In an event that most Doctor Who fans thought couldn’t happen, another lost episode of Doctor Who has turned up. It’s Episode Two of the 1965 William Hartnell serial, The Daleks’ Master Plan
. No word yet as to how it will be released, this news is just breaking today apparently. This is great news for fans, as the last time a lost episode was turned up was in 1999, and most folks had given up hope there were any others left to be discovered. For those who don’t know, in the ’70s the BBC routinely junked old stories. Not just Dr Who, but all their shows. Repeats and sales weren’t an issue then. There’s something like 115 or so lost Doctor Who episodes total
Warp Records, an independent label for electronic music (featuring artists such as Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada), has made their entire back catalog available thru Bleep, a new digital download service. To quote from the FAQ: We are at present the only store to offer very high quality MP3 files
and Bleep music has no DRM or copy protection built in. We believe that most people like to be treated as customers and not potential criminals
The estate of JRR Tolkien won a cybersquatting case against Alberta Hot Rods, a Canadian-based operator which registered jrrtolkien.com and linked it to its commercial celebrity Web site. The group — which has already lost domain name cases brought by actors Pierce Brosnan and Pamela Anderson, and author Michael Crichton — was found to have no legitimate rights
Got this through our gag mailing list at work with this image:
Dear All,
I don’t normally make a habit of forwarding charity e-mails, but this seemed to be a particularly good cause. I know it touched me personally. Mute Tourettes Syndrome has long been in the shadow of its more famous sister-disease,
Tourettes Syndrome, and although much rarer, is even more tragic in its consequences. While a child suffering from Tourettes has difficulty in containing its anger and frustration, a child with Mute Tourettes suffers the opposite fate, and is unable to express their true feelings. There is, however, an answer. A great deal has been achieved by the Mute Tourettes Foundation using new art therapy techniques. However, their work can only continue with your help. Just $5.00 will keep a child supplied with crayons for a whole day. $10 will provide them with enough paper for a week. Please give what you can to help this deserving cause. Thank you.Please open the above attachment so that the benefits of your generosity can be appreciated.
A very cool cartoon from Queen of Wands, highlighting the problem women have when dealing with moronic tech store personnel, who are condescending little arseholes who wouldn’t know one end of a computer from another and are just intent of trying to scam what they incorrectly perceive as an easy mark.
Also worth a look at the pair of amusing cartoons that precede and follow this gem.
Now all I need is an RSS feed of this site and I’ll be a happy camper.
Test-Aankoop, a European consumer watchdog body, is suing the world’s largest music companies for selling copy protected compact discs that won’t play in car stereos and on computers — via Die Puny Humans
Colourful mini iPods have been unveiled at the current Macworld Expo. The mini iPods come in silver, gold, pink, lime and blue, alas there is no purple. They hold 4G worth of music and/or data and is even smaller than your standard iPods. The buttons have been integrated into the scroll wheel, which is actually a click wheel on these things so I’d be interested to see how this goes. Not sure if I like the idea of them reinventing the scroll wheel, it’s a fantastic usability and design feature of the iPod that helps set it apart from all the other wannabe iPods.
Accessory madness has already hit the mini iPod range. You can now buy an armband to shamelessly flaunt your shiny new mininess. Not sure if it’s such a bargain though, a full iPod with 15G capacity is $299 USD, where as the mini iPod holding 4G is $249 USD. You’d really have to love the colours and really, really, really, really need something that bit smaller.
New iLife has also been released with a new app, GarageBand, which allows users to record and mix their own tunes. But wait, isn’t that what Soundtrack was/is for? Hmmm… maybe. GarageBand seems to be the really, really, really, easy way to record, for example, with one cable you can just plug in your guitar and go off! Which has sold me, not sure how soundtrack does do this or if it can.
More stuff was announced but you can read about it here.
Forget the industry spin — the numbers prove that, for Australia, CD-Rs and MP3s are not hurting record sales in the slightest — based on a recent Australian Record Industry Association survey. It would be interesting to see what the numbers for the US or UK say
There’s tentative information about the specs of the first 2-DVD release of Invader Zim. Media Blasters reports that Invader Zim Volume 1 is planned to arrive on 11 May 2004 and will include most of season one and commentary is planned for the bulk of episodes
Sasem has shipped OnAir USB HDTV, a USB-based HDTV decoder — that is, a box you plug into your PC’s USB port and use to receive high-definition TV signals
Just got a fiction recommendation from Moonbeam for The Galactic Miscellany by Rheanna. Moonbeam swears that the author is channelling Douglas Adams, as the story reads like an excerpt from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Footnotes included.
Sitting at Arthur’s kitchen table, one hand wrapped around Arthur’s novelty serial killer mug, Ford looked suddenly older than Arthur remembered him. Which was odd, Arthur thought, because he was certain he remembered a drunken conversation in a bar on Gargalto Two during which Ford had insisted that Beteguesans lived for many hundreds of years longer than humans. Of course, Ford had drunk several pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters by that point in the evening, which meant that he had been insisting all kinds of things, including that the colour taupe was the root cause of all universal conflict and that the American daytime soap opera General Hospital was written by the CIA. [4] But something had given Arthur the idea he’d been telling the truth about his lifespan…
[4] He was actually right about one of these.
A couple of weeks back I stumbled over this rather sweet story that was the 2001 winner of the University of Canberra National Short Story Competition — The Knitter and Miss Newtown by Claire Stevenson.
Franck Le Calvez, a French children’s author, has sued Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studios, claiming the cartoon fish they catapulted to fame in the worldwide blockbuster Finding Nemo was plagiarised from his 1995 creation Pierrot Le Poisson Clown
David Byrne, Talking Heads frontman, has turned PowerPoint into a visual art medium in a satiric DVD/Book combo titled Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information. Byrne claims that, The genius of it is that it was designed for any idiot to use
Nickelodeon are screening previously unaired episodes of Invader Zim on the weekends during double up. I screwed up Saturday’s taping and only got one episode — Gaz, Taster of Pork — but got both on Sunday — The Most Horrible X-Mas Ever and a repeat of Abducted and The Sad, Sad Tale of Chickenfoot. Hopefully Nick will loop them until they repeat and I can catch anything I’ve missed
It has been in place for only a few weeks, but ‘Don’t Miss a Sec’, a contemporary art installation that is in essence a one-way mirrored loo on a construction site near the Thames, has been raising heated, even violent emotions. While it may provide a fine opportunity to indulge in voyeurism and exhibitionism at the same time — like going to the toilet in the bushes, if the bushes were in the middle of the street — in reality the experience is proving prohibitively unnerving to some
Rocket have a Xmas game that pretty well mirrors the reality of surviving the office break-up party.
Amuse yourself by shaking the crap out of the occupants of the snowglobe. Hear them scream as they thump off the walls of their glass domed prison.
And my favourite… prepare to be sucked into the addictive joy of Shuffle the Penguin.
New Communications Minister Daryl Williams is tipped to close the Government’s National Office of the Information Economy in early 2004 and extend a moratorium on new free-to-air TV licences later in the year
I’ll be spending this xmas pretty much by myself (as my girlfriend is visiting her family in Casino), so we had xmas before she left, and I netted some nice stuff:
- Large metal cocktail shaker in the form of a penguin
- Cocktail knickbacks (Hawthorn strainer, lemon zester, muddler, ice tongs, and that cool airlock thingy that sits atop a bottle of spirits and lets you pour a shot at a time)
- Shorts that appear to be brown but apparently fade into a camouflage pattern as the years wear on
- Lots of books (Nietzsche, James Joyce, and HG Wells mostly, plus a big tome of Norman Spinrad’s bitchy critical writing)
- And I finally cracked and bought myself a GameCube and a big stack of games: Metroid Prime, Pikmin, Animal Crossing, and Sonic Mega Collection (a disc of twelve old sonic games which are just as fresh as the day I first played them)
Have you folks gotten anything yet?
The recording industry can’t force Internet providers to identify music downloaders, a federal appeals court said Friday in a major decision shielding online privacy while undercutting the industry’s anti-piracy campaign
Australians will be offered an array of new pay-TV services next year after Foxtel reached an historic agreement with the competition regulator, securing the green light for its $550 million digital upgrade
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