Category: Scary

Reading and Watching Material

Some videos and some interesting reads for you all (videos after the jump as to not clog up the front page):

The Best of 2010 lists are tricklying out, so here are a couple: The Source’s Top 10 Local News Stories of 2010 and imgur’s Top Images of 2010.
A great list of Free and Paid SEO Tools.
Diving into the heart of Stuxnet, one of the most frightening viruses I’ve seen.
I don’t know where I came across this guy, but Engineer Guy has a bunch of great videos and whitepapers that take some high-end engineering topics and explain them to us common folk.
I may have linked to this before, but I’m doing it again, now that we have an Wii and can try it: Dolphin Emulator is an emulator for GameCube and Wii games that can run Wii games at 1080p.
Putting the Record Straight on the Lamo-Manning Chat Logs.
If you’re looking at msconfig or your startup applications list and don’t recognize something, pretty good chance you can find it here.
Adsense, no sense at all –
what it’s like being sacked by a computer.
Install Mac OS X on any Intel-based PC. Now I just need an extra PC that doesn’t suck to try this on (I have lots of old PCs, but nothing that would run OS X worth squat).
Rosetta Code aims to “present solutions to the same task in as many different languages as possible.” It’s interesting to see how a bunch of different programming language solve the same problem.
An interesting read: The Great Tax Con Job (or why the richer are getting richer and why folk like us are getting screwed).

Read on for the videos…

December 30, 2010

Amazon Sold 158 Items Per Second on Cyber-Monday

Yes, you read that right. Their press-release is here, the TechCrunch article is here. It’s an amazing number. I’d like to see how many orders, say, Best Buy’s retail stores did on Black Friday, for comparison.

I personally have avoided Black Friday the last few years, and haven’t missed it one bit. We bought a bulk majority of our gifts this year on Amazon. Thanks to my wife’s eligibility for Amazon Mom and the Amazon Prime that came with it, it made it stupidly easy and fast that it was really hard to pass up.

December 28, 2010

Remember when Bend used to be a quiet town with very little violent crime?

Not so much.

BEND, Ore. — Two people were killed and one wounded in an apparent shooting at a home in northwest Bend Thursday evening, police said.
Around 5:50 p.m., Deschutes County 911 dispatchers got a 911 call and responded to the 60000 block of Fresca Street, said Lt. Ben Gregory.
They arrived to find three people inside with injuries – two dead and a third taken by Bend Fire ambulance to St. Charles Medical Center-Bend, Gregory said.

Video link here.

The family and I were enjoying some donuts when the news broke, and the donut shop owner said there were a pile of police cars speeding up third street to the scene. Scary stuff.

Maybe it’s just that we have better news coverage now than we did back in the day (thanks to the ‘net), but I just don’t remember hearing about all this kind of stuff nearly as often when I was younger.

December 15, 2010

69 Years Later, These Images Are Still Haunting

Pearl Harbor was attacked 69 years ago today. My grandfather and grandmother were both there that day (he in the Navy), and managed to survive the attack, but I do know if you were to show these images to either one of them (my grandfather passed away when I was a teenager), it would undoubtedly bring back memories they’d rather not have.

December 7, 2010

Reason I Hate My Commute #156

Driving home tonight (around 5:40 or so) from Sunriver on the newly constructed northbound lanes (which are very nice), I came about three feet from clobbering a gigantic bull elk (who had an enormous rack of antlers) who decided to skip across the highway in the dark. My car is little and weighs about 42 pounds and would have easily been totaled had I not slammed on my brakes and swerved at the last second.

What’s funny (and sad at the same time) is that the area where the near-miss occurred was less than 100 yards (at most) from the underpass on the northbound lanes that was built specifically for wildlife to use to avoid going across the road (it’s not on the map, but it’s there). Needless to say, Mr. Elk didn’t get the memo to use the safe(r) passage.

November 15, 2010

They Crapped Their Pants So We Don’t Have To

I cannot imagine looking up and seeing this and not being scared to death. Yet they still moved on, which I can’t say that I would’ve done. Those were brave folks. That being said, I think I’d be even more frightened if I saw this.

Happy Veterans Day and thank you to all that have served.

(Photo/headline/links via Reddit.)

November 11, 2010

My Eyes Hurt

And frankly, so do my ears (make sure you have the sound on for the full effect). It’s like an early 90s Geocities site with some home-sung background music thrown in for fun.

Thanks Nathan for the link.

October 21, 2010

Reading Material

Ben Heck creates another masterpiece: A Xbox 360 Slim Portable.
CC&Rs are really obnoxious. This is a great way to fight back.
In case you hadn’t seen it (watch here or here), the Banksy-created Simpsons opening http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/the-simpsons-explains-its-button-pushing-banksy-opening/.
TechSpaceBend is running an UnConference this week and it looks like a load of fun.
Why I love Reddit: A little girl who has a terminal disease is picked on by jackass neighbors. 4Chan makes the neighbor’s life a living hell (which I support, as the folks were jerks), but Reddit responds by spoiling the little girl rotten for which the girl was grateful.
Apple trademarks “There’s an App For That.” I guess to avoid getting sued, I should put ™ when printing that here. Or not.
Entitifier will quickly convert and escape any nasty characters that should be entities.
If you need to create a quick-and-dirty 16×16 icon, here’s a simple site to help you do it.
Subway.com had some hideous code that amazingly rendered (see the ugly HTML source here). Subway fixed the problem, thanked Reddit. It’s still ugly code, but not nearly as much as before.
Finally, a use for all those unneeded phone books: walls for a shed.
Thanks to the Army and a bunch of scientists, we may have found out why honeybees are dying.
gmapcatcher is a great little tool for offline map reading.
Do-it-Yourself Doodler produces some interesting results.
Using Photoshop channels to remove backgrounds from images.
Put this on the list of things I didn’t know Photoshop could do: Multi-object editing with Smart Objects.
A breakdown of all the various fees that airlines charge.
A site dedicated to Web Apps and how to use them: NothingToInstall.
How many computing cores is too many?
VideoEgg acquires Six Apart and creates SAY Media. Six Apart created MovableType, the software running this site. Despite this news, the product is not dead and here’s a great several part write-up as to why you should use Movable Type.
Modern gamers are pansies compared to classic hardcore gamers.
If a file exists, there’s a torrent of it. If not, Burnbit will create it.
Everything you wanted to know about computer keyboards but were afraid to ask.
I was playing with Fedora on a laptop the other day, and this installation guide came in handy.
I wasn’t aware such an event existed, but a local windshield repair guy won the Windshield Repair Olympics.
Use dropbox to trigger torrent downloads.
AES Encryption explained with simple animations.
Before Michael J. Fox was in Back to the Future, Eric Stoltz was Marty McFly.
Line Rider done entirely in HTML5.

October 12, 2010

Dinner On A Budget?

Screw that: I’m all about blowing as much frickin’ money as possible.

October 5, 2010

Need To Charge Your iPod?

You could use an umbilical cord.

October 3, 2010

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