I haven’t bought strawberries from the green grocers for years. The fruit was getting larger and larger, but the trade off for size was loss of flavour.
My travels today took me by a small strawberry farm that sells to passing motorists, so I now have a bag of large, fresh, delicious strawberries. And they’re mine, all mine.
Luckily for me, the dogs don’t like them. A good thing considering that I nearly lost fingers when the Husky discovered that he liked dates as much as I do.
Don’t try this at home boys and girls… PowerLabs is where a serious electricity geek keeps track of his many rail guns, disk shooters, Tesla coils and related projects, documenting them with video, stills, blueprints and tutorials
A new species of baleen whale has been discovered. The stunning find, made after researchers studied the body shape and genetics of a few leviathan skeletons gathering dust for the last 25 years in a Japanese museum, brings the total number of known species in the main genus of baleen whale to eight
A growing movement aims to stop or regulate software that surreptitiously monitors computer use
A US civil rights group fears legal threats from Diebold, an electronic voting company, are having a chilling effect among ISPs, students and voting rights advocates
Cunningham MP Michael Organ has claimed that the Howard government’s mealy-mouthed subservience to the United States has been exposed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s persistence. ‘While our government washes its hands of Australians David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, Mr Blair has apparently won agreement from US President George Bush that nine British nationals detained in Camp X-Ray at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay can be returned to the UK for trial’
A must for the Monty Python fan: leave your mark in the sand with the weirdness of Spam thongs.
Everything Linux has an entire section devoted to silly USB devices, but the dumbest one has got to be the USB xmas tree light that will flash through six festive colours. It’s nauseating enough to cause co-workers to snap and insert the device into one of your bodily orifices.
T-Shirt Hell is guaranteed to have a shirt to offend everyone.
I’m fascinated by magnets and the Green Man has been teasing me with a shiny new one… behold the cow magnet. They’re not for attracting cows. Cows eat everything from grass and dirt to nails, staples and bits of bailing wire. Cow magnets attract these chunks of stray metal that would otherwise lodge in the honeycombed walls of the recticulum, threatening the surrounding vital organs and causing irritation and inflammation, known as Hardware Disease.
Home Secretary David Blunkett has refused to grant diplomatic immunity to armed American special agents and snipers travelling to Britain as part of President Bush’s entourage this week. In the case of the accidental shooting of a protester, the Americans in Bush’s protection squad will face justice in a British court as would any other visitor, the Home Office has confirmed
If you’ve hung around the Internet long enough, chances are you’ve encountered the Goatse guy — google it if you’re curious, but don’t say you weren’t warned. Slashdot has added whole volumes of code just to keep users from tricking each other into opening this photo. That said, someone is fond enough of the image to create a Goatse case mod. In a far more tasteful display of case modding style, Joe LeBlanc turned a junked Mac into a G4 Cube Aquarium
marry, and it gave the state legislature 180 days to make same-sex marriages possible. The Pagan Prattle has an amusing counter to the fundie mantra of biblical marriage
China has announced a government-funded project to promote an alternative to DVDs and attack the market share of the global video format. The rollout of the long-planned project, known as EVD, or enhanced versatile disc, was timed to coincide with the beginning of what China calls the golden sales period — known elsewhere as the Christmas shopping season
So just what happens when two hardcore gamers break up? All goes smoothly until the custody of saved Xbox games throws a spanner in the works:
Justin is a man of action. He promptly called customer support. “I have two Xboxes,” he said breathlessly. “A memory card that’s too small and an ethernet cable. Lets try to figure this out…”
“So you’re telling me it’s not possible for my ex-girlfriend to take with her her own saved games? I can’t believe that! You make it sound like hacking my Xbox is a good idea!”
Generate your own battle cry.
I got lumbered with the not terribly fear inspiring:
I’m going to reduce you to ash, and sell you as spice!
I was a wee bit miffed, picturing my enemies on the battlefield being in serious danger of dying from laughter. But then Brian cheered me up by pointing out:
If somebody was screaming that at me, and the wind whipped their duster/trench/overcoat open to reveal dozens of tiny Schillings or Lawry’s bottles, I’d turn heel and bail.
The teeny spice bottles are a given. So, provided I remember to wear the trenchcoat and drag a wind machine into battle, you will all bow before me in fear.
Federal Democrat spokesperson for IT, Senator Brian Greig, has accused the federal government of using its proposed anti-spam legislation to favour groups with conservative agendas, allowing religious and political organisations to flood e-mail in-boxes with spam and deny other groups the right to respond
Microsoft experiments with an international news search service in competition with Google’s, upping the ante in the hotly contested Web search market
The Design Conspiracy, noticed a growing trend for silly, irrelevant and often unpronounceable names brought about by expensive re-branding exercises. They created a corporate name generator so you too can have a silly brand name, just like Accenture and Consignia
In 1909, residents of Wilmington, Delaware, were able to subscribe to an online music service that piped phonograph recordings over their telephone lines and through loudspeakers. This was one year after the sheet music publishers were told to get bent by Congress: see, they’d grown alarmed at the prevalence of unauthorized piano rolls and had asked the Congress for a Broadcast-Flag-like regime that would let them veto any new music technology that would endanger their business — like online music delivery — making it illegal. Congress told them to get lost. Good thing we rescued those idiots from themselves back in 1908 — can you imagine a music industry where the most lucrative product in the market was sheet music?
It’s a pattern: the Vaudeville artists sued Marconi over the radio — which made them rich. The movie studios boycotted TV until Disney sold out to get the funds for Disneyland — and TV rights made the studios rich. Jack Valenti told Congress that the VCR was the Boston Strangler of the film industry, and then it doubled his income through pre-recorded tape sales and rentals.
Now, of course, Congress has given up on saving the entertainment industry — and us — from itself. With the Broadcast Flag, new technologies will only come into the market if they don’t disrupt the industries built on the old ones. And with the WIPO Broadcast Treaty in the works, it’s fruitless to pray for some technology safe-haven where we’ll be able to develop our gear in peace, far from the short-sighted, greedy lunacy of the entertainment companies. The FCC should be ashamed of itself.
When plugged up to a phonograph the subscriber’s line is automatically made busy on the automatic switches with which the Wilmington exchange is equipped. Several lines can be connected to the same machine at the same time, if more than one happens to call for the same selection.
Each musical subscriber is supplied with a special directory giving names and numbers of records, and the call number of the music department. When it is desired to entertain a party of friends, the user calls the music department and requests that a certain number be played. He releases and proceeds to fix the megaphone in position. At the same time the music operator plugs up a free phonograph to his line, slips on the record and starts the machine. At the conclusion of the piece the connection is pulled down, unless more performances have been requested.
Wacky CSS driven tangrams from Mark Schenk; basic tangram set, tangram toolbox and the running man
Research done by Jennifer Richeson, Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, shows that political correctness in American society takes it’s toll on cognitive ability. It appears that white Americans, when placed in a situation where they are interacting with blacks, spend so much of their cognitive capacity ensuring that they show no racial bias that it impedes their ability to do other cognitive tasks
Caterpillar faced protests this week against its sales of bulldozers to Israel. A dozen protestors marched outside its head office in Iowa, USA. They included Cheryl Brodersen, the aunt of Rachel Corrie, the 24-year old peace protestor who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in March 2003
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