Gadgetopia

File this under strange things on eBay; a spice rack and a poltergeist in a package deal.

I purchased this spice rack at an old thrift shop a few months back and ever since paranormal and unexplainable things have been occuring… the sound of an elderly woman humming in the kitchen as if to entertain herself while baking, banging of pots and pans have also been heard. Spices… have rearranged themselves overnight… Whenever I’m in the kitchen I also feel like someone is watching me… Trying to sell it in hopes that the spirit haunting my kitchen will follow along with the spice rack once belonging to them in there physical life.

Wonder if the seller or buyer will somehow post a followup report; it’d be interesting to see if the haunting goes along with the rack or not.

Link

My Documents: “A Cro-Soft Community Building thing!” Here’s a great skit on YouTube, in the tradition of Abbot & Costello’s “Who’s on First.”

Anybody else have trouble explaining the whole My Computer/My Documents thing to a newbie?

Ever wonder what would happen if you threw a ball out the back of a moving vehicle at the same speed the vehicle was moving? I have — my little brother & I argued about this when we were kids, but Dad would never let us try it. Some Japanese guys had the same question in mind, and went as far as setting up a pretty sophisticated experiment involving a truck and a pitching machine, made a video of it & put it up on YouTube for our edification.

The ball does pretty much what I thought it would — it falls to the pavement. No rips in the space-time continuum, no vacuum vortex sucking the contents of the vehicle out the back, or anything else my brother thought would happen. Just a tad disappointing. I half hoped he was right.

But after seeing that video, what I really want to know now is why the driver was wearing a helmet but the guy riding in the back of the truck wasn’t. Hmmm…

from haha.nu

So here I was this morning, cruising along having a relatively productive day. Then I check Neatorama once real quick and find the link to this perfectly addictive Flash game; Bloxorz. So much for a getting much done this afternoon.

Click the link and kiss your productivity goodbye. Curse you Bloxorz!

Modern Mechanix has wasted my entire day. It is a great collection of old ads and articles from magazines, newspapers, etc.

An example entry comes from the “Definition of Irony” category. The Drop Dead Cigarette Box ad from 1956.

Never Ending TV - Welcome to neverending.tv: Interesting concept. Someone leaves a 30-second video, and you can “respond” to it with another 30-second video. From the starting video, you can navigate back and forth through time, with the idea being that the story is…well, neverending.

Here’s a fun diversion; virtual magnetic letters on a virtual fridge. There are five fridges at the okaygo.co.uk site that will host up to 50 users each, plus a freebie single-user version that you can put on your own site.

Developed by FlashComGuru. It may not be new, but it’s good for a few laughs.

Here’s a totally addictive game I hadn’t seen before; Roboclaw, from the folks over at scenta (got sucked into it by following a new comment on an old post.)

You use the arrow keys to control a robot arm to pick up & drop a ball into a cup while trying to avoid stationary and moving obstacles. Each stage gets progressively harder, until you ultimately lose. But then you have to try again. Glad I didn’t find this while at work, or I wouldn’t have got anything done today.

Here’s a fun distraction — The ACME License Maker.

Choose your favorite state, your favorite year, and your favorite message. You can’t use it on your car, but what do you expect for free?

You’ve got to watch this commercial.

And all this time I thought that the transformers only beat each other up. They know how to have a good time too!

via Jalopnik. (Apparently the commercial is a bit old, but it’s new to me, and very well done, so still worthy of mention.)

Happy Halloween, everybody! Here are a few web goodies for ya:

• Scariest thing I can think of this Halloween? Steve Jobs as Darth Vader:

  Steve Jobs was the chosen one who promised to make things right in the computing world. But as time passed, his hunger for power took over, leading him to sue hapless bloggers and embrace dark arts, like digital-rights management. (via Kottke).

• Take a few minutes to try your hand at some Cat Bowling. It’s harder than it looks. I bowled a 107, which is worse even than most of my usually abysmal real-life scores.

Anybody else have any good Halloween links? Post ‘em and I’ll type them up and pass them out tonight instead of candy. Tune in tomorrow when we take a look at the best way to remove egg stains from a garage door!

Hooray for knowledge!: This is good news. This used to just be for paid licensees.

With the release of 3.2, we’re making the Movable Type knowledge base completely public. (Sneak peak). Like the user manual, it is also completely powered by Movable Type and has comments enabled on every single entry.

Also good for MT information is the MT Wiki. I wrote quite a few of the first entries on this wiki, but it seems to have been shut down after it got spammed (see the bottom of this entry, for instance).

There’s still some good stuff there that’s applicable beyond MT, like some of these that I wrote (at least initially):

• File Permissions

• Intergrating MT with an existing site

• Johannes Gutenberg

• Perl

• SQLite

The official Darwin Awards website is seeking help:

I Need a Programmer! I want to give the website a Wiki-esque interface. I want to do it in Perl, preferably OO-Perl, nevermind why. Can you do the job? Write to me with your qualifications, and I can send you specs for what I have in mind. Oh please oh please oh please, let there be a Perl God for me!

The Darwin Awards, for those who have been hiding under a rock, are most often given posthumously in honor of those who accidentally kill themselves in really stupid ways, thus improving human genome by removing themselves from the gene pool. The website exists to share the stories of the award recipients. And some of the stories are darned funny.

Surely there’s got to be someone reading this that can help revamping this great site.

This Flash animation of a two-dimensional female manikin forever falling through a two-dimensional sky filled with two-dimensional bubbles is pretty amusing to watch, but at times somewhat disturbing (Ouch! Is the neck supposed to bend like that?) If nothing else, it’s a good demonstration of what can be done with Flash.

Be warned; the manikin is wearing only a black string bikini, so it may be considered NSFW, depending on where you work.

According to Google Sightseeing, Google Maps has made some significant improvements.

Today Google quietly updated its map service to add high-resolution aerial photography for much more of the globe than the previous limited coverage of North America. New additions include Scotland, Iceland, Kuwait and many, many more.

Cool! Now even more sights to see from a really-high bird’s eye view! If only I could quit my job and become a full-time Google Maps tourist.