Evolution of the Batmobile

When Kids do Makeup

Funny Twitter thread shows what happens when kids are let loose with makeup

No, this is not an industrial accident involving a chainsaw.

Star Wars Underworld Test Footage

Long before the Mandalorian, George Lucas had been working on live-action Star Wars TV series called Underworld.  Unfortunately, due to cost concerns, it was cancelled.  This test footage from the show has appeared online today through the holonet YouTube channel.

Bad Airline Food

Pictures of truly awful airline meals.

Inouye Solar Telescope, High Res Images of the Sun

Incredible new images from the Inouye solar telescope can capture features as small as 30km across.

Quiz

I got 7 / 13, Snow in book, movies, and Music

Sleaford Mods, Jobseeker

My favorite band at the moment (nsfw).

Batman Actors 1943 - 2016

Making Lego Gummy Candy

How to Read The Witcher Books in Order

'The Witcher' is a series of fantasy novels by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. First published back in the '90s, they've had a cult following over the years but have been brought more into the mainstream, firstly with 'The Witcher' series of video games, and the more recent series on Netflix.  If, like me, you want to delve into reading the books here's a handy guide to reading them in order.

The 100 Greatest Movies Of The 21st Century: The Readers’ List

From Empire

The 10 Best Jeff Goldblum Movies, Ranked

'The Fly' 1986, was the first Jeff Goldblum movie I watched and still remains a favourite of mine.  I also thought he was great in 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'.  Here are Cinema Blend's 10 best Jeff Goldblum's movies ranked.

Key and Peele - Shady Landlord

The 1st Beatles Song to Feature a John Lennon Guitar Solo

Interesting article with other facts about the Beatles.  For example, I didn't know that Paul McCartney played the solo on 'Taxman'.

Related - The George Harrison Guitar Solo the Beatles' Engineer Called 'Embarrassing'

Robot Gorilla Is Accepted By The Alpha Silverback | BBC Earth

(via Cynical-C)

Great Moments in PC Gaming

The opening train ride of Half-Life

Undercover Boss Where Are They Now - Kylo Ren

Why Your 'Star Sign' is Probably Wrong

Professor of astronomy James Kaler explains why

The Rubberbandits, Dads Best Friend

Triple Threat Sandwich Challenge

Link Dump

World's biggest Snickers bar

Lego Cybertruck

What a Big Mac costs around the world

My Bartop Arcade Machine Build

This is the first time I've built a two-player machine, and also my first bartop build.  It's powered by a Raspberry Pi computer and has a pretty decent 50 watt sound system.  It took over a year on and off to complete but I'm quite pleased with the results.  You can see some photos of the build process here.

Old Content

I'm slowly restoring archived content going right back to 2006.  There's a lot of stuff though and approximately 80 to 90 per cent of the links are broken or simply don't exist any more.  Bear with me!

3000 Year Old Mummy Speaks.

Using 3D printing to recreate his vocal tract, academics have been able to recreate the voice of the Egyptian priest Nesyamun, a 3000-year-old mummy.  At the moment it's more of a noise than actual speech, but they hope to use computer modelling to recreate actual words or sentences.

Cutting Books In Half?

Man called 'murderer' for his unusual book 'hack'.  I think 'murderer' is too soft a word!

Graf Zeppelin Over Leeds UK 1931

Probably only of interest to Leeds people like me, but I thought this was fascinating.

The LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin was the sister ship of the Hindenburg airship and offered the first transatlantic passenger service. It made 590 flights before being taken out of service after the Hindenburg disaster. You can view its flight log here.

You can read more about the craft on its Wikipedia page

(via Reddit)

RIP Terry Jones

City Roads Project

Andrei Kashcha's city roads projects lets you enter any city name, and creates a map showing every road within its boundary. You can download the map as a .png or even get it printed onto a mug.

(via Digg)

Irish Girl Really Wants To Go To The Pub

I have to admit, she makes a good case.

Tomorrow's World 1989 Talking About 2020

Tomorrow's World was a BBC series that ran from 1965 until 2003, it covered new developments in science and technology and was one of my favourite shows when I was a kid.  Here's a clip from a 1989 episode where they talk about how technology will play a part in our lives in 2020.

Quick, Draw!

Quick, Draw! is an online game developed by Google as part of its A.I Experiments project.   You have 20 seconds to draw something on the screen and the A.I tries to figure out what it is.

More A.I Experiments

GameCube Joy-Cons for Switch

Shank Mods have made these nifty working GameCube Joy-cons for the Nintendo Switch.

New York Public Library - 10 Most Checked Out Books

In honour of their 125th anniversary, the New York public library has published a list of their 10 most checked out books. 

The 10 Levels of Bass

Davie504 is an incredible player and my favorite Youtube bassist. 

Kerrang! 50 Of The Worst Album Covers Ever

Some of these are pretty awful (and NSFW), 50 worst album covers

Doom Eternal - New Trailer

Can't wait for this but I think it might be time to upgrade my PC.

Fecking Good Gin

We were in Ireland for Christmas and New Year, I saw this in a local supermarket.

Solving a One of a Kind Puzzle Worth $2000

I'm back (I think)

I've decided to resurrect this old blog after 10 years(!) of not posting anything. I'm not sure how often I'll get to update but I plan to post links on projects I'm working on, and any interesting links I think are worthy of a post. Unfortunately, I've had to remove the entire archive, the oldest posts are from 2006 and a lot of the links are broken or non-existent now.  I may get around to restoring some of the old content in the future, it just depends how much time I have.

I hope to get some pics of my recent trips up in the next few days, so call back soon.

Scot Trooper

Saw this guy in Edinburgh recently. I didn't have the nerve to take a picture from the front.

Chernobyl 2019

I was lucky enough recently to take a two-day tour of the Chernobyl exclusion zone in Ukraine, it turned out to be a fascinating and incredibly moving experience.

  

Chernobyl was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history.  On 26 April 1986, reactor No. 4 exploded causing radioactive material to escape and spread over the area, and most of Western Europe.  The disaster was eventually contained but rendered the surrounding area uninhabitable. 

The area is now safe to visit and work in for small periods of time, but it is estimated that the 30km exclusion zone will not be safe to live in for approximately 20,000 years.  

These are a small sample of the photos I took, you can see more in my Flickr collection. 

Wedding March Fail

A poor bride has to walk down the aisle to an absolutely terrible rendition of the wedding march performed on trumpet.

My Retro Game

I used to be a fan of the ZX Spectrum home computer in the '80s, and always wanted to try my hand at developing a game.  I recently discovered that there is a thriving scene for creating new games for the system using a tool called Arcade Game Designer.  AGD was created by industry veteran Jonathan Cauldwell and highly simplifies the task of creating quality retro games.  Below are a couple of screenshots from my (as yet untitled) project.

To find out more about AGD and view Jonathan's other projects then click here.

Play Game & Watch Online

I used to love these old LCD games when I was a kid in the 80s, I actually used to own the Donkey Kong one above.  You can play them all here in your browser.