If it is, you should probably send it back to the manufacturer.
(Via.)
Is your plush uterus accessible to young children?
16 January 2009 — danFrom the makers of Blinker Fluid and the Cross-Drilled Brake Line
16 January 2009 — dan
(Via BB.)
Audiophile nonsense is one of those hard-to-parody things, like religious fundamentalism: Poe's Law states that no straight-faced parody of fundamentalism can reliably be distinguished from the stuff real fundamentalists actually say.
But one Nathan P. Marciniak has, nonetheless, given this difficult task a go.
(For comparison, consider ILikeJam's page of real audiophile products.)
Audiophile nonsense, about which I have of course written on numerous previous occasions, is sort of the Fisher-Price, bonsai version of the real, serious scams, like medical quackery.
(Audiophile weirdness and medical quackery sometimes appear on the same page on dansdata.com. My audience seems to rather like the letters columns that're all about scams.)
Nobody's dying young because of audiophile flim-flam (well, not unless they leave their amplifier plugged in while they replace the tubes...), nobody's spending money they can ill afford to lose (well, OK, maybe some of the crazier ones), nobody's being led into criminal activity. Audiophile nuttitude is just people getting together to fool each other and themselves. Sometimes a lot of money changes hands, but it's all entirely voluntary and essentially harmless.
I'm sure some vendors of crazy hi-fi products are well aware that they're running a scam, But most seem to be sincere - if pompous, wilfully ignorant and sometimes a bit rude.
(Note that Mr Marciniak is not actually the maker of Blinker Fluid and Cross-Drilled Brake Lines. That's KaleCoAuto.)
If you download only one 188Mb MOV file today...
19 December 2008 — dan...make it World War, by Vincent Chai (via).
The high-res MOV version is right there on Chai's site, which could get just a leeetle bit overloaded in the near future. One thousand bonus points for the guy, though, for making that high-res version available.
Usually, you find some awesome short film on YouTube or Vimeo or wherever, and then you go to the creator's site, and there's nothing there but the same squished-down Flash-video version. You can format-equals-18 it on YouTube so you can download a better-than-nothing MP4 version, but that's it.
Vincent, though, has the whole HD enchilada right there for download, like the Code Guardian guys who inspired my last post like this. And like the Exploratorium guys with The Secret Life of Machines, for that matter.
Here's a direct link to the MOV file, which if you're reading this some time after I wrote it will either be nice and fast, or broken:
WW_VincentChai.mov
I hope he puts it on archive.org or makes a torrent or something. I e-mailed him about it, but have not yet received a reply, possibly because he's got better things to do than hover by the computer waiting for e-mails from me, or possibly just because it's the middle of the night where he is.
NOTE: Clearly-enunciated bad language within
9 December 2008 — danPerhaps it was the firewall that irked Stephen Fry so.
(Via. Mr Fry is, of course, not actually very unflappable at all, as listeners to his podcasts already know.)
I'm glad it's not just me and people on b3ta who use the word "cunting".
Sometimes, nothing else will do. There usually seems to be a machine involved.
Get down, baby wood ducks!
6 December 2008 — danThis is probably the most harmless problem ever described on The Daily WTF, but it's also one of the strangest. It's like frightening yourself with ask.com, only... different.
Google now have their own search-autocomplete thingy, which benefits from the somewhat higher average IQ of Google users versus those who, I presume, start every search by typing askjeeves.com into the address bar.
It would appear that the Google search-string database isn't quite as up-to-date as it might be, though.
Update: Oh, look - YouTube does it too!
YouTube connects to to a Google server for its autocompletes, as you'd expect since Google own YouTube, but clearly the results are divided to more effectively serve the two sites' differing demographics.
Google:
And YouTube:
(See also "drinking beer tricks", "eating peanuts tricks", and of course "shooting smack tricks".)
Empower your piston pressure!
26 November 2008 — dan
I am indebted to the reader who pointed me to the eBay listing for this item.
As he said, the listing really does tell you everything you need to know about it:
Car Drive Power Igniting Ignite Engine Air Power Plus
Descriptions:
* Most Hi-Tech, Quality product;
* Power up your car engine;
* Power and smooth driving;
* Auto adjust electronic frequency system, to fasten super plugs igniting the engine accurately within the shortest time, and also to empower the piston pressure to its maximum emplosion;
* Size: 70 x 25mm (L*D)
* Weight: 70g
From the description, you'd think it was meant to be some sort of high-energy-ignition doodad. But it's got a hose barb on either end, so perhaps you're meant to put it in your fuel line.
Or maybe the windscreen-washer hose.
I'm so confused.
(The listing also says "The photos are just for illustration purposes only", which I think you'll find is the usual purpose of photos in eBay listings. But perhaps it means the thing they send you will actually plug into the cigarette lighter socket, or something.)
Cyberdemon crowd surfing
4 November 2008 — danNot a jury in the world would convict you
2 November 2008 — danGiven the desperation of the various cop shows to find new stories "plucked from the headlines" (translation: "we'd rather not have to write our own plots"), I'm surprised that none of them seem to have featured Awful Vengeance wreaked upon a series of spammers.
I remember one Law & Order SVU episode (well, that's probably what it was, they all kind of blend together) featured a child molester tempted into offending again by "Lolita" porno spam. This episode was of course every bit as plot-holed-below-the-waterline as every other computer-related plot on mainstream TV, but I'd forgive the usual "I tracked his traceroute to a ping from 374.257.-111.999, which means he's using 5-bit ASCII..." stuff as long as enough spammers were finding other spammers' ears in their mailboxes.
I've got the plot outline for them right here.
Former Special Forces guy loses a leg somewhere he's not at liberty to talk about, uses his disability payments to start a little Internet Service Provider in his home town, and gets into one of those horrible legal battles with a spamming customer who forces him to keep hosting their server. Then goes on murderous crusade.
He can't just kill the guy he's having problems with, of course. He'll be the first suspect. If he kills eight other spammers first, though, then keeps on killing more spammers afterwards, he'll be harder to catch.
(Preferable murder technique: Cutting something valuable off the spammer and commenting on how it doesn't seem nearly as big as the advertisements promised, while they bleed out.)
The actual spammer-homicide rate is miserably low. There was that one Russian guy in '05, and a couple back in 1999, and that's about it as far as I know. (Anybody know of any others?)
So if nobody can make this happen in the real world, it should at least happen on TV.