Some interesting things that I have found…

The Make magazine (or Makezine) blog page www.makezine.com/blog/ worth looking at as it has lots of crazy and cool things to spend your time attempting…

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories - www.evilmadscientist.com a nice site with more crazy things to spend your time doing…

And finally, for today… I was originally lookingat investing in a Basic Stamp 2 board and development thingy that enabled me to program small robot like things and so on, but as that was extortionally priced, I have now found an alternative, the Arduino. It is a cheaper board $32 as opposed to $119 and for the actual chip, $4 as opposed to $50, so definitely more worthwhile investing in. It is also open source, so it would be much better too, as it also runs natively on Mac (including Intel Mac I am led to believe) but if you’re remotely interested, check it out… todbot.com/blog/2006/09/25/arduino-the-basic-stamp-killer/ for a simple independant overview and here for the main site… www.arduino.cc/

Enjoy!

I found a really great program while perusing Google Earth yesterday. Once I’d upgraded it to a newer version, I was asked if I wanted to be able to create 3d models to plae in the real environment of Google Earth. Being fairly explorative and curious, I clicked yes… Only to discover that it led me a program called Google Sketchup. Obviously one of Googles more quieter and less could I say hostile takeovers… Anyway, it happened to be an immense program that you can create buildings mainly, but really anything that you want. Mac and PC, it is cool with both, but it isn’t yet UB, so us cool Intel Mac dude shall have to wait a bit (in two ways… firstly for the beachball to stop spinning whilst it does stuff and secondly until they actually release a UB version). So go look… www.sketchup.com

Meanwhile my OSX Media Lounge is coming along fairly well, I have almost completed the base of the case only to discove that the steel that I used to consruct it is a bit too flimsy to support all of the components. Guess I’ll have to do somethng else with it… I may get some pictures up soon…

Yes, I am aware that i haven’t poted anyhting for a few weeks, but to be honest that’s probably not because I’m dead but because I’m a bit busy and lazy… Primarily because I have been preparing my UCAS form and CAF form ready to send off for entry to Uni in 2008, after hopefully an eventful and profitable gap year, but we shall see…

Now that I have this out of the way, I may even be able to post a few more things on this old space of mine… I think I may even start now…

You may have or may have not heard of a band called Sister Hazel. Anyway, where I live, which just happens to be Britain, they haven’t been signed or anything so the whole of no-one and the grand total of zero record stores have them or let alone heard of them. So what’s all the fuss about? I hear you thinking “If they’re that good then why aren’t they signed here?” and I suppose that’s a valid point. But honestly I really am not sure why they aren’t signed here. It could possibly be beacuse there isn’t just the market for it, but that’s hardly the case as I for one like them and the majority of the people who I have told about them like what they here. So… for the moment, you’ll just have to pay OTT prices on Amazon.co.uk, or remotely variable prices on eBay for them…

What are they like though? Well… Sister Hazel can be defined the genre of Rock/Alt Rock and maybe even a bit of Country Rock in their older albums. Personally I think they’re similar to the Eagles in many ways, but a lot of their songs sound quite different so you’ll have to make up your own mind. They also sound a bit like Counting Crows and Eagle Eye Cherry, but they are slightly more lively and heavier… I first heard them when watching the film “10 Things I Hate About You”. On a side note, I think it’s great how you can discover music so easily using films, basically, you just watch a film and any music that you like the sound of, you remember some of the lyrics and then search on Google later. 99% of the time you will find it and all will be grand. Getting back to Sister Hazel, they have some really great acoustic parts to their songs, they are all great to sing along to, easy to listen to, and have some great vocals and in parts some very nice guitar solos… Personally I quite like the album Fortress, with the song “Your Winter” which was the song on the film, but other great albums are “Lift” and hopefully their new one being released on 12th October.

So, If you have a chance or a spare minute as I hate to call it, because really, you can’t have a spare minute as you’re always doing something, be it thinking about what to do next, thinking “Why the hell aren’t I doing anything?” or just breathing, just have a listen to Sister Hazel and you should really like it…