Category: Miscellaneous

In the spirit of “actual doing it”, instead of just saying “wouldn’t it be cool if” some guy took his Roomba vacuum cleaner and hooked it up to his computer where, with a bit of coding know-how he hacked it into a musical instrument. (It’s a vacuum—an instrument that sucks… get it?)

For all the technical stuff see roombahacking.com.

All I want to say is, it’s the year 2006; it’s high time all our appliances were capable of playing lowbrow video game music from the 80’s.

(via Waxy)

There are very few things in this world that I would go so far as to say that I hate. Having said that, I HATE Yellow Jackets. I haven’t been stung for a long time (I was stung by a wasp within the first couple weeks of moving to Lethbridge over 3 years ago) but my hatred for this pest runs deep.

Here is a brilliant, cheap, and non-toxic way to deal with wasps and their cousin the yellow-jacket from the AOJ Outdoors Tip Site: Grandpa Kipp’s Sure-Fire Yellow Jacket Trap.

How It Works:

The yellow jackets love fish and will begin to cut off small pieces to take back to the nest. In their “excitement” of buzzing around the bait a few will occasionally hit the water. The soap in the water breaks the surface tension of the waterproof coating on the yellow jacket and it instantly sinks in the water and drowns in a few seconds. Some yellow jackets will successfully haul a piece of meat back to the nest and tell all the other gatherers in the nest where this great food source is. Soon all the wasps from the nest will be working on this fish and over a period of time, all will eventually make mistakes and either fall off the fish and into the water or bump other wasps flying around and knock themselves in the drink, then its curtains for them too. It only takes a day or two to wipe out nearly every yellow jacket in your area.

I’m going camping for the long weekend, and I’ll keep this little contraption in mind should any wasps try and disturb our Victoria Day celebrations.

Steve Rubel’s post, 25 Things I Learned on Google Trends is a fun look into world search trends using the new Google Trends.

What I enjoy is not only what search trends are developing, but how one search item compares with another. Seeing where the less politically correct searches are popular is also extremely interesting.

Sex is obviously a lot more popular than drugs for searches, but it’s mentioned just about as often in the media—rock and roll almost doesn’t even register. Cairo, Egypt gets the award for searching for “sex” most often with most of those searches being done in Arabic. Prostitution, however, is most searched for in Montreal.

Backmasking is most searched for in Melbourne, Australia, and it’s hard to say for sure, but it looks like it had a spike in January when the Wall Street Journal did that story about it, and again lots of other spikes as other big organizations and networks picked up the story.

Pepsi appears more popular than either term—Coke or Coca-cola, and Yahoo is still more popular than Google but they’re closing the gap.

Back in 1982 a group of three kids from Mississippi began a project to recreate, shot-for-shot, Stephen Spielberg’s classic, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. They were 12 years old when they started. It took them a little over six years to finish it, and while that alone is noteworthy, their story is now being considered to be turned into amovie with a screenplay by Dan Clowes of “Ghost World” fame. He talks about it near the end of a recent Wired News article.

The picture itself has become somewhat of an underground hit, garnering a lot of attention lately from the mainstream media. The three creators, known as the Indy guys, are now taking their show on the road. There isn’t a whole lot of the remake footage in it, but if you feel compelled, check out the trailer.

(via Pete’s Linklog)

When I was a kid, one of the things I really wanted was a tree house. I seem to recall my dad insisting that the tree in the back-yard wasn’t big enough yet—I’ll remember that excuse for when I have my own kids—but now I that I have a real house, one in a tree doesn’t seem to have the same draw it used to, at least that was until I saw the beautiful tree spheres created by Canadian craftsman Tom Chudleigh.

Tom’s “Free Spirit Spheres” evolved when his original plan to build a boat didn’t pan out, and instead he put what was effectively the cabin up in a tree in his native British Columbia. Since completing the first prototype called Eve, which was made out of yellow cedar wood, Tom has perfected his techniques. Now, he also constructs the spheres out of fiberglass, fitting them with plumbing, wiring and the all-important windows. Folks with more money than I can buy their own, prices start at around US$45,000.

See freespiritspheres.com for more photos and information.

I’m not sure why, since there are so many of them, but I’m always surprised when I run into die-hard fans of the Family Guy. On at least three occasions I have made the off-handed comment that it seems like the show has been specifically made for someone with attention deficit disorder—to which each of the people I was talking to said, actually I used to have ADHD.

I guess that explains a lot.

Given the enormous fan base, I decided that maybe I was just happening to catch “off” episodes that weren’t as funny as the truly great stuff that they must be putting out in order to create so many fanatics. So I pulled out my roommate’s “Best of Family Guy” DVDs and, as painful as it was, watched them straight through.

Ho-hum… and these were supposed to be funnier than all other episodes? Give me a break.

I’m glad to see I’m not the only one that feels the show is highly over-rated. Jaime Weinman’s blog post “Why I Hate FAMILY GUY” nicely sums up my feelings.

I found a link today over at Cartoon Brew that let me know about Wednesday night’s episode of South Park in which they make fun of the Family Guy. Although South Park has offended me on numerous occasions (to the point that I no longer watch the show), I still think it has a collection of very intelligent writers and is very capable of creating memorable and often insightful commentary on the world around us. For your viewing enjoyment, here is a clip from Wednesday’s show:

Update: I guess the video no longer works because YouTube is cracking down on playing clips of tv shows.