Silliness:

Interesting facts about sleep.

Surprising lot, those Greeks – they had surprisingly sophisticated computers back in 200 BC.

Can you say "too much spare time"? Here's video footage of a hamster running around a re-created computer game.

A superhero name generator, and a stack of other things are available here.

Geekiness:

Too cool, how to drill a square hole.

Silliness:

Stop motion animation of real live people, Tony vs. Paul.

Everyone knows you shouldn't let geeks create interfaces, leave it to people with taste.

Silliness:

Superman studies physics didn't you know.  

Grow your own Loofah. Groovy.

Lord bless the internet, and all who sail in her. Even the crazy flat-earth people.

Silliness:

This is interesting, run your own Nation State according to your ideals. Now, it doesn't support quite what I wanted to do, but I've still got a little crime-free socialist state going on.

W.A.T.C.H. OUT! The Nanny state is about. The most dangerous childrens toys evarrr!!!!1!11!!!!

Geekiness:

Science's role and stance regarding religion in debate. I rather like the pugalistic reporting style of the article, if nothing else.

Ellie's Link:

The bizarre remains of a fight between a Python and an Alligator revealed that they don't really get on very well; and it looks like the Python won.

Silliness:

Scandal as policeman suggests we use the correct word to describe sexually active teenagers and people interested in them.

Donald duck thought of it first, patent denied due to Disney prior art.

Geekiness:

A list of videos of talks given at Google's campus. All nicely stored on Google video.

"You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" Google video again today, with the abridged version of the Italian job rendered in Lego.

Silliness:

Actually interesting, a list of false arguments people make.

This is curious, seemingly impossible objects, how are they done?

I nearly cried laughing - this one isn't safe for work, but no-one told me that until it was too late. The Danish have a novel approach to speeding (apparantly)

Geekiness:

A list of good science books. That's pretty interesting all in all.

Silliness:

It's actually quite scary, but there's a syndrome which causes women to uncontrollably orgasm all the time.

The south park explanation of evolution, made me laugh.

Glad I'm not like this, I just do all the things Dad used to obsess over instead.

Good writing, and very very grumpy. I like it.

There's a fine line between genius and raving lunatic.

Silliness:

Why did they even review it? Gamespot thinks they've found the worst computer game ever made.

Matt'll probably read this one - on designers and attitude in the internet age.

What do you get when a large number of grouches get together and whinge? Why, the Helsinki complaints choir of course!

I like it, the executive colouring book.

Geekiness:

How to build a really good paper aeroplane.

Interestingness:

Some really quite interesting thoughts from a "top educator" apparantly he's really good, I like his thinking (mostly).

Silliness:

Brilliant, want a Ferrari? Knit one!

Nickelback, not a lot of variety there then. (Really effective with headphones.)

I like it, what you can do with very clever editing to make Amateur's appear competent.

Geekiness:

Fabulous game, very very simple, but the feeling of speed is real. Get your missile through all the barriers.

Silliness:

Surprisingly addictive web game.

Geekiness:

This is the single most awesome photo app available on the web today. And it's only a preview! Awesomeness.

Marvellous, a hollow shower. (That's one with hollow water, obviously the shower needs an internal cavity otherwise it wouldn't work very well.)

Silliness:

Well, this made me chuckle anyway - seasoned shot for hunting game with.

Space invaders rendered entirely in ASCII? Bizarre.

The ultimate kitchen question, Will it Blend?

Geekiness:

Whoa, (did I just say "whoa"? oh dear.) what can be done with Photoshop is amazing, to such an extent that I don't really believe this tutorial is real.

Quite possibly.

Ok, so SpectateSwamp has been annoying me with his trolling on Channel9 - and his ludicrous search app - so when he finally challenged the Windows Desktop Search team to a comparison I had to do it. (Note, I'm nothing at all to do with the WDS team, I though it'd be funny.)

Installation experience:

SpectateSwampSuperCrappySearch (SSSCS):

Actually, this is pretty simple, in the same way that "installing" a text file might be simple. It's a single EXE so put it somewhere and run it.

WDS:

Fairly standard installation process, nothing good nor bad to say really. It did require being restarted when I moved the index files, but that's just me.

User experience:

SSSCS:

Three little letters - WTF? No, seriously how the hell does it work. Here's a screenshot of the horrendous thing in action:

Does anyone know how this works? Anyone???

ANYONE?

Ok, no problem it says HELP, so I'm guessing I can type HELP and get some help.

Right...

Well, you can type HELP and you get something - I don't know what it is, but it's something.  

Does anyone know what it is?

Right, so I try a few "commands" out - can't get it to do anything, I do get it to open a text file. Notepad can do that though.

WDS:

Simple case (which I failed dismally to achieve on Spectate Search) let's find a document, any document. Here's how it's done in WDS - you see that little box on the taskbar - type something.

And this is what you get:

The immediate differences from SSSCS should be obvious, firstly you have some results. These results contain the words you were looking for.

I'm not even going to go into the advanced search syntax stuff - I'll leave that to someone who knows something. The second difference is that this program wasn't written by a loony on acid. Look, it has useful labels on stuff so you know what it does, and you don't have to type in P to get to a list of god-knows-what (I think it was a list of stuff I typed in, at least some of it looked familiar.)

Conclusion:

Well, SSSCS gets +1 on the installation over WDS, then it promptly loses about a million points for being utterly unusable and clearly written using squirrels.

WDS on the other hand is quite nice, useful and simple to understand.

Well, that was fun - let's delete the thing now after having awarded it "worst program I have ever seen including the one I wrote which was supposed to print a message but restarted the PC." At least that program was consistent and could have been used for something. 

Silliness:

fnar, the origins of blogging.

Fascinating things, perception and vision. Check out the hybrid images which appear different from far away.

Thoughtfulness:

A simulator for the war on terror.

Silliness:

A simple game of guess the logo. Do you recognise these common logos? (Warming: fiendish)

Genius, genius, genius! When animations get sick of being pushed around.

Geekiness:

Did I mention Line Rider? Well here's a video of the beta version's possibilities.

Happy birthday to me!

Happy birthday dear Meeeeeee!

Happy birthday to me!

Having survived what was just a rubbish day yesterday (picked up just before going to bed.) I've now reached the grand old age of 26 years! I just hope there a few more cards for me when I get home, as two is a bit pathetic.

Silliness:

I'm a Democrat (first and foremost), Anarcho-Socialist Green apparantly. What are you?

A stack of badly done subtitles exposed for the foolishness they are.

So, how many five year olds do you think you could take on?

There are a whole stack of things like this on the t'Internet at the moment, but this is one of my favourites so far.

Awesomeness:

Two high-school girls are proposing to produce Biofuels efficiently from Algae.

Geekiness:

A huge stack of tutorials for photo-editing programs.

Geekiness:

Ah, the problems of working in an industry where no-one understands what you do.

Silliness:

Well, there was only one link - thank heavens for Scott Adams.

Silliness:

The next logical step?

A thing of beauty is a toy forever.

"You can't drink that, it's the law!" Scary stuff.

Well, that's one way to escape prison, post yourself to freedom.

I like this, short animation on Human development as viewed by rocks.

Silliness:

Ingenious, did you ever need to know how much of a chart resembled Pac-Mac, well, now you do.

I was amused by this article on "acceptable" forms of swearing.

A witty response to all the annoying "get a mac" adverts.

Holy sweet cakes batman! (Don't ask me what sweet cakes are.) The worst URLs in history!