Web Cam Hit With Particle Accelerator

The CCD sensor is literally "shot-blast" with protons. The stream is created via the CRaTER instrument, which is part of a NASA experiment detailing the effects of space radiation on electronic components.

A similar DIY experiment.

[via MAKE]

No Humans Inside

I recently snapped this picture of the box a Mackie passive monitor was packed in. Good to know that they are spending time stamping out the ignorance over how loudspeakers work :)

Mackie are in a spot of bother at the moment as one of the main factories that produced their products in China has gone bust. No Mackie product production till mid 2009.

Apple, The Sacred Fruit

I came across this recent post on the businesspundit.com. Its a list of 15 images parodying the logo's of 15 well known companies. They are amusing to be fair but hardly hilarious. The wonky Dell logo to the left is an example of one of them.

At the very end of the piece there is a "Bonus Logo" featuring a take on the Apple brand, where there are numerous bites taken out of the Apple shape. Fair enough, on a par with the others, except of course for the disclaimer they printed before it:

"While Apple is probably one of the more stable companies in our economy, with a robust and diverse set of high-demand products… we just couldn’t resist this one."

Oh but of course Apple is stable, and totally robust! The products are indeed diverse.... you've got the iPod, the iPhone, the iBook, the iCrap.... Apple don't just make products, they make plastic miracles! So then, what would you expect if we plotted Apple's share prices between Dec '07 and Dec '08, against an "insolvent" company, say like Dell?


Click to view the full 12 months

Dell shares lost a massive 57.38% of their value whereas Apple shares only lost a tiny 56.86% of their "robust" value. The difference of .52% between the two, is cosmic in vastness! Apple deliberately lowered their share value of course, because they felt the aesthetics of a shares graph with rising trends didn't look cool anymore, and because they're such trend setters, everyone else, like Dell, followed suit. Thats the real reason why there's recession now, nothing to do with sub-prime loans or bad banking practices, nooooo.... its just because of Apple's fashion sense. Yep!

Why do people blindly worship Apple? Mother of fucking Christ, why! Fact is, Apple are just as vulnerable as any other company. They were in serious danger of going out of business a couple of years ago before they introduced the iPod. I'm surprised that a website with a name like "Business Pundit" should come out with such bilge, it certainly doesn't instil confidence in the rest of their content.

Absolute Christmas

The bottle came in a beautiful sequin jacket, with velour trim and lining. I had to buy it just for that, I mean its very "festive" isn't it :)

You'll never Guess What Santa Brought

Santa brought misery, petulance, disease, pain, dementia and delirium. I woke up Christmas morning with a humongous pain in my head. Probably not all that bad but I never get headaches so something must have been humongously wrong. I took a single paracetamol hoping it would clear it up. 30 minutes later, I'm dying with the flu. Throat all swelled up, snot running down me arse, coughing and spluttering. The most bizarre illness I ever suffered. Headache was gone though.

The disease got worse as the day rolled on. Then the headache came back and brought some chums in the form of leg and arm pain. Headed to bed late after a good dose of Wii'ing (Those Wii yokes are great things, I might have to get one myself). I wake up at 4.30am, sweat pouring off me. I'm unable to clear my head. I'm not sure who or where I am. My inner monologue is non existence, its been replaced with dialogue from Star Trek Voyager. I'm trying to figure out if I'm well or not and all I can hear in my head is the voice of the Doctor giving a run down of my vital signs. Fearing I was dying or at the very least, that my brain was melting, I turn on the light to try and snap myself out of my confusion. A few minutes pass and I regain some of my faculties. Unable to sleep, I ironically, start watching a few episodes of Star Trek Voyager, fondly remembering how brilliant Seven Of Nine was.

I wake up a 1pm. All symptoms of the flu gone, save for the headache, which is much worse. As I write this now, I am suffering no symptoms of anything whatsoever (except some bloating from over eating). I do feel as if, there's more to come though. A very strange ailment to round off 2008.

Merry Christmas

Christmas Thingies

I really don't know what these things are. The first thing you'd think of is that they're some kind of decoration you stick in the ground, but if that were the case then why are they so well decorated on the part that would be hidden.

I've narrowed it down to two possibilities: Novelty Love Lengths, or a festive way to kill Dracula.

Yes, It was Katy Perry!

Just look at the amount of makeup on her, she's almost been plastinated. Check out the high-res version and see if you can spot any pores left uncovered (I count 2 and a half).

There are more related images of Katy Perry here at usemycomputer.com.


Original (well, the original edit)

Man Shoves His Finger Into Table Saw

Now thats faith in technology! Cool for so many reasons!

[via The AnarchAngel]

Guess Who!

This man or woman (ha!), had a very heavy covering of makeup. I was originally going to joke that it was a picture of a dolls head I got my niece for Christmas, but somehow her boobs migrated north during the editing process(just like in that banned episode of Nip/Tuck). I got bored half way though (typical man), so its not as good as it could have been. Guess who anyway.

Christmas Disco

As heard on Victor Barry's RedFM radioshow thing last Thursday night. As soon as I heard the disco version of "The 12 Days Of Christmas" being played in the background, I knew I had to have it, and the WFMU Blog provided! They have the second Christmas Disco album available for download but I found the original amidst the comments section.

There's some classic cheese on both albums, a welcome relief from the same old tired "Xmas Hitz" we get every year. There's plenty of Moog action on each too! So download and enjoy that feeling of being Clark Griswold in Christmas Vacation.

I uploaded both albums in a rar file. Link in the comments section.

Karaoke Zeuhl

There are a few people out there who like Zeuhl music (Magma etc) but don't care for the singing. Here's a little ditty you may be interested in. It's a bootleg instrumental version of Magma's last studio album, KA. Personally I'm a fan of the singing but its very interesting to be able to get a closer listen to the musicianship on the original album.



Download it at ---> zeuhlmusic.blogspot.com

The Prodigy - Invaders Must Die

A month old, but I just got hold of it now. First off: The video is crap, both visually and sonic'wise, get yourself a good MP3 of it for your own reviewing purposes.


Right so well hmmmm.... The Prodigy sound has once again changed. It's more rock-like than ever, so old school ravers are probably going to hate this even more than the last album. Keeping it brief, the song reminds me of late 1990's BBC children's TV programming. I'm getting images of Billie Piper and school uniforms when I listen to it (paedophelia FTW!). It's like the kind of theme music Top Of The Pops would have used if it was still going. In fact, hmmmmm.... didn't the de-facto TOTP's theme tune (Paul Hardcastles "The Wizzard") have a similar melody??? Listen for yourself....



Final verdict on "Invaders Must Die": pfff... it's easy to listen to, energetic, retrophonic, nostalgia inducing... I'll listen to it repeatedly but won't admit to it.... It's pop music.

And because I mentioned Billie, I can't finish without a picture of herself :) And look, there she is in front of a sign for the afore mentioned TOTP. Damn, I remember the first time I saw her of TOTP too...damn damn....

Mary Kenny on Atheism [independant.ie]

"I am convinced that this injection of atheism into the culture is directly responsible for the increase in drug-abuse, in crime and, most specifically, in the five-fold increase in suicide that we have seen in these islands over the last 25 years."

A direct quote from an article she wrote in a recent issue of The Irish Independent newspaper. An article fraught with factual errors I may add (no shit eh?). She continues to detail how Atheism is causing infanticide, by neglect, in society:

"That is a life without moral parameters; in which fathers walk away from their children because the state provides all welfare; in which relationships are casual, and a variety boyfriends and serial stepfathers move in; in which mothers spend the day smoking dope, drinking vodka and cruising for sex on the internet, while their children die with broken backs -- among filth and excrement, dead mice and pet snakes."

And people wonder why I say The Independent is the worst 'paper in Ireland. For years I've read article after article of badly written schlock, the likes of which you wouldn't expect to see even on a blog like this! What makes this rag so vile is that it masquerades as a broadsheet, something which even the Daily Mail doesn't do.

You want to know the best thing about Mary Kenny though? She was a founder member of the original feminist movement in Ireland, the "Irish Women’s Liberation Movement". She was even one of the women who traveled up to Belfast in 1971 on the so-called "Contraception Train" to buy prophylactics which were illegal at the time in Ireland. Their illegal status, was at the behest of the Catholic Church.

[via The Atheist Campaign]

Annoyed

Things like this really annoy me. I was augmenting a stupid little 8bit C64 tune I made in Reason a few weeks back. Oh nothing to get excited about, its the first time I ever tried anything 8bit'ty and its very sloppy and lazy, un-gritty and crap.... I had some apreggiated chords that extended past the end of the main song, just some improvised stuff. I decided to lay down a bass part to this, again improvised. The first take was great (or so I thought) but I had set it to automatically quantise recorded notes and because a lot of it was laid-back, it didnt sound right. So I recorded a second take. This one was even better! The keys were on fire! When I went to play it back though, I realised that I had recorded on the same track as the quantised take and as such no way to seperate the two. I tried a third take but the moment had passed and I just gave up. Grrrr....

iGoogle: Attack of the Roundy Corners

Google's iGoogle is great isn't it? Shit name, but great service. I use it everytime I open a browser. Imagine my surprise this morning when when I fired up the old iGoogle's and see that they've changed things about. [I should point out that this version of iGoogle is not the one I get at google.ie, thats still the old one. I seem to have stumbled upon this via google.com] So whats new about it.



Well anyone familiar with iGoolge will see a new tab thingy on the left hand side. Now you can expand any of your google widgets (including gmail!) inside iGoolge, meaning that you never have to leave iGoogle again. Great! Fab! Brillo! I love it, I can't wait for this to become the norm with google.ie. There's another change though, a change much more unsettling: "Roundy Corners".



That's the old iGoogle above... see the square corners on the widgets. So what have I got against round corners? Nothing, but Google made a huge deal when revamping their RSS Reader that "Square is the new round". They changed all the round edges in Reader to square, demanding that it "looked better". Now they've done the opposite to iGoogle.

I'm beginning to wonder if Google's been infected by some kind of "Irish Planning" bug.

The Thermal Moon

I took a few pictures of the moon with a thermal imaging camera in the early hours of this morning (you know how it is, thermal imagaging camera's just laying about waiting to be used).


I'm not sure how accurate it is, but as you can see, there's a definate temperature contrast between the moon and the space surrounding it. The camera can't register temperatures below -40C so thats where the readings bottom out. The top temperature was dampened by the smallest amounts of cloud cover.


The scale used in this image shows the gradual temperature changes within the structure of the cloud covering.


Here's a rabbit hiding from the cold (and a freak with a camera) in the ditch behind a gate. It was quite a cold night, and there I was without gloves. I nearly got frost bite! The temperature in my poor little digits dropped to 8C.

[Moon Wiki]
[Thermal Imaging Wiki]

Countdown

I caught Countdown for the first time in years on Wednesday. Yes, it was literally years ago since I watched it last. Oh its such great fun with the music, and the letters, and the numbers, and the conundrums.... and the Carol Voderman! Now there's a woman if ever there was one! A woman with a big brain, and a big arse! That's perfection man, that's cosmic equilibrium right there! The show was a perfect blend of brain and brawn, it was like masturbation for your mind. It's not the same without Richard Whiteley though :(

Anyway, during my searching this morning I found a blog dedicated to Carol Voderman's bottom. Have fun!

http://carolsbum.co.uk/

[UPDATE] I had no idea when posting this that today was Vorderman's last appearance on Countdown! Spooky! I told you she was cosmic! :)

LOST In Time

I've been wondering how long before it was back, I wonder no longer.

[via DJ Electra]

Is Firefox Just As Shit As IE?

For a long long time I resisted using Firefox as an internet browser of choice. I could never understand why people raved about it. Regarding security and stuff... in real life, the dirtier the prostitute, the better your protection better be, the same with websites. Bad practice is always the number cause of infection.

The tabs thing never interested me either. I've gotten used to them in IE now, and to be fair, they do clean up things a bit. As for add-on's... not really interested in a bloated fat-client either. Not sure what else is so great about Firefox.

I have been using Firefox and one of its derivatives, Flock, for about 2 years now. Yeah, they're browsers and the work fine. Nothing amazing though. Now for the nub of my argument. I launch up Firefox; I wonder why the internet has gotten slow; then suddenly a big fuck off window comes up telling me "Updates will be installed the next time Firefox starts". Firefox and other Mozilla based browsers are updated every second fucking day! Sure you could turn automatic updates off, and I have in the past, but I swap things around so much that it seems theres always one copy of it somewhere that I haven't disabled it on.

Now I'm a realist, I understand things need to be fixed and updated, but why the fuck did Microsoft get such a bashing over this for years? As is obvious to even the dimmest Apple iFanboy, the more popular something becomes the more likely it will need greater and greater fixes, either because of diverse compatibility issues or a greater threat from external malicious behavior. Lambaste Windows all you like, but you really think if Linux and Mac OS were rolled out to the same scale as Windows in the morning, there wouldn't be the same amount of problems? "Like OMG, my iMovie isn't working with my iCheapChineseKnockOffTvInPCICard". Oh thats too bad, how about trying a good helping of iGoFuckYourself?

Vista is a chink in the armor to be fair. Its a pile of shit. The kernel is fine but the interface is like fighting your way through a wall of piss flaps armed with nothing more than a rubber stamp. Does that not make sense? No, neither does Vista.

And one last thing. Why was it called "patching" for IE and "updates" for Firefox? Shit smells the same no matter what you call it. Evil M$ and their never ending list of "patches", ready to fuck up your system with a set of splash n' dash fixes. Good nice saintly Firefox and their magic list of update treasures, ready to enrich your life with delicious new features. Bollocks!

I've nothing against Firefox, just the bullshit surrounding it. I'm using Google Chrome 90% of the time now anyway. Flock 5%, Firefox 4%... So you think 1% for IE right? Nope, its .5% Opera and .5% IE. I'd use Chrome constantly if it were possible in all situations.

Obama Is The Antichrist?

[ 2012 UPDATE: http://gammagoblin.blogspot.com/2012/05/barack-obama-antichrist-incarnate.html ]


There I was, browsing through Christian films (I do that every now and again). I found one gem, "Countdown to Armageddon", which was made in 1996. It's another one of those, "the world is more evil now than ever" productions. I was having a good old chuckle their take on the world as it was in 1996. They came out with things like Jamie Bulger's killing is a sign that the end is nigh. Then the topic of the Antichrist raised its horny head. The laughing stopped and I thought "holy shit", to myself. They had described the Antichrist just as you'd describe Barack Obama!



Lets look at the points:

• "Great charisma, and speaking ability" People complained that we don't know what Obama's agenda's are. Some wondered, does he actually have any real ideas at all, but everyone has agreed that he's got a silver tongue and shit loads of charisma.

• "rise to power on a wave of world euphoria" Everyone in the world is talking about Obama. Even in Ireland people were crying over his election. I'd say thats a "wave of world euphoria" if ever I heard one.

• "saves the world from its economic and political problems" The world economy is currently fucked. Will he fix it? Well we don't know yet, but whats being said everywhere (even here) is that he brings hope, hope for a great change.
  

• "7 year plan" 8 years in office (if he gets reelected)
  

• "does not regard the desire of women" Two female candidates involved in the last election. A woman running for president, first time ever! He smited them both. If you read this line of scripture backwards and inside-out it kinda makes sense, kinda... ok its a weak point.
  

• "stern look" Yes!

• "3 and a half years into his 7 year reign, he will break the covenant" Now this is the spookiest part of all. Obama takes over in 2009, 3 and a half years after that is the middle of 2012. Scriptures say that very soon after the covenant is broken, Jesus will return and Judgement Day will be upon us.. "Very soon after" the middle of 2012 is the much bespoke of, "End of the Mayan Calander." There are countless separate accounts and reasons for why 2012 might be the end of the world as we know it. I first heard about this back in the 90's when reading about Terence McKenna's description on his Time-Wave Zero theory. Theres also fractal-time theories, black holes and other jobbies.
  

Ok so, you think it's all coincidence then huh? Old gamma's gone a bit gammy... You're probably saying "but this could refer to anyone." Absolutely it could, but this was made in 1996, long before any mention of Obama. So what if its a bit wooly, and the producers of the film predicted that the Antichrist might in fact be a Russian, that doesnt prove anything! If you still think this is fiction, what have you got to say about the following then! Listen back to the start of the video...

• "The rise of a one world governemt, headed by a superhuman dictator"

Watch this, from the mouth of the "beast" himself!





Not only does he mock the birth of his enemy, but he also refers to himself as superhuman. Or how about this? Or These?? Oh you may laugh now, but in 2012 when the 4 monkey men of the apocalyptic Armageddon are chasing after you, don't come running to me. So fall on your knees now and begged to be saved by the Jeebus!

[Obama image via Wonkette]

The New Google Reader... again

I still hate it. I still think the white sidebar is terrible. Reading other blog posts and comments, most other people seem to think so too, except of course for davelarkan and Alfin who left me comments on my original post, telling me I was wrong and that there must be something wrong with my vision. Well most other people must also have problems with their vision so.

There's some good news for Firefox users however. trashrockx has written a Greasemonkey script which changes the colours back to something like the original which is an awful lot easier on the eye. So now you have the best of both worlds, new features with old colours. Excellent, but since I'm Chrome user, I'll have to wait till Google "fix" what they broke.



How anyone can argue that this doesn't look better is beyond me. It's probably only a matter of time before Google introduce themes for Reader anyway.

[via sarahintampa.com]

365th Post... one day at a time

Well the plan has come to fruition! Over the last 12 months I have clocked up 364 posts , not including this one. So it now averages out at 1 post per day. I can now retire this blog for the year and relax for a few weeks! Happy Christmas everyone, I'm outta here!

Whats that? A leap year you say? Theres actually 366 days this year? No you're mistaken... you see.. you didn't carry the one and divide by the 2.... and....

Mother fuckin' leap years!

Google Fucked Up Their Feed Reader

How many experts do you need to tell you that colour coding works better with humans? There's an old saying down by the bayou, "white is shite!". Don't care if the shapes are round-ways or square-ways... the whole thing is just arse-ways now!

 Look, the old way had everything catagorised with colours. Nice!

[More at the Reader Blog]

No "wins" In The Green Party Flickr Stream

I went through the whole Green Party Flickr stream and there are no wins! The above image is the closest we get. And if youre not impressed with "Green Party Press Officer Nicola Cassidy", then try Green Party associate JJ Power below!




Say what you like, but at least he actually looks like an authentic Green Party member. He looks like a guy that would be out in the woods chopping down trees.... no wait, planting! Out in the woods planting trees :)

There's a few nice hi-res stock images of nature and CFL lamps and stuff, so theyre ripe for stealing. All images are UHQ actually. My personal favorite though, is a picture of former Green Party leader Trevor Sargent at the Young Scientist Of The Year competition. There he is rubbing his hands, next to a school girl, with a "mwhahahaha" expression on his face. Poor old Trevor, his resignation was the lube that eased the Green Party into bed with Fianna Fail.




[via Mulley.net]

Someone Broke The LHC

Remember that big LHC thing every raved about a few months back? No? I'm not surprised, no-one cares much for science unless its tinged with black holes that swallow up children, and the 'big ol round yoke at CERN' didnt do that so the gutter press stopped writing about it, and the dregs stopped reading about it.

Anyway, long story short: its fucked and wont be in action till possibly 2010. Some n00b messed up one of the solder joints on part of the cooling system and the whole lot melted. Yeah, so much for finding a Higgs Boson anytime soon. But of course time is relative, and it slows down the faster you travel, and if gravity is matter accellerating along the 4th spacial axis, then what would happen if a train left London at 1pm and travelled north for 20 minutes at 200mph? The names, Higgs Boson, Private I!

Some Links relating to the LHC and its current problems...

[Daily Tech Article On Why The LHC Is Not Working]

[A Picture Of The LHC (Large Hardon Collider) *nsfw(Note The Middle Word!)* ]

[Story via usemycomputer.com : Image via Gameboy Genius]

Venus, Jupiter and the Crescent Moon

This apparently only happens once in a life time (next is in 2052) and I caught it by accident driving home from work. I ran for my camera but both batteries were banjaxed (not just flat, but actually dead... they need replacing) so I only got off a few snaps before the whole lot died on me. Didn't get to see the occultation though :(



[More at the BBC]

David Norris, fisting!

A great pic I found in the Daily Mail recently. There's a high res version if you click on the image above. Handy for some future 'shops perhaps.

[David Norris]

Gail Trimble: University Challenge

I was watching University Challenge on Monday, and I spotted this girl on the team from Corpus Christi, Oxford. I thought she was lovely. I love intelligent women, its just a thing of mine... oh and she had glasses and really nice hair :)

So I took a few pics with my phone, using a pin hole in a piece of newspaper to get the aperture open and increased shutter speed, to cancle out the refresh rate clash between the camera and tv. The pics weren't great, timing was a bitch. After a little bit of sharpening and levels the above pic looks like the tv was in space, which I deliberately left like that :)

I did a little googling this evening to see what I could find out about her. I was shocked when I found this blog post filled with bile and hatred against her Monday night appearance on University Challenge. The guy hates Prog Rock keyboard players, explains it all really :) Oh and he puts himself down a lot... hmmm issues. One last thing, he thinks Brian Cox is "a genuinely cool scientist". And I think Cox a smarmy cunt who knows fuck all... just goes to show how opinions differ. "Brian's Cock", more like! Can't believe he's this generations Richard Dawkins. Yuck!

Anyway, here's a little something else about Gail in Oxford :) Oh and her Monday night appearance on TV gets a mention on a Long Hair Fetish forum too. God bless the internet! :)




[UPDATE 24.02.09] Gail Trimble & Corpus Christi Disqualified For Cheating in Final!

[Gail Trimble Creates Traffic, 22.02.09]

[UPDATE New Post here]