brainwagon

From Raph Koster’s Home Page: But there are no games that are user-built the way the web is. An interesting look into the destiny of Homo ludens and his experiments on the Internet.

Jim Rogan writes in the Philadephia Enquirer: Pat Robertson, bless his pointy little head, has done the good people of the Dover Area School District a big favor. Last week, he lashed out against them, saying they no longer merited the mercy of God. In the true spirit of Christian charity, he hinted that they […]

Lifehacker presented the SimplytheBest Fonts archive: a nice place to find free fonts. I liked the Vitamin font, and used it to create the following with some GIMP Script-Fu:

What a surprise! You Should Get a PhD in Science (like chemistry, math, or engineering) You’re both smart and innovative when it comes to ideas. Maybe you’ll find a cure for cancer – or develop the latest underground drug. What Advanced Degree Should You Get?

Make Einstein write whatever you want. I love stuff like this.

The 1925 classic Phantom of the Opera is available as a download from the Internet Archive. Very cool, one of my fun memories of my time spent in New Jersey was seeing this film in the chapel at Rutgers on Halloween, accompanied by live organ music. Unfortunately, the mpeg itself is of very marginal quality: […]

Ars Technica has a nice article on cobbling together a collection of free tools to rip high quality video for the iPod on your windows box (it also covers other alternatives too, but I’m inherently cheap). Check it out.

Scott Remnant is a bit of a Formula-1 buff, and so ran one of those cool Java applets that news agencies provide to keep track of race results in real time. But the problem was, the applet sucked (bad interface, the fonts were too small, you know the drill). So, he cleverly ran tcpdump to […]

Witness a pack of knitted zombies re-enact that classic Night of the Living Dead. Link courtesy of Boing Boing, who hardly need the link juice, but still…

Heh. Courtesy of Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog.

A 13 foot Burmese python tried to eat a six foot alligator. Results aren’t pretty: Warning! Icky picture might freak you out. Don’t blame me.

I suppose that I’m in many ways your typical smart geek: I can probably identify 95% of all the quotes from Futurama, but I have a heck of a time remembering to put my keys someplace where I can find them. That’s why I rely on tips like this one from lifehacker. Unfortunately, the main […]

Fellow Pixarian Jeff Pidgeon has a new PidgeonBlog to augment his Cafe Press Store Full O’ Swag. Follower’s of the Flying Spaghetti Monster might appreciate his stylish line of pirate inspired apparel.

Exactly what it sounds like: XYZ Computing describes a project to get a M10000 Mini-ITX motherboard to boot from a stick of USB flash memory. It uses Puppy Linux, and is pretty straightforward. As it happens, I have exactly that motherboard: I remember trying to get it to boot USB stick memory and failing, and […]

Contrary to appearances, I actually try to read blogs of people who are perhaps a bit different than me. I do this to help fight against the perception (mostly my own) that I’m a monochromatic personality, interested only in a few geeky topics. Lisa Williams is such a blogger, who writes about a number of […]