Check out this interesting collection of do-it-yourself papercraft. My favorite is the AT-AT Walkers from Star Wars.
Here is the AT-AT papercraft.pdf (234KB)
(Via BoingBoing)
Auction Ads
Last week I received an email touting the great benefits of a new kind of web advertising for eBay auctions, called “Auction Ads”. The email stated that just for signing up I’d get a bonus of $5 put into my account within two business days. Well four days passed with nothing, so I emailed them. They responded by saying it takes a week for the money to show up on my account. It has now been about a week and two days. I’ve given them over 24,000 ad views and they’ve given me nothing.
My advice: don’t waste your time with auction ads.
After the Warming
“After the Warming”, stars James Burke, whom you may remember from the days when TLC actually showed educational television and not just a bunch of reality-tv remixes in various flavors of “how to buy a house”, “how to fix up a house”, “how to flip a house”, or “how to be an cretin while making motorcycles”.
“After the Warming” is like a special edition of Connections (wikipedia) in which we learn how changes in civilization, the weather, and industrialization brought on the current climate crisis we now face.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfE8wBReIxw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxJLyPSRusc
[“After the Warming” is] an early documentary about global warming. It theorizes and tells facts about the effects global weather has had on our history. It then theorizes a lot more about its effects on our future and especially the way in which we will overcome it’s bad effects. If you don’t mind some, not proofed, theorizing from a reasonably intelligent guy, and are interested in our climate, this is probably a must see.
I found the news clip style predictions of an increase in hurricanes, rising oceans levels, and the devastation of New Orleans particularly chilling. Some of the prediction dates were a bit off, but interesting to think about anyway.
(via)
The Top Ten best 8-bit Games
Check out the top ten best 8-bit games as rated by the Game Trailer Countdown. A couple of my favorite 8-bit games, Tetris and Excitebike, didn’t make the cut, but the GT list does have some classics.
Genius: 2012
Cultural phenomenon Malcolm Gladwell gave a talk at the New Yorker Conference 2012: Stories From the Near Future. His talk Genius: 2012 illustrates the importance of stubbornness and collaboration in problem-solving.
Interview with David Sedaris
David Sedaris, author of “Me talk pretty one day”, a book about learning to speak French, shares some tid-bits about life in France in an interview with Franceguide, the official website of France Tourism.
Inexpensive Memory Cards
Thomas Hawk points out where to get an 8GB Extreme III memory Card for just $89US.
How to Talk to the Press
Over the last year I’ve done a ton of interviews about my website and about backmasking. The more interviews I do, the more comfortable I get at doing them.
At first it surprised me how much the skill level of the interviewer makes on the flow of the interview. I’ve been interviewed by reporters ranging in skill from The Wall Street Journal to an individual doing a high school project. I’ve seen the difference in how a piece for a live radio show differs from a pre-recorded and heavily edited podcast. I’ve also seen how practise giving interviews makes such a big difference in how you come across in the final version.
Today I came across some great advice from Matt Haughey on how to talk to the press. Priceless advice for both the interviewer and interviewee. Read up, you never know when it will be your turn! And don’t forget to read the comments, you’ll find some real gems there.
Hax0red
As sad as this is to admit, it appears there is a folder or 5 on my site that have been sending out some kind of pharmaceutical spam. I guess this is just a lesson that when working with plugins that I’m not too sure about, I need to be extra careful.
The files in question have also written special permissions to themselves making it difficult to just erase them. I’ve contacted my hosting provider and hopefully I will have things sorted out soon.
Some of the names of the noxious files in question include:
- bucaon.php
- bucion.php
- caon.php
- chca.php
- chcion.php
- chva.php
- chva2.php
- hoon.php
- leon.php
- orfi.php
- puph.php
- adon.php
- bual.php
- bualon.php
- buph.php
- orphon.php
- orsoon.php
- orxa.php
- soon.php
- ulon.php
- weon.php
- buamon.php
- bufi.php
- buhy.php
- chfi.php
- chhy.php
- chso.php
- orci.php
- orhy.php
- puxa.php
- tron.php
- buhyon.php
- buleon.php
- butr.php
- chal.php
- chle.php
- orcaon.php
- orcion.php
- orva.php
- orvi.php
- pron.php
The interesting thing I found when searching for information about my situation, there appears to be a lot of other sites that also have these malicious php files on their servers and I assume they have no idea about it either—including, and this surprised me the most, many Universities’ sites.
If anyone has any more light they can shed on this, please let me know.
Update: At my request, my hosting provider has blown away the affected directories.
Death Star Cookie
Todd Franklin of Neato Coolville has posted the recipe to make your very own Death Star cookie from his 30 year old copy of Darth Vader’s Activity Book.
Mmmmm, death-licious.