Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

The biggest ever diamond has been found, estimated to be close to 10 billion trillion trillion carats, which is bigger than the moon. Unfortunately it's floating in space 50 light-years from earth, and if it ever made the voyage to earth we'd only be fabulously wealthy for a brief instant, before we were all fabulously dead (I'm ignoring some laws of supply & demand here as I think we'd have bigger things to worry about than split second economic trends). All in all just a bit too much bling to handle.

Entry 738, Tuesday, February 17th 2004, Filed In Stuff
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Country TLDs

I'm getting the hang of my country code top level domains (ccTLDs), but once in a while I'm forced to hunt out a reference site to look one up that I don't recognise. This time I'm posting a link to it so I don't lose it again. Thanks to celes who I couldn't work out is in the Philippines (.ph).

Entry 737, Tuesday, February 17th 2004, Filed In Stuff
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HomestarRunnerWiki

Q. What could be better than a wiki packed full of Homestar Runner information?

A. A wiki packed full of Strong Bad email information.

Entry 736, Tuesday, February 17th 2004, Filed In Stuff
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The Crimson Room

I drank too much last night. I thought what time it was now. I felt thirst of the throat. The bed was different from usual. Is this a hotel? No, it does not seem to be a hotel. I am shut up. I have to escape...

Can you escape the Crimson Room? Put your thinking hat on, collect the objects, click, click again, and click some more, in this tricky puzzle game. It took me a while, but I got out in the end (post for help via the comments if you need it), can anyone tell me what the CD case was for though?

Entry 735, Monday, February 16th 2004, Filed In Games
Rating(65%) • Comments(1282)

The Cheeky Beaver

Take a break from your web browsing over at The Cheeky Beaver on-line public house. Newly opened, but it comes complete with nicotine stained ceiling and beer soaked carpet for that authentic feel. Over a pint why not ogle the bar maid or talk football stats with Les the landlord? Mine's a pint of best and that's my quid on the pool table...

Entry 734, Monday, February 16th 2004, Filed In Stuff
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Animals On The Underground

The subterranean animals of London.

Entry 733, Monday, February 16th 2004, Filed In Stuff
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The Hospital

Investigate the spooky abandoned hospital in this fabulous flash photographic adventure. Beware of Spidermen in the attic [via angrymonkey].

Entry 732, Monday, February 16th 2004, Filed In Stuff
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Emugifs

Classic computer games characters emulated in animated-GIF form. One of my own personal favourites, Pole Position, pictured here.

Entry 731, Sunday, February 15th 2004, Filed In Stuff
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Optimizing Mozilla Firebird/Firefox

Get under the hood of Mozilla Firebird/Firefox and make it even better. As if it didn't blow Internet Explorer out of the water already, these tweaks add a little bit more speed to your browsing. Written pre Firefox, they still apply to the latest build. It's also quite useful to cross reference this guide with the texturizer notes on editing the config file. It gives you a sense of control over your browsing you are never going to see with IE.

Firefox can also be improved with the installation of some well chosen extensions. My personal recommendations are the Tabbed Browser Extension (TBE) and Session Saver, which help you to make the most of Firefox's tabbed brwser abilities, and really do make the whole thing a pleasure to use.

The only thing I am conscious of is that all these tweaks and improvements are just ways to make Firefox more like Opera. Still it's nice to have a choice of two quality browsers. And yet all the web-stats show that the majority of folks persist with using IE. Go figure.

Entry 730, Sunday, February 15th 2004, Filed In Stuff
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Well Designed Weblogs

A collection of some well designed weblogs for those of us looking for some design inspiration. At some point soon I may do a re-design, but I think it's born more out of a need to tinker than any great necessity. I would like to turn my back on the last of the <table> tags in my design though. It's all a question of finding the time to do it though.

Entry 729, Sunday, February 15th 2004, Filed In Stuff
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Penguin Dreams

Androids may dream of electric sheep, but what do penguins dream about? The cruelty they suffer at the hands of Yetis, or maybe exacting their revenge? This cute little interactive flash thing certainly suggests that the mind of the penguin is indeed a weird place.

What is it with penguins btw? They're one of those re-occurring Internet themes, like toast, that I find fairly inexplicable. I mean don't get me wrong I think penguins are kind of cute, and I love eating toast, but I don't really devote any off-line time to discussing them (with the exception of some time during my last job where a group of us become obsessed with adopting a penguin). On-line though they seem to take up an un-natural about of discussion time. Strange. At some point someone should study the psychology of why some subjects become so focused upon on the Internet.

And if only to add weight to my bizarre thoughts this is probably as good a time as any to mention that I'm in the process of planning a lazylaces toast 'special'. I've been saving up the exceptional number of toast related links I have collected to release all in one go. Just don't ask me why. I've already said I don't understand.

Entry 728, Sunday, February 15th 2004, Filed In Stuff
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Abandoned Bicycles of New York

There seem to be huge quanities of discarded items on the streets of New York that inspire the web community. I had to raise an eyebrow at the fashion created with discarded umbrellas [via daisy], I wonder though what can be created with all these abondoned bicycles? I'm now looking out for on-line pieces about London street junk being turned in art/fashion/whatever.