This post is coming to you live from my very cool new pda. I just got the wireless working with it. For once with cutting edge tech things seem to have gone very smoothly , plug and play even, despite being linux. woohoo!

I’ll post some pics and more details tomorrow. The thing is damn slick though, of that there’s no doubt.

Want to befuddle your poor overtaxed brain? Check out this tough to believe optical illuision. Yes it’s true, those two squares are in fact the same color, our visual systems just aren’t up to the task of noting that fact. There are several other illusions to scope out from the link as well.

Never underestimate the power of human ingenuity. How cool is this!

So I am playing Zelda last night and I need to get into the pirate’s ship. There’s a riddle, ‘I can be filled with water or sail upon the sea, what am I” (I’m paraphrasing.).

Sheesh is that easy I think, Vessel!

Bzzt, no joy, the pirates won’t let me in. So I wander around randomly smiting weeds with my sword, thinking. Wait, a pirate ship, seas, shipwrecked, message in a bottle!.

Bzzt, no joy. More weed whacking with sword ensues, but nothing else occurs to me. I start to conclude the game designers are cheating. Later I figure out through a cut scene that the password is schooner and am like schooner? schooner??? WTF does schooner have to do with being filled with water? A sunken boat? That’s a stretch. I end up figuring it is a bad translation or something. Except that later I check it on dict.org and discover that my vocabulary is not as good as I think it is. Go check for yourself if you want the definition. It wasn’t a bad translation though I will say that.

No, this isn’t a belated April Fools joke. We’ve known about the kraken for centuries, through myth, sailor’s tales and the odd bit of actual evidence, but now they’ve actually put their hands on one. Too frigging cool. Can you imagine if one of these things actually attacked a boat you were in?

(link from the sometimes excellent metafilter)

Been checking out the war coverage on the major networks? Wished you could spend more time looking over the high resolution sattelite footage of Baghdad they show? Your wish is my command. Extreme closeups of various areas of downtown Baghdad can be found at that link. It’s amazing how good the quality is.

The Briar King is a better book than I expected. I ordered it on a whim from the Sci Fi book club on the basis of the blurbs in their monthly catalog, which is usually a mistake. But the book turns out to be a well-crafted piece of epic fantasy with some mildly surprising elements. per usual the story concerns the impending onset of a prophecy of doom and the central characters efforts to discover the true nature of the peril and fight it off. It’s the first book in a proposed series, and as such it lays the groundwork for what’s to come and spends a good bit of time on character development. It’s being heralded as the ‘next great epic’ and a worthy equal to George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Ice series, which I really like. I’m not sure it’s quite all that, but the book was definitely better than I expected and like Martin the author is not afraid to introduce empathetic characters and then do away with them in a gritty fashion. I’d give it 3 stars and I will pick up the next one when it comes out.

What’s that? You want to know something about the plot? Haven’t you noticed yet that I don’t tend to get into plots in my little capsule reviews? Go read the book, it’s epic high fantasy, they all have the same plots anyway, it’s just the details that differ 😉

Check out this uber cool photography project. The artist is stitching together a 30 mile long seamless photograph of San Francisco. Unfortunately he’s only publishing the complete project in a very limited set of 2000 or so, but the notion is excellent and there are cool sample shots on the site. Years ago a friend and I considered trying to build a ‘virtual’ downtown portland by shooting QTVR’s on the corners of all the streets, an idea that had occurred to me after remembered a Nova (or some other PBS program) I had seen while in high school about a team of scientists who were experimenting with Laser Discs back when they first came out, and they built an entire ‘virtual’ version of a city by shooting photos every ten feet or so in each direction from within a car, which they then stitched together on an interactive laserdisc so that you could ‘drive’ through the city on your television. This was like mid-80’s and cutting edge stuff at the time.

Anyway I still love the idea and so far as I know there are not a lot of projects to build this kind of stuff. There are

I stumbled across another great index of RSS readers. Mostly all the same clients listed, but variety being the spice of life and whatnot, I figured folks might be interested in checking it out.

As I’ve mentioned a number of times, I’ve been on a sci-fi/fantasy kick for like a year and a half now. The annual Hugo awards are about to take place and in their honor Locus has posted a recommended reading list for books published this year. I’ve read quite a few on the list and thought some of you might find it interesting. China Mi