News-o-matic
September 19, 2006
- Amp pointed me in the direction of an awesome LED display kit for the spokes of your bike. The Pacman display is just insane.
- Very cool inflatable climbing wall, for pools or the beach. Only $7000, but think of the friends you'd make in summer!
- Hundreds of Paris Hilton's crappy albums were pranked by Banksy, with tracks replaced with remixes with titles like Why am I Famous? and What Am I For?
- You can get a pretty nice character sketch done for your MMO character over at MMOArt. It's $50 for a convention sketch, $100 for pencil, $150 for ink, $200 for color, $300 for watercolor and $400 for digital paint. I wonder how much a sketch of me beating up Godzilla on top of an exploding Mount Fuji would cost? I could always put it on my business cards and write it off as a tax deduction.
- Illegal drug prices are apparently dropping in the UK. Useful to know if you're planning a holiday or starting a shipping company.
- Some crazy guy modded his Xbox 360 into a laptop, and did a fairly excellent job. He gets bonus points for bravery for doing it on his brand new 360.
- All Segways (23,500 of them) have been recalled, due to a glitch that could make the scooter's wheels unexpectedly reverse direction and throw the rider off.
- Cory Doctorow talks down copyright once again on Locus, but does it fairly well.
- Pretty awesome YouTube video of TEDDY, an experimental 2D / 3D drawing tool.
- Intel and UCSB researchers have made a breakthrough in silicon photonics, creating silicon-based chips that can produce laser beams. Hopefully this will further extend Moore's Law, but also may be used in the field of frickin' sharks.
- Engadget has a hit-by-hit rundown of Apple's recent announcements, including an improved iPod, iPod games, colored iPod Nanos, the teensy new iPod shuffle, iTunes 7, movies on iTunes and a preview of iTV.
- The Playstation 3 has been delayed outside Japan and the USA, until March 2007. For Japanese and US gamers, the PS3 will still launch in November (if we're lucky, and nothing else goes wrong).
- Detailed article on Omninerd that examines why hunting around for cheaper gas may not really be worth it.
- Some cool videos of the commentary features in Half-Life 2: Episode 1 from Waxy.org. I'm kinda tempted to play through HL2 again with the commentary on, but I have so many other games that need to be played right now.
- More HL2 news - the Aperture Science site has gone live in the leadup to Episode 2 and Portal. Try "login" if you're confused.
- xkcd is a pretty amusing webcomic, although its art is... well, very basic. Anyone who can make jokes about the Riemann-Zeta function and herpes gets my vote.
- Willie Nelson was busted for possession of weed and mushrooms today. This doesn't surprise me at all.