To be fair, Sputtr does look like a pretty good way to introduce your grandma to all of the nifty stuff there is out there on the Web.
"Check it out, Gran! Just type "crochet" and click one of the buttons!"
Metafilter is really not the best place to post about a site like this, though.
I'm pleased to see see this degree of cheerfulness in a self-promoting Wiki-weirdo.
(I have edited a grand total of two links to my site into Wikipedia, in case you were wondering.)
It certainly beats (and I use the word advisedly) those dudes who devote most of their waking hours to finding Wikipedia articles in which a picture of their penis can defensibly be deployed.
As I write this, Monsieur Allyn has frickin' colonised the raincoat article.
I'm sure you'll all be very happy to learn that I just changed the top ads on the main and article list pages of Dan's Data, removing the top-of-page Burst banner and replacing it with a Robert Sherman one, on account of how I quite like money and the Robert Sherman network may give me more of it than Burst does.
There's also separate code for a Robert Sherman popunder - the old Burst banner code could spawn extra windows all by itself.
(As you may have noticed.)
I've been running Robert Sherman banners on this site for a while, now, but not popups.
If you're one of the readers who, as I've previously recommended, blocks my annoying ads, then there's nothing to see here; move along.
If you see the Robert Sherman ads, though, please comment below if you encounter anything particularly offensive. I've previously noticed one Robert Sherman ad from a purveyor of crappy Windows enhancing software which illicitly bundled an offensive popup into their banner whether or not you actually used the popup code (Astonishing! Crap-software vendors are usually so POLITE!). So it won't surprise me much if there turn out to be some other spiders in the Robert Sherman woodpile.
If horrible things show up and Robert Sherman doesn't squash them quickly, then I'll go back to Burst. Ad money is important to me, but not so important that I'm willing to turn my site into a complete freak show.
You may consider those CONGRATULATIONS YOU ARE THE 999,999,999TH VISITOR ads to be the location of my personal avarice-versus-tawdriness line in the sand. If you see stuff that's worse than that, definitely including anything that says Your Computer Is Full Of Viruses Click OK On This Fake Requester To Install Some Crap Or Other, please tell me.
(Update: I gave Robert Sherman a month, then went back to Burst. Robert Sherman ran a few obnoxious ads like fake error messages, and a few other ads that were just plain broken. That wouldn't have been such a big deal, except that Robert Sherman also don't yet have an online control console that lets publishers vet ads and select which ones they don't want to run.)
Possibly the best line of cartoon dialogue ever. It almost makes up for the rest of them.
Defeating Cthulhu should, of course, actually be about as difficult as defeating Jehovah, but the only alternative is that He end up ruling the world, which would significantly impede further progress of the cartoon series. So.
(You can download the video for offline viewing by using this.)
Apropos my previous "those of us who will not rest until we've faithfully reproduced a 100% self-aware Johnny Five in Technic" bit:
The Mindstorms NXT sonic sensor already looks like Five's eyes, which helps. But it's still completely brilliant.
Next stop: The T-1 Battle Units from Rise of the Machines. Which aren't nearly as clever as Johnny, so should be easier to imitate - the Lego Johnny ain't gonna be speed-reading any books with those sonar eyes of his.
(By the way, who knew the T-1s had tracks made by the same company who made the tracks on Jamie Hyneman's remote controlled vending machines? One of them's standing there behind him in his Web site home page portrait; and like the giant penny in the Batcave, a Vending Tank also lurks in the background of many Mythbusters scenes.)
I don't know about you, but the obvious question that popped into my mind when I discovered that there's "A 360 degree view in 71 photos of Will Self's writing room" on Self's site was "what'll happen if you feed those photos into panorama stitching software?"
Ta-daaah.
(If clicking on the above image doesn't work because Coral isnt' answering hails, here's the direct link.)
Lots of the images don't actually match up, but Autostitch knows to discard the puzzle pieces that don't fit. The result also has quite a few dreamy spots in it, like any close-range indoor hand-held panorama. But, y'know, that's just a bit cubist, innit?
It's still not half bad, if you ask me.
(Previous good Bob the Angry Flower Dalek strips here, here and here.)
It was good to see a Dr Who episode that ended in the traditional way - screeching into the theme music with a dramatic zoom onto a completely stupid-looking monster.
Now that's what I'm talking about. (It's good to see that G'Kar's chin is still getting work.)
Father Dougal in excellent cat makeup, OK, that's got its appeal. But people having all of the water in their bodies sucked out by a dude in a bubble-wrap suit is the way it's meant to be.
On the subject of that eternal-traffic-jam episode, I quite liked it once I started treating it as a sort of Borges story rather than sci-fi. It was only spoiled by the hamfisted foreshadowing of the Obvious Next Villain, And It'd Better Be Jonathan Pryce Playing Him Or There'll Be Trouble, You Already Made Me Cross With Those Guys With Huge Heads That Turned Out When They Took Their Helmets Off To Be Space Rhinos Or Some Shit Instead Of The Army Of Sontarans I Was Hoping For.
The modern Doctor Who is all just fantasy with sci-fi paint on it, of course.
But, y'know, could be worse.
Good news for people in search of a sixteenth-scale (trans: quite big) radio controlled tank.
It's a Mitsuwa T-34-85, and it only costs about 17700 yen ($US150, $AU180, as I write this) delivered.
That's not peanuts, but it's far cheaper than Tamiya's famous kits in the same scale. And this is a built tank, ready to roll; just add a bunch of AA batteries (preferably rechargeables...).
For comparison, here's HLJ's page for the Tamiya Pershing I reviewed here (the Sherman's not in production any more).
That's the neat-o Japanese version of the Pershing kit that includes radio, batteries and charger (not normally included with "proper" R/C models), but you could still buy six of the Mitsuwa tanks for the delivered price of the unbuilt Tamiya kit. Probably more, actually, since shipping would then be likely to cost less per unit.
The shipping cost for one T-34 is more than a third of the total price. That's because the tank itself has been marked down to half of its list price. I presume the customers of Hobbylink Japan found the humble T-34 insufficiently sexy.
The Tamiya kits do give you a more impressive toy when you've finished, of course. The HLJ page makes pretty clear what the Mitsuwa kit's missing, though it doesn't mention that this tank doesn't have proportional control - everything's either moving or it isn't, with no control over the speed. People are apparently refitting the Mitsuwa kits with better control gear to fix this, but it'll work well enough without for less demanding users.
You can also expect this kit to be less durable than a Tamiya one, and there's no way to buy spare parts for it, either.
But c'mon. A sixth the price. And it's ready to run.
The big advantage of the Mitsuwa kit over everyday large-scale toy-store R/C tanks is that it has proper articulated tracks. Cheap tanks always have rubber tracks. Those are simple and durable, but they eat a huge amount of the tank's motor power, so even big rubber-tracked tanks are generally an indoor-only proposition.
The Mitsuwa also apparently scrubs up real nice if you invest some work in it. That's another point of difference with cheap tanks - they're seldom very good models, scale-accuracy-wise.
Readers: Please save me from myself, and buy up HLJ's remaining stock of this thing before I do.
(In case you're wondering, I do not have an affiliate deal with Hobbylink Japan. I even had to pay for this. The horror!)
