I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

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.

Filed under 'awesome'

December 29, 2010

Polar bears get the better of spy cameras

In related news, polar bears are FUCKING AWESOME AND DON’T TAKE NO SHIT FROM NO ONE!

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November 4, 2010

Automatypewriter

Old school electric typewriter, rejiggered to automatically type and read your typed input, so you can play Zork. <3.

September 28, 2010

Webpage Asteroids

Fab bookmarklet that lets you blow the shit out of any webpage.

August 25, 2010

Awesome Project offers $1,000 grants for quirky ideas - SF Weekly

Nice write-up for the SF chapter of the Awesome Foundation.

August 19, 2010

They've been swayed: Huge hammock rocks - The Boston Globe

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.

July 23, 2010

Let's start a new life with iDish

This might upset some folks, but I think it’s beautiful. “If iPad were a dish, there are no problem”

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July 19, 2010

July 2, 2010

The 100 Greatest Movie Insults of All Time

My favourite is definitely “I don’t like your jerk-off name. I don’t like your jerk-off face. I don’t like your jerk-off behavior, and I don’t like you, jerk-off.”

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June 22, 2010

ALT/1977: WE ARE NOT TIME TRAVELERS

“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!

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June 18, 2010

Boston squared | Cartogrammar

“Geometry riddle: When is a square not a square? Answer: When it’s in New England.” I ♥ this.

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April 27, 2010

Apple //t

Top notch hack — Wiring up an Apple //e to display messages (and avatars) from Twitter. Tempts me to break out a ZX Spectrum emulator…

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April 15, 2010

Hello World! The Awesome Foundation-San Francisco...

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.

January 27, 2010

tellywonk

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.

January 16, 2010

Still at large: Nikica, 2-ton hippo that escaped from private zoo in Montenegro

I have a new goal in life: Live in a town where a hippo just wanders the streets.

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December 1, 2009

BBC Radio 4 - The Infinite Monkey Cage

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!

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September 12, 2009

TechCrunch: Yeah Ok, So Facebook Punk'd Us

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!

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June 5, 2009

The Awesome Foundation Seeks Awesome Trustees

Can you contribute $100 a month in the pursuit of encouraging Awesome? Become a micro-trustee for a micro-genius grant.

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May 23, 2009

HardTime :: Illusion

Ze Frank has a new video series on what to do in these economically-challenged times.

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May 13, 2009

Kickstarter: goopymart

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!

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March 20, 2009

"In The Loop" Trailer

This looks fantastic — A movie version of “The Thick of It”. Hoping it gets a US release. “You sound like a Nazi Julie Andrews!”

Hugs For Monsters :: Overly Judgemental IE6 Splash Pages

Save on development costs by telling IE6 users to go fuck themselves.

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March 4, 2009

THRU YOU | Kutiman mixes YouTube

YouTube videos remixed into awesomeness.

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February 25, 2009

cufón: fonts for the people

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.

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February 11, 2009

Chairlift: Evident Utensil video

Headfuck digital video compression artifactastic promo clip.

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February 4, 2009

YouTube - Her Morning Elegance / Oren Lavie

Wicked cool stop-motion music video.

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December 21, 2008

Faux Fire

THE MOST IMPORTANT WEBSITE YOU’LL SEE THIS HOLIDAY SEASON!

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December 2, 2008

Papervision - Augmented Reality

If you have a webcam/iSight, you *must* try this. Print out a symbol and make a 3D friend appear in your life!

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November 19, 2008

Campaign Exclusive: Custom USB Drives & Unreleased Jonathan Coulton Album - Creative Commons

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.

Let me google that for you

Awesome — a more polite version of justfuckinggoogleit.com!

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November 4, 2008

On The Hour

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.

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October 29, 2008

5th Grade Reporter Interviews Senator Joe Biden

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!

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October 19, 2008

The Bugle

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.

October 14, 2008

2D Boy: World of Goo

Stonking little indie game, finally officially released. Filled with bizarreness and imagination, I’ve been having a blast with it.

October 12, 2008

ThinkGeek :: Pac-Man Hoodie

I might need to own this.

October 11, 2008

Real Life Tron on an Apple IIgs

What happens when a Tron lightbike exits the grid, and heads into the lands of unprotected memory.

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October 9, 2008

xkcd: Youtube Audio Preview

YouTube implements a feature that featured in an xkcd comic last week. In response, current.com is looking into including velociraptor protection in our next patch release.

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October 8, 2008

The Muppet Newsflash: Whatnot Workshop Opens this Month

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.

September 23, 2008

Wario Land - Shake It! YouTube ad

Brilliantly-done ad for the new Wario game for Wii. Seems dull to start, but worth continuing with!

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July 16, 2008

Dr. Horrible's Freeze Ray Will Stop the World

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.

DEFENDER of the favicon

The classic arcade game Defender, implemented as a Firefox favicon! A bit of a silly hack, but the idea of updating favicons dynamically (to alert users when they’re looking at a different tab) has some milage.

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June 29, 2008

Fail Whale sculpture - a set on Flickr

Quality! A 3D-sculpture of Twitter’s almost-ever present beacon of FAIL!

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January 27, 2008

Michel Gondry Re-creates His Own Trailer For "Be Kind Rewind"

Michel Gondry’s next film involved Jack Black and Mos Def recreating movies amateurishly. Here, Michel Gondry recreates that film’s trailer amateurishly. Genius!

January 17, 2008

Occam's RazR > An Ounce of Prevention

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.

January 11, 2008

Easy Acid

Large collection of loungecore covers. Hugo Montenegro’s version of “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)” is my favourite so far.

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December 31, 2007

iminlikewithyou: Blockles

I’m In Like With You branches out into wickedly-addictive multiplayer Tetris. They even let you play without joining the site.

December 18, 2007

eBay auction: Drive Someone Insane with Postcards

“You are bidding on a rare chance to traumatize a treasured friend or relative with baffling, mind-numbing, mystery correspondence from abroad.” Hooray for the internet!

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November 30, 2007

YouTube - prevent-it.ca

I want to move to Canada so I can see more PSAs like this. Freakin’ *AWESOME*!

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November 12, 2007

Rands In Repose: The Nerd Handbook

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?”“

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October 24, 2007

Google Translate: "Sarkozy is chirac"

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”)

September 18, 2007

Nelson's Weblog: Space Giraffe

Sounds fucking AMAZING! Do I dare buy a $300 console, just to play a $5 game?

September 6, 2007

Kickass Cupcakes

New cupcakes bakery in Davis Square — Deep fried cupcakes? Be still my (clogged-and-barely) beating heart.

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August 15, 2007

YouTube: Of Muppets and Men

The whole of a *fantastic* behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of The Muppet Show.

July 26, 2007

Twibright Optar

Codec allowing you to reliably back your data up to dead-tree. You can print about 200kb to a sheet of A4, then scan it in later to retrieve your data.

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July 18, 2007

People playing chess on roller coasters

Life (deliberately) imitating “art”.

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July 11, 2007

Apple - Trailers - 01-18-08

Quite possibly the best movie “teaser” ever. No title, no cast list, no clue as to WTF is going on… But dagnammit, I want to see the film!

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June 28, 2007

MusicBrainz Blog: The BBC partners with MusicBrainz for Music Metadata

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.

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June 19, 2007

Kempa.com: Vinyl Data

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!

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May 3, 2007

YouTube - Pulp Muppets

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.

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April 13, 2007

Nigel's Green Skeleton Shirt - This Is Spinal Tap - founditemclothing.com

Gonna have to get myself one of these. “Exactly medically accurate”.

April 6, 2007

Magnetbox

Awesome retro blog design.

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April 4, 2007

Internet Access CAPTCHAs

CAPTCHAs to keep the internet looser(sic)-free. I would fully support this project.

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March 9, 2007

Ajax3d Demo

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…

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February 17, 2007

Peter Callesen's Framed A4 Papercuts

Amazing artwork created from a single sheet of A4 paper.

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February 16, 2007

YouTube - Scissor Sisters Live - Take Your Mama

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.

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YouTube - Scissor Sisters at the Brits - I Don't Feel Like Dancing

Stonking live performance by the Scissor Sisters. Disembodied legs and floating singers a-go-go. $5 says the Jim Henson Creature Shop was involved.

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January 27, 2007

Mark Ronson's MySpace page

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.

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January 26, 2007

YouTube - Kitty Washing Machine

Automatic “spa” for pets. I’d pay good money to see Bacon and Clyde take a run through one of these things.

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January 3, 2007

San Diego Zoo's Animal Bytes: Tapir

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.

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November 16, 2006

Firebug

Version 1.0 of Firebug is on the horizon, and it looks about 75% more kick-assier than the current release, which is saving my life at the moment as I do some JavaScript ftuff at work.

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November 6, 2006

YouTube - Girls Aloud - Something Kinda Oooh

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.

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November 2, 2006

souvenirs - a photoset on Flickr

An obvious idea, beautifully executed: Perspective replaces a landmark with its souvenir.

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October 28, 2006

clubNAMCO.com :: Toys :: PAC-MAN® Moving Power-Plush

Wicked awesome (albeit pricey) “waddling” PacMan + Ghosts plush toys. (But what’s with this “NOT available to ship to addresses in Massachusetts” bullshit?!)

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August 3, 2006

OK Go - Here It Goes Again

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?

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July 26, 2006

YouTube - Pulp - Bad Cover Version

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.

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July 23, 2006

Puffy AmiYumi cover Green Day's "Basket Case" (MP3)

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!

July 19, 2006

Self-destruct Button USB Hub | Uncrate

Pretend to be an evil villain whilst hooking up your digital camera.

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July 13, 2006

Bullet in uber slow motion - Google Video

69 seconds of slow motion footage of a variety of things getting shot. Awesome.

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June 28, 2006

419 Eater: The Incredible Shrinking Artwork

“Derek Trotter” gets a Nigerian scammer to ship a wooden carving of a Commodore 64. Just fantastic!

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June 21, 2006

Pitchfork Feature: 100 Awesome Music Videos

Does what it says on the tin. Pitchfork scoured YouTube for 100 awesome videos, skipping over your usual suspects like Jonez, Cunningham and Gondry.

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June 16, 2006

ASCII-WM 2006

‘telnet ascii-wm.net 2006’ to get a realtime ASCII art stream of World Cup matches.

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June 3, 2006

The Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments

“What happens when you combine 200 liters of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints?” The Mentos and Diet Coke meme taken to the extreme.

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May 14, 2006

Fare comment! BBC interviews cabbie by mistake

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!

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May 3, 2006

Eau de PLAY-DOH

That instantly recognizable scent of Play Doh, in cologne form.

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April 30, 2006

Colbert Lampoons Bush at White House Correspondents Dinner-- President Not Amused?

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.”

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April 27, 2006

BBC NEWS | Judge creates own Da Vinci code

“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.

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April 14, 2006

ANOTHER WORLD

Remake of the classic PC game, Another World. Bastard tough, but awesome fun, as I recall.

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Category:Exploding animals - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Best! Wikipedia category! Evah! Everything you need to know about Bat Bombs, Anti-tank Dogs and the Oregon Exploding Whale. Suck it, Brittanica!

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Elias Torres » hCalendar + Google Calendar Reminders

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.

April 13, 2006

Mr. Beast by Mogwai on Rhapsody

Example Rhapsody album link. Follow this, and you can hear one of my favourite albums of the year so far.

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April 1, 2006

FlickCentral: What's with all the CATS?!

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!

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TeeVeePedia

TeeVee.org’s April Fools site is superb. There’s a lot of love gone into this.

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March 30, 2006

iGoatse. the new skin for your iPod

Bad, wrong, and awesome.

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February 10, 2006

London Underground Anagram Map

Genius! Getting from “Queer Spank” to “Erect Bone” requires a four zone ticket.

February 5, 2006

zx spectrum walkthrough - Google Video

Complete video walkthroughs of classic Speccy games (although JSW has clearly been poked to avoid the Attic bug).

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January 29, 2006

Burning visible images onto CD-Rs with data

An attempt at tweaking what you write to a CD so you leave artwork on the disc — Kind of like those Aphex Twin tracks where his face shows up in the spectrum analyzer. Very clever.

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January 22, 2006

Slanket: The Best Blanket Ever

Wow, this is genius. A big fleecy blanket with sleeves, so you can control the TV or type on your laptop without exposing your shoulders. Want!

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January 17, 2006

A List Apart: Articles: Web 3.0

I ♥ Zeldman.

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January 14, 2006

ViewMyCurrency

A great example of why Firefox can be so powerful — An extension which automatically currency-converts prices on webpages.

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January 5, 2006

b3ta: Who you gonna call?

Ghostbusters as a small animated GIF.

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December 23, 2005

Mr. Pibb + Red Vines = Crazy Delicious - T-Shirt

Rawk! Fantastic t-shirt commemorating my favourite line from “Lazy Sunday”. Ordered!

December 7, 2005

MAKE: Laser etching Powerbooks

Wow. For Christmas, I want a powerbook and a big fuck-off laser!

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mozdev.org - nextplease

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!

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December 6, 2005

iTunes Signature Maker

This brilliant little applet analyses your iTunes library and based on your listening behaviour, patches together a short “signature” of your music taste. I’ll upload mine in a moment.

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December 2, 2005

Bill of Rights - Security Edition

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”.

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November 26, 2005

beedogs

Does exactly what it says on the can. “Beedogs.com is the premier online repository for pictures of dogs in bee costumes.”

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November 23, 2005

Indieish: Remixing Pop Culture - CC:365

Podcast promising a new CC-licensed indie MP3 tune every day of 2006. I’m really looking forward to this.

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Mario Unleashed - Google Video

This is insane — Video of some kids at a high-school talent show, performing segments of the Super Mario soundtrack on marimba, complete with costumes and props.

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November 18, 2005

is an ebay fraud seller free? | Ask MetaFilter

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.

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October 31, 2005

Darwin's Ltd.

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.

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September 27, 2005

Meanwhile

Meanwhile is a fantasticly headfucking “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style comic-book from Jason Shiga, who was responsible for the superb “Fleep” strip.

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September 22, 2005

School band play 'Endtroducing' with real instruments

Superb! DJ Shadow re-imagined by hitting things with sticks.

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About This Site

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.