Internet

I never thought I’d post anything Hello Kitty-related, but these cakes are kinda awesome so I’m willing to lift my Hello Kitty embargo just this once!

This was posted on Books of Adam, hitherto-unknown (to me) blog and follows the conversation between Adam, who went to Vegas and his friend Kristin in NY. Sex with sharks gives you Shark AIDS.

I got tired of trawling through forums to find these answers so I collated them for you! My work laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad x121e. It’s stupidly energy-efficient, quiet and most importantly built like a brick. When I took the bottom cover off to upgrade the RAM to 8GB, I was struck by the build quality and was gratified to see the area around the hard disk and other crucial sections of the mainboard was reinforced with extra structural metalwork. ...

Really, the title should have some sort of clever warning about not upgrading 11.10 to 12.04 when running a Rackspace Cloud Server. I tried this on Saturday (4 days ago) and it’s taken me this long to recover my server. And by recover I mean ‘snatch the files and data off it, then recreate it from scratch running 11.10’. You see, among other things, Ubuntu seems to require a custom kernel to run on Rackspace’s infrastructure. ...

This infographic makes a great argument in favour of using a blogging platform – ideally self-hosted – as a means of sharing content. Having a blog, I’m fully in control of my content – I own the copyright, I can modify, show, hide, publish and delete at will. The “danger” that prospective employers and so on can look you up on Facebook and other social media sites and may refuse to employ you based on what they find there is easily mitigated by the control that you have over your content. ...

These days, the hypocrisy in Hollywood has reached astounding levels as the MPAA, RIAA and other media associations have been beating their breast and shouting to anyone who will listen that illegal filesharing and torrents are killing their profits. However, the truth is that firms like NetFlix are losing more money in paying the MPAA’s extortionate licensing fees than they lose to those pesky Swedish Internet Pirates. Peter Kim of paralegal. ...

I came across this on this rather wonderful collection of awesome media. Pusheen makes me rather happy in the feelings! I love little things that cheer people up!

SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) has gone dormant for now, thanks to a massive outcry by millions of end-users who are, ironically, far better clued up about how the Interpipes work than the legislators debating the bills and a host of big-name companies, like Facebook, Yahoo, Google and so on. It’s really awesome to see the industry rally together to fight a piece of legislation that is so badly conceived that it would wreck many more lives and sources of revenue than it would save. ...

This is one of the most fun Tenori-On analogues I’ve come across. It’s really well done, too! Click the squares and put some headphones on. See you in 3 hours.

There is a terrifying new Bill in the works over in the jolly old US of A. It’s called the *Protect IP* bill. It’s been backed by some pretty powerful conglomerates and it’s primarily driven by the entertainment industry. While I wholly oppose piracy and believe in supporting artists for the hard work they do, I also utterly disagree with what is happening right now, *this*very moment, to the Internet. The Protect IP bill will bring to accountability any provider of a platform or medium or means to share content – ISPs, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, uncountable forums, any blogs and many other outlets for free speech. ...

I have a whole bunch of things to share this time around. I’ve been largely ignoring this blog, except as a glorified link dump. Which has worked surprisingly well, actually! So today, I have not only music, but awesome miscellanea to share with the Internets. The first thing is Welder’s new track: https://youtu.be/pbRm5gis2nY It’s pretty relaxed and takes a while to wind up to full speed, but it’s wonderful to listen to. ...

While browsing the web looking at videos, I stumbled across a series of clips that were shot on regular 30 or 60 FPS cameras like mine and then slowed way down with incredible results. I was intrigued, as one would naturally be by such tech. I discovered that folks did this with a plugin called Twixtor, which through some mathematical wizardry does some highly impressive things with frame interpolation. What this means is that is seamlessly inserts additional frames between your existing ones in order to slow down the action by quite remarkable amounts. ...

I came across this on DeviantART! It’s a simple (ish) piece of flash programming but it produces some rather pretty patterns and is quite addictive. Spirograph freaks, eat your heart out! Psychadellivision by ~Volcanic-Penguin on deviant ART

Someone introduced this music thing to me. It’s horrible, but catchy. Listen to it. https://youtu.be/AAiCRuK98ig

Another awesome tune for your aural pleasure!

So, the latest DiRT rally game, DiRT3 is coming out in a month or so and one of the trailers I saw had an absolutely stunning soundtrack. So I looked it up on YouTube and it turns out it was used in some rather spectacular videos – like this one!

Hey folks! I’m going to start to play with time-lapse photography and one of the most useful tutorials I’ve found out there is this one on Vimeo.

My friend Kristoff re-introduced me to this tune. It’s been kicking around my hard disk for a while now, but it’s been like a splinter at the back of my mind. You know, when you can think of the melody but for the life of you can’t remember what the tune is called. Anyway, the mystery was solved and I’m glad to share this with you. It’s a beautiful Goa chill track. ...