Now I can see why the British call them ‘torches’! A modded MagLite, some high power batteries and a projector bulb will get you one hell of a hot flashlight. WARNING! Do not use this to read books under the covers, that is unless you sleep on a stone slab and your sheets are made of asbestos.
Extreme Geek – Fire starting flashlight
Category: Historic
Sensorama: Virtual Reality from 1962
Who says that virtual reality is anything new? Inventor and cinematographer Morton Heilig had a firm grip on it back on the early 60’s:
(Sensorama was) an immersive 3-D virtual reality motorbike ride, in a form factor resembling an arcade game. Heilig saw Sensorama as the future of cinema, an immersive experience, complete with nine different fans to simulate the wind blowing on the user’s face, vibrating seat (to simulate driving over cobblestones), and the aromas of jasmine and hibiscus as the driver passed a flower garden, or the smell of baking pizza as one passed by an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. (Rheingold, 1991) It never received the funding necessary to scale up to commercial production, and quietly disappeared, although Heilig persisted, patenting improvements over the next decade.
[viaNeatorama]
Grimace, Evil Mastermind of McDonaldland
I knew I wasn’t crazy! I remember Grimace being a thief AND having two sets of arms! In the commercials of the very early 70’s, he would steel the milkshakes from various inhabitants of McDonaldland and then get caught by Ronald or Officer BigMac. This must prove that either the criminal system works or that he was subject to some volunteer medical program, because he’s fully reformed. Heck, he’s Ronald’s right hand man these days.
[via neatorama]
The Pop Culture Addict presents… Miscellaneous
Buck Godot Comics
Phil Foglio’s ‘Buck Godot’ comic series is an all time great. It may be from the 80’s but it is still a good read.
Buck Godot: zap gun for hire is a comic with a noir sensibility. Here you’ll find hard-drinking detectives, prostitutes with hearts of gold, foul-mouthed alien bartenders and lots of gunfights.
Wikipedia has an entry on it as well. You can read them as a web comic here if you wish.
BUCK GODOT Comics
Bastard Operator From Hell
I’m going to show my age on this one, I can tell. I remember first reading about the BOFH (Bastard Operator From Hell) back in the early mid 90’s while browsing through the posts on the good old Usenet. At first I didn’t quite know what to think, was this just some sys admin that was venting his spleen in creative way? Turn out, I was right:
The Bastard Operator From Hell (BOFH), a fictional character created by Simon Travaglia, is a rogue system administrator who takes out his anger on lusers (his colleagues, bosses and anyone who gets in his way).
The BOFH stories were originally posted in 1992 to Usenet by Travaglia, with some being reprinted in Datamation. They were published weekly from 1995 to 1999 in Network Week and from 2000 they have been published most weeks in The Register. They were also published in PC Plus magazine for a short time, and several books of the stories have also been released.
As someone in a similar position I have been reading them ever since. The Register has the current archive but you can find older ones at Simons personal page.
And while your at it, make sure you check out the DIY excuse board. I’m sure it will be very handy the next time someone calls and asks why the file they had been working on all morning (and didn’t save) is gone after the power glitch and can’t be recovered from the previous nights tape backup.
Archive of BOFH
Current BOFH on the Register
Bastard Operator From Hell – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Portable Commodore 64 – The Picodore 64
This has been making the rounds lately:
Here are a few pics of my own DTV Hummer project. I had an old PSOne LCD screen lying around and I thought I’d make a C64 laptop. Actually, it’s more like a C64 PDA! It measures 6.5 x 6 x 1.5 inches (15.5 x 16.5 x 4 cm) when closed. It can run from an AC wall adapter or 6 NiMH AA batteries. The keyboard is hacked from a portable folding keyboard for a Jornada PDA which outputs RS-232. I’m using a PIC 16F88 to decode the signals and re-encode them to PS/2 (that was an ordeal to figure out). The PIC checks to see if an external PS/2 keyboard is connected on power up. If one is hooked up, it will route data from that instead. There is an internal ampilfied speaker as well as connections for audio and video output on the back. There’s a serial connection for a disk drive and an SD card slot in the side for a 1541-III but I haven’t been able to get that to work yet. I also have a connection for a userport/joystick. The joystick in the picture is a hacked Atari keychain joystick. The mini joystick wasn’t in the original plan but after I accidentally discovered it on ebay, it seemed perfect.
[via hack-a-day]
Petscii Forums "PETSCII.COM" – Unveiling the Picodore 64 – a Commodore PDA!