Holy crap, how cool does this thing look. Correct: very.

It’s from Asus, makers of excellent motherboards and that EEE pc thing, as this guy explains.

This is pretty much the highlight of the whole thing

Guaranteed to cause pile-ups as people rubberneck to watch him drive by or your money back!

Have started showing on TV and I haven’t even finished reading the original yet.

FUUUUUCK!

(I haven’t watched the above, because I’m a nerd)

So the Space Year 2008 is finally almost dead and buried, and with just under 24 hours of its measly life left to live before its corpse starts to rot and stink up the place, now’s a pretty good time for a bit of a backwards glance, a look back over the past 12 months to remind ourselves of what went on, because that’s a swell thing to do, apparently.

So here we go.

Blah blah Barack Obama blah blah credit crunch yadda yadda Russell Brand blah de blah petrol prices rabble rabble rabble Georgia blah Russia blah de blah de blah OJ Simpson rabble rabble knife crime yadda yadda Olympics blah blah I’M A JOURNALIST blah yadda de blah yadda-blah Boris Johnson blah blah Anonymous rabble Scientology blah de blah Woolworths rabble rabble Max Mosely blah yadda blah rabble writers strike blah blah bumph.

How did we even cram it all in?! Of course, the most important thing amidst all this is that the year we’re bidding a not-so-fond farewell to was great for an altogether different reason: rhyme-me-do!

If over the course of the last 12 months you happened to arrive somewhere a little after you should’ve, you could’ve said “Sorry I’m a bit two-thousand-and-late!” and received rapturous applause and an instant pardon. Taking up aerobics as a new years resolution? “I’m going to get in shape in two-thousand-and-gyrate!”. Emphatically beat people at a videogame? “Welcome to two-thousand-and-devestate, bitches!”. Discussing Richard Nixon’s scandellous administration? “two-thousand-and-watergate”. I comically enjoyed terming the whole year two-thousand-and-delegate, due to the build up of Team Super Excellent at the workplace. All these and many, many more verb-ending-in-something-that-rhymes-with-8-based puns were made available, with pretty much zero effort, and maximum impact. Certainly a reason to two-thousand-and-celebrate.

But what do we do now? Is 2009 going to be similarly rhyme-pun-infused? I doubt it!

If you’re looking to take up wine drinking as a serious activity, you’re in luck, and I guess you could always say “Gee the weather is rather two-thousand-and-fine today!” if you so desired, although it’s pretty shit, and if there’s any justice in the world, would result in a swift decking. I can’t even think of any others (quite possibly because if I could, this entire post would have no point).

Lament, people, for we have lost a good one. RIP in peace two-thousand-and-great.

Something odd about this image...

Notice anything odd about that image? Apart from that it’s of a weird blue thing with some hard to make out writing underneath it, I mean.

No, idiot! It’s not actually an image! It’s full of stars (text)!

This cool little tool will search google for whatever term you give it, find the first image result, and render it out of coloured text. But not just any coloured text… it uses the search term you gave it!

Pretty clever!

Just Do It Nike

Now to figure out a term that’ll return goatse.

So, due to Bulldog/Pipex/Tiscali being utterly useless, I have been cut off and have had no real internets since the 16th. New phone line won’t be connected ’til Jan 2nd (costing £122.33 too ) and internets about a week later, at best, so until then I’m on a crappy Vodafone 3G mobile USB card thingy. Which means pings too low to game, port blocking so no p2p, image compression on web browsing making everything look nails, and random disconnections. Woohoo!

Anyway as a result of this, I’ve been doing things unrelated to internets. For example, this morning I arranged a new contents insurance policy! For a second example, just now I cleaned and polished my leather sofa, for the first time in the two years I’ve owned it! Apparently you’re supposed to do it every three months, but screw that, it’s too busy being sat on.

For my next trick, I might even go to the shops!!!

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

Cor blimey, what’s going on here? This looks suspiciously like a Sven-style gadget review! Have I managed to put as much effort into assessing things as my venerable homeslice usually does? We’ll soon find out!

OK so this thing’s billed as an indoor helicopter, with its most eye-catching feature being a 3-channel control scheme, which for the uninitiated means control of 3 separate vectors of motion – up/down, left/right and forward/backward. This should provide a much greater degree of control over the heli’s direction than those tiny polystyrene-bodied jobbies that were all the rage a while ago managed, as those typically only had 2 channel rigs and were very limited. The only way we ever got those things moving was to weigh down the front to give a constant forward motion, then just use the up/down and left/right controls, which worked ok, but not fantastically.

It’s a lot larger than those tiny polystyrene ones, and on first opening it (a present from my bro, thanks punk!) I thought it’d probably be too big for indoor use, remembering how woefully unstable those old ones were. After giving it a quick charge (30 mins for 10 mins flight time, according to the internets) though, I found that as long as you’re careful, it’s perfectly fine indoors! Whodathunkit? You’d think the extra size and weight would make it more stable too, and less prone to random wafting about.

It does, however, still waft about a bit, and once it’s decided to drift in a certain direction correcting it can be tricky. There’s a trim control on the remote, which helps stabilise things, but due to the tailrotor arrangement any attempts at forward/backward motion will almost always result in some spinning too… although maybe with more practice you can compensate for it.

Anyway now I’ve been all analytical about it I can say this bit: flying it around is great fun, I highly recommend it. I took a bunch of photos of the thing just now, some of which were successful (see above), some of which… (see below (and here))

OMG A GHOST HELIMOCOPTER

Thetans, in my hard drive? It's more likely than you think

This is pretty interesting. Two former high-level employees at Diskeeper have claimed they were fired for not wanting to participate in forced Scientology training. Diskeeper’s CEO is known to be a Scientologist and they say that he forced Scientology training procedures on all employees.

Pretty fucking crazy! Boycott Diskeeper, much?

Discovered via /., where there’s a whole load of discussion covering interesting points which there’s little point me recycling.

As seen at Hypebeast