A guy named Tim sent a link to a more recent report about this, and there is apparently some hope for this fellow. You might want to be warned that, while this version of the story is somewhat less depressing, it has much clearer video and you might want to stay clear if the earlier clip grossed you out. Either way, just be thankful that you didn’t see the original bit on Discovery HD like I did. Trust me.

Befuddlr is a super-simple digital jigsaw game – it takes an image from Flickr, scrambles it, and then times you to see how long you need to put the thing back together. You can choose from a variety of canned pics from pre-selected Flickr groups, or use the handy bookmarklet to make any Flickr image into an instant puzzle. If you need a pleasant little diversion on a Friday afternoon, this might just be it.

This is a somewhat off-putting video clip of an Indonesian man who has a skin condition that looks like tree roots – or maybe giant begonia roots, if you want a more accurate mental picture – growing in huge and quite frankly hideous masses from his skin. Don’t watch this if you are freaked out by this sort of thing.

2,200,000,000,000: The amount spent (in U.S. dollars) by the government of the United States to invade Iraq, as of November 24th, 2007.

I first saw Free Rice a couple of weeks ago, and kicked around the idea of adding a link to it. It’s a straightforward vocabulary game – just match words to their definitions (think “It Pays To Enrich Your Word Power” from Readers’ Digest) – and for every one you get correct the sponsors will donate 10 grains of rice to hunger relief through the United Nations’ World Food Programme. Ultimately, I decided against it for two reasons: One, the words seemed a little to simple to offer any real challenge, and two, it just seemed too good to be true. Play a game, and corporate sponsors pony up for some carbs? There’s gotta be a catch, right?

That would have been the end of the matter, but the Metal Queen herself dropped me a line to recommend the game. Chastised, I did some poking around that the whole thing is on the up and up: You play, and the rice goes to them that needs it. Period. The words are still pretty simple, but I guess I can overlook that in the face of some overriding charity here. So go and play Free Rice – your vocabulary will get a little kick in the pants, and the world will be just a teeny tiny bit better for it. 10 grains of rice might not seem like a lot, but if you get 10 words right that is 100 grains for someone who would otherwise have just about zero. Zip zilch nada.

Bupkus.

And when bubkus is the alternative, 100 grains of rice is a lot.

UPDATE: An increase in sponsorship means that every word you hit the definition on will now buy 20 grains of rice instead of just 10. Which is twice as much, where as twice bupkus is still bupkus. So there is no excuse – take a few minutes out of your day and go play a few rounds. Everyone wins.

This one goes out to my pal Darryl, who once told me that his mom sorts laundry into three piles: green, white, and green & white. Enjoy, buddy … and be sure to put back a Pilsner for me.

Most of the fun in Factory Balls is actually figuring out how to play it, so I won’t say too much here. Suffice you say you have to get the balls into their boxes, and when you run out of balls in the ballblender your game is over. It’s fun, you need to use your brain and experiment, and it is prefect for a boring Friday afternoon at the office. The only caveat is that you cant turn the music off, so you will have to turn down the sound on your workstation. Enjoy.

Take It Off by The Donnas. If you followed the link to the “Josie & The Pussycats” video from last week’s entry, you will have noticed that the girls are obviously channelling The Donnas there. No complaints from this department – I have long thought that The Donnas are beyond awesome. And really, it doesn’t get any more awesome than Take It Off. Enjoy.

NOTE: The Donna’s link is an iTunes URL – if you don’t have iTunes on your box, you are going nowhere fast. So get with the program.

Back in the day, when I was just a little geekboy, the premium after-school snack was something we called a “peanut butter flipover”. The concept was simple – a single piece of bread, spread with peanut butter, and then folded in half (the “flipover”) to make what was essentially a half of a sandwich, but with what was effectively double peanut butter. There was a temptation, I believe, to extend this to a “peanut butter and jelly flipover”, but that did not have the same sublime perfection – doubling up on the “J” as well as the “PB” with the fold just made for a soggy sandwich. With a peanut butter flipover part of the appeal was definitely the comforting simplicity of the thing.

Anyway, that’s not the point here. The point here is that “Peanutbutter Flipover” would be a totally awesome name in Rock Band, and I offer it up free gratis. You want it, it’s all yours. Just make sure you do the name proud, okay?

Many of you are less than a week away from the release of Rock Band – specifically, those of you in the United States who are getting the game on November 20th. On behalf of the rest of us, who have to wait until December, allow me to point out that we hate your fucking guts. With a passion.

Ahem. Now then. There is a temptation by a lot of people to assume that this is just Guitar Hero with drums. This is a bit (okay, a lot) of an over-simplification: While Harmonix did build the basic mechanics of both games, Rock Band is a much deeper experience. The way that you manage your band’s career is just as important as hitting the notes – if you take a gig at a venue that is over your head and stink the place out, you will have to work for months to get back on track. A the stench of a bad show follows you around like dog shit on your shoe, destroying your reputation. Even small items like creating the setlist for your gig become – as in the real world – crucial decisions that can make or break a particular show and by extension, a career.

One of those small items – or, depending on your state of mind, not so small items – is the name of your band. The name you pick is not just for your own amusement – it will be publicly displayed on the networked progress boards, on the covers of magazines that document your progress, and in any on-line performance (being the opening act for a more experienced band is a great way to get exposure) you might get into. And while most of you probably have a Secret Awesome Band Name that you have been carrying around in the back of your head for ages, Harmonix has you covered if you can’t think of anything cool. There is a “name generator” in Rock Band and if you draw on it, the game will randomly take one word or phrase from list “A” and match it with one random word or phrase from list “B” to come up with your nom du guerre:

Some of the possible combinations are positively sublime – you would certainly be hard pressed to do better than “Weekend of the Loaf Dogs”, which has awesome Swedish heavy metal written all over it. Once again, Rock Band appears to rule large.

18: The percentage of all money spent on sporting goods in North America to goes towards golf equipment.

Three Small Words by Josie & The Pussycats. When I was a wee child I worshipped Josie & The Pussycats. I thought they were the pinnacle of cool – Josie was hot, Val was hot and smart, and Melody was … well, blonde. While other pre-teen boys were debating the relative merits of Betty and Veronica, I was jonesing for the Pussycats. Sabrina too, but that is a topic for a different post. So I reserved myself more than a small amount of trepidation when the news came out that they were making a live-action movie a few years ago – a boy does not want his childhood fantasies fucked with.

Luckily, the movie turned out to be pretty good. And the music rocked large – I was seriously worried about them cranking out some Britney-esque vomit, but someone with some actual vision and taste kept the thing on a worthwhile aural path. They only thing that they could have done to make it better was to get in a version of Every Beat Of My Heart … it was the signature tune for the original group, and which – like a lot of Motown-style R&B – would have been awesome in a punk-pop reissue. That’s a small quibble though – for the most part this thing is musically bang on, and Three Small Words certainly stands as a signature piece.

CODA 1: Sadly, you can’t easily buy this in any sort of downloadable format, because Sony Music is apparently run by assholes. If you decide to strike out on your own and download it for free, make sure you find the version that is 2:53 long – that is the real album version, and not the “promo” mix from the video above. You get to avoid the movie dialogue dub-ins and the Casey Kasem wannabe at the end there.

CODA 2: Sometimes you see this with “Letters To Cleo” as the artist. This is not entirely (or even mostly) accurate – while Kay Hanley did do the vocals here, the rest of the band is not involved in this project, something that should be immediately apparent by the obvious stylistic differences. Some people are musical feebs, however, and can’t seem figure this out.

For those that asked, here are a few snaps from this year’s Halloween decorations. I didn’t get as many as I wanted because it was crazy windy and I was kind of busy keeping everything in place.

This year I lighted the path up to the house with glowing skulls – I think it worked out well:

And I am really happy with the lighting effects I had at the end of the drive – this was the first thing the kids saw as they started to approach the house:

I had a lot of pumpkins again this year:

There were some interesting details to be found in the pumpkin patch as you got close to the house:

And I put in some outdoor UV emitters right by the house, which meant that the pumpkin patch got even more interesting when you got right up to the candy:

I also shot some raw video, I may post it later. For now, this should at least sate your curiosity. Enjoy.

A long time ago in These Very Pages there was a brief discussion of the Creationist Museum that a narrow-minded subset of Christian types were sinking unfathomable amounts of money into … apparently in the hopes of luring some more morons into their morass of fricktard beliefs. And as laughable as the whole thing is, I have to admit that I was curious – part of me wanted to see what kind of freak show they were putting on in there. And, as an adjunct, to find out if anyone was actually buying into this bizarre dogmatic vision.

Now we know – and it didn’t even cost me 20 bucks. Make sure you check out the pictures while you are at it – some of them are gold.

1155: The number of kilowatt-hours needed to drive a Toyota Prius from Boston to San Diego.

If you think that this whole bit with the name “Android” is an attempt by Google to keep their name off of the product, go to the head of the class. They will happily take development dollars from the Consortium of Idiots, but there is no way they are stupid enough to let their name be tarnished by being attached to this piece of crap.

You don’t get that rich by being stupid.

Sadly, I did not get to see the gigantic Blue Screen Of Death on The Bay’s flagship store. The thing apparently sat there for three days, but someone sent me this image that was taken on Sunday evening:

Damn. I was going to make a side trip tomorrow just to see it. Kind of like all the pilgrims going to Mecca, except way more holy. But now, well, it would be like going to Graceland after they dug up Elvis and moved him away – the vibe just wouldn’t be the same.

So Google’s “open clusterfuck” framework for mobile phones is actually going to be referred to as “Android” – not the Google Phone, not the Gphone, not even the Hey Microsoft, Take Your Windoze Mobile And Shove It Up Your Ass Phone. Fine – as stupid as I think it is, I will play along and call it by its given name. I’m a good sport that way.

So – there is now a font set for Android called (with some starling originality) “Droid”. And you know what? It looks pretty good. You can’t really tell for sure with these things until you see them in “combat conditions” but as far as the actual design goes, I like it. A lot. Big kudos to Ascender for getting this piece right.

Public displays of the Blue Screen Of Death are nothing new – in These Very Pages we’ve had them on gas pumps, mall directories, and (rather distressingly) on the arrivals and departures boards at the Calgary airport. And while those were all heartwarming examples of the folly of trying to use Windoze for anything that might be even remotely mission-critical, they pale in comparison to this display of the BSOD at The Bay’s flagship store in Toronto:

Could anything be more awesome? No, of course not. Stupid question.

1155: The number of kilowatt-hours saved by a 1500 lumen compact fluorescent bulb during the lifespan of the bulb, as compared to 1500 lumen incandescent bulbs.

There are three new “Get A Mac” ads hitting the airwaves this week, all of them trying to get some mileage out of the ongoing Longhorn Vista woes. “Boxer” is pretty weak, and “PR Lady” is okay … but “Podium” is total gold. Love it to pieces!

I wanted to write something about Remembrance Day and try as I might, I couldn’t come up with anything I liked as much as what I wrote last year. So I am linking to that post and I will leave it to stand as is … I hope you don’t mind.

66: The average points per season tallied by Eric Lindros in the NHL.

A couple of people dropped snarky notes along the lines of “ha ha, the Google phone means the iPhone is dead.” These are clearly people with a complete inability to think things through – the fact of the matter is that if the platform that Google promises ever sees the light of day, it will be the best thing that could ever happen to the iPhone.

The problem right now is that every single smartphone on the market can be lumped into one of three categories:

Phones that dont suck: The iPhone
Phones that suck for everything except email, which they do very very well: The Blackberry
Phones that completely and utterly suck: Everything Else.

First, this is not a good situation for the ongoing progression and evolution of the smartphone in general and particularly the iPhone. The thing needs a valid competitor – something to push the need for more interesting and elegant functions and more imaginative uses. Right now, a stagnant iPhone is still going to be head and shoulders above anything else out there five years from now if they continue with their current hopeless structure.

Second, Apple is fighting to get consumers and service providers to understand that a phone should be a thing of value – a powerful device that is worth what you pay for it (and what it costs to build) – and not a loss-leader giveaway to lock people into long-term contracts. The Gphone (sorry, at this point I refuse to call it “Android”) model would seem to push hardware development along those lines, putting consumers back into the role of evaluating the device in the same way they would any other item of value.

These are both good things, and I really hope this pans out. I worry though – this is so far from Google’s normal release and development model (make the product first, give it to the masses for testing, and then announce it) and I cant help but smell the sweet aroma of vapourware. If nothing else, this coming hard on the heels of the inane “OpenSocial” thing make me wonder if Google’s new business model isn’t something along the lines of “line up suckers to take the fall for us while we push Wall Street into rabid frenzies over nothing.” Certainly I am not alone – both the nebulous development schedule and the bizarre “consortium” are giving greater minds than mine reason to pause. I think Fake Steve hit it right on the head:

The only companies that join consortia are the ones who are too stupid or shitty to make a great product on their own. It’s like, Hey, we’ve got forty spazzo companies that can’t fuck their way out of a paper bag; let’s put them all together and maybe they’ll magically become some kind of big bad powerhouse …

… whenever you see companies start talking about being “open,” it means they’re getting their ass kicked. You think Google will be forming an OpenSearch alliance any time soon, to help also-rans in search get a share of the spoils? Me neither.

Time will tell. But as much as I hope the Gphone works out for everyone, I am not holding my breath. Blue is not my colour.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away …

Hang on, wrong post.

Er, a long time ago (and I am showing my age here) the “bleeding edge” in videogame technology was “3D vector” graphics. This was nothing more than a fancy way of saying “straight lines” but it was a huge step forward because the graphics were scalable – as they moved towards you, they could get bigger, providing a very shaky illusion of depth. The best know of these titles was Atari’s Battle Zone but there were other lesser known entries as well.

Vector Runner is a tip of the retro hat to those games, mixed with a bit of Pole Position and without the stupid pointy tank that you could never ever kill. Use your arrow keys to steer your ever-accelerating cube – er, vehicle and try not to hit the cones while grabbing the coloured power-ups.

It’s pretty much a twitch-fest, bit it is also a fun little time-waster for 5 or 10 minutes on a Thursday afternoon – made more interesting by the rather unique feature wherein it costs points to pause, and the basic sort of inertia that the playfield seems to be subject to. Have fun.

There has been much discussion about the new Time Machine feature in Leopard – a fair chunk of it driven by the fact that there is some serious eye candy involved. The retrogrouches in the audience have complained about something as utilitarian as a backup feature having “star wars” special effects … they think it somehow cheapens or trivializes what is (for them) a near-religious experience.

Hey, backups are important, but not that important.

What these people are missing is the fact that the eye candy will be the thing that finally gets some chronic non-backupers (Hi, mom) to start paying attention to this sort of thing – if they backup simply because Time Machine “looks cool” then the whole thing is a success. And you have to admit that it does look (in the immortal words of Steve Jobs) insanely great.

What people should be talking about is the fact that Time Machine backs up and provides access to deleted and lost items, but it is not a bootable backup. If your whole system blows up, you need to recover first (from your boot DVD or whatever) and then use TM to get your shit back. This is a crucial distinction, and if you want to save a lot of time if this ever happens, you should have a bootable backup on a different volume than your Time Machine files – preferably, one that you store in another house / office / cave / whatever.

Since you probably want to do that on the cheap, try SuperDuper. It is probably the best stand-alone one-shot backup software out there – I know some people swear by Carbon Copy Cloner, but SuperDuper seems to be faster and – important thing here – the basic functions are absolutely free. you only have to pay for the thing if you want incremental or “smart” backups. Get a copy of SuperDuper and a cheap USB external drive (I have seen 150GB ones as cheap as 79 bucks at Costco) and make yourself a bootable recovery disk. Then update it every week – if you have that, the worst you can ever loose is a week’s worth of crap, and Time Machine is ready to jump in and fill those particular blanks.

Get SuperDuper. You’ll thank me later.