Awesome geek tattoos

These totally awesome comic book and geeky tattoos make me want so badly to overcome my fear and get inked myself. Wired has a wicked gallery of comic-inspired tattoos from ComicCon.

Gallery, via BoingBoing

(Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com)

Richard Dawkins reads his hate-mail aloud

A cool video of fellow Satan-fodder Richard Dawkins reading some of the profane, violent, hateful email he gets from his greatest fans; Creationists. His little chuckle at the end is heart-warming and it is always a pleasure to hear the author and biologist speak.



YouTube, via BoingBoing

Oh dear god, the furbies

Do you remember Furbies? I don't remember ever wanting one. I always knew they were creepy and a few steps behind terrifying robot animals enslaving the human race for their own nefarious ends. Here's a video that will give your morning a very strange start, should you chose to watch it.



"The art he practiced was a performing art rather than a creative one: Doctor Jest was the Chief Interrogator of Melniboné. Reaching out with his free hand, he expertly seized the genitals of one of the male Furbies™. The scalpel flashed and the resulting music grew louder and more complex as the Furbies™, their vocal cords surgically operated upon to sing but one note each, screamed in perfect harmony. Even the young emperor was moved by the sinister echo of their songs. 'Why should their pain produce such marvelous beauty?' he wondered. And the Emperor Elric closed his eyes."

via BoingBoing.

Creepy virtual actor looks real

The lady in this video looks like a real person, but she's not. She's a digital replica of the actress Emily O'Brien created by Image Metrics and Paul Debevec at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies. She is also creepy as hell!

The Emily Project, via BoingBoing

Women in the Israeli army

You may have seen this already, and I'm sure I've come across a few of these images, but not the whole collection.

Photographer Rachel Papo's Serial No. 3817131 is just a stunning collection of amazing photos depicting the everyday lives of women in the Israeli army. The project is named after the photographer's own ID number during her service.

Incidentally, I had to use kroxy to get to the gallery, because the photography is apparently unsafe and categorised as "weapons". Filtering, you're doing it wrong.

Serial No. 3817131 via BoingBoing

I Must Haves It

I am not a strong knitter. I can do what for lack of a better word we will call a "scarf", as long as it is all the one colour, and all the same kind of stitch. But I must have this Katamari Damacy Prince of All Cosmos Baby Hat. I do not have a baby, but I'm sure I can modify it. There's a pattern and more pictures over here.

via BoingBoing

Apple announces MobileMe subscription extensions

Following my previous post about the poor performance of MobileMe, users today received an email from Apple Support offering a 60 day period of free the service, in the light of the disastrous launch and the numerous problems encountered.

The Support article is understated in the admission that the launch was hasty and bug-ridden. Apple claims "[t]he transition from .Mac to MobileMe was rockier than we had hoped" and that MobileMe is "still not up to our standards", and announced an extension to any free trial period users may be taking advantage of.

This is the danger with early adoption, and it is great to see Apple acknowledging the issues, and promising to work them out. However, I hold out very little hope that the computer manufacturer will actually address the concerns of users. Apple has a long history of ignoring the glaringly obvious (MMS and video recording for the iPhone spring to mind, not to mention a character counter for SMS length).

MobileMe users wait with baited breath to see if Apple can redeem themselves, but any free time extension offer does little to ease the pain of having already sunk money into the crippled service.

Neato Flickr Set

Some interesting shots of travel souvenirs shot with proper perspective, superimposed over their original locations.

Set, via Laughing Squid.

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

A friend of mine (HI BRYAN) is currently doing a digital cultures class at uni and has been nattering non-stop about it for the past few weeks. Luckily it is all very interesting stuff and this video he sent me was really an amazing piece of work. It totally articulated some of my thoughts about the value of this goofy little video sharing website and by extension the entirety of the ways people share information online. It's an amazing video and if you have an hour to sit and watch it, Michael Wesch will totally blow your mind.

Dinosaur Lamp

I want one of these so bad! Fairly affordable, at $US26 too!

Here, via BoingBoing.

Do I Hate the Cloud?

A post over at Lifehacker has been sitting in my mail for about a week now, waiting for the article that is in my head to get written. It's called Do You Trust the Cloud? and focuses on the risks and benefits associated with having a web-based presense. That's email, calendars, contacts, photos or data storage, that is primarily accessed via an online service like Gmail or MobileMe.

The "cloud" refers to the system of what Apple calls "push", which is where your mobile device or computer speaks to a "cloud", which is connected to the internet, so you're informed of updates like a new email, without the need for your email application to be actually open. The LH article focuses on recent outages and what you do when your entire digital presense just disappears whenever there's a hitch, but it prompted me to think more on a recent dilemma I have been experiencing lately, and that is: Do I Hate the Cloud?

I spent four hours in line for an iPhone, and I knew ahead of time that I was also going to get one of those fandangled MobileMe accounts, because I really liked the idea of using a web-based email program that looked like a native OS application. All things considered, it was not a problem I really needed to spend approximately $100 solving.

And now, instead of using Gmail, I use MobileMe. Or at least, that's the plan. My iPhone certainly beeps at me when I have a new mail, Blackberry style, but when I'm at work I tend to just have gmail.com open. Here's why.

At my work, we hotdesk. It is unpleasant for many reasons, but one of them is differing levels of insane user restriction. Some computers will let you install your browser of choice (Firefox 3) but not the flash plugin, some will let you install flash but it won't run with sound, some will let you do nothing of the sort, etc etc. I used to solve this by running Firefox Portable from a USB stick but MobileMe and FP did not get along. Not even a little bit. Seems that MobileMe needs a little too much juice than the USB stick can provide.

But apparently it is also taxing for some of the computers at work themselves, so I never know when I sit down what my day is going to look like. I also hate that MobileMe does not automatically filter messages into folders, like every other email solution has been doing for the last five years. Oh, and it hasn't got any web-based chat option like Google Talk, which is a great way to waste time in between news bulletins.

Apple needs to at least get folders and auto-filtering working, ASAP, as well as working out whatever causes all the hanging and freezing. It is a laughable to call this a syncronised or mobile solution to email.

Zombie Flashmob

One of my favourite flickr sets shows a flash mob of zombies invading a train in San Francisco, and according to Laughing Squid they are at it again.

Pic courtesy of Scott Beale/Laughing Squid

Stem cells trial helps broken bones

A 36-YEAR-old man who suffered a badly broken leg that wouldn't heal is walking again without crutches after the successful trial of stem cells to repair non-healing bones.

From The Australian, originally heard on 2UE.

Suck it, Pell!

Stupid IT Measures

In the media industry, I think the notion of blocking any websites is completely ludicrous. Any source of information is arguably a crucial piece of research needed at any point of the day by the folks charged with staying abreast of current affairs.

Which is why I find the blocking of one of my favourite atheist blogs, Friendly Athesit by Hemant Mehta, totally freakin' lame.

"Cult/occult"? Would a website about Catholicism or Christianity be blocked for the same reason? A quick Google search says no.

Conveniently, I had already seen the comic that Hemant was linking to, as I have a handy dandy RSS feed of xkcd already. I don't know a great deal about how they compile a list of websites to be blocked, but it appears to be ultimately futile, infuriatingly unfair, and a breathtakingly stupid study in trundling, archaic mediocrity.

Good thing I got this out before Blogger was blocked for the reason "IWSS Security Event, Content classification: OH SNAP".

Meme Timeline

Sometimes I wonder how all of this "internet" stuff is going to look to our distant descendants.

The Internet Meme Timeline, via Laughing Squid.

New Torrid Site

Every month I set aside approximately $AU100 for the Torrid.com clearance half price sale. After my first ginger tiptoes into the brand's sizing, I quickly established my groove and can easily come away each month with a few t-shirts or singlets, and a pair of good quality trousers, or amazing shaper stockings, for the same price you can often spend on a single item.

They've just announced a new website, which looks great. They've not added the functionality to search by size just yet, but when they do, I just might branch out of my monthly sale splurge!

It's great to get a hold of quality plus size gear that is not completely lame, and their gorgeous models are all bigger gals, so it minimises the chance of that post-parcel-opening disappointment that can sometimes come after an impulse online buy. A plethora of realistic pictures is the closest thing to actually trying the items on when you're shopping for clothing online, and the ability to snare a pair of pants for under $10 on sale is a great, risk-free way of investigating that website's sizing.

I don't always like their range, and they don't accept non-US PayPal accounts, but there's so little choice when you carry a few more than common, Torrid's stuff is a welcome blast of chic and style.

Boooooks!

Oh Merlin! I totally agree! (P.S. I really love the ylnt podcast!!)

Yesterday the significant other and I dropped in to the Borders at Bondi Junction and resolved to be more proactive with our reading. He decided he would read reviews and stay on top of new releases, and we both want to boost our use of the excellent Shelfari, in order to branch out more. I'm currently devouring Saturn's Children by Charles Stross and despite the hilariously bad "femme bot" cover that I am ashamed to reveal on the morning train, I'm enjoying it very much.

Leave a good book suggestion in the comments! And feel free to add me on Shelfari: I live here.

Bland Blake Prize for Religious Art

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the latest moral outrage prompting calls from the historically stupid for the mandatory hate crime prosecution of atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews everywhere as well as anyone with a sense of humour.



Click the pictures for links to the SMH and Age articles about the controversy.

I dig the second one! The Sydney photographer responsible, Dean Sewell, said "Jesus was crucified to pay for the sins of man, and Corey was crucified by the media to pay for the sins of the MySpace generation". So that's a bit of awesome in the middle of an overwhelmingly boring exhibition that was last year responsible for a statue of the Virgin Mary in a burqa and a hologram of Christ that morphed into Osama bin Laden, and was labelled as "gratuitously offensive" by noted art critic Former Prime Minister John Howard.

Google Lock Out

Link, via BoingBoing

Scary!

Google has apparently suspended the account of CrossTech Media President Nick Saber. He tried to login to his email and was informed "Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]" An email response from Google's customer support described an inconclusive investigation and claimed they were unable to reveal any further information about the account due to privacy and security concerns.

An entire Google empire was gone. Google Talk, Picasa, Google Docs, and the additional storage he paid for. That's nuts! I've had my account suspended once after trying to send a stupidly large attachment, but it was all squared up pretty quickly. I hope Nick gets his issues resolved soon!

Fairfax Digital Tries to Pass Off Google Street View as Own

This is so lame.

Fairfax's real estate arm, Domain.com.au today emailed its subscribers an update on their website's search functions, in light of Google's release of Street View for Australian cities.


View Larger Map

The email, and a special Domain.com.au page set up to explain the changes, contain no reference to Google, and features a screenshot of the Domain website's toolbar, featuring an un-branded version of Street View, integrated into the rest of Domain's tools.

Now, I read No Logo in high school like the rest of the world, and am a fan of the generic as much as the next lady, but this is just poor form, Fairfax!

I generally use realestate.com.au for my unending search for the perfect apartment, with a great location and cheap rent, (so far zilch, by the way) and haven't been on Domain's website in a long time, but when I saw this email, I wondered why they were trying to pass off Street View as their own creation!

It is totally sweet to be able to hit up a view of a house from its street (and check out any potentially disastrous neighbors while you're at it), but by not providing any acknowledgment of where Domain.com.au are getting this service from, this appears to be a completely shameless attempt to capitalise on Google's work.

Links and credit are due on your tutorial page immediately, Fairfax Digital! It's 2008 and you should know better than to at the very least flout netiquette, and at the worst, try to take credit for somebody else's work.

Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle

Haha! I love it.
BarackObamaIsYourNewBicycle.com

String telephone booth

Very nice work, Michigan. *snicker*

here, via Laughing Squid and BoingBoing

Eww!

Check out these gross little lizard snake things, apparently the tiniest of their kind. The snake (herein named Professor Scales, in honour of T-Rex's tiny friend) was discovered in Barbados by Blair Hedges, an evolutionary biologist, who co-discovered the lizard in 2001.

Squirmy!

From here, via BoingBoing.

Uhh, awesome?