moonbuggy

This guy has apparently wired up bits of his house so you can control them over the internet. I was just switching his Christmas tree lights on and off.

There’s a webcam so you can see what’s going on in the room.

`It is no secret that the MPAA and other anti-piracy organizations track down alleged pirates by uploading fake torrents. Up until now it was always unclear where those files came from, and how to identify them. [..]

The server boxes that host these torrents fall in serveral ip-ranges, and are not yet blocked by blocklist software like peerguardian. Here are a few of the ranges that were discovered recently. You can easily add these to the blocklist of your torrent client (if it supports one), filewall, or blocklist manager.

# 66.172.60.XXX, 66.177.58.XXX, 66.180.205.XXX, 209.204.61.XXX, 216.151.155.XXX’

I remember once back in early high school we had an assignment for phys. ed. class where we had to write about something we’re recently achieved and were proud of. It was some self-esteem building thing, I assume.

This was back in the early 90’s, when the interwebs were nothing much more than shell accounts, lynx and telnet. At this point in time, at the tender age of 12 or 13, I was playing MUDs quite a bit, and had infact, after many months of effort, managed to become a wizard and was able to actually program my own little kingdom in the game that other players could run around and kill monsters in. [They were mostly killing hobbits. That’ll teach the hairy little bastards.]

So, I wrote my assignment about the months of work I’d put in to reaching the point where I could program my own part of the game, and I wrote about how I’d learnt the programming language [LpC, it was] and done good bit of coding in the time since, and all the various other things that had taken many months to do. [I didn’t write about just _how_ I was accessing the internet in the early 90’s, which was an achievement in itself. :)]

And I was reasonably proud of all the effort it had taken me to get there, and the effort I’d put into the coding. Bear in mind that all the other people playing/programming this game were university students, so I thought it was pretty good to be holding my own with people 10 years older than me, many of whom were actually studying for Bachelor degrees in computing at the time.

Anyways, I got the assignment back and was told by the teacher that it didn’t count as an achievement and I’d have to do the assignment again. Everyone else’s achievements counted, except mine, apparently.

And that is why PE teachers are PE teachers and not kings of the interwebs like me. Ha! 🙂

`Health authorities in Madrid have acted to close a pro-anorexia website, accusing it of endangering the lives of teenage girls.

Four months after the city led the world in the Size 0 debate by banning ultra-skinny models from its catwalks, health officials are shining the spotlight on the growing number of “pro-ana” websites that glorify starvation diets.

Their first strike is against The Great Ana Competition, a website that awards a diploma to the girl who eats the fewest calories in a two-week period. They have filed a suit against the competition, which uses a scoring system that doctors said “would cause malnutrition in normal women”.’

`So much development so many job Dubai is the place of oppotunity itself. However if you are a born idiot and have no repsect for other people then I guess you have no chance of getting a job no matter what. Check out the email converstation below and to think this guy actually applied for a job at the company North 55. I don’t think this man will ever get a job in Dubai as the whole agency network will know about him by now, total loser.’

This is a fun little IRC trivia channel where you can play trivia, funnily enough. 🙂

Link goes to the website. You’ll need an IRC client to play.

`You would think that being a former sitcom star would make it easy to find love and sex in La-La-Land. You would be wrong. Danny Pintauro, who played adorable Jonathan Bower on Who’s The Boss for eight seasons, posted a personal ad on a gay Web site, describing himself as “sexy, passionate, fun, verbal, obedient (and) open to anything.” The ex-child star, now 30, didn’t use his real name on the hook-up site but displayed a photo of his face and one of his naked body in which his hand hides most of his penis (which was described in the personal ad as 7″ and circumcised).’

`A 17-year-old boy in northeastern China was so disappointed with the looks of a woman he met over the Internet that he hanged himself after seeing her face-to-face, state media reported Friday. [..]

The girl described herself as a beautiful 19-year-old and the pair chatted on the Web for weeks before arranging a December 26 rendezvous in the nearby city of Mudanjiang, in far northeastern Heilongjiang province.

The boy arrived to discover the woman far less attractive than advertised and 10 years older than him, Xinhua said.

The boy immediately returned home, lost his appetite, and four days later hanged himself from a tree.’

‘A Brazilian court has ordered YouTube to be shut down until it removes a celebrity sex video from its site, a judicial clerk said today.

Brazilian model, TV host and ex-fiancee of football great Ronaldo, Daniella Cicarelli, sued YouTube after a video of her apparently having sex in shallow water on a beach with her boyfriend was posted to the site.

For days it was the most viewed video in Brazil.’

see it here »

`Assuming you find the idea of some errant myspace numbnut faced with a gaping ass entertaining, then you will become first giggly, and then fall aside laughing to know that within an hour I had “goatse’d” 400 people.

Within two days it was 25,000. Twenty five thousand.

We are now up to nearly a hundred thousand viewings of this file in its new ass-o-rama version. I am sure that through libraries, schools, colleges, cubicles, offices, warehouses, the sound of someone’s throat reflexively making a sound not unlike “Uuuuaaaaaghhhghh” has filled the air. The amount of time lost in horrified stares and frantic jabs at the keyboard and mouse to get away, far away must be into the realm of hours by now. Maybe days! Days of slack-jawed horrified faces staring into a big square eyeball. I don’t know, that gets a chortle out of me. I’m easily entertained.’

Acronyms are funny. 🙂

More here: Citizens United Negating Technology

Just lots of useful PHP scripts and examples.

`2. The part of the brain that regulates reasoning, impulse control and judgment is still under construction during puberty and doesn’t shift into autopilot until about age 25. [..]

6. Cheese consumption in the United States is expected to grow by 50 percent between now and 2013. [..]

8. The U.S. government has paid about $1.5 billion in benefits to thousands of sick nuclear-weapons workers since 2001. [..]

13. Ancient humans from Asia may have entered the Americas following an ocean highway made of dense kelp. [..]

50. Researchers from the University of Manchester managed to induce teeth growth in normal chickens – activating genes that have lain dormant for 80 million years.’

‘The communications director for Montana’s lone congressman solicited the services of two men he falsely believed to be criminally minded hackers-for-hire — with the expressed goal of jacking up his college GPA — during an exchange that spanned 22 e-mails over two weeks this past summer.’

The emails are hilarious.

I’ve just recently purchased some cheapish hosting that will give me a significant amount of extra bandwidth and storage space. I’m going to use this extra hosting to do something about the dead links that are slowly building up in the archives.

I’ve downloaded copies of pretty much every video I’ve linked to over the years, so I’m going to slowly start hosting these myself, as I discover broken links. If there’s a video or audio clip you really want to see but can’t get to because the page I’m linking to is no longer there, either leave a comment on that post or email me through the contact page and let me know what post it is, and I’ll see if I can put the video back up.

[The contact page was broken before, but I think it’s working at the moment. :)]

‘On Monday, Graef visited CNET’s Second Life bureau for a discussion about her business, how best to set up businesses in Second Life and the nature of competition there.

Unfortunately, as the interview was commencing, the event was attacked by a “griefer,” someone intent on disrupting the proceedings. The griefer managed to assault the CNET theater for 15 minutes with–well, there’s no way to say this delicately–animated flying penises.’

(5.4meg Flash video)

see it here »

`Server Downtime

We are constantly working to improve our server downtime. Keeping you awake at night is our #1 priority.

Clusters and Scalability

If your websites go down we’ll make sure to confuse you with technical terms and instructions. It’s our job to keep you aggravated, and we never disappoint.’

`A hoax American website claiming to sell live penguins that have been farmed in New Zealand has fooled some people into trying to buy the cold water birds.

Penguin Warehouse Inc has offered to ship seven types of penguins around the world, claiming their aim is to “dispel the myth that penguins do not make good house guests”, while also “ridding the house of pesky krill”, Christchurch’s The Press newspaper reported.

An American woman bought a large portable swimming pool, which she installed in her living-room ready for a penguin she dubbed Magellan.’

`[An Australian] court ruling has given the recording industry the green light to go after individuals who link to material from their websites, blogs or MySpace pages that is protected by copyright.

A full bench of the Federal Court yesterday upheld an earlier ruling that Stephen Cooper, the operator of mp3s4free.net, as well as the internet service provider that hosted the website, were guilty of authorising copyright infringement because they provided a search engine through which a user could illegally download MP3 files.

The website did not directly host any copyright-protected music, but the court held that simply providing links to the material effectively authorised copyright infringement.’

`Everything on the desk was blackened with soot and burned either partially or completely. Three external hard drives, a digital camera, videotapes, papers, CD’s, etc. The floor, wall, and radiator cover were burned, along with the tabletop.

Every cable that was connected to the laptop, Ethernet, Firewire, Power, and USB, was forcibly shot out of each portal, and each portal covered with the black soot. Metal bits and electronic debris from the power cable hub and other cables was scattered around the room and some wires had split apart into copper shreds. Molten silver metal flecks are still lodged in the windowsill.

A supervisor arrived later that day and after surveying the scene and materials, conceded that their company had caused the accident. He noted, in particular, the internally fried coaxial cable.’

`Underground hackers are hawking zero-day exploits for Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system at $50,000 a pop, according to computer security researchers at Trend Micro.

The Windows Vista exploit—which has not been independently verified—was just one of many zero-days available for sale at an auction-style marketplace infiltrated by the Tokyo-based anti-virus vendor.

In an interview with eWEEK, Trend Micro’s chief technology officer, Raimund Genes, said prices for exploits for unpatched code execution flaws are in the $20,000 to $30,000 range, depending on the popularity of the software and the reliability of the attack code.’

`Okay, wait a minute.

You guys are killing my server.

I used to have a million digits of Pi listed here, and it was really great.

But now you have brought my server to its knees with your interest in its greatness.’

I just like the domain name, mostly. 🙂

`My name is [edited] and I run [edited].com

I have been running the site for over two years and we have been ranked very highly for the search term [edited].

On Thursday morning I checked our google positions and your site is now above us for this term. I haev checked your blog and it has nothing to do with [edited], so I think it would be best all round if you remove your blog from google for this search term.

Please understand that we make our living from this, and you are just writing a blog that has nothing to do with [edited].

If you do not remove yourself from google for this search, then I will call them myself and have you removed.

I expect a reply soon.’

`A daft bill by technology wizard Senator Ted Stevens, which would have meant telecom companies could charge sites for access for the use of their ‘pipes’, has died a death.

The US Congress ran out of time to discuss the bill in the current session and, when a new Democratic Congress comes back from its holidays, the bill is unlikely to get a sympathetic hearing.

The presentation of the bill did manage to amuse most of the technological community as Stevens presented the Internet as a series of tubes and pipes which would get blocked if the bill never went ahead.’

It’s just a holding page atm. But it’s a good domain name.

I’m hilarious. 🙂

A Google search for that phrase currently gives a link to www.moonbuggy.org/tag/piss/, which makes me laugh. 🙂

It’s down the bottom of the page, but still in the top 10. Heh. The only results above it at the moment are from the SMH, The Herald Sun and The Australian newspapers. 🙂

It’s probably not as funny as I think it is. But fuckyas. 🙂

The post Google probably wants to be pointing to is here: Taking the p out of PM snow joke

This is an audio clip of a guy calling his ISP’s billing deparment. He was quoted a price of 0.02 cents per kilobyte for his data, but the ISP thinks 0.02c is equal to $0.02, and no one he speaks to can see any difference between cents and dollars.

More at VerizonMath.

`The tide of unwanted email is rising as spammers find new ways to dodge filtering systems, experts say.

A study released in November 2006 by email filtering firm Postini, based in California, US, found that spam now accounts for 91% of all email and that over the past 12 months the daily volume of spam has risen by 120%.

A separate report, from IronPort Systems, also in California, concludes that worldwide spam volumes increased from 31 billion messages daily in October 2005 to 61 billion messages daily in October 2006.’

These people take your RSS feed and turn it into a shockwave widget thingy that you can apparently drag from your browser to your desktop if you install their software. [shrug] Looks something like this:

Links to lots of TV shows, cartoons and anime.