 years old is not special because it is a mere precursor to thirtysomethinghood).
Gift 1: (Andy) ‘Kelmo and the Star Men’ - A gripping work of sci-fi from the 1950’s answer to Arthur C Clarke.
Gift 2: (Delia, Belinda’s mum) - A large quantity of chocolate, still not finished.
Gift 3,4: (Nadia, Cute Sister) - DVDs of Spaced (Series 1), and Black Books (Series 1).
Gift 5: (Belinda, Cute Girlfriend) - Pure Evoke-2, DAB portable radio. Imagine a grown-ups ghetto blaster, the styling is optimised for listening to fourty-somthing programs like Radio 4’s ‘Face the Facts’ or perhaps Gardeners’ Question Time, however it features a pair of largeish speakers and is also capable of picking up trance music stations.
Gift 6: (Grandparents) - A cheque for
The Hellebore Shew was a series of approximately thirty shows broadcast on London’s Resonance FM. This programme features original poems and music composed by Dan Wilson.
I have built an incredibly detailed archive including downloads in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis format. Now that the series has ended, you can enjoy it in the comfort of your own home.
The Wild Geese, the 1978 mercenaries-rescue-African-leader action-adventure film starring Roger Moore, Richard Burton, Richard Harris, and more, has come out on DVD. It has received glowing reviews, the first and glowingest of which is by my good friend Olly Smith.
To mark the successful flight of the X-43a, NASA’s latest jet, the BBC are running an online vote on the subject. Apparently, “hundreds of people sent in their own ideas for how we should all be getting around in years to come.” Hundreds of people? and these are the best ten?
1. “Double decker motorbikes.” Ridiculous, especially the claim that “A family of four could comfortably travel on a two-storey machine, but still zip through congested roads, without having to hang on like a motorcycle display team.” Just saying it doesn’t make it true, Martyn. Where’s your evidence? Where are the schematics? I don’t like this entry, but I like you, Martyn. You’re a dreamer. And God knows we need dreamers.
2. “Computer-controlled cars.” Alright Martin. Dull but competent.
(At this stage I wonder what it is about Martins that make them so popular in this transport brainstorm)
3. “Screened, lockable cubicles on trains.” Thanks Trish, you get back to your Daily Mail in your lockable cubicle. Well done for turning a pleasant piece of conjecture into a bilious attack on the rest of the human race.
4. “Robotic trousers like the ones shown in Wallace and Grommett’s The Wrong Trousers.” I don’t know what it is about this that annoys me so much. Perhaps the fact that he says “trousers” twice. This ought to be a funny entry but it so plainly isn’t. It’s like saying “Silly walks like those demonstrated in the Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks sketch in which John Cleese performs a silly walk.”
5. “Travel tubes. These would be around a metre wide and would suck you up into the network once you’ve selected a destination.” This is plainly cribbed from Futurama, but at least Chris has embellished it a bit with his swaggering account of lunchtime drinking which has an undertone of desperation.
6. “I am still waiting for the rocket powered skateboard that I should have got on 1 January, 2000.” Nice one Max - a wry humour at work here, subtly satirising this kind of survey.
7. “Star Trek type transporters.” Shame on you, Susan, although on second reading, the sentiment about dinner with your mother eventually won me over.
8. “I’d like to see horses return to our streets. Here’s hoping we run out of oil soon.” The image is interesting Tom, but your execution is poor. You go from a wistful nostalgia to a sweeping Luddite manifesto in the blink of an eye. I think running out of oil will mean slightly more of a change than reverting to horse and cart. Try packs of marauding man-sized cockroaches, or three-armed cannibals. Try spiders with hooves.
9. “Luggage conveyor belts.” Alright Richard, but your claim that “these could travel at some speed” is vague and unsupported.
10. Here’s the humdinger. “In my vision of the distant future, I would like to see more use of telekinesis. People could harness the power of their minds (some part of the 90% we don’t use) to dematerialise their molecular structure, and transport it via loopholes in time, to the required destination.” More use of telekinesis? The 90% of our minds we don’t use? “Dematerialise their molecular structure and transport it via loopholes in time?” Jon, you are my hero. And you get my vote.