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.

If you've ever wondered about the person behind Stephen Colbert, here's a rare look, during an appearance at a forum at Harvard's Kennedy School of Politics. It's about an hour long, in all, so it'll take time to load - the GVI download is 415MB.

Rabbit versus Snake - most cool. ^_^ (FLV)

Interesting community: day_on_earth, featuring simply photos of every day from different parts of the world, contributed by community members. And here's a slideshow (Flash required) from recent news events, courtesy of the Guardian, with some excellent photographic skills on display.

Yay hoofie costumes! Here's a very cool quadrupedal goat.

relee's set up a weblog for matters pertaining to SL happenings, its future, scripting advice, and more. You can subscribe to it here, as relee_sl_rss.

For SL news with an Australian perspective, I noticed there's SLOz. Perhaps the writer can be proven wrong on this count? "There certainly is no cohesive Australian community in-world that I’ve been able to nail down."

A particularly good Doctor Who video starring the Daleks, set to an eminently appropriate EBM track by Rotersand, "Exterminate, Annihilate, Destroy". For a high quality downloadable version (with the correct aspect ratio too), look here.

Yay bunny doll TF! And this time, with added 'yeena goodness. Finally, just some good ole ~shiny~ latex, starring Micah's Geoff and Trevor. ^_^

Oh, one more: a costume. Not at all worksafe. *giggle* Hm! You can tell I'm not a hardcore Star Wars fan, when this is news to me.. "The language spoken by the Jawas (the hooded aliens of Tatooine) was created by recording speakers of the African Zulu language and electronically speeding it up. The language spoken by Greedo, the green alien killed by Han Solo, is the Peruvian language Quechua played backwards." You do work here? So, The Sarah Jane Adventures began - and very well. Supposedly aimed at a slightly younger audience, it remains eminently suitable for a much broader range, just as the Doctor always has. It struck me, though, that whereas the central characters here were attempting to prove (successfully) their ingenuity and guile, those of Torchwood often seemed more intent on proving how idiotic one can be and get away with it. (And why is there this seemingly inviolate wall preventing anyone in Torchwood mentioning the Doctor, when SJS was reminiscing in this taster episode?) Anyway - suffice to say, it's good stuff; the series itself won't be starting until "later this year", however.

Still - ep.10, "Out of Time", showed far stronger promise for all concerned than any of the opening episodes, Owen especially, going from a nasty creep with a penchant for using alien tech to mesmerise clubbers into having sex with him, to someone so fragile and in love, only to have that togetherness wrenched away from him. And Jack's.. responsibility? Was it a duty, or a reflection of his own self, of something he can never permit himself?

Ep.11.. eh, seems fairly safe to skip it. Why the need for a Fight Club remake? Ep.12, though, from the same writer as Out of Time, opened with quiet style. Some "huh?" moments, like Toshiko's claim that pencil would fade, but - that dance. That moment of dancing will remain one of the series' highlights for me.. simply beautiful.

Now for the season finale.

I just noticed the Manage Settings page here now has a checkbox to turn off the hover menu you now see when your mouse is on top of someone's user icon. A harmlessly useless feature, but also perfectly positioned (in my journal's appearance, anyway) so that after clicking on the "previous entries" in my flist, the pointer will then be on top of everyone's icons.

Unfortunately, the "use placeholders for embedded video" option does literally replace the entire area with a simple placeholder of the same size, so it doesn't get rid of those huge voids. (I never watch clips in those embedded spaces - much more convenient to open them in new tabs and let them load in the background)

On the other paw, using that kind of area for this.. ^_^

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Thanks to everyone for their support in this past week. It's meant a lot to me. I've also been taking a break from reading LJ; I'll be getting back into circulation today.

The SL Town Hall on Dec 20, 1430 PST (2230 GMT) could be worth listening to, if the comments are any indication. It'll have a tech focus, so this is one for the geeks amongst us - want to find out if the client will be able to render HTML on a prim, have mesh-based avatars, or be available in a lightweight mobile version? Plenty of good discussion just in the comments.

I thought this short was worth sharing - it's about the life of an aspiring artist, making his way through University by way of the night shift at the local supermarket, and the fun that entails. There's something of a Clerks spirit in it, exploring the ways everyone employs to try maintaining their sanity through the drudgery. Not worksafe, as the artist's means involves the appreciation of the aesthetics of the female form. Cashback.

Or maybe the twenty second teaser for the Doctor Who special, The Runaway Bride, is more to your taste. ^_^ Quality's not too wonderful, but it's perfectly enjoyable.

What a fascinating Flickr pool. ^_^

Here's the Photoshop CS3 beta download link. Supposedly it's good for 30 days for anyone, unlicensed, but CS2 serial numbers should lift that restriction; there've been some reports of rejected serials, however. (For OS X users in particular, this is the first Universal Binary version)

There's a new 25th anniversary edition of The Last Unicorn coming, but - the rights owner, Granada Media, is still refusing to pay Peter S Beagle anything. However, if you buy your copy direct from Conlan Press, he gets around half the sale price. Anywhere else, not a penny. "This new edition is a huge improvement on the previous one. It is widescreen instead of fullscreen, it was made from the digitally-remastered German DVD (so the picture is gorgeous and the audio is 5.1), it has extras (including a video interview with Peter), and it has much better cover art."

kuma_chan amongst others might like (or be ticked off by =:) this tidbit: "Blake's 7 will be produced as a series of all new 36 x 5-minute audio dramas based on the original cult series broadcast on the BBC in the 1970s. The audio adventures were recorded last week and will debut in spring 2007." (And I never noticed until the other week that the original Roj Blake also played the present day version of the killer in the Ghost Machine episode of Torchwood)

SaveABunny - a rabbit rescue operation in the greater Bay Area. Like any such outfit, they can always use a few pennies to help with their expenses. Yet another filesharing site: zShare. Looks quite clean, requires no registration, no tedious delay imposed on free users (indeed, it's purely ad-supported), and 100MB cap per file. A new wiki, devoted to matters linguistic: LingWiki. Fairly sparse at the moment, as it's apparently only just come into being.

"A man has been charged with breaking into a barn, scattering pornographic magazines around, and then spray-painting the genitals of three goats orange."

How to reclaim bank penalty fees in the UK.

Amusing little quiz: "Hair Care or Digital Audio?" You've probably seen it already, but having finally watched one person's rant on Pachelbel's Canon, I've got to recommend it.

If you find the amount of time it takes for an OS X sheet dialog to appear, you can affect it globally quite simply. For example, to make them appear immediately, enter this in a shell window:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime .001

That setting takes effect on application launch. (To return to the default, use a value of 0.2) This may be handy in sheet-heavy apps, or on particularly slow machines.

Rainbow Brite, yay!

I noticed Fujitsu's going to be shipping a 300GB 2.5" drive at the end of Feb 2007. Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be the result of an increase in bit density, but seemingly just the addition of another platter, raising its height to 12.5mm - too tall for many laptops. Cheap OS X giggle. I'm pleased with that. I was puzzled how I might drag an image from OmniWeb to the desktop, if the image also had a link - OW will, by default, drag the link rather than the image. So, I bunded that up with a couple other queries off to the Omni Group, and promptly received a reply addressing each point in turn, including a solution to that: hold Shift at the same time. Voilà! Sure, I can click on a FA image's Download link to get just the image, but that saves that effort. ^_^ Yay! Got the mansion model from the HRA, for reaching 150,000 points in AC:WW. ^_^ Maybe now I'll sort the place out so I can actually walk around it again.

So, I suppose Torchwood's doing okay for itself. According to the newly relaunched Outpost Gallifrey: 'The 10pm slot saw Torchwood being watched by 971,000 viewers, while big US import Lost attracted only 863,000 viewers. This was the first showing in the UK for both episodes.' and that 'a second series has not been officially commissioned for the Doctor Who spin-off, but claims that scripts are already being prepared and that "both BBC Two and BBC Three are fighting for the right to screen it first - with writer Russell T Davies pushing for a slot on BBC One."' A battle that's apparently since been won by BBC 2.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the ending of Random Shoes gave me cause to cry again.. partially in sadness and regret, yet somehow, it also gave me some hope as well. I suppose it's Torchwood's Love and Monsters, but for me, this one succeeded well.

Want a really hot 3D card?

Rather a lovely sentiment here: "Santa is the belief that, even in the darkest hours — whether that be winter's depths, or poverty, or invading Romans — even then, there is benevolence. That there is a person, a saint, a god, out there somewhere, that is kind and giving and good. And that this goodness comes to you, when you are good to each other."

The author as a young rabbit.

In the last entry's comments, schnee pointed out a wonderfully useful little app - Pathway. "My idea for Pathway originated when browsing Wikipedia. I would always start off quite focused on a certain subject. Unfortunately, Wikipedia articles tend to be full of distracting links, just screaming to be clicked on… Soon enough, I found myself totally lost in myriads of loosely related pages. I can't count the time I wasted on backtracing them, and if you have a bit of wiki-experience, you’ve probably encountered it too."

I shan't go into depth discussing it, as it'd be too easy to delve into spoilers, and besides, I'm disinclined to read reviews of films before watching them, preferring to enjoy them on my own terms - perhaps you feel similarly. Rather, I'll simply offer a strong recommendation for Pan's Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno), a fantasy/wartime drama set in the days of General Franco's ascension, from Guillermo del Toro, known for The Devil's Backbone and Hellboy. This is a long way from Labyrinth, be warned; "But Captain, obey for obey's sake... That's something only people like you do."

It's both brutal and wondrous. Perhaps this from the IMDb comments puts it succinctly: "People will watch Pan's Labyrinth in a way that most won't watch Land and Freedom. In doing so, they will also discover a world of fairy tales which existed before Disney sunk its claws into them: a dangerous world, where nothing is as it seems and every step is a possible death – a place which may leave even adults shivering under the duvet, part in terror, part in wonder. And all this backed up by the finest cinematography I've seen."

So, you know about the app for using a Wiimote as an OS X input device. So did someone else, who came up with - of course - WiiSaber. Video clip here.

Quite an interesting interview with a guy from Toshiba's optical drives division, on HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray, from a technical perspective. Toshiba's in the HD-DVD camp, so there may be some bias involved, but it's quite illuminating all the same.

A very good place to check for animation, hosted by an animation director: The Living Animation Festival.

It seems there's been a recent bout of hedgehogs born in the UK, but coming into the world too late to gain enough weight to hibernate. "If you find one keep it warm, feed it some cat food and put it into a cardboard box until it puts on some weight, then it can be released back into the wild to hibernate."

"It has emerged that the crew of a Nimrod used a teapot to block a hatch gap in their plane after a mid-air mechanical fault." I'm pleased to see Torchwood finally find its feet - curiously, right after the excrutiatingly bad Cyberwoman. Greeks Bearing Gifts didn't have much of a plot, regrettably, but good to see an attempt, albeit rather flimsy, at developing Toshiko as a character. (Horribly cheesy CG, though) They Keep Killing Suzie, though.. now that was actually quite a good story, though rather chilling - moreso than the gratuitously gruesome Countrycide, as there was much more reason to it. Can we buy Toshiko a UPS or two, though?

Sinfest icon by ibneko

Bored? Throw paper.

And, I felt this bit of retail idiocy was worth passing on. (This is a bit odd, too)

Finally, have some Christmas music. You'll remember it always. =:)

Will anyone going along to the mighty LondonFurs bash on the river have a camcorder? I'd love to see video footage of what happens. ^_^ (And indeed, at MFF this year too. Pictures, even, but there doesn't seem to be such a thing as a furry picture repository that offers the simple "give me all the pictures" option, instead of that damnable array of useless thumbnails and resolution options, adding layers of complexity where none existed before. Have I mentioned I don't like Gallery/Coppermine/etc much? =:)

Now this is the lighter to have.. a pewter Dalek. ^_^ A discourse on the gentle art of cooking chestnuts. For anyone with a Wii, or knowledge thereof: - is there region locking on the games? - is the power supply suitable for use worldwide? - is the video output also worldwide? (PAL/NTSC, monitor support, etc) Some possible beginnings of hope in Palestine, with the Israeli PM proposing an exchange of prisoners.

On the apparent winner of the presidential runoff election in Ecuador: "Mr Correa, who trained in the US, counter-attacked by accusing Mr Noboa of dodging tax, exploiting labourers and wanting to turn the country into a giant banana plantation. He also suggested that the US president, George Bush, was dim."

Torchwood "Small Worlds" - quite a reversal of fortunes from earlier, indeed. Finally, I wasn't wishing everyone wasn't being such a twit. This is a good narrative development. And actually quite a strong opportunity for everyone as a result, when they're not being called upon to be total idiots. A faerly dark story, even if not without its problems, but one I kept on wanting to watch. (Just - please, Jack, ditch the blue LEDs on the Range Rover. They really don't suit you. Unless you're planning on getting gyroscopic wheel hubs too) "What else could I do?" - wouldn't that have been so much better delivered in a tone of quiet, desperate frustration, than shouted out in anger?

Pharyngula passes on word of "an episode of This American Life on Carlton Pearson, an evangelical preacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He had a thriving church with tens of thousands of members, when he had an insight: there was no hell. No eternal torment for damned souls. Jesus came to earth to save everyone, not just the few, not just the true believers. He called this the 'gospel of inclusion'. You can guess what happened. The church collapsed."

Also from said weblog is what's looking, so far, as that rarest of creatures - a creationism debate that's entirely civil and cordial. (You'll want to bookmark that one, if you're at all interested - there's a lot being said)

And just for the fun of it, here are three short Powerpuff Girls music videos. ^_^

Brassy - I Got My Own Thing	Devo - Go Monkey Go	Power Puff Girls - Chemical X

kyhwana found this little short, Kiwi (FLV). All the poor thing wants to do is to know what it's like to fly..

ristin pointed out these cat pictures. ^_^ You'll have seen some of them before, but they're all good. Quite an amusing, very brief, interview with Jack Barrowman. And, another, longer interview from Gay Times (the pages are in reverse order, so you'll want to click "previous" for the next page; four in total). "Florida, as you know, is a lovely place where Cubans go to live, and Jews go to die." -- Jon Stewart, Midterm Midtacular.

How could I not make note of this Bunny comic? ^_^

The trailer for the Simpsons movie actually suggests that, despite the show having jumped the shark some time ago, the movie might actually be worth seeing. Caution: brief violence against extremely cute bunny. You can find Richard Dawkins reading from "The God Delusion" at Randolph-Macon Woman's College here, including a Q&A session, as YouTube clips and a 113MB downloadable QuickTime file. The Q&A session was apparently notable for featuring several students from Jerry Falwell's nearby institution. What a delightful word.. "propinquity". (1. nearness in place; proximity. 2. nearness of relation; kinship. 3. affinity of nature; similarity. 4. nearness in time.)

NSFW, but funny

Torchwood: sadly, not even Cybergoodness (even if in the form of a cheesy Catwoman-like strappy costume) could save "Cyberwoman" from its abysmal writing, camerawork, and editing.

Baguette + Camembert + medium-rare sliced roast beef + whole grain mustard = love. Well, one kind, anyway. :-9

A most amusing (and apolitical) Farewell to Donald Rumsfeld. =:) (FLV)

Wine for the day: Turner Road 2004 Cabernet/Zinfandel, an exceptionally good balance of the richness and spiciness of its grape varieties.

A singularly cool bit of design: a furry watch, as momentrabbit noticed. Sadly, it's only a design concept - but such a good one. bosn might like this final minute from Wednesday's South Park, featuring sea otters. ^_^ What vegetables (I'll include mushrooms, for this purpose) do you particularly enjoy? Any particular preparations that really elevate them? For me, brussels sprouts are best boiled quickly with orange juice, a little water, and cilantro/coriander; or, for that matter, barbecued, wrapped in bacon, letting the porky juices permeate the sprout. Cabbage can be really good, too, especially red cabbage with a little sugar, vinegar, and cloves. And broccoli can be wonderful stuff, either just steamed quickly in the microwave by itself, or served with a good helping of lean spicy ground beef and some Campbell's nacho cheese soup (surprisingly low in fat). These rabbit stamps are rather cute. ^_^

A personal angle on the validity and benefits of stem cell research - highly recommended.

You've seen the "press button - receive bacon" hand dryer icon, ne? Well - how about actually making a bacon dispenser? There must be piles of deceased hand dryers around, and someone mechanically enterprising could surely rig up a mechanism to release a slice of (cooked) bacon upon demand. The unit could be affixed to a wall with a few of those nifty 3M sticky pads, suitable for a quick, covert installation..

Only for extreme geeks, so arbutus might enjoy this too - Every Character has a Story, exploring the history behind each character in Unicode. Did you know the tréma and the diaresis share the same space in Unicode, as their appearances are almost identical, despite quite different linguistic functions? (Amongst other folk, this caused the Deutsche Bibliothek concern, as they need to preserve the different marks accurately)

Fans of driving games might like Test Drive Unlimited - how well it plays remains to be seen, but the stills aren't a bad start. (And happily, it allows play over the net, not just ad hoc, which seems to be missing from many PSP titles)

This non-partisan list of lousy US political websites is worth a giggle, including one politico's use of a pig for his "under construction" image, and another's bizarre recipe for margeritas.

Torchwood "Ghost Machine" - still plenty of ragged edges (HollywoodOS, "This was not meant for us", Owen blowing his cover, and then not realising what he'd been told was a honking big clue), but, this time around, I could actually feel sympathy for many of the people involved. It's no Who, but it's certainly taken a few steps in the right direction. (And Cyberfun next week, yay! Splott? That's fine. I've seen one bus route ending in Wyllie)

Doctor Who scores a repeat hat-trick of National Television Awards, again landing Most Popular Drama, Actor, and Actress.

Michael J Fox advocates stem cell research, a potential route to a cure for conditions such as his Parkinson's Disease, in this campaign spot for a current US candidate.

If you're a lupine fan, or just feel like helping some wolves, consider helping the Dancing Brook Lodge in Newport, New Hampshire:

We are fighting to keep our current location open and save the lives of our 46 wolf-hybrids. On Tuesday Oct 24, 2006 Judge Edward Tenney of Newport District Court ordered that all the animals have to be moved off our property by Dec 8 2006 or the town is to take custody and the animals would be put down.

We have started a mail-in campaign to the judge and selectman of the town of Lempster. If you support our mission and want to help please send these people letters voicing your concern and support.

We are also in desperate need of money for both our legal defense fund and relocation fund.

lifemetercomics brings us this outstanding Halloween-themed videogame shirt design. In the US, emergency contraception - such as "Plan B" - is sometimes difficult to obtain. Enter Emergency Kindness, a network of volunteers: "If you are having trouble procuring EC, we will do everything in our power to get it to you before your 72 hours are up." patch_bunny noticed this rock formation listening to an iPod.

Here's an educational look at the effects of running a fast graphics card in different PCI lane modes. Their results indicate a slight loss going from 16x to 8x, but a much more noticeable change dropping to 4x.

So, the Merom MacBook Pros are out - not much news, given Merom vs Yonah doesn't show a great deal of difference. There's a small speed bump, Firewire 800 returns to the 15" models, and memory's doubled, so the 17" ships with 2GB (as two modules), expandable to 3GB. Same GPU (256MB X1600 Mobility), same prices. Seems like it'll take the forthcoming Santa Rosa chipset to make real changes, and there doesn't seem to be much new on the mobile GPU front at the moment.

Torchwood - I'm not sure yet. There's plenty I like about the show, its premise and characters, but the first two episodes suffered from some ragged plots. (And as for the method of escape in ep.2, erg. Not sure I'd want to be anywhere near that creep) I'll be following it, though, and enjoying it. Cool going that it's one of the earlier shows to benefit from the HD treatment, too.

Captions, anyone?

'If I had one reservation - and, contractually, I must - I'd say it's a shame the show hasn't been pitched at a family audience. Why? Simply because some of the concepts (a particular "magic" paving stone outside Cardiff's Millenium Centre, for one) are exactly the right mix of the mundane and fantastic to excite a child's imagination. The eight-year-old me would have gone nuts over some of the ideas here.' How will Torchwood shape up? We'll soon see. ^_^ The first two episodes air on BBC3 tonight, at 9pm BST. (Judging by the episode synopses, I'm not sure they'd be quite ideal for the average eight year old =:) I thought ibneko might like bunnywarez' latest item - kitten mittens. atomicat reveals the news that babies are stupid. ^_^

Here's a little historical gem of techie history: a BBC short from 1936, Television comes to London, looking at the appropriation of Alexandra Palace as the site for the corporation's experimental transmissions of television, broadcasting in Baird's and Marconi's formats on alternate weeks. (The following year, the 405 line Marconi system was adopted) Also noteworthy for the inappropriate soundtrack, which swells to majestic heights at times like mentioning the new drainage system required. It's fun seeing the launch of television as newsstand headlines, and on a geekier front, one of the camera tubes being painstakingly hand blown.

Spectacularly awful games of yore, via savant_da_rat, including such gems as Custer's Revenge: "In addition to the faithfulness to details like Custer's blue cowboy hat and magnificently gay pink scarf, the creators did exhaustive research on cowboys having sex. The game uses the time-honored historical Old West style of scoring, which is one point for each successful pelvic thrust, seven points for all solid slaps to the ass, and immediately being declared sheriff if you perform a full backflip without leaving the vagina."

Ah, it's official: Torchwood will debut on BBC3 only. First ep will be on BBC1 simultaneously, on Sunday Oct 22, but the rest are for BBC3 only, until the New Year, when it'll be repeated on BBC1. Interesting that they'd choose to hand BBC3 such a coup, but presumably uptake of digital terrestrial and satellite's broad enough now to permit such a move.

rigelkitty spotted a new study published in The Lancet, which estimates some 600,000 deaths in Iraq due to the post-invasion violence. The report can be downloaded in its entirety here.

Finally, I got around to watching Buffalo Boy, a tale of 1930s life in Vietnam, the title taken from the livelihood of those who'd take locals' buffalo away to higher ground when the floods came, for a fee. It's a raw tale of abandonment, and of the essential need for others' company and assistance, in conditions that make those endured by Steinbeck's folks seem luxurious. Beautiful and harrowing, it manages to convey the feeling of life at that time surprisingly well, even given the cultural gap for a foreign audience.

It's heartening to see some nations continuing to look forward and dream, with news from Sweden that "the state agency SSC has carried out a technical study showing that it is indeed possible to put a little red cottage on the moon." (Thanks to befrafa) So very cute! razzlfraz found this video featuring a giant plush teddy bear that they'd turned into a costume. otter3 noticed this interview with Nicholas Meyer, director of The Wrath of Khan. (Also uncredited screenwriter for it, as well as involvement in the two others I'd consider the best of the series: writer on IV, and writer & director on VI)

XaoS is a good fractal generator, with plenty to choose from, along with various coloring modes, and an autopilot mode. (OS X, Linux, Windows; or, for older versions, BeOS, OS/2, old Mac OS, and DOS)

A possible sign of corporate retrenchment? It appears Sony's pulling out of LCDs entirely. A little surprising, given the ubiquity of LCDs in new TVs, with plasma remaining a good contender at the upper end - the volumes involved would seem to be still sustainable, as opposed to, say, cellphone and PMP displays, now wholly a commodity offering, though still with differences of quality between manufacturers, and different grades.

Not all that many people probably know of Eudora, but, I still have a soft spot for said mail app. ^_^ It's just been announced that future versions will be free and open source, coming in the first half of 2007, and will be based on Thunderbird. If they manage to make a smooth transition of the underlying engine, I'll certainly give it a try. Mostly, I get along with OS X's Mail quite well, though it still exhibits design quirks that irk me slightly, such as taking a second or two to switch between mailboxes, where Eudora would bring them up instantaneously, as well as leaving mailbox selection in the menubar, rather than as a pane; for something only requiring occasional access, a pane seems an inappropriate UI design choice.

Just a quickie to note that there's now a trailer for Torchwood. ^_^

As ibneko kindly pointed out, Arashi no Yoru Ni has been subtitled. ^_^ (You'll need a recent player, like VLC, as it uses H.264 for video, Vorbis for audio, within a Matroska container. Hopefully they've used soft subs - much nicer to be able to choose where subtitles appear, such as below the picture. Ah, no - it's hardsubbed) Catch the trailer here, if you want to see what it's all about.



Bolt City is a collection of comic strip works, all of very high quality; eg Copper: "Bunny".

Keith Olbermann's been one of the more perceptive US political commentators of the past few years, even engaging in investigative journalism at times. This closing monologue on Rumsfeld's comments on disagreement is a powerful and timely reminder. He finished with Edward R Murrow:

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,” he said, in 1954. “We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.”

Sci-Fi Pulse claims Torchwood recording's not been going entirely to plan, courtesy of poor low-light performance of their new HD cameras, forcing the use of brighter lighting.

Panda sneeze. ^_^

It looks like the Mac mini's been silently upgraded, according to one recipient's unit, delivered as a 1.6GHz Core Duo rather than the base model's advertised 1.5GHz Core Solo, plus a larger HD and DVD-R. Much more appealing, even allowing for the GMA945 graphics.

"A Vatican official has said the Catholic church will excommunicate a medical team who performed Colombia's first legal abortion on an 11-year-old girl, who was eight weeks pregnant after being raped by her stepfather."

terminotaur came across this rather good, drily cynical Australian PSA on voting and the democratic process.

Someone's come up with a hack to strip iTunes 6's DRM, in the form of QTFairUse6, but regrettably, it appears to piggyback on top of iTunes, intercepting the decrypted AAC data, prior to decompression. So, you do wind up with a "clean" file, but only produced in real-time. It's also Windows-specific at the moment, but that may change. (It's not related to the original code of the Hymn Project, which, I believe, was able to decrypt the "protected" files itself, and thus wasn't subject to the real-time limitation)

Thinking of AAC, what HE AAC (aka AACplus) implementations are there? I'd been hoping that'd appear in QT7, but that didn't happen. Sometime, I otter rip a well-engineered clip or two and compress it in a variety of codecs and bitrates, then back to 44.1kHz PCM, and offer the results here for blind testing.

If you're using OmniWeb 5.5, you can enable a DOM inspector by entering this at a shell prompt; it'll then be available in the contextual menu. Quite spiffy, actually - nicely separated within a HUD-style translucent window.

defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniWeb5 WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true