A new, very furry music video: Wintersleep - Jaws of Life. Where else will you get to see a bunny driving a car that's transformed into a mechadeer? (Band's site here)

The other clip you should see this week has to be one person's description (FLV) of March of the Emperor, the original French title for March of the Penguins. =:)

Bruce Campbell is inherently cool (FLV), even in a commercial.

Kawaii Not comes up with another gem. =:) On the genuinely cute (and bizarre) front, though, this fruity entry from CuteOverload really needs to be seen. Who knew you could do that with a banana? (And as for rats..) Here's a superb way to waste an afternoon: a Warcraft-inspired Flash game, noticed by patch_bunny. Lay down a choice of towers with their differing capabilities, upgrade or install new ones as you're able, and see how many levels you can annihilate. ^_^; And if someone at the con's reading this: "Are any of you guys that are headed to FC going to be coming through Colorado on your way back? If so, can you accomodate a small animal carrier with 2-4 baby rats in it? Will trade MULTIPLE full color commissions in exchange for transport help."

ysengrin may want to see the trailer for the forthcoming New Zealand film Black Sheep, as shadowolf noticed.

Sounds like a fascinating documentary: American Eunuchs.

Consider, if you please, the lives of dogs and cats. (Thanks to momentrabbit and dagoski!)

As for the iPhone - drop-dead gorgeous, but it's the UI that fascinates me. It pretty much goes without saying that screen will be coming to the other iPods soon enough. If you've not seen it in action, here's a quick demo that'll give you a good idea of just how much work's been put into the device.. so beautifully refined. Or, if you'd prefer to watch the full-blown demo, the keynote and just the introduction can be seen here, or, for best quality, go to the iTunes Store, search on "keynote", and click "Subscribe" on the Macworld Keynote Address. It'll load in the background - 1.2GB in all.

Speaking of which, this Ars thread explores some of the future possibilities of multitouch UIs - it also covers that demo you may have seen, by Jeff Han of MIT. (And if you haven't, watch it now!)

Apparently, its version of OS X - which does indeed appear to be the real deal, simply optimised and relieved of portions irrelevant to the device - weighs in at "considerably less" than 512MB of flash. I wonder if World of Warcraft could run on it.. =:) (Yes, joking, but still.. only trouble is that the critter appears to be Xscale-based, and furtherance of its design seems to've largely stalled in recent years. Perhaps the iPhone might be where the PowerPC makes its return to Apple - there are some quite attractively low power, high performance PPCs around)

Deservedly, comment of the week on The Comics Curmudgeon, speaks of this Curtis strip, "Why the hell aren't glowing telepathic otters the most publicized aspect of Kwanzaa? Its presence in Curtis has single-handedly legitimized this holiday in my mind." "A mother and son accused of stealing a snake from a pet store were arrested when they returned to the store and asked for books on how to care for the animal, police said. Store clerks recognized the suspects from surveillance video taken during the theft and stalled them until police arrived." The question posed in this quiz show is "which of these orbits the Earth?", with the choices being the Moon, the Sun, Mars, and Venus. The pain, the pain..

Parallels Workstation is nifty stuff. Have a look at these screenshots showing OS X and XP applications side-by-side on the same desktop, like any other apps, each running natively within their own OS, no emulation involved.

Could be interesting: a memorial to Carl Sagan in SL, opened by his son.

balor has nobly been researching what may, indeed, be the world's worst book. Don't say you weren't warned. (An excerpt is included. Oh, how you'll wish there weren't.. and no, this is not intentionally bad, and even has a glowing New Yorker review)

I wonder what kind of climate and soil durians can manage in, outside their native areas..

Not that I have a Linux-capable router (or maybe I do? It's a 3Com 3CRWDR100A-72), but if I had one and put one of the router distros on it, is it possible to rig the firewall rules such that traffic coming in unencrypted would only be able to see the internet, not the LAN, and anything using WPA2 would have full access? (Some bandwidth throttling mightn't be a bad idea either, just to be sure no casual visitor on the street wound up slurping all my bandwidth)

Quote for the day from Tycho: "E3 wasn't so much work as it was... It's hard to say what it was, which I suppose is another reason to dismantle it. It was more like our Moose Lodge, a masculine retreat minus the bongos and face paint." (The comic, though, leaves me puzzled, given I was flying intercontinental before I could walk =:)

For OS X geeks, Google's now released an implementation of the Linux FUSE mechanism, permitting the (theoretically =:) easy addition of a range of filesystems. "Examples of file systems that work have been tested (to varying degrees) include sshfs, ntfs-3g (read/write NTFS), ftpfs (read/write FTP), wdfs (WebDAV), cryptofs, encfs, bindfs, unionfs, beaglefs (yes, including the entire Beagle paraphernalia), and so on."

Streamburst has a novel approach to DRM - don't use it. Just add a few seconds at the start saying who downloaded that copy, and embed a small off-screen "watermark" confirming that. Buy an episode of, say, Long Way Round for £1.35, and you get a 752x416 H.264 version for DVD-grade playback, 320x176 H.264 for iPods and suchlike, and 208x112 MPEG-4 for phones. An excellent idea, though spoiled a little by remaining only level with the cost of the DVD purchase - in this case, £13 for all ten episodes on 3 DVDs.

Just so neat.. a foil boat floating on a sea of sodium hexafluoride, a colorless gas. A superb quote regarding not actually lapine shoes, but so very nearly. =:) Arashi no Yoru ni isn't just an anime.. ^_^ Interesting take on personal net.radio: Musicovery. Requires Flash, unfortunately, so it's strictly a browser-bound affair, and may or may not be open to non-OS X/Windows folks. Still, it's a novel approach. marko_the_rat might like to peek at some forthcoming Ratatouille books.

Album title for the day: Tim Koch's "Please don't tell me that's your Volvo".

One of the more daffy memes I've seen, so naturally it appealed: on your LJ user info, you'll see your ID number next to your name. Look that up in the US Patent Office's listings, and see what you're registered as. ^_^ I'm just a boring "air inlet device for internal combustion engines", from 1922. Whee, I suck!

Supposedly, Sony will not allow porn on Blu-Ray. As the brief article notes, "It does not matter how you stand to porn. It is here and it is a massive business. It is also an industry that is an early adopter for new media technology. VHS might not have won with out the adult film industry adopting it." That said, does the future of HD porn lie on either format - and there are others in the background as well - or with downloads? An hour of good quality 720p video using H.264 can fit into around 1GB - and whilst that might sound like a lot, with a low-end DSL connection of 2Mbps, that's about 90 mins to download. Scale up to a more usual 8Mbps, or a good cable connection, and that's all possible now, without any additional equipment required.

Torchwood season 1 finale: oh, gods, what bottomless pit of eternal hackery spewed forth such writing? A few good plot points - particularly the ending, and not just because it brought this to a close - but so much sheer wretchedness everywhere else. Was this some fanfic stinker that managed to slip into the script pile? (Ah, I see the writer was also reponsible for the execrable Cyberwoman, and the nearly-as-stinky second episode. Also Countrycide, which wasn't too bad) Still.. there was that rather delightful endcap to the season.

So, another chapter in SGI's history wraps up, with the last of their Mountain View offices closed; they're now all safely tucked away in Sunnyvale. I only managed to visit a couple times, including one occasion where I visited FurToonia's new home, having handed it over (with almost no downtime, yay!) from tbyte to the paws of another wizard who was working at SGI at the time, deep in their network bowels.

I'm impressed by the level of detail exhibited in Wikipedia's entry on "porn".

Rather a cool photo: a man with 800 acupuncture needles applied to his head.

Enjoying a little relaxation in the spa built within the massive ribcage of a long-expired creature.

As noticed by rabitguy, UCSB's Cylinder Radio page, with selections including cakewalks & rags, classic Vaudeville, early black artists & composers, and German comedy skits from 1904-1909. "Alternate takes were commonly issued in the early years of the phonograph industry for a variety of reasons. Cylinders weren't moulded until the turn of the 20th century, so mass production was impossible, and moulds and stampers had a limited lifespan. Artists went back into the studio to record popular songs if the masters wore out. UCSB retains any alternate takes of a given title. An interesting example is 'Any rags', by Arthur Collins, for which UCSB has three different takes." An example track - purely random - is Rabbit Hash, by Billy Golden, from Edison Records in 1903.

<td></td><td>I do like the look of this Japanese robot (578k, courtesy of roohbear and his amazing WMV-fu); some background can be found over here. Although I'm not quite sure the designer's aim for one that "can also walk just like a real woman would" has been entirely realised. iStat Pro is a neat widget, offering network throughput, complete temperature listings and fan speeds, and more. funos spotted rather a beautiful piece of murine artwork, by Jakana. (All safe) And you may (or may not) have noticed that FurAffinity is finally on new server hardware, resulting in some blissfully lagless responsivity. Much better!</td>
So, I finally managed to pay off my mortgage to Tom Nook, leaving me with the largest home available. No debt! What a curious notion. Now what? I suppose I'll just shower the locals with random gifts. ^_^ After all, a complete harvest day can bring in around 150,000 Bells - and that goes a long way in Bunnyton.

Juice of the Day is..

Environmentally aware folks might want to keep an eye out for the IPTV channel on its way, green.tv. (Nothing there yet but a placeholder, though)

Seems Grover had a bit of an accident, but it seems they were able to save him. Thinking of which, if your life could be saved by a brain transplant into any cinematic or television robot, who would you choose? The classical stylings of Robbie, the menace of Maximilian, or perhaps one of the Bjork All is Full of Love androids?

( Bunnies on Bikes ride, in Portland this weekend )

One student's response to exam time, courtesy of a lot of window blinds..

And, well.. I suppose I had to take this quiz. ^_^

You Are a Creative Cook

Your cooking is unusual, inspired, and definitely one of a kind. People love your unique style, but you've had your share of kitchen flops. You have the makings of a cult chef. You may not cook at the Four Seasons, but you could have your own little funky cafe in San Francisco!

There's uncalculated volumes of pure cuteness to be found in an old entry in this weblog, from June 2005. Think "baby wild bunnies".. be prepared.

New Fur-Piled!

W00t! The package from Lik Sang arrived. ^_^ (Along with a VAT demand for £20..) Wipeout Pure - looks as fun as I remember the original being. My My Katamari Damacy - bear in mind, I've never played the original, so I'm just winging it for now, as this is the Japanese version. And.. for exceptional cuteness, Taiko no Tatsujin Portable - a drumming game, with animated drum creatures, dancing dogs, and more. Silly amount of fun!
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Mmmm. I think I'm going to be getting well into Apoptygma Berserk.

( A 'fifty questions' quiz )

Mmm. Okay, that's a meme I can go for.. "In this post, talk with your icons, and *only* your icons. Post early, post often, and respond to whomever you want. Just leave a dot or a dash in the comment field if LJ tells you you can't post a blank comment."

Pic for the day: Ultraviolet's Gimme a shot. (Not work safe.. and speaking of which, these furs, of lupine and lapine interest, appear to be from a new comic - did anyone catch it at AC?)

Not that I was able to go along, but these photos from the AC2005 Morimoto dinner, posted by kaputotter, suggest the food was orgasmically good.

And elsewhere at AC2005, a rocking fox. Every home should have one.

As you know, Roy Disney and friends have been crusading against the Disney company's mismanagement in recent years. It seems that's now at an end, with Roy Disney announcing the closure of SaveDisney. Too late to save the 2-D animation teams, at least as they were, but maybe they and the company can rise again. Speaking of whom, they'll be handling the US release of the animated avian feature Valiant on August 19th.

A new furry adventure, gorgeously illustrated (and with lemurs too): The Katurran Odyssey. Be sure to check out the full-size sample pages.

Another source of military news: the Moscow Defense Brief. An example of the stories featured is a look at Russian cooperation in India's nascent independent space industry.

Dino folks might like to know there's a CG feature film version of GON coming in 2007. Surprisingly, very little I found noteworthy was announced at the recent Anime Expo, though I did notice The Fuccons being picked up - the everyday tale of a family of three American mannequins who've moved to Japan. I think I'll want to see this.

For anyone stuck on dialup at the moment, there is quite an intriguing Inmarsat-based option, offering 144kbps in a tiny portable unit. There is a small catch in the airtime pricing, however.

A new study concludes that organic farms produce the same yields as conventional farms: '"First and foremost, we found that corn and soybean yields were the same across the three systems," said Pimentel, who noted that although organic corn yields were about one-third lower during the first four years of the study, over time the organic systems produced higher yields, especially under drought conditions. The reason was that wind and water erosion degraded the soil on the conventional farm while the soil on the organic farms steadily improved in organic matter, moisture, microbial activity and other soil quality indicators.'

( Eek! A meme! Who have I met, or spoken with, on my Friends list? )

Oh dear. I think my parody meter just blew.. Snopes actually has an entry documenting Rubber Johnny - Mutant?

I was saddened to read of BoingBoing's note that Bob Moog is currently undergoing treatment for brain cancer.

Finally, please enjoy a couple covers of Teen Spirit, by Paul Anka, and the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain.

No, I couldn't end an entry like that. ^_^ Here's the best in show, best comedy, and fan favorite, of the Anime Expo 2005 anime music video contest: The Wizard of Ozaka (16.6MB). (The full-size 82MB version's available from animemusicvideos.org, but you need to have had your (free) registration for two weeks, IIRC, before downloads are available) Knowledge of the series used isn't required - just think of a 3m36 version of The Wizard of Oz, as an RPG..