Search Google With Images

I just noticed, on the search term box of Google Image search, a little camera icon. So I clicked it and discovered that you can now supply an image and let Google search using it as a search term, just like [www.tineye.com]. Magic stuff. I'll be up all night with this one, searching for the origins of symmetry.

Brain Fade

Japanese Tsunami 2011: In-Car Footage

Scary, yet fascinating footage [via] of the recent Japanese tsunami hitting traffic, via car dash-cam . While watching, I noticed a car floating by with what looks like a wheel clamp attached. That's one way to beat the clampers I guess. Or it could be just something caught up in the wheel perhaps.


Fuck you clampers! Tsunami power!!

I Always Wondered Why The US Flag Was "Backward" On Marine Uniforms...

Jessica Simpson, in the US Army apparently.

The blue field of stars should always be in the highest position of honor. When viewing the flag on a wall, the highest position of honor is the upper left when displayed horizontally, and at the top (upper left) when displayed vertically. When displayed on a "moving object" like a person or vehicle, the highest position of honor is the front, and not the rear; so the field of blue should be displayed to the front. 

In application, then, flags are displayed on moving vehicles with the blue-star field always displayed towards the front of the vehicle. In this way, the flag appears to be blowing in the wind as the vehicle travels forward (flags are always attached to their flag poles on the blue field side). If the flag were not reversed on the right hand side of the vehicle, the vehicle might appear to be moving backwards (or "retreating"). 

For flag patches worn on uniforms, the same principle applies: the blue star field always faces towards the front, with the red and white stripes behind. Think of the flag, not as a patch, but as a loose flag attached to the Soldier's arm like a flag pole. As the Soldier moves forward, the red and white stripes will flow to the back.  

As the proponent for standardization and authorization of heraldry items within the Department of Defense, the Institute of Heraldry addresses the apparent oddity of the reverse flag patch by stating, "When worn on the right sleeve, it is considered proper to reverse the design so that the union is at the observer's right to suggest that the flag is flying in the breeze as the wearer moves forward." 

Previously the U.S. Code prescribed that military use of the flag will always be red, white, and blue. However, with the updated Army Battle Dress Uniform that was recently unveiled, the flag patch will become a camouflage, muted color. [marlowwhite.com]

And that's the end of that chapter. Another great mystery solved.

"Friday" Composer Demolishes Critics

Haters Gonna Hate

Here is Ark Music Factory co-founder, Patrice "Pato" Wilson, musically destroying people who critacised him over his involvement in "Friday", the infamous song performed by Rebecca Black. In the video, he denounces people who said he was a paedophile or a "fat Usher" It has to be said though, the Ark Music Factory website does look like a bit like pedo-bears den.

Apparently (according to the video anyway) the reason Pato used the theme of getting a lift to school with your friends in "Friday" is because he was too poor to get a school bus, bus, bus, bus.... but he "made it work" in the end. I wonder what he'd do if he didn't have any friends. Perhaps Rebecca Black would have walked to school, and instead of singing about the choices of what seat to take she could have entertained us by telling us how she avoided stepping in the dog shit on the pavement.

I also wonder if he'll write a follow tune about the copyright problems he's currently having with Rebecca Black over "Friday". Perhaps he can use the power of auto-tune to solve it. No hard feelings about it anyway, critacising him only makes him stronger, so all's well that ends well. *auto-tune off*

P.S. You can talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk....

Genuine Yamaha OPL3 FM Pop Music!

Judas by Lady Gaga



Bad Romance by Lady Gaga



Neutron Star Collision by MUSE



Fairytale by Alexander Rybak

I've been busy getting my old CreativeLabs SoundBlaster AWE32 card up and running, for nothing more than to make use of the on-board Yamaha OPL3 FM synthesis chip. The original problem with the card was that it's a ISA and not PCI board so it didn't fit on any modern motherboards. I managed to find a 300mHz Celeron board lying around with a single ISA slot and hobbled it all together. It would run Windows XP but was a bit slow for audio work, so I thought about being totally retro and installing Windows 95. I gave up with that idea after a few days of constant install conflicts. I now have it running Windows 98se, which is very smooth.

I intended to record from the boards line-out but that was very noisy so I recorded all sounds internally. This mean't that there are a few moments of lagging in the recordings as the machine struggles to keep up with playback and writing PCM data to the hard drive. I have since cleaned the Line-out ports and the noise has been dramatically reduced, so all future recordings will be done like this, eliminating the lag problems.

All music here is written by the respective artists, I only hold claim on the recordings. The sequencing was done by others too. Unfortunately, the midi files came without any info on the creators. All MIDI files found at http://cool-midi.com I decided to go with pop tracks for the novelty value of people hearing tunes they might be familiar with, in FM form, plus I was delighted to see people (or companies) still producing MIDI files of relatively new "chart-music".

More recordings to follow. This projects SoundCloud account is YMF262 by the way.

Pi To 10,000,000 Decimal Places - In Text File

You might find this Pi to 10million places .txt file useful. I have an Flash actionscript I wrote, that generates graphics based on Pi. I finally have a decent number of places in a nice text file, to try out. Thanks to little-scale for the effort.

Love Beach

An Extensive Guide To Irish Astronomy

That's the guide right there, above. If there's something happening in the sky, you can be guaranteed there will be clouds over Ireland. It's as natural as the mother fucking gravity that keeps your arse planted in your seat.
[ image via ]

Steve Ballmer & The Magic Of Names

Those last few posts made me think of Steve Ballmer. Everytime I see him he reminds me of someone. I can't figure out who though. Perhaps it's just Ballmer himself... Perhaps I'm just so used to being introduced to the man originally by that "Developers, developers, developers..." video that all I can think of is a pseudo-parody of the man himself. Or perhaps it's Hermann Göring. Yes, yes, I see the similarities alright. Then again, no.



I will always prefer Bill. Come back Bill! Isn't it funny how his name is Bill and he's a "Bill"ionaire? It's as if his name somehow destined him to become what he is. It reminds me of that episode of The Golden Girls where they are discussing how surnames were often derived from the craft the person worked at, and Rose thought Ronald Reagun invented the Ray Gun. Or something like that. It must be at least 20 years since I saw that episode last. It's all a bit of a blur, but in finishing up I'd just like to say: Steve Jobs, what a cunt.

Julie Larson-Green

And here's that "other post" I promised earlier, about 49 year old corporate vice president of program management for the Windows Experience at Microsoft Corp, Julie Larson-Green. I just found myself liking the woman in that earlier Windows 8 presentation I posted. She comes across as being quite friendly and articulate; energetic without being brash; intellectual, but down to earth. A bit like Jeri Ellsworth in that regard. Here's her bio from the (now well out-dated) Mircrosoft press center page.

Updated: August 11, 2008

As corporate vice president of program management for the Windows Experience at Microsoft Corp., Julie Larson-Green oversees the design for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Her responsibilities include program management, user interface design and research, as well as assistance and support technologies for "Windows 7," the successor to Windows Vista, currently under development.

Larson-Green joined Microsoft in 1993 and has focused on user interface design throughout her career. As a program manager in Development Tools and Languages, she was instrumental in several releases of Microsoft Visual C++ for 32-bit operating systems and led the development of Microsoft's first customizable integrated development environment for Windows. Moving to the Windows team, she was responsible for the Internet Explorer 3.0 and 4.0 user experience, including features related to the Web-integrated Windows desktop.

Continuing her focus on end-user software, in 1997 Larson-Green joined the Office team and led program management for Microsoft Office SharePoint and Microsoft Office FrontPage, including the early work in information worker servers. Most recently, she has been responsible for leading the user interface design for Microsoft Office XP, Office 2003 and the 2007 Office system, which was lauded for its innovative reinvention of the user experience for productivity software.

Before joining Microsoft, Larson-Green was a senior development engineer at a Seattle-based company that created leading desktop publishing software. She holds a master's degree in software engineering from Seattle University and a bachelor's degree in business administration from Western Washington University. A native of Washington state, she lives there with her husband, who is a university professor, and her two children.

And here's another video of her with some very dodgey "power zooming" at the start!



So was the Windows 8 post just an excuse for this post? No... Yes.

Windows 8

I kinda like it, for what it's intended to be used for anyway, and being forgiving, for it being in the rough-and-ready stages. It's a hell of a lot better looking than what's going on with Gnome3 and Ubuntu Unity, that's for sure. But lets be honest here about Windows8: This is just Microsoft's version of Android, so I'm not surprised I'm more accepting of the "new" interface paradigm that I might have originally expected myself to be. I also like the look of Julie Larson-Green, but that's for a whole other post.

So that's how everything seems to be going with things these days. The same touchscreen OS for everything. Ubuntu merging it's Desktop and Netbook versions together into "Unity", Windows with it's "Android thing". Microsoft might as well use it to kill off Windows Mobile. As Green said in the video, it's all about the merging of shite together. Well she said it better than that. The lines of work-home-mobile devices and interactions are blurring in todays world. But does that kind of cross-platform-ability work? Might they attempt to bulldoze their way onto the mobile market by making an OS that looks seemless on whatever you run it on? Can Microsoft really take on an OS that already has the majority share of the mobile device market, and one that is FREE?

I don't know what I give a fuck for. I'm still using Windows XP, and more often than not, I'm on Linux distro now, and I even recently installed Windows 98 on a machine to work with legacy hardware. As for mobile devices, it's Android all the way. So Windows 8? Great, knock yourselves out. And Mac OS "Lion"? Selling it at $29.99 only goes to prove that Apple will eventually give up on software completely and focus on highly-profitable over-priced hardware. I'm surprised they aren't giving the OS away for free. Mark my words, Apple Mac's will be running Windows as standard in the near future. "They'd never do that" ye say. Ye also said Intel chips were the work of the devil. It's all about what brings the best profit.

[video via]

Don't Mix The MiXX!

I was listening to Neal recently, on one of his magical "Into Your Head" podcasts (if I ever do get my podcasting off to a start, I will definitely be stealing the line from Phoenix Nights and call it: "Cumming In Your Ears"). So anyway, I was listening when he mentioned he was drinking some [lemon flavored] MiXXed Up from Lidl, when that reminded me of a post I never finished, in which I reviewed the caffinated beverage.

On revisiting the post I see I had no more than the picture created, with no text about the actual drink itself. I really can't remember much of what I wanted to say about the liquid, it was so long ago now. According to the image, I wanted to poke fun at the fact that the substance was clearly designed to be "miXXed" with alcoholic drinks but a warning told the purchaser not to. The taste, so far as I can remember, was cross between battery acid and pigs piss. Perhaps I'm being unfair, but I remember not liking all that much. But it was cheap. So all in all, a great stimulation drink.

Bear Grylls: A Lovely Cup Of Tea

Bertie Ahern Flashes Kids At Wax Museum

Haha, only kidding. It's just a little joke, you see. A bit like Bertie's leadership skills. This was taken from the Gammagoblin archive, which is frighteningly vast. So vast in fact, that I actually have a physical copy of the orders given by Hitler to exterminate the Jews. You know, the ones that historians can't find a copy of. Yep, I haz them.

[ related post on wax sculpture ]

Miriam O'Callaghan

Picture unrelated [via]

Ripper Of Carrigstown

Barry O'Hanlon: Ichi the Killer has nothing on this fucker!

I was never a big viewer of Fair City. For a short time, around the Suzanne v Damien thing, I kept in touch with it every week, but I rarely watch even a single episode per week now. I'm more interested in taking the piss out of it, on the periphery, than aqually watching. I would only watch Fair City again, to see people die or get beaten up. I think if someone died every week I would be glued to it. Perhaps they could introduce a "Redshirt" character like they did in the original Star Trek series. Someone who just floats into town on a Sunday and has the shit kicked out of them on Thursday, now that would be entertainment. Or would it? Perhaps it's only the "regulars" dying that bring entertainment.

Suzanne got hammered last week in the park. The Fair City FX crew appear to be using a different flavor of jam they smear on the actors faces, since Turdlock had a mirror fall on him. I only saw the aftermath, I wonder was the attack as hilarious as Barry O'Hanlon's first victim, who died from a door knob to the face (Roddy Doyle already did "The Woman That Walked Into Doors"). I think they should have Barry kill everyone in Carrigstown. A one man holocaust machine.

This post is quite unrelated to a tweet I made last year, where I distanced myself from any genuine affection for the RTE program in a tweet using a humorous ironic analogy. This direction post has appears to have put a new spin on it.
[unedited image via bigmentaldisease]

It's Amazon - If Amazon Sold Mind-Altering Chemicals

The video above explains why Joe Duffy was right about "Bath Salts". And this woman knows her shit about shit. She litterally put the shit up the shit! She's the Mythbusters of shit i.e. she does the shit so you don't have to end up in shit. Ok, enough with the shit.


So Joe was right to close down the Head Shops! Ah but of course, Watson: the bathsalts! But don't be frowning that your Head Shops aren't open anymore, you can now buy the real thing online, without fear of the fuzzies knocking on your door. Thanks to the magic of the TOR anonymous network and the peer-to-peer open currency of Bitcoin, you can get your goodies from the "Silk Road". A magical underweb where "you buy drugs with digital dollars".

"Sellers feel comfortable openly trading hardcore drugs because the real identities of those involved in Silk Road transactions are utterly obscured. If the authorities wanted to ID Silk Road's users with computer forensics, they'd have nowhere to look. TOR masks a user's tracks on the site. The site urges sellers to "creatively disguise" their shipments and vacuum seal any drugs that could be detected through smell. As for transactions, Silk Road doesn't accept credit cards, PayPal , or any other form of payment that can be traced or blocked. The only money good here is Bitcoins. 

Bitcoins have been called a "crypto-currency," the online equivalent of a brown paper bag of cash. Bitcoins are a peer-to-peer currency, not issued by banks or governments, but created and regulated by a network of other bitcoin holders' computers. (The name "Bitcoin" is derived from the pioneering file-sharing technology Bittorrent.) They are purportedly untraceable and have been championed by cyberpunks, libertarians and anarchists who dream of a distributed digital economy outside the law, one where money flows across borders as free as bits."

All sounds very safe and secure doesn't it. Just like the Sony Playstation websites! I think I'll stick with buying can's of caffeinated Kx from Tesco with the change I find down the back of the sofa, if it's all the same. Anyway Joe, it's time for you to try to ban the internet again!
[ The Atlantic Article via RistoranteMystica : Amazon quote via Gawker ]

Ming On Lenihan

I left out, what can only be described as, a loud guffaw upon hearing Luke "Ming" Flanagan using the death of Brian Lenihan, to rip the arsehole out of Bertie Ahern. Don't let the bog accent and turf cutting agendas fool you, this man is a killer on the loose!

For me, hearing that Brian Lenihan had died was actually sad news. Well not really sad I guess, but regretful. While the man may have sealed our economic fate for the next 3 millenia, I have to give him the same respect I offer Hitler at his purging of the Jews from Europe: he honestly thought he was was doing the right thing. It's a real pity Lenihan couldn't have offloaded his cancer onto Bertie Ahern in a brown envelope. Bertie would have jumped at the chance of getting a brown envelope if Brian had written "political favor" on the outside.

Creosote Creatures

Experiments In Digital Video Destruction

A test video for a concept of pseudo-digital video destruction that I developed. Influenced by artists such as Kim Asendorf, quayola, Jonathon Moore, etc. But it's mainly a continuation on from my JPEG compression destruction ideas from a previous post.

See an alternitive version with a more mainstream choice of The Flashbulb's music.

On A Pole, Beats The Dole

Google "Derek Davis Porn"...

... and you get this. [ image from joe.ie ]

Eye Shadow

[via WoW]

I Get This A Lot

I think this manic behaviour is fairly common on the internet, but then again, who doesn't love SRS BSNS.

Bear Grylls Tackles Irish Water Charges

[ Irish Water Charges: Irish Independent ]

Maybe It's Maybelline

[ source images ]

Jim Corr: What's Been Lurkin' In The German Gurken

Angela Merkel, infecting a batch of cucumbers with the deadly bowel based E.Coli bacteria.

Jim Corr has recently issued a statement* explaining the truth behind the spate of deaths and illness suffered by Germans and non-Germans alike, from a new varient of the e.coli bacteria. He explains how it was highly suspicious that the finger should be pointed at organic cucumbers, cucumbers  who's origin was specific to the country of Spain only. He suggests that this is a complete manufactured story. As man-made as the varient of e.coli found to be infecting people.

He continues to say that Spain is teetering on the verge of economic collapse and the slightest downturn in confidence could lead to disaster for the Mediterranean state, which would lead to another Irish like IMF/ECB bank bailout. He suggests that this would play directly into the hands of the Germans who would gain immense control over another EU state.

Corr's evedence relies on the fact that Hitler once tried to take over Europe in the 1940's and that it's no coincidense that the outbreak of the disease should take place in a country aptly named "Germ"any. Using their new found power over the country they could easily confiscate land to use for setting up meat refining factories for the reptilian inviason in 2014

*Disclaimer: To the best of my knowledge, Jim Corr has never said anything like this. This post has been a complete work of fiction... much like the rest of what Jim actually comes out with.

Related: Daily Mail report from 2007 outlining the removing of individual wrapping of cucumbers to save plastic. Perhaps this is what has caused the problem, since all phallic shaped objects should always be rubbered-up for safety.

Related: German supermarket giant ALDI are doing a stellar job of reassuring customers that their cucumbers are 100% safe. [via]

Autoanthropophagism

Want some? Tastes like yum!
The eating of one's own flesh... I first came across the term over 15 years ago when reading an issue of Dark Side magazine, which was a special edition, all about the infamous history of the "Video Nasties": the films banned in the UK in the 1980's. The word was used in a review of Joe D'Amato's gut-rencher, "The Antropophagus". The reviewer told us at the end of of his article that the protagonist finally succums to his his own flesh-lust and begins to devour himself "in an act of autoanthropophagism."


Is that Harry Potter?
Skip ahead to today, when I read of a man who ate his own gonads, and took the pictures to document it, for the worlds viewing pleasure. A "Heat-wave" in Ireland this weekend... might chance a BBQ...

[ link: http://www.bestgore.com/extreme... : Venereal Gore NSFW etc.]

I can't say I'm too shocked, I do afterall, like to bite my own finger nails... but now... Maestro! Some music, if you please. To help the medicine go down, two choice cuts of ear-throbbers for you. "Balls" [all you need are, balls!] by Sparks (does what it sez in the tin) and "Mein Teil" by Rammstein (which was inspired by the famous German cannibalism case).