devolute.net

Here is a mini-lego-made Star Wars recreation of a massive battle. X-Wings, AT-ATs, Slave 1 and TiEs swooping over the landscape. This would have made my childhood.

View the full set.

usernamecheck.com is probably a good place to go when you first start out with a handle, it’s too late for me and ‘devolute’ now! What this little web-tool does is it scans all the popular web2.0 sites to see if your handle of choice is in use on their service or not. I think it serves a dual purpose of not only checking to see if your nick was a wise choice or not, but also it serves to reminds you where you may have previously registered accounts and forgotten about them.

Visit usernamecheck.com now to check if you have any impersonators!

via swissmiss

Twilight Zone is a collection interesting urban photography. All shots were taken in Japan from the emergency staircases of buildings (not from the roofs) in the twilight. The contrast between the endless drab concrete surfaces and the lights is beautiful.

Found at Visual Evasion

eBoy isn’t the be-all and end-all of pixel art, honest. The goons at the Something Awful forums have produced a whole town of pixel art. Some of the quality of the stuff is really pretty good. It seems like many people have contributed and I suggest you spend 10 minutes playing ’spot the meme’. There is a military base, Darleks, Futurama’s Planet Express, AT-ATs, Rabbit ambulance and god knows what else. Oh, and Monorail cat taking citizens to work.

Ambulance all employing the principles of hopping instead of rolling

Visit the blog of the guy who got the ball rolling for more information. You can view the project in a Google-maps style interface at gooncity.com. It’s still growing.

This couch is awesome. Designer Christian Zuzunaga made it for Italian company Moroso.

Pixel sofa

Videolan media player has been a life-saver for digital video viewers. I’ve used it for a year or so now and since then I no longer had to one have to muck about with stupid ‘Kazzaa’ codec packs and other crappy codecs and players. Instead, all I had to do was download a reasonably sized media player and it would open any format I could throw at it. It was a blessing and it’s on my Windows desktop, my Ubuntu Laptop and my workplace Mac. It’s never let me down, it’s fast and it ‘just works’ ™.

So now I’m obviously quite sad having downloaded the latest new version (0.9.2) which has had substantial changes. There is a new, ’shinier’ (read: more messy) interface, bug fixes, support for even more codecs and oh yeah, now when I skip forward through video too fast it crashes. The old VLC never crashed. Never. I recommended it to everyone who just needed a video open now, but I don’t think I can do so anymore. Fingers crossed they fix it, but for now I’ll be downgrading and I think it’s another case of shine-over stability.

Finally, someone is asking the important questions about the upcoming U.S. elections. Also, they give sources: which puts this website way ahead of most of the major news networks. Huzzah!

Visit isbarackobamamuslin.com

If they’re not releasing free albums using Bittorrent trackers, or encouraging remixes by giving fans their tracks in easy editable Garageband formats, then they are pulling pranks like this:

Nine Inch Nails Blue Screen of Death

This has been spotted at a few NiN gigs recently, but c’mon. We knew it was a fake. Trent would never use Windows for a show!

Videos available at Gizmodo. Thanks to LtRandazzo @ flickr for trigger-like photography.

I know it’s early days. The new Google browser is on Version 0.2 and I’m sure more features will come, more options and less bugs. It’s a browser with potential. It’s pretty fast, it does everything you want (tabs, good javascript support, privacy modes, W3C compliant rendering through webkit) but it’s just a bloody browser. In some JS tests, it’s not even as fast as Firefox.

Unfortunately, it seems like it’s only El Reg who have noticed this.

People are calling Chrome a cloud operating system because it is a “platform for running web apps”. It renders HTML and interprets Javascript, you know, like every fucking browser made since 1995. It’s also got Google Gears built in. Great. I’ll alert Tim Berners-Lee.

They are completely right. The gushing over Chrome by otherwise insightful blogs like Techcrunch about it being a challenger to WIndows is ridiculous. I wish it was, but it’s simply not. Get a grip people!

BarackRoll’d, as it were. Colbert tried to make it clear for him, but what can you do ‘eh?