I have found Nirvana

And this is it.

Edit: Indeed, the site appears to be down now. Probably surpassed their bandwidth limit.

David Copperfield is awesome

Just picked up this story over at Digg.

Would YOU believe an illusionist who said he had nothing in his pockets?

I'm only a year late on this...

Transparent aluminum.

In the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Scotty teaches a 20th century human how to make a substance called transparent aluminum, which is several times harder than glass.

Now, apparently, we've done it.

New Windows XP theme

When Microsoft released Windows Media Center Edition, it released with a new default theme called Royale (screenshots here). It was basically the default Windows XP Luna theme with some glass effects.

Recently, someone got their hands on another version of that theme called Royale Noir; it's essentially a black version of the Royale theme (screenshots). Very, very nice. Installing the Noir theme also installs the Royale theme, so you get two in the one package.

And either one looks better than Luna.

D&D made simple

GameSpy put together a simple explanation of how to play D&D.

tvRSS

tvRSS is a site dedicated to providing RSS feeds of TV show torrents. I recently started using this along with the RSS Feed Scanner plugin for Azureus.

It's a pretty simple concept; the Scanner periodically checks the various feeds, and if it finds a new entry with one of my keywords, it downloads the torrent and starts it up in Azureus.

RSS Feed Scanner allows the set up of multiple feeds, for multiple shows. I currently have one set up for Heroes, one for Smallville, and one for Jericho. It also has the ability to parse the filename string to determine season and episode (assuming it uses one of about 5 season/episode formats), so I can instruct it to only download Smallville episodes Season 6 episode 6 and later, for instance. It will keep track of which episodes it has downloaded, and won't download those later.

This saves me from having to search for new episodes every few days, especially now that I'm trying to watch 3 different shows.

Pics

I recently discovered that Google offers 250MB of free image storage via PicasaWeb, an adjunct to their Picasa image editing software (which so far seems cool enough, except that resizing images is bass-ackwards). So, I've uploaded a bunch of the pictures I've got sitting on my hard drive of various weddings I've been to recently, a certain van wreck, stuff like that.

If you're interested.