Zero Punctuation!

Yay, another one!

The British accent makes it more awesome. This one has an… imaginative ending however. You’ve been warned!

On a somewhat related not, I preordered Orange Box the day it opened up for preorder, so TF2 beta, here I come! I hope that not only is it good, but also that my graphics card can handle it. Valve’s dropping DX7 support, apparently. This makes the lower end closer to my aging gaming machine. Valve seems to assume with their site design that average people are running widescreen or crazy-high resolutions or something – their sites don’t fit horizontally on one 1024×768 screen…

Yay!

Scientists figure out how to burn salt water!

Once this goes commercial, we can have water-burning power plants, and there should be little to no greenhouse gases from the creation of electricity! This means we can get electric cars running on green power! Woo! The water even recycles itself, what with the rain cycle and all that. Yay! ^^

Lie Detectors

Apparently are a fraud.

A good quote from the FAQ:

As unbelievable as this may sound, even federal agencies like the FBI and Secret Service assume that all of their applicants have cheated in school, lied to people in authority, driven under the influence of alcohol, etc.

Q. You maintain that polygraphs are biased against the truthful. How can this be?

A. Applicants who explain all their past indiscretions to the polygrapher during the “pre-test” interview and actually give honest answers to the “control” questions (and, as a consequence, feel less anxiety when answering them) face an increased likelihood of “failing” the “test.”

EDIT: Good! Wait… they had that power?!

Dasher!

Dasher is an interesting text input system. While it can be used by disabled people or whatnot, I just like using it because it’s new to me and even somewhat fun. I can tell that there’s a potential to have it be very, very fast, but I don’t have that much practice with it yet. It’s easy to pick up, but hard to master. For me, watching the guy in the video linked by “interesting” helped. It may also be that I haven’t trained it with my writing style enough – apparently it learns with use.

YouTube

Three interesting YouTube videos:

Nintendo A Capella

Re: Harder Tetris on Piano

Capturing and Viewing Gigapixel Images

Edit: I’ve replaced the poorly-done Ask Steve and Movie pages with one Animations page. This one is text-only, so it is now possible to actually figure out what’s what. Also, Snow Day is back up, I hadn’t realized a link to it was missing until I got an email about it. … Why do I even keep the animations up? They’re just kinda embarrassing now…

I Found an Awesome Studying Tool!

If you’re like me, although flash cards do work, they’re too much of a hassle to create, keep track of, and use. Quizlet takes all of that away – the hassle, the mess, and the inconvenience! It is an entirely web-based flash card substitute! Simply upload your flash cards, or enter them in the extremely polished input pages, and you’re good to go! It will even take away cards you get right, quizzing you only on what cards you need work on. It also has symbols for foreign languages, although not ¡ or ¿ for Spanish… It even gives you percentages… and mine is shooting up towards the ideal 100%… Thanks, Quizlet!

Just in closing, I know it’s online elsewhere, like where I found it, but making Spanish symbols is somewhat simple. Turn on NumLock, hold down Alt, punch in a code, and release Alt. This will allow you to create special characters. For example, 173 is ¡,168 is ¿, and so on. I found my list here.

Oh, and if anyone’s wondering why I wasn’t at school today, I’m down with a cold. It’s enough to make it hard to hear and whatnot, I don’t want to get others sick, and I’m not feeling too great, so…

EDIT: Quizlet also allows for customization of the character sets! In the “prefs” page next to username in the upper right. Mr. Andrew there seems to have either thought of and/or coded every possible helpful thing I can thing of at the moment.