my.bicycle

-William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

LOL80's: A Picture Thread

At WashingtonPost.com, a lengthy piece on the VPOTUS: Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency . I'm hoping the tide is going to turn soon.

DM of the Rings I: The Copious Backstory Lord of the Rings is more or less the foundation of modern D&D. The latter rose from the former, although the two are now so estranged that to reunite them would be an act of savage madness. Imagine a gaggle of modern hack-n-slash roleplayers who had somehow never been exposed to the original Tolkien mythos, and then imagine taking those players and trying to introduce them to Tolkien via a D&D campaign. (apologies; I can't recall where I first saw this)

Get your Rube Goldberg on with Goldburgers-To-Go , a simple-machine simulator game. ( Geekdad )

Promo image by James Jean , originally uploaded by Foxtongue . because liked The Fountain a lot, and I still reallly want to see it. With three Ls, even.

LOL Feeds presents RSS/Atom feeds as those charming cats with the bad grammarz. Here is my long-love, recently neglected Waxy.org Links presented thusly, with the links intact. It's funnier than it sounds, if you're into meta humor.

Kinkless Desktop 1: The "No Mercy" Cleanup | Kinkless So we have an undifferentiated mass of stuff on the desktop. This is the point at which a lot of organization self-help tells you to sort through it file by file. I am not going to tell you this. Why? Because I am lazy and realistic. You are just not going to clean up your desktop right now. Why? It’s overwhelming. So we’ll use a trick I call the “No Mercy Cleanup” : The No-Mercy Cleanup Get rid of your hard disks, CDs, and network shares. you can bring these back later, but for now we want an empty desktop. Make a folder called “To Delete on Monday March 7” (using a date one week from today) Select all items on your desktop (Command-A), command-click unselecting the “To Delete” folder. Drag and drop everything on your desktop into this new folder. Brush hands together, lean back, bask in the glory of your new clean desktop. “But! I have! stuff! I need! in there!” I hear you say with too many exclamation points. Yes...

Mac Rumors: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Interviewed at All Things Digital : It's stunning to see these two on stage together. Bill Gates' memory about programming he did for the early Mac is surprisingly detailed and rings of nostalgia on his part. Steve Jobs' ability to make the autocrat of the OS world look small is uncanny. And the final joke which stymies Bill so badly is worth watching the whole interview.

June 8, 1959: They'll Never Complain About Slow Postal Service Again The missile was fired shortly before noon from a launcher aboard the submarine USS Barbero, cruising off the coast of Virginia. Twenty-two minutes after launch, the missile struck its target at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station in Mayport, Florida. The mail was retrieved, sorted and routed in the usual way from a post office in nearby Jacksonville. Rocket mail, which has a whiff of theatrics to it, still exists and still has advocates around the world. Since the end of the cold war, a number of surplus missiles culled from the Soviet nuclear arsenal have been used to fire mail around Russia, including a few experimental launches from nuclear subs.

Get this widget! ( warren ellis )

I know how wikis work, but I'd have trouble explaining it in 3 minutes and 52 seconds, like this: Video: Wikis in Plain English | Common Craft - Social Design for the Web

The funny thing is, I've been wanting to make a game or novel about this for some time now. The parallels between samurai movies and westerns is not only a source of historic cinematic greatness, it's heaps of fun. I look at the way Yojimbo was turned into Fist Full of Dollars , Seven Samurai into The Magnificent Seven ... I wonder what happens when Takashi Miike of all people takes it in mind to drag some back. ( synaesthesiaJP )

NPR : NPR Live Concert Series As weezie describes it, "something for everyone." There is some real breadth in the material here.

You may have heard of the Hipster PDA - a stack of 3x5" cards with an industrial clip or brass brad holding them together. It's fabulous, but how can you get the music playback capabilities of an electronic PDA? ( 43 Folders )

I've become so used to Microsoft and Yahoo's conscious efforts to block out every non-first-party client from using their Instant Messaging protocol that I've just assumed that there was an irrefutable business reason for it. Surprisingly, I find this not necessarily to be the case. Google Talk cooperates beautifully with the standard Apple IM application, iChat. See how, here: Google Talk Help - How do I configure iChat for Google Talk?

Bloat. If you think that Americans are getting fatter, take one good look at the operating system (OS) your computer is running right now. It gets larger and more weighed down with every update. We are in the third decade of global personal computing, and have we really progressed that far? Let’s go back to the dawn of personal computing and grab an old sentimental favorite, the Apple Macintosh Plus. The Mac Plus is an icon of the ’80s along with padded shoulders, big hair and Devo. It seems that we all had a little Mac, either in our college dorm room, in the upstairs bedroom, or on our office desk at some time. With its tiny 9-inch black & white screen and all-in-one packaging, the Mac Plus is a computing relic in the days of widescreen LCD monitors and dual- and quad-core systems. ( full article ) ( tokyopia ) Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that’s not considered thoroughly here, like just how much more crazy stuff you can do on computers. Try running any 3D app...