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!
Popularity: 19% [?]
This is a Flash demo of a C++ Physics engine. Yes it sounds like something only a programmers mother would recommend but some of the demos are fun such as the falling rag dolls pictured.
A physics engine is a piece of code that lets software model real world physics. A human can be thought of as a series of lines joined together (that describes the limits of my artistic ability!). But the angles that those lines make is constrained in the real world by bones, ligaments etc. Bending your arms back until they snap off is not a good idea!
In software a physics engine does that and lots more- objects roll or slide down slopes according to the pull of gravity and friction. This site shows a clever bit of conversion work off a C++ (programming language) physics engine into Flash. Very impressive.
Popularity: 17% [?]
This is just a reminder that NaNoWriMo is back on again, growing year on year. I covered this last year in Portent so there’s not much to say except to mention the other stuff that is done by NaNoWriMo such as the encouragement of Young Writers- take a look at their programs.
Others have picked up their idea as well, well sort of- it’s much easier to read a novel in 30 days than write it- DefectiveYeti (Remember the Cliche rotation project) have done this with NaNoReMo 2007- where they’re reading Catch-22.
Popularity: 8% [?]
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.
Popularity: 13% [?]
This is a word guessing game. You enter the word in the box on the left and if you get one of the words, it appears on the map.
Some words are on the edge of the screen and open up into other maps. The white square in the centre of the pink rectangle in the top left represents this map. There are lots of others so i guess it will take quite a while to guess them all. You can share your game with someone else as well for a collaborative effort. It’s simple, but well done but might take a few weeks to solve.
Popularity: 8% [?]
I like this. What happens if you enter a phrase in English then have it translated into foreign languages then back to English. That what this site does, using the Babelfish translation service.
For instance the phrase “This website is called Portent and it’s about interesting, new and fun stuff on the web.” when run through this ends up with “This site of the Web is called the false prognoses and is extreme messages and of the safeguard the end to interest in the Web the substance.” which sounds about right! or what about
“Humpty Dumpty, of that one in a wall, Humpty Dumpty one was company/signature, had a great case, all the horses of the king and all the men of the king, could thus immovable not he Humpty in in course.“. You can probably figure out the original!
Popularity: 7% [?]
Sometimes you need Post-It notes. And if you want to have a little fun, you can easily create them online using this generator.
Then you could be really sad by printing it out on a colour printer, cutting it out and super-gluing it to someone’s computer! Prank #1928 from “the Boys Book of really nasty pranks”. Just imagine the look on their face when they try to remove it! Won’t you be popular!!
Popularity: 16% [?]
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 eg “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- ie ee gettin’ that?
Both sites are interesting though the UK one looks better. Yaar!
Popularity: 14% [?]
This is almost certainly one that should be filed under the “Don’t try this at home” category. Mankind’s ingenuity has developed many different types of weapons of which one of the most nasty is a flame thrower. They have their uses- clearing bunkers and caves in wartime. Of course one of the things you don’t realise is that man carried flame throwers made the wearer a bit vulnerable- one stray bullet and you become a human torch as the fuel was carried under pressure and …
So it’s a bit of a risky thing to try - I could easily see anyone doing this ending up in the Darwin Awards one year so try it at your own risk… But it’s still fun to look at someone else doing it!
Popularity: 27% [?]
One weekend each year in September, London throws open its houses to anyone who wants to visit them. Not all houses, but designated buildings and houses. Lets face it London is full of them, but here you can go in places that are often never open to the public. But just for one weekend until next year.
They have a google maps and a half decent search, you can even see which are more children friendly (and visit the rest!). About the only annoying thing is the intro splash screen which is so 20th century and should be dropped immediately. I’ve linked directly to the search, not the intro page because of that.
Popularity: 8% [?]
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.
Link
Popularity: 10% [?]
This is well done. A visual generator for characters in the style of the Simpsons, complete with an appropriate backdrop and a message that you add.
Popularity: 7% [?]
The latest version of Google Earth, the free downloadable software for Windows and Macs has a secret flight simulator built into it. Activated by hitting ctrl+alt+A you can fly in one of two aircraft over the surface of the earth.
There are instructions here on the key combinations. It’s not a combat sim, all you can do is fly but it makes nice use of the Google earth scenery and you can add all the layers- you have to view the sidebar then enable things.
Note, even with a fast net connection, if you want to see everything (I had roads and 3d buildings turned on) you have to hit the space bar now and then to pause it so it can play catch up and I have a 20 MB ADSL connection!
I spent a while flying over my part of London (East) and the screen shot above shows me approaching Canary Wharf from the south. Very nice. One or two minor bugs (this is beta) like closing the sidebar if you try to change location. But as a free toy this is superb and you get more accurate scenery than any other flight simulator out there!
Popularity: 6% [?]
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.
Popularity: 7% [?]
This site consists of several thousand techy quotes, mainly i guess taken from Internet Relay chat so they’re shown as dialogues. As examples of idiocy and meanness but often very funny (and sometimes bad language) . For example, this is typical of programmers.
<k2xl> in 1998, i made a C++ program to calculate pi to a billion digits.
<k2xl> i coded it on my laptop (pentium 2 i think) and then ran the program.
<k2xl> the next day i got a new laptop but decided to keep the program running.
<k2xl> it’s been over seven years now since i ran it. and this morning it finished calculating.
<k2xl> the output:
<k2xl> “THE VALUE OF PI TO THE BILLIONTH DIGIT IS = ”
<k2xl> mindblowing eh?
<k2xl> i looked in the code of my program, and i found out that i forgot to output the value :(.
Comment: true story, i fixed the code and am running it again
Popularity: 10% [?]