GromBlog

Mailing List working again
Big Apologies to everyone who gets gromblog sent to them by email (using the sign-up box on the right-hand side --> ). I know it's not been working for over a week now but it turns out that it wasn't anything to do with me screwing up for once - there was a change in the Blogger api code. Luckily, Monsur, who runs the excellent bloglet has sorted it now - cheers Monsur!

Genuinely Useful XP Tweaking tips
If you use Windows XP then you'll benefit from having a look at these XP tweaking guides - they contain a lot of simple to follow advice and many good ideas to improve your system.

'The Man Behind The Motion'
Here's a cool short film called 'The Man Behind The Motion' - it's a 'mockumentary' about the artistes who perform motion capture for computer games. If you're not on a 56k modem then get yer ass over to watch it - it's very funny.

Sh(l)ock Photography
More discussion point than creative artworks, ashkan sahihi takes on some very odd themes in his photography. Most controversial are his series entitled 'cumshots' and 'Drug Series' both of which are fairly self-explanatory.

Cynical about the music industry?
Mike Peters and his band (remember 'The Alarm' from the 1980s?) have reformed and released a single under the name 'The Poppyfields'. Having young handsome stand-ins for their vid-shoot, and pretending they have a combined age of 13 - they have shot up the charts! Proving image is everything in the shallow world of pop!

More Financial Pr()n
Not sure what it is with people hiding pr()n in financial websites but here's another one.
Check the links down the left hand side. Handy stuff for people looking for...
secured credit card, student credit card, credit card application, bad credit credit card, visa credit card, credit card debt, discover credit card, capital one credit card, credit card processing ... and so on...
But wait!
One of these links is not like the others.... can you find it?
hint: search for "apply for credit card online" look below
thanks again to
Ol for this one.

My mother is insane - a true story
I first saw this the other day but we've been posting so much stuff recently that this was put to one side for a quieter time but I've been sent it again by one of our readers which has prompted me to finally post it.
My mother is insane is a thread from the Something Awful forums which is gob-smacking when you see it. This guys mom hoards more pointless trash than anyone I've ever seen before - she buys things from eBay for no reason and has filled her house - and I DO mean filled - several times over, so much so that there is only one room that's still vaguely habitable! Not worth visiting on a 56k modem as there are over 5Mb of photos to see.
thanks to Gary from digimask

Top Flash animation
Rockstar games (of Grand Theft Auto fame) hold an annual multimedia competition. One outstanding entry this year is Drew Cope's Japanese drum Machine which was only a runner-up which just goes to show the high quality of the competition.
cheersOl

A touch of genius
I had to giggle when I heard this. A New Jersey mother is sueing, current bad-guy flavour of the month, the RIAA under federal racketeering laws.
After reading what the FBI considers "organised crime" and thier definition of racketeering, it would seem that the RIAA falls neatly into those catagories.

Mums rock.

Unfortunaly, I doubt it'll ever reach the courts as violence was never threatend.

Another fiendishly dificult web game
As a follow on from the Crimson Room blogged yesterday, I thought I would share another mind twistingly difficult web game. Not as polished, but with an outstanding soundtrack, Quest for the crown.
Turn up the sound and let'er rip.

Ring Of Fire
Such a traversty!! In homage to the late, great Johnny Cash - an advertising company has attempted to use the song 'Ring Of Fire' to advertise..... well - I'll let you guess. Unfortunately (depending on which way you look at it) the attempts have been blocked by some of Mr. Cash's family members.

Live Linux bootable CDs - a very large list
Courtesy of /. comes an extremely large list of Live Linux CDs. We're big fans of these cds on this site with Knoppix being our tool of choice. If you haven't used one of these cds before then they're amazingly useful tools to have - simply burn the image onto a cd and then you can boot pretty much any computer straight into a basci Operating System of your chioce (NB: the list above are all flavours of Linux but you can use BartPE to create a windows-based version). The advantage of these images are that nothing gets installed - the whole operating system is loaded into memory so they're great for fixing/recovering broken computers, hacking or just to learn how to use a different operating system without having to install anything - it works even on systems with no hard drive in!

Proof of alien life!
can be yours for just $1,300,000.00. Unless, that is, someone out bids you.

Not only that, but the same guy is also selling "proof" of time travel and the existance of the Devil.

/me twirlls hand next to head whilst making cookoo noises.

Happy Tree Friends
A lovely selection of cartoons from 'Happy Tree Friends' where cute and fluffy little creatures get splatted in various ways. Bit dark but very sweet!

Yawning Animals make me laugh
Loathe as I am to not the superb Crimson Room site off the top of the blog now, I feel I have to share the hilarious Yawning Animals page with you all. It would cheer up even the most suicidal lemming. I'm grabbing a load of these images to use as buddy icons on msn messenger.

Hack to square one
A while ago we blogged hackquest, a site that contains shed loads of computer related challenges and puzzles.
It's a site I revisit every month or so, do one more challenge, get stuck, and give up for another month.
When I visited last night I was excited to find it's undergone a facelift and re-release.
However, excitment soon turned to horror when I found that (although the old accounts are still valid for this new site) non of the completed challenges have been migrated. So the fourty of fifty challenges you spent all that time doing, will have to be done again. Sods law dictates that at least 60% of them you'll have forgotten how you eventually did them last time.

*Warning*
If you are interested in this type of thing, don't expect to get any sleep for the next few weeks/months, this site sucks time striaght from your life without you even realising.

Escape from the Crimson Room
Aaarrghhh! Someone please tell me how to get out of the Crimson Room. I can get quite far but then I realised that it's 1am and there's no way my brain can take anymore. This tricky puzzle game was brought to you by our reader Sven and the letter 'Q'.

One of these images is not like the others
One of our most popular features are the regular 'One of these ...is not like the other'. Today, courtesy of NTK, we can bring you the Google Image Search for street sharks - as to be expected, the odd one out is NSFW.

Find the pr0n
Gutted! As a follow up to Jenny's post a few days ago (find the pr0n, 6th Feb) I am very disappointed to discover the after promising to relaunch the site after 'reburbishment', financepage.co.uk has gone offline! And I didn't even get to spot the pr0n!
Hark - is that the faint creak of a web designer swinging from the gallows after the MD discovered their 'hidden' image?

NICE TITS
oh yes... mmm... lovely... I just love tits! Do you like tits? If you do, check out nice-tits.org. Nothing beats a nice bit of Ornithology! (Perfectly SFW)!

Unreal Tournament 2004 demo released
Busy day today!
Just announced - the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo has been released. It's free to download, is just over 200Mb to d.load and contains 5 fully playable maps. You can even jump online and play the demo in full multiplayer mode.
What's yer excuse? Get Fraggin'!

INDUSTORIOUS CLOCK
I know it's been blogged before - probably several times - but this Flash clock is just super!

Shark attack update
Dan P trawled t'interweb and found a pic to go with the story bellow. (If it's not on this page when you view, Rueters have added more pics and it'll be a page or two further back).

Australian drives mile with shark attached to leg
This story sounds amazing! An Australian was attacked by a shark whilst out snorkeling. He swam 300 yards then drove for a further mile to get help - still with the shark attached to him!

Fish Piercing?
I'm very undecided about this but maybe Solomon's years of experience can enlighten us on some of the more technical aspects of Fish Piercing. I don't think it would actually be any problem for the fish - it's just not able to give an opinion which is why I don't think this is a particularly good idea - since someone's already done it, I can't see any reason to repeat the experiment & believe me - I've seen far worse things pierced!

Illegal Art - The Grey Album
Dj DangerMouse (I assume this is the same guy as DM & Jemini but I might be wrong) has been served with a 'Cease & Desist order for his recent Grey Album, which remixes Jay-Z's The Black Album and the Beatles White Album despite only 3000 copies being printed. Luckily, if you want to hear it just click on the link above.

Honey, that naked lady looks just like you...
A Greek man is being reported as not the happiest person on the planet after finding his wife naked on an exhibitionist website.

Random Name Generator
One of the first uses of the internet seemed to be random name generators. Whilst most of these were for your 'rock star name' or your pr0n star name', there weren't any that interesting ones that just made random names. Mostly because there isn't much point. Or at least that's what I thought until I realised that it's useful for authors who need to ensure that their characters don't actually exist and might sue. That's just one example of when you might need a Random Name Generator.

Linux distros, through the roof
Number of Linux distributions greater than number of Linux users

Windows "live" CD
If you've been visiting GromBlog for a while you'll have seen various posts about Linux "live" CDs (Knoppix, etc.) i.e. a working operating system on a CD/DVD that requires no installation.
Now someone has given us the tools to create a similar working Windows CD.

Very useful for us M$ admins, alowing us to chuck away that knackered old 98 boot disk in favour of something a little more heavy duty.