Portent

Since it was discovered that dropping mentos mints into a bottle of diet coke releases the co₂ in the diet coke very rapidly, turning it into into a water cannon (really!) there has been an arms race to see who can create the most spectacular display of it.

I suspect that this video may prove to be the best one so far, at least until the next one. With help from Coca Cola and Mentos (No doubt they supplied a lot more than the the 251 bottles of diet coke and the 1500 + Mentos used in the video), to the guys at eepybird who made the video (and starred in it).

The reason for this reaction is nucleation where the surface of a mentos mint is able to help release the super saturated co₂ stored in the diet coke very very quickly.

Don’t swallow diet coke and mentos at the same time- it is dangerous! (There are videos of people doing this I understand!).

For a humourous take on Mentos/Diet Coke experiments and videos here’s something I wrote!

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Ah, old but still fun. Enter a block of text or a website (bit like Babel fish or Google translation), select your dialect and you have a new version.

The dialects include, redneck, Swedish chef, cockney, jive, Elmer Fudd, pig latin and moron so plenty for everyone!

I took the first para of the last Portent story (on Streetwars) and ran it through as redneck. This is what it gave!

“Eff’n yo’ find yo’seff in London an’ witness varmints bein’ soaked by water pistols in a determined but fun way, don’t be alarmed, cuss it all t’ tarnation. It’s probably jest players fum Streetwars doin’ a hit on someone.”

Just think Cleetus from the Simpsons…

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It takes more than being able to select pieces and drag them into place to be a strip cartoonist but I guess that Strip Generator is as near as you are going to get unless you are a PhotoShop whizz. You can play with it without registering but free registration gets you a blog and extra tools.

The main use of the site is creating strip cartoons and the Flash interface is pretty good. You have three frames, but you can remove them or add extra and resize them. There are a large number of icons, humans, beings, shapes, objects and text bubbles to play with. These can be resized, flipped and rotated.

Like most everyone else on the site I am a talentless hack and Dilbert etc have nothing to worry about in the shape of competition but I still fancy creating something! This is an excellent site- very nicely implemented and well worth a look.

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So is this picture two dancers or the body of a headless woman?

This and several other photos show off some signs and logos that you would have thought would have warranted a second look. Mind you the London 2012 Logo is there- and now that I’ve seen it, yes it does look like Lisa Simpson is performing a sexual act!

Some of the hospital signs are equally as dodgy. All I can say is there must be a lot of innocent sign and Logo writers around!

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As an avid 12 year old viewer, the BBC children’s programme Blue Peter showed how to make Water Rockets and I was hooked. Using just a washing up liquid bottle, a piece of wood (as a launch gantry) and a bicycle pump with a football pump, I launched half a dozen rockets over our house.

What I also learnt and what Blue Peter didn’t say is that water wrecks bicycle pumps. My father used to say it didn’t do his roses any good either. The launch platform was located on the corner of the rose patch brickwork. Well you need stability when you’re busy pumping and prepping a rocket for launch.

You can read all about Water Rockets, and even download a shareware calculator- determining just how much water you need to maximise thrust without overfilling the rocket must have killed at least 6 roses.

I’m sure there is a mathematical formula for the optimal amount- but I’m sure it is a differential equation. The thrust depends upon the pressure of the compressed air. Too much water and not enough air and it is pretty feeble thrust. But too much air and not even water and the reaction mass is insufficient to send it very far!

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It’s less than a month since I was on a couple of roller coasters at Blackpool pleasure beach and a fortnight since the same on Clacton-on-sea so this is kind of topical. You’ll need Java installed. It takes a few seconds to load and the programmer obviously enjoys writing ‘Please wait’ type messages!

This isn’t meant to be Roller Coaster Tycoon but it is a fun diversion, and it has a serious side and lets you change speed, mass, the size of the hills, even gravity and friction! If there are 4 people in a car then I think I reached serial murderer status with 24 dead. Just be glad I’m not a real life designer!

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The link on the picture takes you to the UK Talk Like a Pirate Day website, while the bottom link goes to the US one. Maybe we’ll see other national sites some time e.g. “Parlez comme un Corsair?”

This annual event exhorts people to talk in the present tense, drop the gs off the end of words “endin” in ing and double up vowels- is ee gettin’ that?

Both sites are interesting though the UK one looks better. Yaar!

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As you can see, although it looks ok, my first go wasn’t a total success. There are 5 questions, each with three choices so that means a possible 3^5 = 729 different versions. On my second go I got hands up but I’m not saying how until I’ve sold it for a lot of money.

This isn’t too serious- more for bright kids but it is interesting and lovely illustrated. If you really want to design a roller coaster , I suggest you get one of the “Roller Coaster Tycoon” game series. There you can design it to be ultra elaborate of different designs and as extreme or not as you like.

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There’s a technique called dynamic soaring that birds particularly Albatrosses use to harvest energy from places where winds are changing such as in wave troughs.

Gliders use the same technique and radio controlled gliders in this video, to get up to a speed according to the radar gun of 399 MPH. Call me a little skeptical but are model gliders structurally able to go that fast without over stressing the wings? Certainly one or two of the comments suggest the same. Anyway you make your mind up!

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The links go to a youtube video of the fan in action. Unless it was a fridge I doubt you’d find anything er cooler! There are 42 LEDs and through careful timing, you can program all sorts of animated graphical effects. I suspect that you need to be half decent at programming it- it comes with 5MB of storage and you need a serial port. Also, it costs $389 from here.

If that is beyond your budget they also sell a cheaper ($5.00) hand held fan that can have up to 6 messages.
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Don’t recognise the face? That’ Bill Heine, the man who put Headington on the map with his shark through the roof.

MagMyPic is an excellently implemented generator of magazine covers. Just upload a photo, select a magazine- there’s 14 to pick from Vogue, Time, National Geographic and many more and the results are plain to see.

The man pictured is responsible for increased reporting of sharks (not the legal ones!) in the Oxford area. See the previous story!

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If you like misquotes, or the innumerable rules of English that are broken by English, or silly quotes, and some of the absurdities such as “quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square, and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. “.

Add to this Shakespearisms- common phrases that are now in English- e.g. “to the manner born“, funny translations and more and you can see why I like this rather plain looking but lots to read site.

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Crazy Golf isn’t quite the right name but the game is pretty much that. See the white ball in the top level. Moving the cursor behind it, gives it a push forward. The white rings and squares deflect it, while the dark blue circles swallow it.

You just have to get it to the target- a rotating disk with the word next in it. Sounds easy but .. well see for yourself!

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Films these days cost a lot to make so they have marketing budgets to match, and of course a website. The website often includes a gimmick- a game, etc and because there is a decent marketing budget the quality is usually pretty good and its done in flash of course.

Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy aims to be the next Harry Potter and the first film- the Golden Compass comes out in December. I’ve read the books and they are different- possibly more in the CS Lewis “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe” mould but that is a big generalisation of course! The website includes a 20 question personality test to tell you what your daemon is. Mine is Marchestra, a female gibbon.

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Visit any computer shop and the console games you’ll see on sale are just for the PSP and Nintendo consoles. Yet there is a stylish and powerful games console costing just £125.00 that runs Linux out of the box and has loads of free software available. You don’t need to hack it to run your own software like you do with the Sony PSP. Most manufacturers lose money on the hardware and make it with software so they don’t want you messing with it.

GP2X is at heart a games machine. It has two 200mhz CPU’s with 64meg of RAM, custom graphics hardware and decoding chips and takes SD cards.The display is 320 x 240 pixels which is slightly better than my old Commodore 64. By comparison the more expoensive PSP has a resolution of 480 x 272, and the Nintendo DS display is 256 x192. Films though can be viewed at resolutions up to 720 x 480 through the built in custom hardware and if you plug the GP2X into a TV or monitor you get a whopping 1048 x 720 display.

I’ve been burnt by buying a game console before. Remember the ill fated Gizmondo which had $100 million spent on promoting it and had very little software available. Well the GP2X has outsold it without any budget for promotion. The firm behind GP2X have already sold an earlier console the GP32 and have been around for at least five years.

The biggest difference is the sheer volume of free software available now for the GP2X and their open attitude to development. GP2X have taken the Nokia path, giving away software development kits to encouraging game development rather than the Nintendo/Sony/Gizmondo way where only ‘approved’ devleopment companies can produce games for it. Even if you don’t want to learn game programming, as a games console there are so many games available now- for instance over 1,100 alone with MAME, SNES games with a SNES emulator and ports of Doom, Quake 1 and 2, Duke3d, Neogeo, Hexen and many more.

The link takes you to a detailed review of the software available and you can see many of the games listed in a 11Mb WMV video download.

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