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.

This brief clip from a recent George Stephanopoulos interview with Bush is perhaps a little unbelievable, but, there he is, unequivocally denying his own most beloved soundbite: "Listen, we've never been 'stay the course', George." Yet, some things never really change, as this Salon story recounts of Bush's days at Harvard: 'Bush, by contrast, "was totally the opposite of Chris Cox," Tsurumi said. "He showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him." When asked to explain a particular comment, said Tsurumi, Bush would respond, "Oh, I never said that."'

rabitguy found this gem: Jethro Tull: The Hare Who Lost His Spectacles (FLV).

We're coming ever closer to the commercial reality of flexible displays, it seems. Only monochrome for now, but 150dpi and 10" across, in the prototype shown; they hope to move to mass manufacture in 2008.

Has anyone heard of The Mouse and His Child, from 1977? It's not familiar to me at all, but sounds at least worth seeing - IMDb only lists it as available on VHS, unfortunately, and long out of print.

eliki noticed a new comic, Catena - "funny, cute, lively, furry and all about cats". Well, "new" - new to me, anyway. ^_^; Very good artwork, too.

Latest casualty of Sony's all-consuming obsession with control: Lik-Sang goes out of business. How forbidding imports can be legal I'm not sure, but there you go. Or, as Sony put it: "Ultimately, we're trying to protect consumers from being sold hardware that does not conform to strict EU or UK consumer safety standards." - despite all the hardware being manufactured with all EU & UK safety regs in mind, regardless of intended destination.

And proving you can indeed fool some of the people all of the time, L International has apparently managed to secure a $45m distribution agreement for computers that may, at some point in the future, ship, eg "a quad-core notebook that will used a touch-sensitive colour OLED panel instead of a keyboard" and a 'fully programmable GSM cell phone based on Microsoft Windows Mobile or Symbian OS and a fully fledged personal computer capable of running multiple operating systems, including MS Windows XP and Windows Vista 64-bit edition' with 'a five megapixel camera that can take "TrueHD (1920x1080) 30fps progressive video"'.

silvertomcat noticed this regrettably brief glimpse at Tron.. on Ice.

Regarding special people, though, Ozy & Millie finds some perfect words.

Yay! Finally got the DS online, after setting the router into moron mode - ie, no encryption (not that WEP counts anyway), no firewall. So I now have a friend code for Animal Crossing: Wild World - now to find someone else who does. ^_^;

Lapine fans really ought to take a look at hawthorn in the fur. Aww! ^_^

With all the hoohah over Boot Camp allowing Intel Macs to boot XP, I was left wondering whether pure virtualisation environments like VMware take much of a performance hit, and whether they're still suitable for gaming use. Being able to multiboot's nice enough, but vastly less elegant than being able to have the additional OS(s) running and available simultaneously, both for the multiplied potential, and the inherent ability to "boot" by simply loading an entire memory image off disk, with all the applications' states preserved. (Reminds me, I should get VPC reinstalled sometime - unfortunately, it doesn't store license info in the usual places, like ~/Library/Application Support, so the recent reformatting toasted that. Wonder if OpenStep 4.3 would install? Would be fun to see NextStep again.. or BeOS, for that matter. Never did manage to lay my paws on a devsystem, unlike, say, tilton, though I was registered with Be, in the hopes of being able to afford such)

I think I'd like to get stuck into OpenGL. Any recommendations for tutorials? The old NeHe ones might be as good a place as any to start, even if that won't bring me quite to the point of photorealistic animated lapines..

Oh, so much Kenny Everett goodness coming my way! 5GB of commercially unavailable fun. ~happy bunny~ I'd never even heard the name until a year or two back, when akira114 sprang one volume of Ernie Kovacs' work on me, but I can definitely see parallels between them.

VoIP for voiceposts appears to be in the works.

Today's bit of giggly low humor is brought to you by Peeps.

I should get around to watching The White Room sometime. It does seem to be quite the KLF curiosity..

QotD, from JK Rowling, who has apparently derided models whose "only function in the world appears to be supporting the trade in overpriced handbags and rat-sized dogs".

So, the PS3 will debut at around 499-599€. Eep! For that price, Sony's really going to have to make sure the initial titles are something to behold - certainly, there'll be the usual early rush regardless, but opening day sales don't foretell success or failure.

Sausagebunnies.

Chax is a handy add-on that adds tabs to Tiger's version of iChat, as well as other goodness, such as Growl notification. (No, not you, growlcoon =:)

Today's moment of boggle is brought to you by freakylynx, who noticed that Paris Hilton has been approached to play Mother Theresa.