Make your Mac Mini a mini-tower with some cool toys from Green House in Japan.

Everyone has that person who forwards tonnes of amusing pictures and jokes that everyone has heard/seen at least four times … my person is my cousin. However there is sometimes a gem in rough. This is one of them. ;P

As some of you know, my girlfriend owns a Hedgehog. White thing, looks like a cross between a rat and porcupine. Anyway, my mother mentioned to my uncle that she had one and his reply was amusing enough to share:

Initially I had wondered how much fun as a pet a spiny, nocturnal burrowing animal would be that hibernates in mid-winter (…), but it also says in the New Columbia Encyclopedia that a “hedgehog [which has a high level of immunity to viper venom] will bite a snake and then roll itself up [into a tight ball with its spines pointed outward] as the snake strikes, repeating this procedure until the snake is dead.” I suppose that could be good for a few laughs if it’s too late to get to the video store.

Anyone have a viper?

NBC, Sci-Fi, USA, and Bravo have inked a deal with DirectTV to sell TV shows without commercials within hours of airing for a mere US$0.99. Now, this fall, this is a tad more expensive than I’d like with me watching 26 shows this fall (ie: US$102.96) , but the pricing is that bad if one could ditch cable all together. My major complaint is that it only works if you have the DirectTV HDTV tuner and are subscribed to DirectTV. So you already have to be subscribed to cable in order to order these shows. IMO, this is a lot like double dipping. If they offered them online in say HDTV quality video H.264 w/ hq AAC or 5.1 AC3 audio, it would definitely be worth the $0.99 an episode to download. Basically DVD quality video for a season. In the case of say Stargate SG-1 or Battlestar Galactica, that is only US$19.80/season/series (~$22.50 CDN a season at current exchange rates). This is very reasonable. I’m sure they’d argue that this would promote piracy but not doing it is promoting piracy as well. Hell, if they would also count they downloads as legitimate viewership, some shows I love would survive simply because there are enough viewers worldwide that love the show enough to pay for it. I could still be watching new episodes of Farscape and Firefly … grr …

There was an interesting poll on New Scientist SPACE that was recently tabulated. What was it? The World’s Best Space Sci-Fi Ever. Now, I agree with the results, but I wonder if the results are slightly tainted by the timing … I mean, in six months, would Firefly and Serenity be #1 and #2 respectively? I’d like to think so … but who knows.

Fairly cool … if you have an iPod Video. A torrent site just for you.

ROTFLMFAO! Check it out!

A recent clarification of fuzzy sections of the DMCA (american) has added this cool bit:

Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

It looks like emulators for ROMS of older platforms are legal in the States … perhaps even the ROMs themselves. For more information on this, cheak out Arstechnica’s article on the matter.

According to the OSx86 Project, Intel OS X 10.4.1, is cracked and floating on the torrent networks. Apple is going to have a hard time locking this OS to their systems if this keeps happening.

Google’s Public Service: Preserving Public-Domain Books. It’s officially, Google Print has entered into the Beta Test phase. Don’t believe me? Wanna read a book from 1839 on the Theory of the Steam Engine? Really cool huh?