smikwily.com

Well crap. Another one of my faves bites the dust. You get to the point where you hate watching new shows because you are worried about them getting canned, but you do it anyhow. Then you pay the price when they can’t pay the bills…

Very cool concept if it is something that can be pulled off for a decent price: Microsoft Gaming Innovation Video #1 – Google Video

NASA – Self-Portrait is a great shot of Astronaut Steve Robinson as he works on fixing Discovery’s heat shields on August 3. The pic shows his view from the reflection of his helmet’s mirrored finish.

Me likey so far.

A great little Flickr stream dealing with Transparent Screen, the art of taking a photograph of your computer’s surroundings, without the computer, then replacing the computer, using the photo taken as a wallpaper, creating an almost artificial looking effect. I’d consider if it there wasn’t just a blue wall behind my screen

Bonus link to the originators site where a gallery of pics is located.

One of the crew from AintItCoolNews.com was lucky enough to tour the Pixar facilities and has the details and their pictures around the place. Enjoy it, because the odds are good you won’t ever work in a place quite like it.

Found a few freeware goodies and thought I’d pass them along. Haven’t tried any of them yet, so BEWARE!

SpywareBlaster – Keep spyware from installing in the first place!

EverNote (Beta) – makes it easy to store and quickly access all your notes on an endless, digital roll or paper.

ClamWin – ClamWin is a Free Antivirus for Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003. It provides a graphical user interface to the Clam AntiVirus engine. (Please note that ClamWin Free Antivirus does not include an on-access real-time scanner, that is, you need to manually scan a file in order to detect a virus.)

PC Inspector File Recovery – A data recovery program that supports the FAT 12/16/32 and NTFS file systems.

I’ve been looking for a nice AV program that doesn’t actively run, but allows me to run it if I think I’m infected. Just happened to find the others along the way.

the nail that sticks out… tells the story of Shuji Nakamura, a Japanese researcher responsible for the discovery and creation of a technology that enabled the “millions of new products that we use everyday from LED traffic lights, to DVD players to LCD televisions, and many other products.” For his work, he was given an extra $200.

Due to the nature of the Japanese business, he was forced to sue the company he worked for, after moving to the US and becoming a teacher at UC Santa Barbara. He was awarded $194 million by the court, but after an appeal to the Japanese court, that ended up being closer to $8 million. A good payout, but considering the amount of money his work brought to his company, a very small slice of the pie.

TC:Elite and Damnation are a few mods I’m anxious to check out. The first is a Counter Strike style mod for use on the free Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory game, while the latter is a single player “steampunk fantasy-western” for Unreal Tournament, offering some third person action for platforming and such.

WuzzaDem has posted a special O’Reilly Factor featuring the little green man with a bucket full o’ butt kickin’: Yoda.

Bill O’Reilly
You’re talking in circles, sir, and you’re not answering my question.

Yoda
Already know you that which you need.

KODAK: Taken On The Road-American Mile Markers is an interesting drive across America, displayed as photos taken every mile along the way.

Interesting little read on the history of the plumber from Nintendo over at NFG Games. No mention of the 3D incarnations of Mario, but it does give a little history, including the reasoning for the mustache, hat, and gloves.

Mario’s basic look was because of limitations of the video game systems, not because that is the way they wanted him to look per se.

Longmire does Romance Novels is a bit of photo-manip done to the covers of romance novels. Click through to check out ‘I Married A Sissy Boy’, ‘Lord of the Tube Socks’ and other great literary classics.

[Update - Farked!]

One of the coolest implementations of grub and gaming is the recently announced EverQuest II – /pizza program for EverQuest II. While in game, type /pizza and you will be prompted for a Pizza Hut order for delivery.

HoustonChronicle.com has an interesting article about an artist who has taken his piercing through the bridge of his nose and converted it to hold his eyeglasses.

It sort of looks like the glasses that Morpheus wears in The Matrix. They sort of float on your face by attaching to your nose, instead of requiring the ear “hooks”. It appears to be normal set of glasses, but something doesn’t look quite right. Once you figure it out, the whole “cool” factor comes into play.

Had a buddy tell me last weekend about a nifty little feature that Google offers that allows you to send a SMS message to 46645 and Google will do its thing, SMS’ing you back with the search results. Here is the official link if you want to check out the details – Google SMS

And if you are having problems remembering it: 46645 is GOOGL on your keypad

Calvin and Hobbes – someone has thrown together a site featuring one of the greatest comics every. Enjoy it while you can.

Real World Doesn’t Use a Joystick really hits home if you’ve ever seen blocks after playing Tetris or had to pull your foot off the gas after a few games of Burnout 3. It’s good to know I’m not the only one who has had dreams about the latest game to occupy their freetime.

Google just continues to amaze me. Everytime you think the competition has a leg up on them, they come out of nowhere and just demolish them with something that’s not only better, but simpler at the same time.

Their latest Wow? Google Maps

Wiki + Recipes = Wikipes. Interesting idea for a wiki.