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| Thursday, January 5, 2006 10:28 AM |
| Stuffed with Stuff |
 by Fëanor |
- This sight greeted me when I popped open my RSS reader this morning, and I found it grimly amusing:
- The Digg story on the new Previewseek search engine (still apparently in beta) asks if it could be a Google-killer. I don't know about all that, but it is a pretty cool search engine. It has options for searching the web or a dictionary, or for images, videos, or MP3s, and it gives you screen-shot thumbnail previews of the pages it links to, as well as a summary/synopsis of whatever it is you searched for. Pretty crazy.
- It turns out loud noises could hurt your ears! Um, duh.
Okay, okay, the fact that I wear either headphones or earbuds practically all day could indeed be a danger to my hearing, and I should be careful to keep the volume at a healthy level, and thank you Pete Townshend for pointing this out. But really, is this that serious an issue? I think the news outlets are latching onto this and blowing it out of proportion with their typical love for sensationalism.
- I haven't tried it, but Google Earth War sounds like a great idea. It uses Google Earth as the basis for an international war/strategy game. (Via Digg)
- The Entertaible looks pretty cool. It looks like it's sort of an interactive, dynamic video/boardgame type of thing. It's still in prototype stage right now, to be demoed at the Consumer Electronics Show, and it'll be sold to bars and casinos and the like at first, with a home version to follow only if it does well. Sounds like right now it basically just plays electronic versions of old boardgames, but it has tons of potential, and the pictures of it are pretty intriguing.
- How do we avoid the upcoming format war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD? Build a chip that plays them both! Brilliant! (Via Digg)
- This site - Text-Image.com - is pretty fantastic. It converts any image into a textual representation (HTML, ASCII, or Matrix - Matrix being Japanese characters apparently?), and it does it online in just a few seconds. Not sure what I'd use it for exactly, but it's still totally cool. (Via Digg)
- This site for testing the readability of webpages was posted a long time ago on Download Squad, but I put it away and forgot about it until now. It's hard to say how accurate it is, but it seems like a pretty cool little tool to me. I'm pretty embarrassed by our blog's results, though; we're like a trashy paperback here. Monkeys could read us and get something out of it.
- Ever wondered what the official pronunciation of "GIF" is? Well, that page features a strong defense of the soft G pronunciation ("jif"), but also includes a bunch of comments that argue the contrary view. I still feel a bit confused, but "jif" does seem to have the hard evidence behind it. (Via Digg)
- If you haven't heard yet, it sounds like Jon Stewart is going to host the Oscars this year. Damn. Now I might actually have to watch them.
- Wired News posted a few hacks for digging out and downloading tracks off of MySpace.com that you can normally only listen to streaming versions of. Sweet. I'm headed back over to the Protomen page to test these out... UPDATE: The xml hack worked better for me, as I was able to download one of the MP3s I was trying to get that way; sadly, I wasn't able to get the second MP3 - 404 error (although, now that I've poked around a bit more, I think that's probably the Protomen's fault and not the hack's fault; that particular file just doesn't seem to be on the server). The URL hack didn't work at all; it just redirected me back to the myspace homepage.
- It's sounding like the casting of John Glover as Skeletor that I posted about yesterday is probably just a rumor, and the He-Man movie is still dead in the water. Sigh. Well, I still think this movie will be made at some point. I mean, how can the studios resist making an epic fantasy film loaded with special effects based on a TV show with nostalgia appeal? It's like printing money, people!
- It's an old story, as many of the commenters on Digg are quick to point out, but this article on the "Wow!" signal - a still-unexplained signal recorded at a SETI radio observatory in 1977 - is, as the webpage's domain name indicates, damn interesting. Check it. And watch the skies. Keep watching the skies. And...listening to the skies, too, I guess.
- Slate has a depressing - but also interesting and amusing - analysis of how movie theaters make their money and what this means for us as consumers. Basically, it's all about bringing teens in and making them want to eat and drink. Which means lots of movies that appeal to a wide variety of teens. Which means crap. (Via Backwards City)
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