Lavonardo

Why, certainly!

• One more great map from strangemaps, this one showing which US state matches with which country size- and GDP-wise. Finland = Colorado, which ain’t bad at all.
• Photographs of speed. Some seriously great snaps.
• The end is nigh: multicore programming is hard.
• With candidates like these, the seven new wonders are bound to be boring. Where’s teh internet from the list?
• Been a happy google reader user for quite a while, but with their recent data loss issues, having another RSS-reader might be worthwhile. Or not. Anyway, seems that there’s quite a selection of the tools available.
• Sushi books.
• Editing CSS isn’t exactly the best fun available, a good editor makes it less of a chore.
• Airlinemeals, just the thing to check before a transatlantic crossing in the cattle section of a 757.
• The 65 million dollar pants-case makes it to the court. By the description the session was high on surreal, and fortunately low on understanding the accuser.

[ image nabbed from goopymart's photoset on flickr. ]

Something off the side of the trawler.

• Yes, the whole american nation feels the pain of the wrong guy nearing Hank Aaron’s home run record.
• World Domination 201, a surprisingly lucid document from the lately very frothy keyboard of ESR.
• Songbird, an open source love child of iTunes and Firefox.
• Climate change accelerating evolution - sounds fishy, but apart from some clever accounting, the Smithsonian guys aren’t exactly the lowest-regarded scientists on the globe.
• Worst lyrics of all time - turns out that I had always mentally shuffled War Pigs lyrics to a more sensible direction, this tautology is terrible…
• A very upmarket moleskine jacket. I’m happy with mine as-is, though the spine does exhibit worrisome tendency to age less than optimally.
• Launch cost back in the boom: 5M$ and up,
  launch cost now: 12K and change. Things have changed. For the better, obviously.
• Social networking and the chasm.

Recently sighted game-related links:

• The third part of the history of computer role-playing games is out. This one concentrates on the decade starting from 1994 - and covers many of the classics of the genre such as Planescape:Torment and the Baldur’s Gate saga.
• Unsurprisingly, a videogame on Lost has been announced. No statement on which seasons this will cover - if it’s up to the third, the spoiler-averse in the audience (including me, obviously) will avoid this until the third season is available on dvd - expectedly in september.
• Bethesda Softworks has bought the Fallout IP. If the resulting game combines the storylines of the previous Fallout installments with the graphics of Oblivion, its arrival will be a happy day indeed.
• Keyboard pad for xbox 360 - how long before the first Z-machine (and Zork, naturally) makes it into the Live Arcade…
• World Without Oil, an alternate reality game launched on mayday eve. Haven’t played with it at all yet - seems US-centered on a first blink.
• Publishing a game based on George R.R. Martin’s still-to-be-completed septalogy a Song of Fire and Ice suddenly bankrupted Guardians of Order. The sad history of the franchise doesn’t deter Green Ronin from trying out the very same move.

A couple of blogs that have broken the interest barrier recently:

• I have no idea what a stint pig actually is, but the porcine author writes well.
• ThreeDimensionalPeople, on a web-enabled immediate future.
• Despite appearances, we are headed for the summer. Jäätelökesä takes care of analysing the new arrivals of the ice cream scene.
• Teknokekko, since truth is often stranger than fiction.
• Kaiken pelitys - recent subjects of games, doom metal, movies and more games are all quite near to my heart.

April fool’s is gone again - wikipedia again collected the tricks, the links below are pure - no fooling of readers here.

• Jeff Minter, the last of the bedroom coders, has a blog.
• Cute Animals, part x: two sea otters holding hands. Video taken in Vancouver Aquarium - visited it back in 2003, and found these playful critters pleasant to watch.
• Bagophily, for the barf bag fanciers.
• Web typography is limited, that’s a fact. A SXSW presentation explains how to make it suck less.
• Supermarket2.0.
• Firefox OS - is a cross-platform browser really rendering conventional applications obsolete. No, definitely not, even for casual desktop users.

Surfed less than expected, but hit some interesting pockets of weirdness that need to be shared:

• Devon seems to be very rich in events that brim with peculiarness: Blackawton Worm Charming Festival, Potwalloping Festival and a three day long Hunting of the Earl of Rone.
• The f*ing short version of The Departed.
• What a movie critic must know. The requirements are hard, and for a large part hovering uncomfortably close to pretension.
• Fifteen unintentionally funny comic panels. Mainly from a much more innocent era, but that hardly lessens the impact.
• Steam Trek, and don’t forget the steampunk Star Wars either.

Best enjoyed with a quality browser.

• A surprisingly large-scale prank played at the superbowl.
• WTFCNN? - mercilessly reporting on the yellow-press-like headlines uncomfortably often sighted on CNN.
• Interactive fiction on the DS.
• Wave Bubble, just the device to eliminate cellular phone traffic nearby. Probably approaching illegality in the continental states and un-gentlemanlike conduct all over the world.
• Laws of physics that do not apply in Hollywood.
• The finnish wikipedia hosts a seminar on wednesday evening to celebrate the breaking of 100k barrier in the number of articles.

No rhyme or reason, just things to poke and click.

• What would the world map look like if the countries were sized according to named criteria.
• Presentation files from O’Reilly’s recent Emerging Telephony 07 are available.
• Economist, the next generation? That’s what Project Red Stripe attempts to be.
• Amazing kids’ book on typographic animals.
• Evolution of blogging.
• Dance Dance Immolation, for those among us that are really confident in their steps.
• Over a million free stock photos at everystockphoto.com.

[ Abba the Hutt image from studio muscle. ]

Miscellaneous surfing targets picked up recently, all somehow concerned with literature in some form.

The first link has way too many non-euclidian angles and oddly shining colours for any sane human to click on. The subject is, of course, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and the ever-reliable Kenneth Hite will take readers on a slow ride through the entire bibliography of the troubled Providencian. Livejournal sadly does not offer browsing per-subject, but the individual articles are at least tagged with a common header.

Charles Stross brings forth a disturbing topic in this blog: as of last year, to glorify terrorism is a crime in the UK. A bunch of enterprising authors have joined forces to produce a short story anthology on the very subject.

It’s been ages, absolutely way too long since my last trip through Orwell’s 1984 - the first chapters of the novel are now available in graphic form.

“A science scout” is not a very clearly defined term, but they sure have got nifty badges. Some of which I will appropriate at an opportune time.

Haven’t read the rather imposing first issue of monocle yet. Ought to, as the review I stumbled upon in Jason Kottke’s blog is on the positive side.

Jari Lindholm.

A finnish journalist with a biting tongue and an eye for the news.

Truehoop.

NBA.

Sarjakuvia.

Odd comics in finnish.

Assistentti havaitsee.

Sharp discussion from the halls of academia as a staff member.

Seppänen.

Pointful observations.

BTJ-Kustannus.

Publisher of the forthcoming book on new-style boardgames.

Descriptions are for wussies.

• 19 ways to screw up a website.
• Fifth Element Street Scene as a spherical panorama.
• Fake Gucci Ad = Instant Fame.
• Media images from Children of Men.
• Spaghetti junctions.
• Cats watching cats watching cats.

Today’s headlines from Link City Bugler:

• Shark Pictures. The variety among the species is great (and got incidentally discussed at length today on a non-coffee break).
• Cross-platform widgets. Something to look into once I finish my first.
• Shadow of the Colossus. Yet another quality wikipedia article. Yet another game I haven’t even started.
• Lunar eclipse. A full lunar eclipse. At night. On a weekend. March 3rd, visible in Finland. Count me in.
• Slimline Classics. For the busy reader who wants to test the waters beyond Jackie Collins/Clive Cussler/Jari Tervo.
• What’s so special about this number? Many things, as the 400+ kilobyte page explains (and restricts itself to the first ten thousand numbers).

Randomly selected surfing destinations for the selective traveller.

• An amazing collection of geographically alternate earths. A lot of science, very little fiction, pretty maps. Worth a peep.
• If nothing else, Joel Kotkin launches half a dozen new words in his article on superstar cities.
• A nice selection of textbook disclaimers (yes, this is an anti-intelligent design page).
• Kickassclassical, for those awkward moments when you cannot recognize a piece if classical music featured in media (odds are 2.21 to 1 that it’s Carmina Burana anyway).
• JPG magazine, looks like best-of-flickr on paper. Which is not a bad thing at all.
• Angry Alien produly presents: 30 second editions of popular movies, as acted by animated bunnies. The hotel room wrestling scene of Borat is deeply disturbing even in this format,
• Boo hoo, bad microsoft, allegedly turning e-mail back five years by replacing the HTML-renderer in Outlook. Here’s a clue: no HTML in e-mail. Have two, actually, they’re pretty small.

The perennially useful Jason Kottke provided no less than three very interesting topics topicsday.

Tried out origami a few years back (bought a starters kit from a dingy Chinatown shop in San Francisco). Liked fiddling with paper, but obviously not enough to keep doing it. This exposé on a master of the art just might re-strike the spark of interest. The papers ought to be in a drawer, so all I now need is a rainy day for inspiration.

The Morning News provides a guide on How to behave in New York. Been hankering to go back a long while, and the mightily verbose guidelines ought to be applicable to any urban environment anyway…

And last, but definitely not least, especially in stirring up a hornets’ nest way: an imaginatively abusive rant against gadgets from the former alpha geek of gizmodo. About as entertaining as William Shatner trashing trekkies back in the day in the Saturday Night Live.

First collection of links in a long while.

• H.P. Lovecraft’s Case of Randolph Carter as hypertext. The interface is iffy, but the concept interesting (seek out Anchorhead for an even better experience).
• An overview of parallel computing. 50+ pages, probably not that light reading.
• Gonegaming’s awards for 2006.
• An absolute treasure trove of unusual articles in wikipedia. In some cases mere “unusual” is definitely an understatement.
• In the beginning (like, seven years ago), there was korsoraattori, now there’s a a new dialect of SQL for the folks from northeastern Vantaa.

Pop. 7.

Elevation 1069′.

• Bill Gates said that spam would be gone by 2006 - according to a new study it’s back and worse than ever.
• Never was much of a Final Fantasy fan, but the games long history covered in a lengthy article on IGN makes interesting reading.
• Employer2.0, just when you thought the bubble couldn’t get any more inflated.
• ogleearth, a cornucopia of geographic-web- connected things.
• eat.fi, a gourmet/map site of Helsinki.
• A very brave bunny, wouldn’t expect many rabbits to dare to pester a snake like this.
• The new and supposedly authentic chinese restaurant has opened its website.

The license and registration, please.

• The release imminent release of Windows Vista is accompanied weird alternate reality game: Vanishing Point (and a related wiki).
• Lounasblogi, about having lunch in downtown Helsinki would be much more usable were I able to actually have lunch somewhere else than the ghetto of Pitäjänmäki.
• Playing Fair with the Player, first new article about interactive fiction in quite a while.
• Feltron’s annual report - great idea, great design.
• What do 200 calories look like. There is quite a difference between celery and peanut butter (more than 30 times of weight).
• The initial set of Firefox 3.0 requirements is out. Nice.
• The music of Veronica Mars.
• Mapperz - an interesting blog/newssite on geographic web.
• Video on demand never got off the ground - how about books on demand?

Links with numbers attached. Whatever will Mr. Interweb think of next?

• Ten kick-ass opening sequences.
• Eleven inspired sequels. Inspired, as in: “unexpected”.
• Twelve top appearances of bands in films.
• Thirteen photographs that changed the world.
• Fourteen Tipping Points of Evil for Google.

For those about to click.

• IBM has published a gentle introduction of the wonders of virtualization.
• The collected wisdom of lifehackery is out in book form.
• The D programming language, somewhere beyond C, but not in the same direction as C++.
• Tony vs. Paul (which goes to show that stop motion is still a viable technology).
• Map of Gotham City, straight off the pages of Batman.
• A truly scary article on ultra-right wing mercenaries running wild in Iraq.
• The weather in Helsinki sucks, we’ve established that much recently. Space weather is much more interesting.
• Of the 365 days of 2006, the Internet Explorer was unsafe for 286 of them.

Jason Kottke has listed the cream of the crop of his 2400 links remaindered last year. Most still as interesting as on the day of posting.

A small batch this time:

• Searchblog, John Battelle’s take on things.
• Bad Astronomy, good blog, and interesting articles.
• Blake Ross, the man behind firefox.