This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.
It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.
In related news, polar bears are FUCKING AWESOME AND DON’T TAKE NO SHIT FROM NO ONE!
Old school electric typewriter, rejiggered to automatically type and read your typed input, so you can play Zork. <3.
Nice write-up for the SF chapter of the Awesome Foundation.
The first-ever Awesome Foundation grant recipient gets a front page photo & story on the Boston Globe. This is what AWESOME can do for you.
This might upset some folks, but I think it’s beautiful. “If iPad were a dish, there are no problem”
New EP of covers from Amanda Palmer.
“I’ve re-imagined four common products from 2010 as if they were designed in 1977: an mp3 player, a laptop, a mobile phone and a handheld video game system. I then created a series of fictitious but stylistically accurate print ads to market them, as well as a handful of abstract posters (you know, just for funsies).” Wonderful!
Thrilled to announce that the San Francisco chapter of The Awesome Foundation is now up and running.
Bay Area folks! Got an idea for something you want to build that will advance Awesomeness? Apply for the $1000 grant now! We’ll be picking our first recipient in May.
The fabulous and funny Anna Pickard has launched a new TV blog, and it’s topnotch. She’s kicking off by watching all of Lost for the first time — all five seasons — over the course of one week, so she can be ready for the final series next Tuesday. Marvelous.
I have a new goal in life: Live in a town where a hippo just wanders the streets.
Oh, BBC Radio, I could kiss you sometimes. A thirty minute show about science and comedy from Robin Ince and Brian Cox? With Dara O’Briain as a guest? And available as a podcast? YES PLEASE!
Very satisfying. Facebook add a ridiculous feature, only visible to people who work at TechCrunch. A writer spots it, give FB a whole 24 minutes to respond to his questions, and in the TC way, rushes out a story so he can “scoop” competitors. Pwned!
Can you contribute $100 a month in the pursuit of encouraging Awesome? Become a micro-trustee for a micro-genius grant.
Ze Frank has a new video series on what to do in these economically-challenged times.
The artist “goopymart” is funding production of plushies based on his designs, and is looking for patrons. I’ve chipped in for both — I really want me a cuddly geek to call my own!
This looks fantastic — A movie version of “The Thick of It”. Hoping it gets a US release. “You sound like a Nazi Julie Andrews!”
Now this is lovely — convert fonts into VML, then seamlessly replace text on webpages. Like sIFR, but without the horrendous hassle of needing to do things with Flash.
If you have a webcam/iSight, you *must* try this. Print out a symbol and make a 3D friend appear in your life!
Looking for an excuse to donate to Creative Commons? Donate $50 or more now, and receive a 1GB USB key with a “Best of Jonathon Coulton” MP3 compilation — including the raw tracks so you can remix and mess around to your heart’s content. I went for the $10-a-month-for-a-year option.
The iconic BBC radio series (which gave way to The Day Today) finally gets a full CD release (including bonus material, such as Chris Morris’s fantastic flexidisc for Select Magazine). Subscribe to the podcast for snippets of genius.
Feeling oddly patriotic that the combination of easy access to video cameras and internet video distribution mean a fifth-grader can score an interview with a VP candidate and share it with the world!
WHY was I not aware of this sooner‽ A *THOROUGHLY* splendid satirical weekly podcast featuring John Oliver (off of The Daily Show) and the man who I described as his “erstwhile” UK comedy partner (until I discovered they were doing this podcast together), Andy Zaltzman. Absofuckinglutely fantastic.
Stonking little indie game, finally officially released. Filled with bizarreness and imagination, I’ve been having a blast with it.
Wicked awesome — FAO Schwartz has created a Build-a-Bear-like experience for creating “Whatnot” Muppets (the random background artistes of the Muppet world). The at-home experience is particularly clever — you get a set of cards and vinyl clings, put together the Muppet you want, send it in, and they make and ship you your Muppet. Note to my family: Yes, this is what I want for my Christmas.
Summary of Joss Whedon’s new online musical miniseries. I plopped down the $4 for a “season pass” in iTunes, and loved the first episode. Looking forward to episode 2 arriving in iTunes tonight.
Quality! A 3D-sculpture of Twitter’s almost-ever present beacon of FAIL!
Michel Gondry’s next film involved Jack Black and Mos Def recreating movies amateurishly. Here, Michel Gondry recreates that film’s trailer amateurishly. Genius!
Avoid being Rickroll’d with this anti-rickrolling firefox plugin. A great example of Firefox’s extensions making the internet a safer place to be.
I’m In Like With You branches out into wickedly-addictive multiplayer Tetris. They even let you play without joining the site.
Great Rands article. It’s a bit hit-or-miss describing me, but the section “Nerds are fucking funny” sums me up perfectly. “Humor is an intellectual puzzle, “How can this particular set of esoteric trivia be constructed to maximize hilarity as quickly as possible?”“
Google’s new text translation service was created by running machine learning over UN documents. Unfortunately, its “learning” for politicians’ names is.. erm.. “interesting”. Try also “Sarkozy sarkozy sarkozy”
(Since Google will probably fix this, at the moment it translates “Sarkozy is chirac” to “Bush is classless”)
Sounds fucking AMAZING! Do I dare buy a $300 console, just to play a $5 game?
New cupcakes bakery in Davis Square — Deep fried cupcakes? Be still my (clogged-and-barely) beating heart.
The whole of a *fantastic* behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of The Muppet Show.
Life (deliberately) imitating “art”.
More on the BBC/MusicBrainz link-up — Not only are the Beeb paying to use MB data on their site, the music experts over there will be helping update MB. This can only be a good thing.
Compilation of the ZX Spectrum programs sometimes included with British pop singles in the 80s. “OH DEAR!! a bat bit you” I had no idea about the Urusei Yatsura track. Gonna have to give that a shot!
Why have I not seen this until now? Beautifully-made pitch-perfect re-casting of Pulp Fiction with Muppets. Sam the Eagle *is* Christopher Walken.
Gonna have to get myself one of these. “Exactly medically accurate”.
Holy crap! It’s Zarch of “Just about the only game you can play on your school’s Acorn Archimedes” fame, redone in JavaScript. Now to find “Mad Professor Mariati” and a RISC OS emulator…
Another great live puppetry performance with the Scissor Sisters from last year’s Brit Awards. I love the way the entire set erupts to life.
Stonking live performance by the Scissor Sisters. Disembodied legs and floating singers a-go-go. $5 says the Jim Henson Creature Shop was involved.
His covers (and to call them “covers” does them an injustice, they’re *massively awesome* reinterpretations) of Coldplay and Britney Spears are outstanding. Can’t wait for the full album.
Joy & I “adopted” the Malayian Tapirs at San Diego Zoo as part of our Christmas gift to each other. Tapirs are *awesomely* ridiculous looking creatures, and I love ‘em to bits. Can’t wait to see them when we’re in California in June.
Man, this is the best sliver of pure P!O!P! gold I’ve heard in a long time. I’m going to have the chorus engraved on my tombstone.
Very cool (and pretty low-budget) promo from OK Go. Just four guys, eight treadmills, and presumably hours of sweat and choreography. Anyone know who directed it?
It’s a great song, but this video just made it even better. I’ll always have an especially soft spot for it after someone on a mailing-list I was on made it clear he didn’t get the joke, and wondered how Pulp had pulled it off.
I’m curious to test out RedSwoosh’s P2Pness, so link-followers: Have a shot at downloading seven stonking megabytes of J-Pop oddness! Windows users should be directed to download the RedSwoosh client, while Mac & Linux users should be redirected to the CoralCDN service. Let’s see how little bandwidth I can use distributing some QUALITY CHOONS!
69 seconds of slow motion footage of a variety of things getting shot. Awesome.
“Derek Trotter” gets a Nigerian scammer to ship a wooden carving of a Commodore 64. Just fantastic!
Does what it says on the tin. Pitchfork scoured YouTube for 100 awesome videos, skipping over your usual suspects like Jonez, Cunningham and Gondry.
This is just splendid in ways unimaginable. A cabdriver who was in the BBC’s reception area was rushed onto air by mistaken producers, thinking he was an internet expert to talk about the Apple vs. Apple case. Full marks to the bloke for struggling through the interview despite being clearly horrified!
Stephen Colbert performs a superbly scathing speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner. President? Not laughing. “When the president decides something on Monday, he still believes it on Wednesday - no matter what happened Tuesday.”
“The judge who presided over the failed Da Vinci Code plagiarism case at London’s High Court hid his own secret code in his written judgement.” Brilliant! I reckon it’s a Vigenère with “smithycode” as the offset, but I’m too lazy to test that theory.
Best! Wikipedia category! Evah! Everything you need to know about Bat Bombs, Anti-tank Dogs and the Oregon Exploding Whale. Suck it, Brittanica!
Greasemonkey script which finds hCal microformats embedded in webpages (such as Upcoming.org) and allows you to add events to your Google Calendar with one click.
Superb AprilFool from Flickr — The “interesting” photo pages are only showing kittens. Extra points for respecting users’ timezones, so the hack only goes into effect for the 24 hours that is April 1st for you!
Genius! Getting from “Queer Spank” to “Erect Bone” requires a four zone ticket.
Complete video walkthroughs of classic Speccy games (although JSW has clearly been poked to avoid the Attic bug).
Rawk! Fantastic t-shirt commemorating my favourite line from “Lazy Sunday”. Ordered!
Ooh. This is just supersmart! A Firefox plugin which works out when you’re on a site with multiple pages to a story (or search results), and lets you flip through them with keyboard shortcuts. This makes TWoP much easier to read. Hurrah!
Fun! The Bill of Rights, printed on bits of metal that you’ll need to remove from your pocket next time you’re going through “security”.
Podcast promising a new CC-licensed indie MP3 tune every day of 2006. I’m really looking forward to this.
This is a long MeFi thread, but worth reading. Summary: Someone posts to mefi asking if it’s possible to catch an ebay scammer. Turns out said questioner *is* an eBay scammer. Collected MeFi masses turn up addresses, bio, photos, etc on scammer. Now in police hands.
Attention Cantabrigians. Darwin’s has a new-ish store in Inman Square. Rather sadly, the highlight of my day at an old job was getting to Darwin’s for one of their superbly flavourful sandwiches.
This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.
I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.