6:29 PM (0 comments)
Tough Pigs posts a review of Muppet costumes, from the store-bought classics to modern and homemade.

5:43 PM (0 comments)
Part two of the OD 4th birthday celebration, as we look back at good links from Year 2 (for context beyond just the link, you may have to dig back into the OD Archives):

YEAR 2: 2002-2003

• Harry Potter: Pampered jock, patsy, fraud
  
• Kikoman!
  
• Posters from the WPA
  
• Sports Night scripts
  
• MAD parody of the Onion
  
• Ricky Jay's rotting dice*
  
• NASA faked the moon landing
  
• Gaping Void
  
• Studebaker design sketches
  
• The Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency
  
• Demotivators
  
• Stealth Force Beta
  
• Tough Pigs
  
• Ben Stein's How to Destroy America
  
• One Got Fat
  
• The Art of Playing Card Design
  
• Entrances to Hell
  
• The Heinlein Concordance
  
• The MegaPenny Project
  
• The Laws of Christmas
  
• River City Hacky Sack
  
• Mark's Very Large National Lampoon Site
  
• The Games We Played
  
• The Terrible Secret of Space
  
• Weapon Specialists
  
• The High Line
  
• The Center for Munchausology
  
• The Mad Scientists' Club
  
• The Peanuts Tarot (Archive.org)
  
• The Playmobil Tarot (Archive.org)
  
• Super Hero Food
  
• Howard Hawks' Lord of the Rings
  
• Starship Exeter
  
• Hive-mind flight simulator piloting
  
• Dave's Quick Search Deskbar (Best. Freeware. Ever.)
  
• Posts: Columbia Disaster (Part Two, Beyond, and Coda: "The Dream is Alive")
  
• The New York Public Library Digital Library
  
• Flash Flash Revolution
  
• Hulk's Blog (still going!)
  
• Harvey Smith's "Systemic Level Design for Emergent Gameplay"
  
• Liquid War
  
• Konono and Congatronics
  
• The Mah Jong Museum
  
• Flyguy
  
• Smitty's Sno-Balls (with MIDI)
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  

* Bonus points to CNN for keeping that link available and open two years later, unlike so many of the news sources I've linked to in the past.

1:32 PM (0 comments)
Via Trabbold, if you're not using the OD Desktop, the Blue Ball Machine would be a fine substitute.

1:11 PM (1 comments)
One morning I decided that a random thought passing through my head was important enough to be posted to the web.

Now, 1,460 days and 2,957 posts later....it's the 4th birthday of Ober Dicta!

Celebrate by using the OD Desktop (made up of the rotating corner art that longtime OD Readers will recognize from the design of the original OD*.)

Meanwhile, I'm digging back through the archives and will be updating this post over the coming hours with some of my favorite links and posts, from classics worth revisiting to Net chestnuts that might be new to some of you, collected from the past four years of posts:


YEAR ONE: 2001-2002

• Uplink
  
• Orisinal
  
• Post: Raging against a free coffee mug
  
• Kung Fu Chess
  
• Human Clock
  
• The Hollywood Stock Exchange
  
• My Onion cameo
  
• The Chronology of Animation
  
• Chowhound
  
• best_picture_ever.jpg
  
• Post: Senator CBG
  
• The Crossover and Spin-Offs Page
  
• The Book of Sand
  
• The Foresight Exchange
  
• Extreme Ironing
  
• The Secret Lives of Numbers
  
• The Alphabet Synthesis Machine
  
• Take It Easy
  
• Post (image): Virtual Reality Ninja
  
• Edge and the World Question Center
  
• Remodeling a Murder House
  
• Nuclear Blast Radius Explorer
  
• The NFL IQ Test
  
• Post: Video Games Are Not Incredibly Stupid (a rant which appears to have outlived its inspiration, now 404 on the author's site.)
  
• The A-Team Story Generator
  
• The Ultima Tower
  
• Post: Mocking reviewers of Rune
  
• Brandon Bird, "Two Warriors Come Out of the Sky"
  
• "If he couldn't have his comics, nobody could."
  
• The Periodic Table of Science Fiction
  
• The Periodic Table of Comic Books
  
• Post: Delving into the mysteries of Hi-Ho
  
• Post: Stabbed in the head
  
• Post: The launch of HeroClix (little did I know...)
  
• Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide Online
  
• The Dictionary of Victorian London
  
• Vintage Labels
  
• Using marshmallows to find the speed of light
  
• KIT FISTO FAN PAGE!
  
• Building a homemade Gauss rifle
  
• The Forevertron (along with House on the Rock, the FAST Corporation, and the Safe House, one of my favorite places in Wisconsin)
  
• Films of the Westinghouse Works, 1904
  
• Dragons versus the Air Force
  
• Anticryptography
  
• The Imaginary World
  
• Obtanium.net
  
• Tales of the Plush Cthulhu
  
• Los Diablos Guapos
  
• Post: River Crosser d20 prestige class
  
• Bookworm
  
• "Your Friend at the End"
  
• Post: Bad emoticons

That should keep you busy and/or entertained. Why don't we do Year 2 tomorrow?

Picture accompanying this post by Flickr user djwudi.

* Which I am stunned to discover is still there. I haven't paid for that webspace in at least three years.

12:59 PM (0 comments)
Why aren't you taking Panexa?

WARNINGS

Muscle: In a small number of tested cases (84%) PANEXA was found to cause abdominal wall muscle breakdown coupled with spasmodic activity in lower back/spinal muscles, resulting in most patients violently bending forward like a book slamming shut. While some other drugs promote similar responses (gemifbrozil, fresh cherries, nicitonic acid, cyclosporine, mustard gas, and acetomenaphin) PANEXA's reactions are over 48X as powerful and take place with a great deal more panache and flash. Also, PANEXA can contribute to developing inhumanly powerful tongue muscles, capable of licking through steel. Lymphatic System: If, after taking PANEXA for a period of four to six weeks, you still have any functioning lymph nodes remaining, double the dosage every two (3) weeks until they are all gone.

Yes, it's a parody site (via Waxy.)

12:12 PM (0 comments)
Thanks to Laura for the invite to last night's Dorkbot meeting, where I got to hear some interesting talks and see some fascinating projects including "room sonar" and some fascinating information on spectrography and the way our eyes process color.

But the highlight of the evening was John Miles' Equinox clock radio, a touchscreen linked to a basement server setup that can bring in everything from AM/FM to local emergency channels and VLF submarine chatter. Go goggle at its awesome construction, then download the client software and try it out for yourself. Good fun!

3:38 PM (0 comments)
In the mood for some low-calorie, high-octane, nonsensical fun? Howsabout The Very Good Adventures of Yamroll in the Happy Kingdom? Don't miss the sample short (via Drawn.)

1:47 PM (0 comments)
Over at Beautiful Stuff, Justin passes along news of a cool fan-made King's Quest sequel and series-closer: King's Quest IX: Every Cloak Has a Silver Lining.

The bad news: the project has been cease-and-desisted. The good news: you can have an adventure of your own by saddling up and joining the Quixotic quest to Save King's Quest IX.

11:54 AM (0 comments)
Police have apologised to an artist after raiding his home when an artwork made out of bacon was mistaken for a human head.

Exciting lede for that story. Of course, my favorite part is two paragraphs later:

They had been acting on a tip off from a criminal who had broken into the artist's home just days earlier.

That's right: even if you were to actually commit a crime behind a locked door, you still might be reported by a burglar. Criminals beware!

(story via J-Walk.)

UPDATE: After two emails on the topic, proof that lede is not misspelled.

4:49 PM (0 comments)
DefenseTech's Noah Schactman has posted a great story to Wired News about the iron-nerved tech-heads of a bomb disposal unit in Baghdad:

If ordnance disposal is the military's rough equivalent of firefighting, defusing bombs in Baghdad is like doing the job in a city of arsonists. ... Guerrillas in Iraq cobble together weapons from whatever they can find. A bombmaker in Mosul might use dynamite and a timer from a washing machine. One in Baghdad lashes artillery shells to a motorcycle battery and a cordless telephone. Insurgent cells swap tactics on Web sites, and when American forces catch on, the terrorists move to newer tactics.

UPDATE: Noah's gallery of photos taken while he was in Iraq on this assignment.

3:13 PM (3 comments)
Via continuing discussion of the Manhattan Mystery Smell over on Metafilter, two updates on the story. My favorite excerpts:

One (New Yorker) questioned whether the Chock Full o' Nuts plant near the Gowanus Canal might be responsible. Another asked if the old Domino's sugar factory in Williamsburg had come back online.At an IHOP on Richmond Avenue in Staten Island, employees simply giggled when the subject was broached.

..."Tell the city I want a lot of butter delivered to the neighborhood," said attorney Stephanie Carvlin, who first detected a pancake odor as she walked to dinner in TriBeCa Thursday night.

...A labor organizer, Rekha Eanni, said she could not characterize the exact smell, but after getting out of a night class at New York University she was overcome with a craving for pumpkin pie. When she got home there was no pie, so she did something she never does. "I made myself a pretty big bowl of vanilla ice cream with honey and cornflakes," she said.

6:43 PM (0 comments)
A great list of online applications that will allow you to do everything from create online calenders to setting up your own wiki (via Metafilter and digg.)

5:48 PM (0 comments)
Jarvis knows what you need from American Science & Surplus. I, for example, am apparently in desperate need of a soldering iron.

3:47 PM (0 comments)
Google points toward lots of great content posted on Google Video (via digg.)

2:50 AM (1 comments)
Improv Everywhere has returned, and this time they brought 200 people with them.