Homade’s LEGO-esque media players cleverly conceal their controls into the raised dots on the surface of each block. The players come in a variety of bold primary colors, and like their snap-together doppelgangers, are made primarily from plastic.
via lego mp3 players and ipod dock: block rockin’ beats on [technabob].
Ooh – awesome. Note the controls on the actual knobs of the brick – cute!
You and ‘SuperJenn’ were once pretty good friends, online. But one day you logged in and noticed that she’d axed you from her friends list. Shocked at first, you thought it must be some kind of accident. But after a few moments of soul searching… you realize that you probably over-engaged in one of the 11 behavioral triggers that can cause people to drop friends online.
via 11 Ways to Lose Friends and Followers Online | Social Media Rockstar.
The funny thing is, I’ve done pretty much all of these things – either on Twitter or on FaceBook.
Oh well. *shrugs*
Inspire the young Einstein by using IdeaPaint to transform children’s walls into a larger-than-life canvas for creativity, imagination, and fun.
IdeaPaint isn’t just for the kids. IdeaPaint is perfect for organizing a busy family – noting daily tasks, appointments, shopping lists and scheduling important events for the week.
via IdeaPaint | Gallery.
See, now this is one of those things that I should have thought of.
I’ve requested a free sample from their website – no idea if they ship to Australia, but hey – it’s free. Free is good.
Protego is the name I’ve given to my new Pee Cee. There’s a bit of a story behind this one, so bear with me.
So first up, we have the story of actually buying the thing. Originally, Protego was an server somewhere in Melbourne, when management had an “oh crap, we’re the largest Apple reseller in the world and we have too many PCs on hand” moment. Thus, the PC Clearance Sale was born.
I managed to obtain a copy of this catalogue through the usual official channels (that’s the email system, folks), and at the time, was looking for a cheap gaming machine to get my game on. My Steam account was filled up with games that I couldn’t play because the system requirements were too high for any machine that I had in my possession. Games like TF2, Left 4 Dead, CS:Source, and even Portal struggled on any hardware that I had, and only CS:Source even ran on my paltry GMA 950 MacBook… What I needed was a cheap gaming rig. I wasn’t prepared to fork out hundreds of dollars, though – the PC I bought had to be able to handle the games I wanted to play, while having a lifespan of a couple of years.
In any case, I managed to find a computer that suited me – an ex-server, something with a little grunt behind it, but also plenty of expansion options. If you’re interested, Protego is actually an IBM eServer xSeries server, the 8485 variant of the 206m models. It came with a 3.0GHz Pentium 4 CPU (with Hyper Threading), 2x1GB ECC DDR2 PC2-4200 RAM, as well as 2x80GB SATA HDDs.
Now obviously I’m going to be using a machine like this for gaming, and I don’t think the inbuilt ATi ES1000 graphics with 16MB ram are going to cut it. Luckily for me, an XFX 8400GS (w/ 256MB RAM) was also in the PC Clearance Sale – I managed to nab that as well. I put in my order for all the parts, and I was set. Or so I thought…
Elation turned to disappointment when the machine arrived at my location. I opened it up to find that it only had a physical 8x PCIe slot – not a 16x one, which most graphics cards take. Even more unfortunately, it wasn’t an open-ended slot either – the 8400GS that arrived with it was, unsurprisingly, a physical 16x card. Some research had to be done on my part.
The Problem - that piece of plastic needs to be removed. Also, dusty case is dusty.
via: English Russia » Russian Wall-E Case Mod.
This is actually amazing; I’m stunned at both the final result and the abolsoute dedication needed to pull something like this off, not to mention the attention to detail and skills required… 
Hit the link above for more Wall-E case modding goodness… 
Intriguing indeed.
These things all seem to start with Twitter, don’t they? In this case, this tweet pointed me to a link – which promptly 404’d on me. “Address Not Found”, said Firefox.
Hmm. I thought nothing of it until this morning, when yet another tweet came in. I tried the link contained within again, and, surprise surprise, another 404, with exactly the same error message. Now, I was curious. Why was I getting 404s? I tried the excellent website DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com, and even that said noisypoppy.net was down.
As a preliminary step, I tried it on my iPhone over the 3G network. Funnily enough, it loaded fine there – however, still no joy on iPhone or Mac via Wi-Fi. To me, this said something about DNS.
Next, I tried the good old proxy way: proxy.org, and then any one from the list – lo and behold, noisypoppy.net actually worked. I was able to browse and interact with the website in a normal way – via proxy.
By this time I was convinced it was something to do with DNS. So off to OpenDNS.org – where I then plugged in the requisite IPs into my Mac’s DNS entires (after the Internode ones on my router). I try and load up noisypoppy, and what do you know, it works perfectly. Curiouser and curiouser…
I managed to subscribe to the RSS feed (so I don’t have to go and manually check the website), but now when I go and try and read any of the articles from NetNewsWire, it still manages to 404 on me.. 
Why won’t things just work? And here I was, thinking the internet was downright infallible…
If you think you’ve got a solution for me to try (or think I’ve missed something), shout out in comments.
