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Firefox To put it simply, if you are still using Internet Explorer to surf the Internet, well, you shouldn’t be. Firefox is quicker, safer, easier, and its free. Go get it. GetFireFox.com.posted by Aaron at 2/17/2005 11:09:00 AM Create Your Own Works of Art Create your own works of art with ArtPad. After you've made your masterwork, email it off to a friend to add to it. Very cool idea.posted by Aaron at 1/25/2005 01:20:00 PM Never Lose Your Digital Camera A guy finds a memory card from someone else’s digital camera in a cab in NYC. The card has 200+ pictures. The guy who finds it proceeds to set up a blog posting one picture a day while completely fabricating a story to go with the pictures. Truly excellent! Update: 9/20/04 10:27pm: Nothing good ever lasts. The anonymous author decided to shut the site down after today's huge increase in traffic.posted by Aaron at 9/20/2004 10:42:14 AM HomeStarRunner.com I've known about HomeStarRunner.com for a while. But like many online comics/flash animation sites I kinda never got into it that much. I took another look at it recently and discovered it to be quite funny actually. It’s strange, no doubt about it. But, I found myself laughing quite a bit at its subtle humor. At HomeStarRunner.com you’ll find many interesting characters and all sorts of flash animation shorts. Take some time and look around.posted by Aaron at 9/13/2004 09:47:12 AM Solar System Simulator NASA has a neat page online where you can create custom images of just about any object in the solar system from any vantage point for any point in time. The images are created on the fly and displayed right away. Here is a link to the Solar System Simulator page. Here is an example of the Earth as see from the moon as of when I posted this. Here is an actual image of the Sun on the morning of June 8th 2004 during the transit of Venus (see the lower righthand corner) and here is the Simulator's version.posted by Aaron at 7/9/2004 12:49:44 PM Where is George? Yesterday I found a crumpled up, dried up dollar bill on top of our washing machine that had just survived the spin cycle. I flattened it out find a red stamp with the words "www.wheresgeorge.com". Today at work I clicked over to www.wheresgeorge.com and entered the bill's serial number along with some other information and was presented with this page. Pretty cool, I thought. I entered a few more into the system. Check on them here, here, and here to see if anyone else is curious enough to log them in.posted by Aaron at 6/21/2004 02:57:38 PM My Dublin Light Show There is an array of 22 robotic spot lights over Dublin Ireland until May 3rd, 2004. If you go to this web site you can create your own spot light arrangements and have it displayed above Dublin. On April 26th, 2004 two of my light arrangements graced the Irish skies. The coolest part is that they set up web page with the results of your designs. Check them out here and here.posted by Aaron at 4/27/2004 10:53:00 AM Star Wars Cutout Models Extremely cool Star Wars ship plans that you download, print out, cut up, and glue together. Here is the link. The site is mostly in Japanese, but you'll get the idea.posted by Aaron at 3/17/2004 01:18:45 PM JZ and The Beatles? What do you get when you take all the vocals from The Black Album (JZ's 2003 rap album) and all the music from the The White Album (The Beatles' 1968 masterpiece)? You get The Grey Album of course. DJ Danger Mouse has taken a vocal-only version of JZ's Black Album and all the music from the The White Album and combined them to created quite a unique set of songs. Plus, it’s not that bad either. Download the entire thing here. posted by Aaron at 2/13/2004 09:06:42 AM Dr. Who Lives One of the fond memories of my geeky youth was sitting around for 3-4 hours on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon watching Dr. Who on the local PBS station. For those non-geeks among us, Dr. Who was an amazingly low-budget BBC sci-fi show. Each Eposide was an hour long and one "story" would span 4 episodes. PBS would slam them all together for 4 hours of sci-fi goodness. Ah, the memories. But, back to today. BBC has just started to release an animated Dr. Who episode. It's cheezy, overly dramatic, and not too well written.... just like old times. posted by Aaron at 11/14/2003 10:02:41 AM The Mother-load of Free Games What happens when old computer games die? Well, they don't really die. It's just that the companies that make them stop supporting them. And the general public moves on to newer, fancier games. But what happens to them... alot of them end up at the Home of the Underdogs. This site features tons of old (and some no-so-old) PC games for downloading. For free.I can remember spending months of time (not days, not weeks, but months of time) playing several of the classic games you can find on this site. Ah, the memories. posted by Aaron at 7/2/2003 03:36:38 PM Secret LOTR Diaries Holy Crap. This is funniest thing I've read in a long time. Check out the Secret Diaries from all the Lord of the Rings characters. It won't really make any sence unless you've seen the movie (first one) or read the book.Diary except: ARAGORN, day six, "Stubble update: I look rugged and manly. Yes! .... Still not King." LEGOLAS, day eight, "Far too dark in Mines of Moria to brush hair properly. Am very afraid I am developing a tangle." posted by Aaron at 1/9/2003 01:12:51 PM Playing with Matchbox Cars, Revisited When I was a kid I can remember setting up all sorts of blocks and books and stuff on the living room table and running Matchbox cars around them while making engine and tire screeching sounds. OK, that was last week, but still. HP and VW have realized that all adults are still kids at heart and have given us this little addictive game. posted by Aaron at 1/9/2003 12:57:34 PM Ho Ho Ho, Merry BURP! A drunk Santa, trying not to fall off the roof. 'Nuff said. Play here. posted by Aaron at 12/27/2002 01:50:23 PM What the hell is "Las Ketchup"? With all the 2002 wrap-up lists, polls, and specials on their way this holiday season, here is the only one that was created with the input of 55 billion responses. The search engine Google has put together a list of the top men, women, brands, celebrities, bands, and tons of other stuff based on the all the searches that took place this past year. The lists, called the Google Zeitgeist, is packed full of interesting and surprising facts. If everyone clicks here after the holidays then maybe I can make next year's list.posted by Aaron at 12/13/2002 09:26:34 AM Silly Pedestrians You don't know how many times I've been stopped at a red light in downtown, usually near the Inner Harbor, and there's are a group of people, usually out-of-towners, that are waiting to cross the street. I can see them looking around and trying to figure out if they should cross or not, even though there are plainly visible walk/don't walk signs all over. Then for some unexplained reason they determine that the best time to amble across the busy intersection is the exact second that I get my green light. I really hate that. And, that's why I love this game so much. Also check out a very polished online version of Battleship.posted by Aaron at 12/3/2002 12:33:39 PM I Used to Believe I used to believe that my Dad personally knew everyone on TV. We would always watch Indy racing on Saturday afternoons and I always thought that my Dad and Mario Andretti were close personal friends. This is the idea behind I Used to Believe.com. Do you have any incorrect observations from your childhood that you'd like to share? posted by Aaron at 11/20/2002 12:01:01 PM Your Brain is Defective ...and this web page proves it. I had to actually save the image and cut-n-paste the two squares together before I would believe it. Now if those MIT geeks could only figure out how to make the cashier think my $5 is actually a $20. That'd be really useful.posted by Aaron at 10/15/2002 12:30:46 PM Quaka, Please! I know it's probably a good thing to see young, religiously inclined, people reaching out to other young people using Hip Hop music. But that doesn't mean I can't snicker at their names. The Friendly Gangstaz Committee, a Quaker rap group, have been kickin' out the mad Quaker rhymes since back in the day! Word.posted by Aaron at 10/7/2002 03:23:27 PM A Real War on Terrorism OK, not everything on this page is fun-and-games. Slate is running a very long 9 part article on the war on terrorism. I can't agree with all of the, sometimes, idealistic stances that the author takes. But, I found the article to be quite good at describing the current global landscape of conflict and terror at a much deeper level then the "terror bad, America good" stance usually taken by major media. Well worth a read if, like me, you're feeling a bit overwhelmed with what to think about America's role in the "War on Terror".posted by Aaron at 9/18/2002 01:01:51 PM :-) September 19th, 1982, 11:44 am, Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science online bulletin board...... the smiley is born. Whether you love it :-) hate it :-( or feel indifferent :-| about it, this is where it all started.posted by Aaron at 9/13/2002 08:49:05 AM Sequence of Family De Shadis Maybe it's just me, but I found this extremely funny. What would happen if you translated something to another language, then back again? Nothing, you say? You'd be wrong. Using Google.com's translator we can see what shadisfamily.tripod.com translated from English to French then from French back to English would look like. Update [9/25/02]: Apparently Google caught onto people using their translator as a 'funny looking page' generator and killed the ability to translate an inline translation. To bad, I thought it was pretty cool.posted by Aaron at 9/9/2002 01:14:54 PM The Biggest Arcade Game, Ever. What do you get when you combine a PC, a cell phone, the National Library of France, and 520 light switches? Answer: the largest Tetris game on earth. The Blinkenlights project has actually been putting images and animations on the sides of buildings in Germany for a few years. The French version is first to have interactive game-play. Just walk up to the building and call into the controlling PC on your cell phone. Whatever image is currently being displayed will be cleared and a game of Tetris will start with you in control via your cell phone. Apparently Pong and Breakout are in the works.posted by Aaron at 9/3/2002 03:55:36 PM Are you EVIL?! Are you an EVIL person bent on taking over the world, but find that your Evil Secret Lair is not up to par? Are your Non-genetically Engineered Henchmen simply not cutting the mustard? Do you find that it is hard to get world leaders to take you seriously without your own Doomsday Satellite. Well if so, then your prayers have been answered. VillainSupply.com is the place for you. The Villain Supply web site has everything you'll need to wreak havoc on humanity while keeping those cumbersome do-gooder secret agents out of your hair. Check out the Lairs & Bases listings of real-estate suitable for your truly evil plans. Or, go to Doomsday Weapons to check out the The Ultimate Formula "X" (It's only $172 billion, and will "Destroy All of Creation". That'll turn some heads!) Beware, this is only for the..... TRUELY EVIL!..... BWA HA HA HA HA!posted by Aaron at 8/8/2002 03:23:53 PM SodaPlay - Physics Geek Out Geek out alert. This is pretty far out stuff. Go to sodaplay to build your own physics based machines that spin, roll, or walk across the screen. The machines, or models as they are called, may just look like stick figure contraptions of dots and lines, but are actually mass points and springs that dynamically react to the environment and each other. Designate some of the springs and "muscles" and watch your creation come to life. Click on the sodazoo link to see other's creations. Click on the sodaconstructor to build your own. Here is an example of one of my models.posted by Aaron at 6/19/2002 10:40:31 AM Free Games Online I already thought that I wasted alot of time on the 'puter playing games. Now there is no hope. Don't go to this link if you ever want to have a social life again. Don't try these either. They didn't make it on the list, but should have.posted by Aaron at 5/23/2002 09:40:31 AM Build Your Own Lego Person/Superhero Here are two really cool sites that let you build your own Lego Person and Superhero. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to save them or send them around to friends once they are completed. I personally feel that the Lego Person builder is missing some key choices like receding hair lines and babies for each arm.posted by Aaron at 5/15/2002 12:17:04 PM The Blue Flame The discussion usually goes like this: "How about a slide." "I think a swing set would be too much." "Would a small blow-up pool be ok?" Well, the questions about what to put in the back yard for the girls has been answered. I'm going to build a rollercoster, just like this guy did. Just kidding. But, check that thing out! A real, homebrew rollercoster. It's even got a loop! I wonder if his homeowner's insurance agent has been notified?posted by Aaron at 5/14/2002 02:40:11 PM A new college savings scheme. We herd about upromise.com on the story-box the other day. You register your credit cards and when they are used at participating merchants you'll get a cut of the purchase back (from the merchant). The money goes into your upromise account and can then be routed to a 529 college savings plan. Cool! The great part is that family and friends can setup accounts of their own that feed into your account. upromise calculates that the average family can accumulate as much as $8000 between now and college age. By 2018 that should be enough to cover beer costs for freshman year. But hey, every little bit counts.posted by Aaron at 5/14/2002 01:52:16 PM  |