Archive for October, 2005

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Saturday, October 29, 2005

 

Windows Registry Guide

Handy reference guide for tweaking the registry. Lots of ads, but the content is there. It has a bunch of categories and the articles in each one point directly to the registry entry you need to change.


Thursday, October 27, 2005

 

Elderly man shoots and kills caretaker in Philadelphia

`An 83-year-old man in a wheelchair shot and killed his caretaker, saying he thought she had been stealing from him, police said.

[..the man] is a World War II veteran, and has used a wheelchair following a stroke that affected one side of his body.’


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Man Convicted of Sprinkling Fecal Matter on Pastries

`During the trial, the jury saw store surveillance videotapes of the man tainting the food.

Customers had complained the fresh-baked items smelled and tasted like manure.

Nahidmobarekeh could get anywhere from 10 years probation to two to 20 years in prison.’


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Die-Hard Fans Ignore Fire Alarm At Eagles Game

`Without knowing if it was safe or not, fans said that they made a choice to say and watch the Eagles play.

“The stadium is concrete. If there’s going to be a fire, what’s really going to burn? There’s a huge game going on,” Pulcinski said.

“Not even a thought to get out of the stadium. Didn’t think what it was, didn’t care,” said Pat Mullen, a fan.

What if there had been a real emergency?

“I would have died, probably in a happy place,” Castelli said.

The Eagles said that if there had been a real emergency, the Eagles vision screens would have displayed information on what to do and play on the field would stop.’

People can longer think without TV.


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Naked man orders coffee while masturbating

`A female employee at the restaurant in nearby Thamesford took an order for a large coffee just past midnight on Oct. 3, prosecutor Michael Carnegie told court Tuesday.

When the car pulled up to the window, the employee noticed a man alone in the vehicle, completely nude and masturbating, Carnegie said.

The man handed money to the employee with his unoccupied left hand, court heard.’


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Wednesday, October 26, 2005

 

DalekCity – The Online Home of the Dalek Builders’ Guild

`We were the very first site devoted to the building of the Dalek, and it is still our intent to supply all the information you’ll need to produce an accurate full size working Dalek as seen in the long running BBC TV series Dr Who.

The menu system is complete, but at present some of the menu items are not available. These menu items will be populated over the coming weeks, so come back regularly to see additional content as it is added!

The Moderators, The Dalek Builders’ Guild.’


Spot The Scotsman

(2.3meg Windows Media)


Researchers find alterations in brain’s circuitry caused by cocaine

‘Cocaine causes specific alterations in the brain�s circuitry at a genetic level, including short-term changes that result in a high from the cocaine, as well as long-term changes seen in addiction, researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center have found.

Such findings suggest possible new directions for treatments for addiction to the drug, they said.

In a study available online and in the Oct. 20 issue of Neuron, UT Southwestern researchers used rodents to pinpoint an important molecular mechanism that switches genes “on” in the part of the brain involved in drug-induced rewards. They also determined that cocaine, through a process called “chromatin remodeling,” alters the normal biochemical processes that allow these specific genes to be turned on and off.’


Texas wants to ban all marriages

`Sec. 32. (a) Marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman.
(b) This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.’


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Top 10 Richest Men Of All Time

`It would be too easy to rank the world’s richest people today. You could simply take the founders of some of the top firms in the world, sort them by the value of holdings in their company and voila! At AskMen, we have consulted with economists, financiers and historians to rank some of the most influential men in the history of humanity, as ranked by wealth in 2001 US Dollars (some figures are approximate as they take into consideration inflation, GDP growth, currency exchange rates, and fluctuations in share prices).’


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The Giant Cowgirl


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Dark Throne (beta)

Started having a play of this tonite. It’s not too bad. 🙂

If you want to help me out, you can follow this link to give me some gold or whatever it is. 🙂


Scare Tactics

A scene from TV show where a guy is scared to the point of hysterics by some midget rat monster.

(5.3meg Windows Media)

see it here »


Tuesday, October 25, 2005

 

Hotel in Central Baghdad Is Hit by 3 Explosions

`Three enormous explosions, at least one of which was a car bomb, struck this evening near two prominent hotels popular with foreign journalists and contractors, causing heavy structural damage to at least one of the buildings, shattering glass throughout the neighborhood and catapulting debris hundreds of yards away.’

(1.5meg Windows Media)


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how-to turn a digital camera into an IR-camera

`First of all, I know this has been done before (with webcams for example), but I thought it would be nice to give you an extensive insight view of how I transferred my old digital camera (which would probably fetch only $30 on ebay or such) into a infrared camera. The whole idea is just that a lot of people probably have old cameras laying around, collecting dust, so why not make one of your old cameras an infrared one? :-)’


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Clock: Orrery (planet display)

`The Orrery is a ten foot tall planet tracking display. The lower half is a mechanical binary calculation engine. Each layer is calculating the orbit if one of the six human eye visible planets (Mercury through Saturn) to 28 bits of accuracy. The Orrery is primarily made of monel (a nickel copper alloy), and stainless steel. The planet spheres are ground from natural stones that resemble each planet they represent.’

Pictures of the Orrery clock also.


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CSS Shorthand Guide

`Ok. Let’s set the record straight. There is no official guide for each and every CSS shorthand property value. So let’s work together and put one together shall we? Ok. Straight to the business. Anytime I’ve ran into a specification (besides the confusing mess at the W3C), it turns into showing off a couple of examples and you’re supposed to be set on your way. Well well. Over the years, I’ve found quite some interesting unknown quirky facts about these shorthands… hence this Guide was born.’


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Physics Flash Animations

Some of these animations are pretty cool.

I’m sending planets spinning about suns in a binary solar system at the moment. Fun. 🙂


Rape victim: ‘Morning after’ pill denied

`After a sexual assault one recent weekend, a young Tucson woman spent three frantic days trying to obtain the drug to prevent a pregnancy, knowing that each passing day lowered the chance the drug would work.

While calling dozens of Tucson pharmacies trying to fill a prescription for emergency contraception, she found that most did not stock the drug.

When she finally did find a pharmacy with it, she said she was told the pharmacist on duty would not dispense it because of religious and moral objections.’


Live, gold-dusted bacteria used in bioelectronic device

`”On the bacteria’s surface, there are these filaments that grab the nanoparticles,” said Saraf, who came to UNL last year from Virginia Tech. “When the humidity increases, the bacteria swells because it absorbs moisture, and it contracts when the humidity goes down. When it swells or contracts, it increases or decreases the distance between the nanoparticles.”

The distance between the particles, of course, affects their ability to exchange electrons and therefore their ability to pass on electrical current Saraf and Berry found that a decrease of less than 0.2 nanometers between the gold nanoparticles (reflecting a decrease in humidity from 20 percent to essentially 0 percent), resulted in more than a 40-fold increase in electrical current.

“So now we have a very, very sensitive device that can measure humidity,” Saraf said. “What is interesting is that the sensitivity of the device increases when the humidity goes down, which is completely opposite from other devices. [..]”‘


`Missing’ penis sparks mob lynching

`Police in the south western Nigerian state of Osun say they have embarked on a constant patrol after mobs lynched at least 12 people since last weekend.

All the killings occurred after the victims were accused of making people’s genital organs disappear. [..]

The most gruesome case occurred on Friday when hundreds of members of the evangelical sect Brotherhood of the Cross went to the town of Ilesa for their annual convention.

While the sect members were on a house-to-house preaching mission, someone raised an alarm that his penis had disappeared.

An angry mob descended on the visiting evangelists and burnt eight of them to death. Two buses and a car were also burnt.’


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Hong Kong Nazi Porn Fails to Offend

`Popular Hong Kong men’s magazine Akasi pulled out all the stops for its October issue this year, capitulating to a bizarre new fascination many Hong Kong residents have developed for Nazi Germany.

In what some local fashion magazines have dubbed the new “Nazi chic,” swastikas and German uniforms have been popping up all over Hong Kong lately, prompting Akasi to publish a multi-page spread of a sexy model seig-heiling her way to sexual freedom and romping in the grass with a plastic version of wartime general Heinz Guderian, Hitler’s army chief of staff.

And aside from a few scant mentions in independent online publications, nobody seems to care.’


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Protecting the Presidential Seal. No Joke.

`You might have thought that the White House had enough on its plate late last month, what with its search for a new Supreme Court nominee, the continuing war in Iraq and the C.I.A. leak investigation. But it found time to add another item to its agenda – stopping The Onion, the satirical newspaper, from using the presidential seal.

The newspaper regularly produces a parody of President Bush’s weekly radio address on its Web site, where it has a picture of President Bush and the official insignia.

“It has come to my attention that The Onion is using the presidential seal on its Web site,” Grant M. Dixton, associate counsel to the president, wrote to The Onion on Sept. 28. (At the time, Mr. Dixton’s office was also helping Mr. Bush find a Supreme Court nominee; days later his boss, Harriet E. Miers, was nominated.)

Citing the United States Code, Mr. Dixton wrote that the seal “is not to be used in connection with commercial ventures or products in any way that suggests presidential support or endorsement.” Exceptions may be made, he noted, but The Onion had never applied for such an exception.’


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More users migrate from Microsoft Exchange to new Lotus Notes

`More users are migrating from Microsoft Exchange to the new version of Lotus Notes and Domino 7 with its new collaboration features and tools that help improve productivity for IT administrators and application developers.

The new upgrade has the competitive advantage because it supports Linux, Windows and Unix, said Surjit Chana, IBM vice president for marketing, partners and workplace client technology.

Chana expects more customers of IBM to upgrade to the new version of Lotus Notes as well as attract new customers to deploy Domino 7 particularly from the small and medium enterprises.

“A lot of users of Microsoft Exchange are now migrating to Lotus Notes 7 because of the many innovations, security features, reduced total cost of ownership and a strong support by IBM,” said Chana.’


Kentucky lands grant to protect bingo halls from terrorists

`Kentucky has been awarded a federal Homeland Security grant aimed at keeping terrorists from using charitable gaming to raise money.

The state Office of Charitable Gaming won the $36,300 grant and will use it to provide five investigators with laptop computers and access to a commercially operated law-enforcement data base, said John Holiday, enforcement director at the Office of Charitable Gaming.

The idea is to keep terrorists from playing bingo or running a charitable game to raise large amounts of cash, Holiday said.

But to some, the idea of protecting bingo halls from terrorists is nonsensical.’


Smurfette’s Secret

`It’s bothered me for years …

… I’m talking about the Smurfs, of course. You know — those little blue people on TV.

They’re not normal people, are they? I mean, besides being blue and all. There’s something … different about them.

Think about it: There is ONE, count her, ONE female in the whole bunch. All the rest are male. There is ONE, count him, ONE, adult male in the whole bunch.

I’m not exactly a scientist, but I do have some science training. And you don’t really have to have much to see that, even though they look like little blue people, there’s some kind of profoundly different life cycle going on there.

And I think I’ve figured it out.’


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Boss threatens DNA tests over gum

`An office boss threatened his staff with DNA tests after chewing gum got stuck on a director’s trouser suit.

Tony Price, managing director of IT firm WStore UK, was angry after he found the gum squashed under a desk.

He sent out a memo demanding his 80 staff in Farnham, Surrey, submit to the test to weed out the culprit.

However, after the plan was leaked to the media, Mr Price, 33, said he was only joking – but was angry at the breach of his gum ban.

Now he is pledging to hunt down the employee who alerted the press – by forcing workers to take lie detector tests.’


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ACLU Reports 21 Homicides in U.S. Custody

`At least 21 detainees who died while being held in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan were killed, many during or after interrogations, according to an analysis of Defense Department data by the American Civil Liberties Union. [..]

In one case, the report said, a detainee died after being smothered during interrogation by military intelligence officers in November 2003. In another case cited by the report, a prisoner died of asphyxiation and blunt force injuries after he was left standing, shackled to the top of a door frame, with a gag in his mouth.

One Afghan civilian, believed by the ACLU to be Abdul Wahid, died from “multiple blunt force injuries” in 2003 at a base in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, according to an autopsy report provided by the Defense Department.’


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You’ll never squawk alone

`[..] when a passer-by found what looked like a human foetus in an alleyway they assumed the worst.

Within hours one kindly soul had laid a bunch of flowers at the scene, expressing her sorrow. Another did likewise, imploring the mother she suspected of aborting her child to come forward.

After five days the alley behind Oakfield Road, Anfield, had become a sprawling shrine filled with flowers, teddy bears and cards.

Yesterday Merseyside police took the unusual step of announcing that their investigation was over and that the foetus in question had been that of. . . a chicken.’


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How toxic is your bathroom?

`Earlier this year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did something amazing. It issued an unprecedented warning to the cosmetics industry that it was time to inform consumers that most personal care products have not been safety tested.

Where the US goes, the UK inevitably follows. If the FDA starts the ball rolling by flexing its muscles, it is possible that in the not too distant future 99 per cent of personal care products could be required to carry a caution on the label: “Warning: The safety of this product has not been determined.”‘