Sometimes interesting things literally fall into your lap. Consider this PowerPoint presentation – it contains the details of a recent “secret” anti-terrorism simulation that was staged by the U.S. government’s Department of Homeland Security. The simulation was presented as a way to be prepared for a “realistic and credible threat”. What is interesting about the whole thing is that the DHS believes that the suspected threat will come from “left-wing” and “social activist” groups – kind of odd when you remember that the second-most deadly terrorist attack on the United States was carried out by a card-carrying member of the Republican party. Left-wing indeed.

I apologize for the size of the file – I wanted to leave this in it’s original PPT format for both authenticity and to point out that the DHS makes really ugly slides. And yes, the fine print on the front page means exactly what you think it means – the keepers of the Patriot Act – and the upcoming Military Commissions Act – can throw your ass in prison for having this. Be sure to leave a note for your friends.

This is far and away the single coolest thing that you could have on your desk. Cooler than the Hello Kitty USB hub, even. This needs to be on every geek’s wish list this holiday season.

2.5: The percentage of uncertified web sites that deliver adware, spyware, and spam.

If you are looking for some new content for your iPod or want some new tracks for the drive to the office today, scoot on over to the Mercedes-Benz site where Mixed Tape 14 is now available for your downloading and burning pleasure. For those of you who were dismayed when the mixed tapes went from popping up every fortnight to every 6-8 weeks, you will be glad to know that the gang at M-B have instituted a bi-weekly podcast to fill the gap and to give you a taste of the sounds they are picking through for the next compilation. These guys really do have their shit together.

5.4: The percentage of “Trust-e” certified web sites that deliver adware, spyware, and spam.

Who was wrong? I was wrong. Sort of. Way back when it was noted with some derision that the PS3 “value” system would not include an HDMI port, with no way to upgrade the machine after the fact. If you bought the ghetto model, you were going to be shut out of true hi-def. And while that info was right at the time, Sony has now done an about face and turned me into an after-the-fact doofus. Every PS3 will now come with an HDMI port, giving everyone who can afford to buy one a taste of 1080p goodness. The caveat (and with the PS3, there always seems to be one) is that the HDMI port will use a non-standard connector, and Sony – being the only source – will soak you 129 bucks for the cable. Nice.

You may also have heard that the cost of the PS3 has been reduced. This is true … but only if you live in Japan. You are still going to be soaked for the full amount on launch day here – and quite possibly for a lot more than you are budgeting. As with most Sony console releases, the number of “value” systems in the retail chain will be vanishingly small (ie: none) and retailers are going to be “urged” (ie: told) that they should only sell the system with at least 2 games as a bundle. With taxes and an HDMI cable, you are probably looking at very close to 1000 dollars. Excuse me while I search for my enthusiasm.

So Kurtz makes a funny about using the laptop in the can (which is not all that funny, I do it all the time) and uses a throwaway blog joke at the end of it all. The joke’s on him, though … there really is a guy that is blogging his dumps. 365 of ‘em. My favourite quote: “I always pause for a second to see what I’ve accomplished before I turn it into alligator food.”

Truly, the internet is a wondrous thing.

42: The percentage of people “busted” by the Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy tool that were actually running legitimately purchased copies of Windows.

Everyone knows that telephones and mice are the number one ways to spread germs in the office. The phone is easy to avoid – just don’t use it – but the mouse, that can be a little trickier. In most places, no mousing means no working and that means no job. What to do? Perhaps the shiny new “germ-free” wireless mouse from Iogear is the answer. It purports to have a nanotech compound that kills bacteria, fungus, and other nasties on contact. Does it work? Couldn’t tell you. But it certainly cant hurt if you are in the sort of environment where shared mice are a fact of life.

Whaddya know … a corporation with a brain. Earlier, in These Very Pages it was noted that Virgin Atlantic was banning all Dell and Apple laptop batteries from the cabins of their aircraft. They now appear to have clued in … they have taken the time to train their in-flight crews and gate staff to understand how to check the serial numbers on the batteries and allow the ones that aren’t overly likely to burst into flames. Kudos all around.

Music and rhythm games are one of the most fabulous genres of entertainment. It’s not even remotely coincidence that Donkey Konga and Guitar Hero are two of the absolute best games of the “last” generation of video game consoles. Music games have a double appeal: They use natural motions and actions – making the games easy to access and learn – and they have an instant sort of gratification that comes from the immediacy of the sounds and reactions.

The only problem with music and rhythm games is that they don’t translate well to casual gaming or 10 minute breaks at the office, since they usually involve a specialized controller and some setup time. So why not try a wildly simplified variant – the insanely cute Music Brothers, fresh of the flash boat from Japan.

Like the vast majority of Japanese games it is incredibly well crafted from a visual standpoint, and the interface is rather sweet as well. However, most of the instructions are in devil writing, so here is a quick rundown of what you need to know to play the game:

Tap the arrow keys to match the pattern on the screen. The circles mean you tap the spacebar.

When you see an arrow in a “bar”, it means to tap the matching key repeatedly to “fill up” the bar.

The taps will play a song – but in this case rhythm doesn’t matter, just the order of the keys.

Time is the enemy here. Run out of time and you are done.

Every mis-hit costs you one of your “gumdrop followers”. Lose them all and you are done.

You can gain new followers now and again.

The top button in the main menu is “Start”. You don’t need the others.

When the game ends, you can just close the popup with the chicks. No idea what is going on with that. After you close it, the buttons are “Retry” (on the left) and “Main menu” (on the right).

Once you get playing, no language is needed – just start bashing your keys and have some fun. This one is a keeper. And did I mention cute?

UPDATE: Rick S. was kind enough to send along a link to Beat Bubbles, a translated version of the game. So yeah, you can ignore my crib notes up there and just jump in with some comfortable english surroundings.

5.63: The length in kilometers of the “trail” of data on a standard CD if it was unwound from a spiral into a straight line.

A long time ago, in a blog far, far away there was a post about iPod compatible boxer shorts. Perfect for all of those times when you want to hang around the house in your underwear and still listen to hands-free music. Happens all the time, I’m sure.

The problem, of course, is that this is sexist in the extreme. What about the girls in the crowd that want to shimmy to the latest groovy tunes while wearing nothing but their gitch? Are they left out, doomed to a boring and clothed existence?

Well, no. All of you half-naked music-loving females can just slip on a pair of iGroove lace panties, tuck your iPod nano into the built-in pouch, and dance your …. er …. something off.

Equality is a beautiful thing.

NOTE 1: The iGroove link might not be completely suitable for you to click on at work.

NOTE 2: No, I don’t regularly cruise lingerie sites. I got the link from a perfectly respectable tech blog.

Presto is yet another attempt to drag feeble oldsters kicking and screaming into the interwebs. This time the entire interface is hidden away, and the pre-tech generation gets a one-way connection to the digital world through a … printer.

That’s right. Your senile old grandparents, apparently too simple to learn the ins and outs of a web browser, can now get email from the kids and grandkids via a server-side email account and a printer that is slaved to some sort of remote connection. They just plug it in and wait for the reams of loving letters and attached digital photos to start pouring in.

I sense a massive failure here. Either the thing will sit there and gather dust because the kids are ungrateful little pricks who can’t be bothered to give gramma the time of day, or the old folks will rip the cord out of the wall because it spits out paper spam all day, every day. I am guessing the latter is more likely, and really … do gramma and gramps really need to be snowed under with ads for bigger cocks and can’t miss stocks?

I think not. Shove this one into the dustbin now. Yuck.

It’s not news that YouTube is big. The buzz all around the net today is that hordes of investors are lining up to try and purchase the Little Video Site That Could for anywhere up to 1.5 billion dollars.

It’s also not news that Microsoft will try and copy anything interesting and original, usually while (a) trying to pass it off as their own idea, and (b) more or less screwing it up.

What is news is that the trolls at M$ have already launched their very private beta of Soapbox, their rather obvious YouTube clone. It has all the same features – tagging videos, a tray of similar results, etc. Unfortunately, with no new features, there is nothing to make users abandon the already-entrenched goliath that is YouTube. Microsoft will need either a lot of fanboys on board to make this anything other than a curiousity … inertia is a powerful force in the on-line world.

Wait and see.

That’s right. Spaceballs cartoon. Little more needs to be said.

How quickly things are changing! Two years ago the grumpy old men who run the New York Times were poo-poohing citizen journalism as the exact kind of thing that the Grey Lady needed to stomp flat for the betterment of everyone. Now they are rooting around for a WordPress guru to ride herd on their foray into blogging and grassroots reporting. Any takers?

The weakest link in the Google Apps line-up just got a handful of much-needed tweaks. Among the new bits in Google Spreadsheets:

Save as PDF
Open Document support
Some more currency symbols
Ability to share with people who don’t have Google accounts
Soft returns in text cells

The currency thing was a really big deal – for a company that claims to be a global player, it was kind of embarrassing to give the impression that they thought the whole planet used “dollars”. The other items are more or less niceties, but they do make the package seem more like a business tool and less like something you might dabble with and then toss aside. The fill low-down and all the grotty bits are laid out in detail in the Google Apps blog.

You would think that a USB hub with two measly ports would be saddled with somewhat limited functionality. Well, fuck functionality. This baby is not only shaped like Hello Kitty, but it talks and waves and interacts with the included screen saver for extra wacky desktop fun. Who cares about the stupid ports? It’s Hello Kitty!

The “alpha squirrel” is back, this time to expose the Gaping Plot Hole that infect a large portion of the videogames on the market today. It also, in a backhanded way, points out the depressing sameness of the games that are being released for the “big two” consoles. Foamy is once again my hero.

50: The number of mini-games in the new “Wii” version of Super Monkey Ball”.

You may have heard about the latest in an essentially endless stream of exploits for Internet Explorer – this one allowing “drive-by” hijackings of unsecured (ie: pretty much every one) Windows machines. Oddly enough – even though the code is posted here and there so you can do it yourself – Microsoft maintains that there are no instances of this exploit actually being used.

Oh yeah? I guess the mopes at M$ just don’t spend enough time surfing porn. You’ve been warned.

One of the more eye-catching features of the new iTunes 7 release is the automatic fetching of album art – even for songs that you didn’t actually purchase from the iTunes store. One sort of odd thing is that you need to be logged in to your iTunes store account to get the fetching routines to work – quite curious since Apple swears up and down that they are not collecting or saving any of the song and user data that is transmitted when looking for the covers. Why, then, is there a login requirement? Is there some sort of skullduggery afoot?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Who knows? But if you don’t want to play this particular shady game but you DO still want to get lots and lots of album art then you might want to take a look at this – a small library of routines that allow you to fetch art from the iTMS anonymously. This currently exists as a perl script, and you can either put it in your CGI directory and call it that way, or you could buckle down and port it to PHP and just make it a module on your blog. And if you don’t want to do any of that, then just take a peek at the on-line demo page here. The best part is that the graphics files are stored as 600×600 images at the iTMS, so you get the full sized deal, not just some nano-formatted postage stamp. Have fun.

Ascending to the top of the geek-hero podium today are these three chaps from Cambridge – engineering students all, they plan to put a rocket into (admittedly low) space for under 1000 pounds (that’s the cost, not the weight, you feebs). To check things out they sent a test version of their instrument package up to 32km with a surplus weather balloon, and being 21st century kinds of blokes they were sure to take a zillion or so snaps and post them for the world to ogle. Warning – these guys have a pretty high nerd-factor stereotype going on, so you might want to avert your eyes if you are squeamish about that sort of thing.

Now, you might say “Pfft, 32 klicks up, big deal” … but it is worth remembering that the “X-prize” was given out for a much lower flight. Also, when your pictures show the curvature of the fucking planet, well, you are kicking some serious geek ass.

19,960,000: The amount in pounds sterling (£) raised for AIDS research by Queen’s Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert.

The shiny new iTunes 7 has been out for about a week now, and users of Hymn may have noticed that the DRM has been changed slightly – meaning that your existing copy of Hymn / QTFairUse no longer works to free the files from their digital shackles. You need a new version of Hymn … and luckily, you can get that right there. You’re welcome.

Today is September 19th. Which means that today is that most magical of days … Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Revel and rejoice. Avast.

2008: The year that Microsoft’s video gaming division will turn it’s first profit.

As we grind on towards the flashpoint of the current video game console war, it is worth noting that the gang at Sony and the crew at Microsoft are leaning more and more heavily on their obvious (and in the case of the PS3, startling) advantage in the areas of graphics processing and computing horsepower. It is hard to fault them for this – it is one area of this particular battleground where they have a definite helping of superiority over the third party in this little skirmish.

It is worth pointing out, however, that rampant amounts of silicon horsepower do not necessarily ensure that the games on a powerhouse console are any sort of fun to play. The battle lines are being drawn, then … jaw-dropping specifications and barely-contained power on two fronts, countered with the oddball concept of having a good time on the other.

Who will win out in this clash of ideologies? No one knows, but at this juncture it is probably worth pointing out two things:

1 - Despite a clear advantage in technology for Sony, the PSP is being outsold 5 to 1 by the odd duck that is the Nintendo DS. The DS has games that look vaguely cheap and retro, while the PSP has stunning graphics and is also a fucking home theatre in the palm of your hand. So why the clear sales advantage for the “low tech” entry in this sweepstakes? Easy – those cheap and retro games are shitloads of fun.

2 - The Xbox 360, at this point standing atop the unassailable pinnacle of gaming power, is being outsold by the freaking GameCube – a five-year old console with virtually no vestiges of support or marketing – in Japan. Again, the reason is fairly easy to pinpoint: The Xbox 360 “exclusive” games are for the most part, well, yawners. Boredom might sell in the NFL, but on the gaming shelves of Nippon, forget it.

Does this mean that the next-gen wars are over before they begin? Of course not – one only needs to look at the sad fate of Beta, crushed under the heels of the inferior product that was VHS. But in the meantime, anyone who wants a reminder that breathtaking graphics have nothing at all to do with the enjoyment you get out of a game should take a look at White Jigsaw. There are no graphics at all – just unadorned jigsaw pieces tempered with a very well-developed sense of gameplay and level design. This game has one-bit graphics. And it will suck you in big time.

Consider it a lesson. And have fun.

Look! It only took a mainstream media outlet seven fucking days to catch on to a story. These guys are getting quicker all the time! Thanks to Tracer D for the tip-off.