This is a really, really cool picture of Chicago at night.

I loves me some Star Wars parody. This magnificently awful (read: Sweded) version of A New Hope is a masterpiece! (via BoingBoing)

Maximum PC employs a few audio "experts" to see if compressed MP3 files make a big difference to sound quality.

With the possible exception of the USB Key that survived a washing and drying cycle, no other Maximum PC Challenge has ever surprised us as much as this one. It’s downright humiliating, in fact, that in many cases, we were unable to tell the difference between an uncompressed track and one encoded at 160Kb/s, the bit rate most of us considered the absolute minimum acceptable for even portable players.

They also come out pretty solidly in favour of variable bitrate encoding, which I'm sure is no big surprise to anyone.

Israelis are suing their government for laser cannons. It sounds like something out of science fiction, but there is a working laser cannon in storage in New Mexico, and the Israelis want it. The hell?! When did we get laser cannons?

A new study suggests that Daylight Savings Time is actually worse for the environment. Up yours, Bob Hughes. Now can we finally put this debate to rest?

"There is a reason we continue to get daylight savings under the rubric of energy conservation because as a policy, it costs individual consumers nothing and asks them to conserve nothing. So it's wildly popular," he says.

"Unfortunately, it's entirely ineffective."

Previous studies on daylight savings have had similar findings. But most have been based on simulation models, not concrete data. An exception was a study on the extension of daylight savings in two Australian territories for the 2000 Summer Olympic Games, which showed more electricity used.

Discover lists 14 different distributed computing applications that use extra processor cycles for other purposes. I've been using the SETI@Home client for over 10 years, but there are other projects that are a bit more personal, like Folding@Home, FightAIDS@Home, and the Help Defeat Cancer Project.

BBC News has a brief eulogy for Netscape Navigator. I started using Mosaic early in 1994, and migrated to Netscape almost as soon as it was released. Those were heady times, where platform choice was less about using an efficient tool and more about being on the side of everything good and wholesome. It was a sad day when the mighty Netscape, who once stood toe-to-toe with Microsoft, was sold to AOL. We should have known that the good guys only win in the movies.

There's more on Netscape at Wikipedia.

Wired has 10 interesting science videos showing a number of weird chemical reactions.

Joe Mathlete Explains Maramduke

Marmaduke has finally died, thus completing the 2006 American Icon Yuletide Expiration Hat-Trick that James Brown and Gerald Ford kicked off several days ago. It remains uncertain whether he committed suicide, was murdered by his owner-girl (who did a fantastic job at making it look like an accident), or simply lost his balance in one of his frequent auto erotic asphyxiation binges.

Like any comic strip that reached its nadir about two decades ago but whose shambling bulk nevertheless marches on zombie-like through newspapers world-wide, Marmaduke is ripe for a send-up. Joe Mathlete combines just enough sarcasm, dry wit, and profane, disturbingly sexual content to make you remember how badly this sucks, and why doesn't God just let it die already. Now if he would only do the same for Family Circus, Garfield, and Dennis the Menace, he could probably quit his job. I'm sensing the beginning of a cottage industry here.

Link

Sony's Aibo is Returning

That's the rumour, at least. Aibo was always a neat looking toy -- maybe a little too cute, but hellishly robust in features: camera, visual recognition, wifi, voice recognition, and a solid AI. Now, according to the totally reputable Stuff magazine, Sony is going to give Aibo another chance and have it interface with your PS3 and PSP.

The old Aibo was totally drool-worthy for anyone with an interest in robotics -- the new Aibo, with redesigned, cooler body and proposed interface options, is even moreso. I mean, it's no voice-command R2-D2, but that's only because I have a real dog.

Link to story on Engadget
Link on Wikipedia to more Aibo sites

Splashback

This is one of my favourite games, and it's strange it didn't manage to get posted sooner. Maybe because I was never really any good at it, I don't know.

You start the game with 10 drops of liquid and a board filled with blobs. You can click in any square to add a drop of liquid to a blob. Too much liquid and the blob will explode, sending a drop in all four directions and adding an extra drop of liquid to your tank. The object is to clear all the blobs from the screen.

I find this game interesting because there's often a chance for good strategy, adding drops in such a way as to get the largest chain reaction. It's also fun to watch the screen clear as blob after blob explodes. I'm not sure about the whole alien and little girl thing, though. She's got this kind of knowing look on her face like we're down with something. Are we supposed to be down with the alien? I'm not. He's got a gut like my old man.

Link

Shuffle

In Shuffle, both you and your opponent start with a row of marbles, with the object being to knock your opponent's marbles off the board. Each round you win shortens your supply by one marble and moves you a step toward the center of the board. The first person to win four rounds wins the set.

Anyone good at pool will be good at this game. I'm not good at pool, and lasted only ten rounds before finally getting clobbered.

Link

Poloroid-o-nizer

Nothing but a fun little utility that takes an image from the web and turns it into a poloroid.

I have a friend experimenting with poloroid film right now, so this is a little more topical than I thought it would be.

Link

Peanuts by Charles Bukowski

Peanuts, re-imagined in the style of Charles Bukowski. This is dark, funny, and brilliant -- exactly the kind of thing the intarwebs were made for.

Link (via Memepool)

Rose and Camellia

You play Reiko, newly widowed and shunned from her home by the aristocratic members of the family. In order to secure her place in the house, she must defeat the other family members in a slap fight -- or what the game refers to as "the elegant art of feminine conflict".

The game is easy to play, but takes some time to get used to. Fortunately, it's also just silly enough to hold you attention, without being so silly as to lose credibility. I had great success on the Easy level; the harder levels require more patience than I was willing to put in.

Link (via Memepool)

Hypnotist Puts Man in Video Game

Thanks to the always delightful BoingBoing, I was reminded of an incredible video they'd posted about two years ago. In it a hypnotist named Derek Brown manages to hypnotize a man playing a video game about shooting zombies. He's then moved across the street to a warehouse set up to look just like the game he was playing -- including roaming undead. The result is that the man thinks he's been put in the game.

Like Cory, I don't know if this is real or not, but the man looks horrified enough to make me believe it's the real deal. It's certainly a great video either way.

Link to video
Link to BoingBoing post about video

Picnik

Picnik is one of the internet's coolest utilities. I didn't think I'd end up using it too often when I first heard about it, but I end up using it several times a week. It's just too convenient and too cool not to.

Picnik is a photo editing utility. The program itself is all flash-based, and the interface is smooth, fun, and very easy to grasp. It's not really geared toward top-end photoshop users, but it's more than sufficient for minor photo editing, and there's lots of room for novices to expand into. They're also adding more features all the time, so I suspect any digital scrapbookers out there might also find this to be very valuable.

All the regular editing features are provided, like resizing, cropping, levels, and colour adjustments. There's also a "pro" account you can upgrade to for $25/year which adds access to all kinds of fonts, shapes, photo frames, and digital effects like turning your photo into a pencil sketch and creating HDR images. Again, probably not really worth it to the gearheads, but way, way worth it if you're looking to ramp up the fun level of your image editing.

There's way too much great stuff about the site to mention here. But for me, the true convenience is how it can access your photos from Flickr, Webshots, Picassa, Photobucket, and even Facebook -- so you can load, edit, and save all through the Picnik interface, without having to download anything. And that's how it should be.

Link to Picnik

Vector Magic

Vector Magic is an awesome utility developed at Stanford that turns ordinary bitmapped photos or line art into vector graphics. It's fast, it's free, and it apparently outperforms Adobe Live Trace and Corel PowerTRACE -- which also makes it wicked.

You can see pretty much what it's capable of in the picture above. There are some more great samples to view on the Vector Magic site. The bitmap I played with didn't come out perfectly, but it was pretty darn close, and any modifications it needed could be done easily in Illustrator. This is a really handy site for anyone doing a lot of desktop publishing. I'm looking forward to playing with it as the software develops.

Link to Vector Magic

Word to Your....

You gotta know that a site featuring a giant caricature of Vanilla Ice is going to have some good stuff on it.

It's a collection of funny/goofy/strange pictures with the phrase "Word to your..." written on them. They're funny because the phrase overstates the obvious. Kind of like this description.

Anyway, I think this one here with Virgil, Wrestling Superstar is my favourite.

Link

Proxy.org

I've been looking for a good anonymous proxy for some time now. Mostly so I could watch streaming video of Grey's Anatomy online. But it turns out proxies have another use -- and this is protecting your privacy.

You may not realize it, but websites capture a lot of information about who's visiting them. There may be times, such as when you're surfing from work or some other registered domain, when you don't want people to be able to trace your referrer or your IP address. You should be using an anonymous proxy at times like these.

Proxy.org is a site that sends any URL you enter through an anonymous proxy, so you can surf those sites with confidence. It chooses a proxy randomly from a list of over 4000 proxies; unfortunately, quality does vary a little, so you may not be able to post to someone's blog or run scripts through the proxy you're given. In those cases, I recommend hitting the service a few times until you get a good proxy assigned to you. Or -- what the hell -- find a proxy you like and stay with it!

Link to Proxy.org