Marvin Heemeyer, a muffler shop owner who plowed a makeshift armoured bulldozer into several buildings after a dispute with city officials, was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound after a SWAT team cut their way into the machine with a blowtorch early Saturday
Yahoo’s new browser toolbar is advertised to clean out adware and spyware from the user’s PC. They forgot to mention that Yahoo excludes by default two popular adware/spyware applications — Claria (ex-Gator) and WhenU.com — Claria has commercial bonding with Yahoo
An open source Solaris is in the works, Sun spokesperson Russ Castronovo has confirmed. However, he declines to reveal any significant details about the project, including what software license Sun will use, whether all of the components of the operating system will be open-sourced, and when, exactly, Sun intends to release an open source Solaris
It has been announced that the latest version of Shareaza, a popular P2P application for Windows, was released under the GPL. Currently the source code is hosted by the Shareaza servers, but the announcement makes mention of the code becoming a project on Sourceforge. The binaries are still available for Windows only, but I imagine it is only a matter of time before a Linux port emerges
A smart bullet that can be fired at a target and then wirelessly transmit back useful information has been developed by US researchers. The projectile, created at the University of Florida in Gainesville, US, is 1.7 centimetres in diameter can be fired at from an ordinary paint-ball gun. The front is coated in an adhesive polymer that sticks it to the target. Inside, the elongated projectile holds a sensor, a tiny wireless transmitter and a battery. This enables it to report back its findings to a laptop or handheld computer up to 70 metres away. It can also reusable, because compressed gas within the gun provides the propulsion — via Die Puny Humans
Nokia’s new 3220 camera air phone is an effort on the part of the company to gain market share that has been slipping away to manufacturers of mobiles considered trendier than Nokia’s older standby models. A motion sensor in the 3220 makes the lights blink in a sequence that spells out letters when the handset is waved. Joi Ito ponders the joys of an airtexting enabled BlackBerry and its potential as a hecklebot
The German inventor who pioneered the technology behind the Sony Walkman has won a multimillion-pound payout nearly 30 years after dreaming up his invention. Andreas Pavel’s original 1970s concept of the stereobelt
revolutionised portable listening and Sony’s version — the Walkman — became a global hit. Now the 57-year-old stereo enthusiast, who works in Milan, is threatening to use his payout to sue Apple Computer, whose iPod portable music player is the digital successor to the Walkman. He is believed to be considering cases in Italy and Canada, where his patents were filed later and may still be valid
Who says the cold war is over? Wren Turbines, a UK based manufacturer of scale modeling jet engines, usually for remote control aircraft, has provided the engines for a 130kg+ scale replica of Boeing’s B-52. At roughly $3000 per turbine, this is a serious piece of engineering
If you need factual film background beyond what the Internet Movie Database can offer, then Masters of Cinema may be for you. The site has news and articles about classic foreign cinema and features links to Web information on scores of noted directors such as Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Antonioni and Hitchcock. Release dates of selected movies on DVD are also a feature — via journoz
In celebration of D-Day, Colossus, one of the earliest electronic code-breaking machines, has been rebuilt after ten years of effort by computer conservationists. Colossus was used to break the Lorenz cipher. Remarkably, the use of parallel processing (five tape channels) and short gate delay time (1.2µs) allows the Colossus to match the speed of a modern PC
The recording industry is testing technology that would prevent consumers from making copies of CD burns, a piracy defence that could put some significant new restrictions on legally purchased music
An 11-year-old girl led a fellow sixth-grader, Satomi Mitarai, to an empty classroom during their school lunch hour Tuesday, slit her throat and slashed arms with a box-cutter and left her to bleed to death — via Die Puny Humans
Tim Robinson has built a computer capable of solving polynomial equations — using Meccano. His difference engine uses a similar approach to Babbage’s design. He’s also created a differential analyser complete with a GUI. Both could be scaled up indefinitely to handle larger problems
Some critics say the endless stream of hugely popular reality television shows are as dull as watching paint dry. Well, now they can test the theory with a live, eight-week round-the-clock Webcast of just that. Billed as the ultimate reality TV show
, British pay-channel UKTV Style promises a wall, some brushes and different types of paint in its program Watching Paint Dry
For all you Home Star Runner fans, be sure to check out this week’s update, including photos of The Cheatar, a giant fibreglass guitar with a sexy The Cheat design. The guitar will be auctioned off for charity along with other over-sized guitars, after being on display for a Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame exhibition in Cleveland.
The Cheatar is modelled with one of those sexy 80’s hair metal band members from Limozeen.
Found a copy of the amusing Bollywood inspired Peugeot 306 sculptor ad — via boingboing
Another corporate 70s Bollywood spoof, this time by Absolut Vodka. A ten minute film, made in 2002 and filmed in India. Absolut Mulit is a Bollywood pseudo history of the mullet. Really well-crafted, with awesome songs and dancing. Low-level product placement — no actual bottles or mention of vodka — but the familiar Absolut shape makes subtle appearances — via boingboing
Queensland Internet service provider OnTheNet claims it is the first non-Telstra ISP in the state to install broadband ADSL infrastructure into telephone exchanges
A 15-year-old grammar school boy yesterday became the first person in Britain to be convicted of inciting someone to murder him. The boy, who can be identified only by the pseudonym John, invented a cast of characters in an internet chatroom as part of an elaborate plan to commission his own murder
My dad managed to come out of a car accident yesterday with a couple o’ cracked ribs and approx. Five hours waiting in the emergency room. Apart from the ribs he seemed okay enough to still go to work at 5:30 this morning as usual. I cannot say the same for my beloved charade, the car my dad was driving at the time.
The general consensus last night was that the car’s a write off, someone was backing into traffic and didn’t see the little purple car with Powerpuff Girl stickers on it. My dad seemed very impressed that the airbag deployed (at all) and he didn’t get hurt as badly as he thought he could’ve. Cars in the girly hatchback class seem to have a bad rap when it comes to safety, so Dad was quite happy with its final valiant effort to protect him. My mum maintains it had something to do with her mum blessing it with holy water when we first got it.
I am normally not one to get too attached to a car, a car is some mechanical metal object that gets you from A to B. This attitude probably stems from the fact that I am female, and when I was younger, spent too much time being dragged around to drag races to watch my dad race. This hobby of my dad’s even took us to Ipswich one year for the Summer Nationals, or Sumah Nats as pronounced by most of the redneck drag racing community. Mullets and t-shirts with fluro coloured car graphics as far as the eye could see…
I am/was however quite attached to my little purple Charade. For a start, it was a gorgeous shade of shimmery violet, not unlike a pair of Docs I own, (cars these days tend to come in crappy uninspiring colours). Incredibly reliable, always managing to get me where I had to go without drama, sure it’s no powerful beast but it was a zippy little car, and was great for squeezing into tight car spaces, and damn it, it had character! I could walk into a car park and see my car straight away as there aren’t normally too many shimmery violet Charades around with the left headlight pushed in slightly, (after being made redundant from my first job, I had to drive back to the office and get some stuff. I hit a stopped bus on the way back while trying to get out from behind it).
I got the Charade in early 1999, I was working part time as a checkout chick and starting my second year studying graphic design at college. The car I was predominantly driving was a 12 year old Ford Fairlane, an old work car from Dad’s company. It was nicknamed Moana, ’cause you had to keep it over 60 or it would start squeaking or moaning and there was a certain way you had to brake that only me and my dad could do to minimise the squeaking. Other drivers would actually get my attention to tell me to get the car fixed, that’s how screwed Moana was. Eventually the radiator totally gave out, and I couldn’t get around the block without it overheating, or towing a mini dam behind me.
It was at this point that Dad decided it was time to get a new car, not only can he claim some of it as a company expense, but I guess he finally realised the only way he was going to have his daughter even be remotely affiliated with his business, was to get a company car for her to drive in. (My dad was always quite disappointed that I didn’t want to be a secretary, or doing paperwork or some sort of girl-type
job even if it wasn’t for his company.) So my dad picked me up from work one day, took me to see a 1998 Charade in purple and asks do you like this colour? Duh, I’ve been your daughter for 19 years so far, do you really need to ask this question?
Ah memories…
My dad’s been driving around in it lately as his second car, the utey-trucky thing he normally drives isn’t always practical, and I’m sure he enjoys spreading his hankies, AM station preferences and Quik-Eze in as many vehicles as possible. He too has expressed some affection for the girly hatchback, and am sure he will miss its cosy shiny purpleness.
Xingtone is a new application that will convert your MP3 to ringtones and the music industry is freaking out (despite the fact that phones like the P800, which can play an MP3 without any conversion as a ringtone, have been around for at least a year) — via boingboing
Popular Science has an article on getting your mobile phone unlocked. In London, there are shops that advertise phone unlocking on practically every block, but it’s almost unheard-of in the USA and Australia — via boingboing
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