News-O-Matic
February 23, 2007
- BBC News has a darkly amusing story of birdwatchers in Scotland tracking down a rare swallow, just in time to see a hawk swoop down and kill it. Bugger.
- Battlestar fans will enjoy a gallery of characters drawn in the style of the Simpsons. There are a few minor spoilers in there, be warned.
- If you're bored, try Flash Element TD, a very cool Flash game that feels like a cross between Chu Chu Rocket and Warcraft 2. My advice is to get to rocket towers as soon as you can - they're awesome.
- Gizmodo has a very cool video of a radially-expanding table that I now want for my dining room.
- Saints Row is an okay Xbox 360 game, but it has some pretty amazing bugs. How amazing? Well, amazing enough that a guy called Cabel made a great little musical about them.
- I've made no secret of my desire to own a robot vaccuum cleaner, with the Roomba from iRobot high on my shopping list. Building on their success, iRobot have released the iRobot Create, a robot platform for robot tinkerers. It supports commands for movement, sensors, sound and displays, and supports connection via USB for uploading programs written in C or C++. Finally my dreams of a combination vaccuum cleaner / weapons platform / sushi delivery bot can be realized.
- I've been meaning to add an RSS feed to this site for ages, but in doing some initial investigation I found instructions for adding RSS Autodiscovery to a site. This allows browsers to automatically detect your feed(s) and make them easier to add.
- David Caruso is a bit of an overactor, but it's not until someone mashed together dozens of his best/worst moments from CGI Miami into one fabulous YouTube video, that the true depths of his ham are realized. /me puts on sunglasses.
- Fortune has a cool article on South Park creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. There have been moments when I thought South Park was losing it, but they continue to bounce back and crank out great episodes. Not everytime, but their hit rate is still pretty remarkable.
- SciFi.com has news that George Clooney is involved in bringing Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age to TV as a six-part miniseries. I have no idea whether this will be any good or not, but we can always hope.
- Ars Technica tells us that the first pirated HD DVD movie has hit BitTorrent, and appropriately it's the cult sci-fi movie Serenity.
- Troy Hurtubise rose to fame by building a bear-proof suit and documenting it in the movie Project Grizzly. He's now working on a more general-purpose exoskeleton for the military, and it looks pretty badass.
- I'm not really a car guy, but the Aston Martin Rapide Concept is a pretty sexy beast.
- There are some interesting rumours flying around about ultracapacitor technology as a possible replacement for batteries, but no-one's really sure what's real and what's imaginary. If it works, the tech would deliver 10x energy storage of the best lithium-ion batteries around right now, which would make electric cars and all-day laptop batteries a practical reality. I'll believe it when I see it, I think.
- CNN has a nifty story about a robot garage in New York that stacks 67 cars into a basement that would otherwise fit 24. Everything is automated, and the pricing is quite competitive - $400 a month or $25/day.
- A California lawmaker is lobbying to make traditional incandescent bulbs illegal, in an effort to cut power usage and combat global warming. Interesting idea, albeit a heavy-handed one.
- Thanks to Alicia, I've recently discovered the glory that is Arrested Development. I also discovered a rather excellent fan-made poster for the show, done in the Star Wars style.
- I stumbled over a rather cool little short story by Isaac Asimov called The Last Question. Worth a read for sci-fi boffins.