The makers of the documentary offer a free, Creative Commons licensed .torrent download of their film, Done The Impossible which is also being released on DVD. Must see for all the Firefly/Serenity fans.

I recently watched the Firefly episodes, but still need to watch the Serenity movie… No matter though, ‘cos I quite enjoyed Firefly, and the fact that the documentary about the Firefly people. Gotta love it. Pity about our stupid Telkom 3GB cap and pay per meg download situation here, I’ll have to beg and grovel to get this elsewhere… *sigh*

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Tags: Done The Impossible, Firefly, Serenity, Telkom

Those crazy Japanese have done it again! Make dominoes from EVERYTHING in the house.

Wow, this is cool! And I thought it was impressive when we filled our kitchen floor with dominoes… Heh.

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We have some bad news for those on the sunny island of Malta: you don’t exist and we have the evidence to, er, prove it. Look on the bright side, though: since you either don’t exist or are currently drowned, you can reasonably argue with the boss that the rest of the afternoon spent in front of a bottle of excellent red wine is in order.

Haha, unlucky!

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Found this on digg.com:
Our editors have compiled a list of the “Top 10 Strangest Custom Gaming Systems” for your enjoyment. Which ones are your favorites?

I blogged this using digg.com’s “Blog this” link, wonder what it’ll look like…

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1001 things to do with Liquid Nitrogen [via boingboing.net]

Heh-heh, this is pretty awesome (even though the actual site makes your eyes hurt…).
My favourite so far is the shaving cream one:

Freeze a can of shaving cream and then peel the can away from the cream. Put the canless cream into someone’s car. Let the oven-like heat from the car’s sitting in the sun defrost the shaving cream. 2 cans will fill an entire car.

Tags: Liquid Nitrogen, shaving cream

Final Fantasy Potion Taste Test [via Joystiq.com]
At the event the new Final Fantasy soft drink “Potion” was available for sampling. According to sources that were at the event it tasted like a nutritional supplement drink with a fresh aftertaste.

Hehe, I recall reading about this before. A Final Fantasy “potion” for sale, for real.
As long as it tastes good.

Update:
1up.com reveals that Final Fantasy XII Potion has hit the streets, and here’s what they say:

Within each Potion bottle, you get 100ml of “herb drink,” a subtle blend of Royal Jelly, Propolis Extract, Elderberry, Camomile, Sage, Thyme, Hyssop, Fennel, Marjoram, Rosemary, Basil and Melissa, not to mention carbonated water, caffeine and artificial coloring. To be honest, it tastes just like any other Japanese “genki” drink, and there’s not much of a difference in taste between this and a can of Red Bull, though Potion probably contains less chemicals.

I’d pay to have that! At the current exchange rate, that puts a 100ml bottle of the stuff at the same price of a Red Bull.

Update 2006-03-10:
spong.com has a link to a “Hilarious TV Ad” for the Final Fantasy XII Potion drink… Go have a look, I’ll be checking it out later this evening. Can only be good.

Tags: Final Fantasy, Potion

I’ve been wanting to get a Planet aggregator page (See planetplanet.org) going for my blog for a while now, and whenever I had the urge to do so, I went and had a search for a WordPress plugin or some such to automatically update a WordPress page on my blog, with the Planet’s content, all with my current WordPress theme’s markups and doodats. Either I didn’t search properly, or there was no such thing…

As a short-term hack (long-term being figuring out how the WordPress plugin architecture works and getting a management interface going), I created a small shell script, together with the planetplanet.org app, to directly interface with the mysql database, and just update the WordPress page’s content.

You can see the end-result on my Bug-E’s Planet page.

The code can be found here. The shell script is the least of the effort though.

Installation instructions:

• Follow the instructions at planetplanet.org to get planet installed
• Follow their instructions to setup a config.ini file going, with all your rss feeds in the config file.
  I ended up with a single template, found here (right-click save as…), that had a very simple loop in.
• Run the planet script once (python planet.py path/to/own/config.ini), making sure that it fetches everything fine, and creates all the output files you expect it to.
• Open your WordPress admin interface, and create a new page (not a post, a page). Give it a name, leave it blank. Take note of it’s ID. You may need to have a look inside your database what that page’s ID is.
• Download my planet2wordpress.sh script above, save it someplace
• Open the script in an editor, and edit the first 8 config lines, filling in your database details, and some path details.
• Important: Make a backup of your database first, use mysqldump or something, just in case something bad happens.
• Run the planet2wordpress.sh script manually, like so:
  sh planet2wordpress.sh /path/to/wordpress.template.output.html
• If there were no error messages, all should have worked fine, and you should see your planet’s contents on your blog page.
• All that is left to do now is to play with the planet template file to make it look correct, this part took me the longest.
• Once you’ve got the template all finished, just add the planet2wordpress.sh into your crontab, for every 15 minutes or however often, and voila, you have an automatically updating Planet page.

I hope this helps anybody that’s been wanting to do this. It helps me.

Tags: Planet, planetplanet, WordPress, planet2wordpress

Sony BMG announced that they will be temporarily suspending the production of CDs containing the First4InternetXCP content protection. Why you may ask? Well they tried to stop the hax0rs of the world from stealing music, so the hax0rs used Sony’s technology to exploit a Trojan virus. Touché Sony!

Sony Stops Production of Content Protection CDs – Gizmodo

It was almost to be expected, the technology that they used was rather broken to begin with.

A story I didn’t pick up on before, was that some clever virus writer decided to make use of the Sony CD-protection to hide his virus code on a computer from anti-virus programs.  I’m guessing the virus won’t spread very quickly, as it’s really one of those situations where several conditions will need to be met before it will propogate.  How can Windows be *so* broken to allow just any app like this to be installed??  It amazes (and amuses) me.

technorati tags: sony, DRM, Gizmodo, virus

What I haven’t heard anyone suggest is that Script Kiddies and cheaters were the revenue stream Sony originally had in mind when they produced the copy protection.

Sony’s revenue model – Jonathan Wellons – O’Reilly Media

Jonathan makes a good point…  The fact that an audio CD can be used to easilly add software to your machine to be able to cheat at online games is a bit of a bizarre concept, but it’s true, and anybody wanting to cheat on World of Warcraft will scramble to get their hands on such software.  Allthough, I’d bet that the software is already available for download on some or other P2P network or cheat sites, so I seriously doubt that this news about Sony’s sneaky DRM tactics would increase their revenue.

I’m just waiting for the first news that Sony’s copy protection scheme was used to aid in cheating in their very own Everquest.

technorati tags: sony, drm, World of Warcraft, Everquest, cheat

Yahoo engineers apparently couldn’t help themselves. The beta of the new Yahoo Maps for a short while listed “The Dude’s Fish Store” at 1600 Amphiteatre Parkway in Mountain View, CA.

Silicon Valley Sleuth: Yahoo Maps pranks Google

Hehehe, now that’s some funny stuff…

technorati tags: yahoo, google, maps