Need some cool high resolution scans of old time Hollywood actors and actresses? Look no further than Doctor Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans. Courtesy of metafilter.

I found out that you can use this link to send SMS messages via Yahoo!. Cool. I bet you could script this pretty easily and make it useful.

Wow. Check out these plane struck by lightning images. Crazy. I found a link to this on Fark.

Frequent readers of this blog will note that I’m a bit of a gadget junkie, and I’m particularly interested in people who build rather than merely use gadgetry. In that spirit, a while ago I played a bit with getting Asterix, a free PBX system running on my Linux box. This guy definitely has done one better: he built his own hardware pbx, complete with eight telephone extensions and the ability to process three voice calls at once. Neat, but the coolest thing was his justification of the project.

The only value this thing has is entertainment value. It’s great when there are guests with bored kids, and once set up it gets plenty of attention from the adults too, if they are engineers that is.

I don’t actually use it for anything.

It was worth building because it finally scratched that childhood itch.

There is no better reason to scratch.

I was watching The Soup this morning, and their clip of the week was priceless: a commercial for a cat-shaped neck wrap. From their product description: Invention Channel presents the Cozy Kitty:

Just heat the Cozy Kitty in the microwave for 60 seconds then wrap her around your neck.

Can an urban legend about someone mistaking a real cat for their pillow be far behind?

Think you are having a bad day? Try the Wikipedia list of unusual deaths. At least no vultures have mistaken my head for a stone.

Need to do calendar calculations in your head? Try this page which describes Conway’s Doomsday Algorithm, with lots of good links.

Note: I found Lewis Carroll’s method of doing the same in a previous post.

Or at least (as Dan noted) it’s a dark day for fiction again, as the results for the 2005 Bulwer-Litton Contest are in. For those not familiar with this annual contest, writers submit opening sentences for imaginary novels.

My favorite entry:

When Detective Riggs was called to investigate the theft of a trainload of Native American fish broth concentrate bound for market, he solved the case almost immediately, being that the trail of clues led straight to the trainmaster, who had both the locomotive and the Hopi tuna tea.

Mitsy Rae
Danbury, NE

I’m hopeless when it comes to color. But ColorBlender.com has a really nice interface that allows you to match and generate color palettes. Fun.

The Internet Archive has a version of the 1962 documentary The Wall about the first year of the Berlin Wall, including the murder of Peter Fechter on August 17, 1962. A sobering glimpse into the Cold War.

For those young-uns without historical perspective, check out the Wikipedia entry for the Berlin Wall.

Need some audio material? Try the Colonial Williamsburg Past to Present Podcasts. Or, you could just download The Declaration of Independence, available from Project Gutenberg as etext #1.

Got a few pennies lying around? Try building some of these impressive structures. Have lots of dollars? Try this page instead.

Hey, you need to keep pages like this around when you are bored.

Lifehacker is rapidly becoming one of my favorite blogs. They have all sorts of good info that seems strangely timely, like the following link on how to get the best pictures of fireworks.

How to photograph fireworks : Lifehacker

Today is the opening day for Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, but just in case you want to know what Orson Welles’ broadcast sounded like, you could surf over to The Mercury Theatre on the Air and download the mp3 or you could fetch it from me. The Mercury Theater info site deserves a plug though: they have all the broadcasts of the Mercury theater done up as a BitTorrent. They’d rather you downloaded the bunch that way, rather than just clicking on the individual link, so if all that you want is the one file, fetch it from me. Otherwise, download their piles of stuff and enjoy.

Addendum: Hmmm. WordPress seems to want to make this available as an enclosure. It looks like if you are subscribed to my podcast, you’ll get Orson Welles. Oh well. 🙂

This little bit of Shockwave madness seems strangely appropriate today. Today, after all, is the opening of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, and it is good to keep things in perspective.