irishblogs – Page 38 – Something Odd!

Will swap voice and texts for data

I hardly ever use up the monthly voice minutes and texts on my phone. Apparently carriers make more and more of their revenue from their customer’s data usage. Glad I’m near wifi most of the day!

What about you?

Harness racing on Cork’s roads

Two harness racers on the Cork to Mallow road defying Garda attempts to stop them and driving against traffic on a very busy road. Crazy guys, crazy.

Why so skeptical?

In a few years time, there may well be no rhinos left alive. And when I say no rhinos, I do not mean “none left in the wild”. I mean none in the zoos either. The captive animals will have been killed too. The reason for this is an insatiable desire among some people for rhinoceros horn – a material thought by some to possess magical healing powers. It’s really just a mass of keratin – the same substance that your hair and fingernails is made from. …

This is what you get when critical thinking is left to one side and blind belief trumps patient scientific inquiry. Where unsupported and uncontested beliefs thrive, dreadful scenarios can play themselves out, right down to the last animal standing.

Skepticism – the wider issue

SubWars

When nobody on the subway gives an old man their seat … (via)

The Placebo Effect

Via The Cork Skeptics who showed this video at their last meeting when Rebecca O’Neill talked about being a health food shop worker. (Audio of the talk here, Colm’s going to love all the pingbacks!)

Reddit PvE Rev 6 Minecraft Server

One of the great things about Minecraft is that you can pack a level into one nice compressed archive. r/Minecraft on Reddit have a number of servers (I think) and this is one of them. You can download that world from here, it’s pveRev6.tar.gz but there are lots of other worlds there to check out too.

I had to fiddle around a bit to get creative mode working. I think I copied the region folder from the tarball into a creative world I created for this purpose. There was probably one or two other steps too but it’s been a while. Figuring out stuff in Minecraft is half the fun isn’t it anyway so go find out yourself 🙂

Digital Acid

“Turn the lights off, stand in the middle of the room and wave your arms about frantically….”

Watch it fullscreen, but not if you’re averse to flashing lights..

Smiley’s People, a BBC podcast I listened to recently inspired me to look up this old Ash & Dave C64 demo. Unfortunately the podcast is not available any more.

Happy birthday my rubber keyed friend!

Well, 2012 has turned out to be quite a year for retro computing. The Commodore 64 turned 30 this year, Jack Tramiel died, and the ZX Spectrum is 30 years old too!

I have fond memories of the original 48K ZX Spectrum. Even though it had a tiny rubber keyboard it suited my much younger and smaller hands. I do recall the “Symbol Shift” key got stuck a few times making it hard to type in BASIC code but I guess I opened up the machine and cleaned the keyboard membrane when that happened.

On the off chance you haven’t read it yet there’s a great article on the Sir Clive Sinclair’s machine in the first issue of Retro Gamer that came free with the 100th.

At the time many 8 bit machines used tapes to load their software. Disks were a rare luxury. The loading sounds became so engrained in our minds that even now they’re recognisable and someone created an iOS app that recreates them. (Thanks Conor!)

Or the real thing. It takes a while …