Rabidgremlin’s Soapbox

A very nice video explaining the origins of the Internet. Love the clean, simple (mostly) black and white animation.

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.
The icons used are from the PICOL project which is the Pictorial Communication Language and is a project to find a standard and reduced sign system for electronic communication.

On Friday, whilst at my parent-in-laws, we chased a large bug out the lounge. After a couple of minutes it came back in and this time when we helped it out it dropped its payload (a giant spider) and revealed itself to be a wasp and disappeared out the window.
I didn’t think to much of [...]

Crashed Ice is a combination of downhill skiing, hockey, boardercross with a little bit of “roller ball” thrown in, awesome. I would love to try this, even though I would get broken into little, little pieces.

I came across this t-shirt site a few months ago called Threadless, not only do they have some very cool T-shirt designs but they are all user created.
The idea is that you design a T-shirt, upload the design and if it gets lots of votes then its gets printed! Better yet if you design gets [...]

I started building my first Firefox extension last night and as a result I had to dig into XUL (pronounced zool, al la Ghostbusters).
XUL is the “XML User Interface Language” and is technology of the cross-platform GUI used by Mozilla products such as Firefox and Thunderbird.
Now I have been aware of XUL for years but [...]

So I wanted to take some close up photos of some Lego blocks (don’t ask) and I wanted them to be on a clean white background like you see in swanky product shots.
After doing some digging around on the web it turns out that what I wanted was a light tent which would allow me [...]

Two interesting bits of news from Google today. The first is adsense for games which allows game developers to place Google ads inside games.
Only flash games are currently supported and there are some fairly hefty entry requirements for early adopters:

Game plays: Minimum 500,000 per day
Game types: Web-based Flash only
Integration: Must be technically capable of SDK [...]

With heavy guitar music and much fanfare the first Google Android handset has been released by T-Mobile.
The device looks pretty nice (but not iPhone sexy) and has a ton of features. It will go on sale on the 22 October and retail for $179 US.
Initial reviews are mixed but I suspect that this New York [...]

Ooooooo, Just found a link to the new Google Chrome browser on my Google home page.
Its pretty cool, very lightweight and very very fast. It even has as “stats for nerds” link on it’s task manager which gives heaps of detail on memory and CPU usage. The internals of the browser are pretty interesting as [...]

Wow I certainly scored a lot of great birthday goodies this year. I’m very impressed with my reticulating saw, sonic tape measure and carpenter’s pencils (real man’s pencils, you need to sharpen them with a knife).
My sisters-in-law made me this fantastic pac-man cake:

I was also given a cool mini Bluetooth based keyboard for my media [...]