News-o-matic
November 13, 2006
- There's an amazing video of an autistic man drawing a huge picture of Rome after just one helicopter flight over the city on Drawn.ca. The guy's nickname is The Human Camera, and he completely deserves it.
- The Tech Lounge has a succint but useful article entitled 10 Reasons to Buy a DSLR Camera. I adore my sexy little Canon S600, but as soon as my friends whip out their DSLRs it really shows its limitations, particularly in extreme conditions such as low light, high motion and large distances. I guess that's another expensive gadget for my wishlist.
- Eyedia.com has a gallery of some amazing paintings done on homeless shelters in Shinjuku station, Tokyo. The page also mentions that the cardboard houses were incinerated as part of a cleanup programme.
- Apparently Boy Scouts in LA can get a merit badge for not pirating movies. Nice to see the movie industry working behind the scenes for the benefit of all mankind.
- In a move that surely will probably result in a thousand years of all-out war, the USA has banned Vegemite. They seem to have a problem with the addition of folic acid to the iconic Australian spread, which they only allow to be added to breads and cereals.
- This year's Ozone hole is the biggest ever, says the World Meteorological Organisation. Now that I'm back in Australia, my worry level about this is significantly increased.
- There's a heart-warming story on NPR about Lady, a family dog who developed a worrying addiction to sucking hallucinogenic toads down by the pond in her backyard.
- Amp pointed me in the direction of an excellent collection of 2006 Burning Man pics, including some superb otherworldy infrared shots, crazy aerial shots and an excellent gallery of studio shots of the wacky characters at the festival.
- Amp also mentioned dead-in-iraq, an art project where the artist logs into America's Army games and types the name, age, service branch and date of death of a real US soldier in Iraq into the chat channel. He doesn't actually play - he just sits there and waits for his guy to be killed, then moves on to another soldier's name during the next round.
- A pelican swallowed a pigeon in St James' Park recently, and a photographer managed to snap a quick photo of the event. Personally I'm a little conflicted about this - pigeons are disgusting and I immediately agree with anything that culls their numbers, but I'm also a little worried about the evolution of carnivorous, baby-eating pelicans.
- Word on the street is that Dell will soon be selling AMD-based notebooks for less than US$500. This is good news for AMD, which has been trying to get in bed with Dell for ages, and good news for consumers, as laptop prices continue to be pushed downhill.
- Windows Vista's official release dates are out - November 30 for business customers and January 30 for mere mortal home users. I suppose I'll eventually run it, but I can probably wait until the first service pack.
- Yet another weird story from Japan - a Nagoya man has been arrested for stealing about 5000 pairs of shoes to sniff. Nice.
- The Smoking Gun has an excellent mug shot of an Aryan dude with some overwhelmingly classy facial tattoos. Apparently he's on the loose in Salt Lake City - look out Cam and Clair!
- I found a rather cool set of net acronym pics on Flickr. My fave is (naturally) pwned.
- JibJab has a very funny, one-minute version of The Shawshank Redemption as part of their Great Sketch Experiment.
- Good news for horndogs - scientists are working on a male contraceptive pill.
- I decided to turn spam filtering off on my new hosting to see how bad things really were, and yeah... it kinda sucks. Apparently October 2006 was a particularly bad month for spam though.
- CBS news has an interesting little report on the Airblade, the funky new hand-dryer system from Dyson that uses 400mph blasts of air to dry your hands in about ten seconds.