this dude really hates horses. (warning bad language). (via waxy).

Google earth seems pretty neat really cool! Link. Like a computer version of a world atlas, road map, directions, information guide etc. It's free and about an 8mb download.

One of the pictures is Nelson, New Zealand. The other is Nelson, Lancashire, UK, including the famous Railway Street and other locations (Southfield Street, Lancaster Gate). Some locations have better satelitte images that others. (for example, in London, you can make out cars and trees quite clearly). The third screengrab, is of the Anthony Nolan Trust in London - if you click the image you can see a bigger version, where you can see all the little car dots - there's even a house nearby that seems to have a bright blue swimming pool.




Other neat features: double click (left) to zoom, double right click to zoom out. click and drag to scroll, click drag and throw the image to get it to continue scrolling. There's a sight-seeing tour (of America) in 'My places' as well. The middle button on your mouse will let you move the view around in 3D.

I've included a picture of the statue of liberty. If you go to a big american city like new york, you can turn buildings on and it'll show you all the buildings in 3D (pic attached to post). The only problem seems to be that sometimes the program will go really slow - othertimes really quick... restarting the program seems to speed it up again though - and it appears to keep a cache of the data it's downloaded so you don't have to wait ages for it to download it again.

Other neat stuff: It has Area 51. Railroads. Crime Stats. Census. Cloud coverage. Volcanoes. Earthquakes. Grand Canyon's pretty cool. There's even more cool places you can check out here. In fact - this would make a cool virtual holiday on a big projector :)

sun now make a laptop...
amd suing intel for intel making people buy intel (and not amd) ...

Supershadow - Star Wars Mania!

Features plot and scripts for the final trilogy.

The geek of geeks passes.

mugabe is a big fat pratt. news link. normally countries have all their houses knocked down by natural disasters, such as the tsunami, but in zimbabwe, the government is knocking down all the houses because they're led by a big fat pratt. comments here worth reading. someone should go kick his ass.

Have you seen the new button on here - blogger will let you upload photos easily while you post stuff, and they'll host if for you. Perhaps in answer to msn spaces. (You've always been able to do it with 'hello'/bloggerbot but this new way seems much easier).

DigitalCameraInfo review the Olympus E-800 8 megapixel Digital SLR - what do you think - why would you need 8 megapixels? Surely 6 is enough - in fact, I've printed 3 megapixel images up to A0 (16 A4 sheets), and it looks very good (due to printer interpolation).

shake it shake it shake it.

anyway, i've downloaded a screen saver called screenpaver - it basically does a slideshow of all your photos as a screensaver - just like the built in one in Windows XP - however I don't have windows XP - but I was wondering if there's a free slideshow screensaver out there that you know of?

the table

table and chair photos ('The Writer')
Click to view images:
[1][2][3][4][5][6]

severed arm

man loses arm in combine harvester. or something like that.

Film Reviews / Thoughts.

The Bourne Supremacy - About 20 minutes in they're accessing a computer system, and it prompts for a password ie. restricted access, yet it says 'Treadstone Project' - AS IF it would display the name of the secret project if it's restricted access!!? Anyway really good film. (ooh they're gonna make a 3rd one! due 2007)

Saved - Funny. Hyper 'born-again' christians at a hyper christian school struggle with vairous issues... worth watching.

also, I don't think anyone's written about i'robot on here (apart from a link to a trailer) - but it's very good worth watching at least once. depite all the blatant (crappy) 'converse all stars' adverts.

other films I've seen recently: Batman begins (link to my thoughts on it), Millions, Monster In Law, Spivs, The League of Gentlemen.

so we're getting a mac (not me personally). an old imac - unknown spec. we want to put OS X on it.

there's a good guide here on how to do it. and there's more info here.

However - I have some questions: I've found the requirements for OS X 10.4 (here: 256mb ram, firewire (why?), slot loading imac supported) - but will this run on earlier macs or is that deliberately disabled? Also what are the requirements of OS X 10.3? (according to this tray loading imacs will run it fine).

intel mac, osx mac intel, windows mac, osx dell, and other experiments. thinksecret (been slashdotted so super slow/down)

SMOG ALERT

smog (from the BBC)
heavy showers and thunderstorms (from metcheck)
Localised flash flooding, hail, gusty winds and frequent lightning will all combine to produce hazardous travelling conditions.
Sounds fantastic. Friday daytime, 7mm rain in N20, 4mm rain in Hampstead.

hamstead heath (london, UK) gets giant table and chair. bbc news.

civil servants (england, UK) don't have to wear ties. bbc news - quote: "He made it plain, though, that there was still no room for "Blue Jeans" or "Trainers", still considered barbarians by many." more funny comments at the bottom of the article.

foxit (download.com) - free adobe acrobat reader alternative.

Search and browse smarter with MSN Search Toolbar, now with Windows Desktop Search

Did you know that Microsoft have an add-on for IE that adds tabbed browsing...? it's a big download at 7.88mb!

Search and browse smarter with MSN Search Toolbar, now with Windows Desktop Search

"Cruise, 42, was previously married to actresses Mimi Rogers and Nicole Kidman, from whom he separated in 2001." Crikey I didn't know he was married to Mimi and Nicole at the same time, kept that quiet, then seperated them at the same time, sneaky. Now he's marrying Katie Holmes. bbc news.

dell would happily sell mac os x, if apple were willing. linky link

Adam is in need of GPS solutions for outdoor pusuits - I have a Garmin eTrex. Any mapping solutions would be appreciated.

fancy a printer with your mouse sir? link.

dude switches from linux to mac (does anybody know who he is?). slashdot post about it. and mac os x for intel is apparently out there.

dude makes some photos, gets into trouble with the secret service (in "free" america).

this is a lovely website, with some lovely colours and some lovely pictures.

health tests easy to do and informative.

this thing's weird. really weird.

ebay link

Megxon M500 - digital camera with 2.5" screen - plays MP3s, plays MPEG4/DIVX video files, will RECORD TV and fit 90 minutes on a 512mb SD card!! 6 built in games, dictaphone. It's got tv-in/out so that you can directly record TV onto it! It's like an ultra portable video recorder/player! (it's pretty small too, at 18.5mm thick) It does VGA/30fps videos and has STEREO AV in! It's also got an alarm clock and built in calendar.

more weirdness: super fujicam a cheapo digicam that's trying to cash in on the fuji/fujifilm name!

rumours from the land of crazy people:
dude thinks intel will merge with apple.
Apple are a hardware company and their real enemy is Dell (not microsoft).

okay, lets make up some random crazy dude stuff / and some not so crazy stuff:

Apple's enemies are all other companies other than Apple (excluding their partners, Intel) - so that means that Microsoft/Dell/HP/Linux are competitors. Apple is interested in making money, pure and simple, IBM seem to be stopping them from making the most of the current market situation. The current market situation is made up of millions of people who want to use the Internet/Email, but are having major problems with Windows due to Windows/Internet Explorer stagnation - Microsoft have been taking a VERY long time with an extremely out of date browser, and an operating system that's probably got more patches than original code. So Apple want to make the most of this, and to do this they need suppliers who can supply them in bulk (and this is something Intel can do).

Apple could release ultra cheap Mini (Intel) Macs (or just leave them at the current price), sell more than Dell, and end up with 30% or more market share with all those people running Mac OS X because they just want to use the internet and email and are sick of buggy/dodgy windows / viruses / spyware / popups etc.

Those people who don't want to go Apple, can just use Firefox, and have to put up with dodgy Windows.

Google are officially God - all $77bn of it. cnetblogs tell the story.

I think CASIO may have just made the perfect digital camera.

The CASIO EXILIM EX-S500 - it's ultra compact, ultra cool, has 5 megapixels, 3x optical zoom lens, large 2.2" screen, built in anti-shake technology, and VGA MPEG4 video with sound, letting you record up to an hour on a 1gb SD card. If it's anything like the S100 I've currently got then, it'll be fantastic! (the S100 is ultra small 3mp, very fast very easy to use, lots of controls and features, but a limited video mode (320x240 /15fps))

link

Check out Dynamism.com - they get the brilliant gadgets only available in Japan, reprogram them in English and flog 'em. Legends.

well. holy cow batman. apple using intel cpus. FACT.

keynote speech by steve jobs in summary:

ibm can't make fast enough G5s, or G5s that'll work in laptops.
apple have been working on OS X for both G4/G5 and Intel chips for 5 years.
exchange features will come to the mac (currently you can't access calendar properly, and getting email to work properly is a pain too).
they're using a 'rosetta' program that lets you run powerpc apps on intel chips, but people can quickly and easily change their software to run on intel macs.

more links: apple press release | intel press release | MacNN speech notes.

just for some background - Apple have never ever used intel/x86 processors before, they have always used Motorola / PowerPC / IBM PowerPC chips. It makes you wonder what will happen next? Will you be able to install OSX on normal PCs? Will Macs become much cheaper? What CPUs will they use/will the be 64bit? And why didn't they go for 64bit AMD cpus?

apparently 'you will be able to order the 10.4.1 preview for Intel today'

G5 performance vs P4 performance (G5s twice as quick as P4) - perhaps P4s will simply replace the G4s and Laptop CPUs to start with? and then later use Quad core P4s when they get released? apparently they've been talking to AMD as well, although if Apple's deal with Intel is anything like Dell's deal with Intel, then that may never happen...

IE7 not for Windows 2000. "What kind of silliness is this?" Microsoft claim that IE7 will rely on too much stuff that's in Windows XP, meaning they couldn't possibly make it for W2K. I thought this was the kind of stuff Microsoft weren't allowed to do? You know, Microsoft, if you remember all those law suits? Do you remember them? you're not meant to tie software into an operating system. story here. I don't care too much, I guess we'll just have to roll out Firefox onto 3000 Windows 2000 PCs, when IE6 becomes completely obsolete. (It's pretty much obsolete as it is anyway).

The Weblog Review

The Weblog Review - this site review's blog sites. i found that funny. you might too.

G8 Summit in Edinborough. they're planning a protest on the 6th* of July to 'Make poverty history' - who fancies going? I do! (*6th according to the BBC - the make poverty history website has the date as the 2nd of July, not the 6th)