MetaFilter reports on quite an, um, interesting hobby:

It seems that this gentleman [YouTube videos] bought a set of musical robots from the defunct Showbiz Pizza restaurant chain. This gent has been reprogramming the robots to sing recent hit songs, rather than the '60s Motown hits they sang originally. He then takes video of these performances, and posts it on YouTube. I guarantee this version of Evanescence's Lithium will haunt your dreams (or, perhaps, make you hurl).

This was a bit disturbing for me...

lingro calls itself a "multilingual dictionary and language learning site" and takes a different approach to web-based translation. You input a URL and it reloads the entire page, making every word "clickable" for instant translation between the English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Polish languages.

kottke posts about "a timeline of human history (mostly sex and violence) by Milo Manara." The image is huge (15941 x 261) and has some NSFW elements, but it's quite an interesting work...

FreeRice is an addictive game that not only builds your vocabulary, but also donates food to charity (Snopes confirms this, as I was skeptical).

The CollegeHumor original video 24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot is a hilarious look at how 24's Jack Bauer would have saved the world back when the Interweb was dominated by AOL... :-)

Best Week Ever presents: The Manliest, Most Honest Commercial Ever Made.

Oedipus: The Movie is "The story of Oedipus, in 8 minutes, performed by vegetables." Definitely worth the watch... ;-)

Brian Dettmer's Book Autopsies are amazing works of art.

Thinking about how much data is contained in and accessed on hard drives has always amazed me, but seeing this YouTube video demonstrating the internal workings of a hard drive during various operations make me that much more impressed with the technologies behind them.

CNN reports that actor Dick Wilson died on Monday at the age of 91. Best known as Mr. Whipple, the star of over 500 commercials for Charmin toilet paper, Wilson had many other TV and movie roles. The MetaFilter thread has a bunch of video links for your nostalgic viewing pleasure.

The Asheville Indymedia article Clowns KKKick KKK ass is hilarious:

Saturday May 26th the VNN Vanguard Nazi/KKK group attempted to host a hate rally to try to take advantage of the brutal murder of a white couple for media and recruitment purposes.

Unfortunately for them the 100th ARA (Anti Racist Action) clown block came and handed them their asses by making them appear like the asses they were.

Need to brush up on your breakdancing skillz? For a mere $20 you can buy Alfonso Ribeiro's video Breakin' and Poppin' (YouTube video) and be doing head spins in no time! :-)

Some of you may know of Wade Boggs' near-legendary drinking prowess. I wasn't fully aware of the extent of this prowess until I came upon the article The Origin Of Boggs. It's definitely worth the read...

Amazed with the amount of customization apparently available at the Domino's Pizza web site, The Sneeze decides to see just how literally they will follow instructions. My favorite result is none pizza with left beef. :-)

Besides the bigger redesign of my '80s site I mention below, I've also made some minor changes to my DrikoLand Gallery pages, most notable adding a Personal Favorites section to highlight some of my favorite photos.

I've also considered adding PayPal links to the photos on the gallery to make them available for sale. I've never had anyone actually offer to buy a print, but I suppose if the option is there, there might be some incentive for people to do so.

Suggestions or comments on the new section and/or the e-commerce possibilities are most welcome!

It's probably obvious to my few regular readers that I haven't posted in some time. It's not for lack of things to post, as I continuously save items of interest for future posting. It's mostly lack of time to sit down and properly make the posts themselves, which sometimes require some more thought, research, and/or formatting. In any case, I haven't been making enough time for that, although I have been working on some behind-the-scenes things here at DrikoLand.


First of all, I finally migrated all of my '80s pages to a subdomain, 80s.driko.org. Along with that migration I've redesigned most of the main pages to conform with the design of the blog. I think it's a much cleaner look, but I still have to apply it to many of the subpages, which will of course take some time. Please take a look and tell me what you think!

Secondly, I've also made some tweaks to the DrikoLand Gallery, which I mention in the next post above.

I'll try to be better about posting more regularly, but we'll have to see if I can stick to it or not... ;-)

Update 2: Stage6 closed up shop at the end of February. It was one of the only decent places to find high-quality music videos that I've come across, so I'm quite sad to see it go. As I mention below, pretty much no one matches YouTube in its selection of all kinds of videos, but until it ups its video quality (something in the works, apparently) it's still hard to watch some of those videos. In the meantime, if anyone has come across a decent Stage6 replacement for music videos, please let me know!

Update: I removed the embedded video, as I didn't realize that it prompts people to download a divx plugin. Sorry about that...

My latest obsession (like I need another one) is amassing a collection of '80s (and beyond) music videos. For some time now, I've been TiVoing VH1 Classic's We Are The '80s and creating pretty decent-quality MPG files (~640x480) once I transfer the shows to the computer. USENET newsgroups (alt.binaries.mpeg.videos in particular) have also been a gold mine for high-quality videos. YouTube is an amazing source for all sorts of obscure videos, but the resolution is not that great (~320x240). Still, I think that a lower-resolution obscure video is still worth a download in most cases, if only to remind myself to keep looking. ;-) Finally, I found a couple of boxes of VHS cassettes in my basement and realized that I can connect my VCR to my computer's TV decoder card in order to capture video from VHS. Of course, it has to be in real time, but I've found some great stuff there. The quality usually leaves something to be desired (although the resolution is good, ~640x480), as almost all of the tapes were recorded in six-hour SLP mode, but again, some of this stuff I haven't come across anywhere else...

Most recently, I've come across another great source for music (and other) videos, sometimes even available in HD (~720x480 and up) resolution: Stage6, sponsored by divx, a popular video codec for AVI files. I've been uploading some of the stuff I've recorded off VHS there, starting with Sun City, seen below:.

As I get to them, I'll post some more videos to Stage6; keep an eye on my profile page here. Let me know what you think! Of course, any suggestions for good sources of music videos are welcome... :-)

Mmmm... Tornado Potato.

A teacher of English in Taiwan took a somewhat unusual route to help the children learn: use MC Hammer songs! The YouTube video is priceless. :-)

Check out this awesome Homer Simpson cake...