Site Of The Week

Strange and creepy, yet brilliant, modernista (http://modernista.com/3/) is a triumph of flash web design, and well worth a look.

Don't forget to bookmark the "On The Net" blog, at http://www.digitalus.co.nz/onthenet/ You can read this article online and follow the links directly to the sites mentioned.

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Audioscrobbler

Audioscrobbler builds a profile of your musical taste using a plugin for your media player (Winamp, iTunes, XMMS etc..). Plugins send the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler server, which updates your musical profile with the new song. Every person with a plugin has their own page on this site which shows their listening statistics. The system automatically matches you to people with a similar music taste, and generates personalised recommendations. Check out http://www.audioscrobbler.com/

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The Dying Art of Bullet Making

Like darning socks, making bullets is a dying art. Used to be just about everyone with a need for ammo poured their own, using iron or even wooden molds. These days only a few diehard hobbyists still do it, and they use aluminum molds. But even fewer people still make silver bullets. Learn how to make your own silver bullets and defend yourself from werewolves, at http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/1487

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Beast Blender

The Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists invites you to create a being that has never existed out of bits of other creatures, and then email the result to your friends. Check it out at http://www.beastblender.com/

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Fevolution - the art of Eric feng

Artist Eric Feng, aka Feric, creates surreal and beautiful art that combines East and West, the natural and the mechanical. Check out his gallery of hybrid creations at http://www.feric.com/

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The Great Beams of Film

They slice us, they disintegrate us, they roast us alive, they level our greatest monuments and pinpoint our deepest fears. But they also transport us, link us, serve us, protect us and illuminate the path to fortune and glory. They are beams, the glowing lances of focused radiation that have lit up our movie screens—and our imaginations—since some unknown caveman accidentally scratched a birchbark negative and became prehistory’s first FX guy. Check out the Vue Weekly website as it salutes the Great Beams of Film! http://www.vueweekly.com/articles/default.aspx?i=2064

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Kyyptos

Kryptos is a sculpture located on the grounds of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Installed in 1990, its thousands of characters contain encrypted messages, of which three have been solved (so far). There is still a fourth section at the bottom consisting of 97 or 98 characters which remains uncracked. The Kryptos site contains some information about the sculpture, including some photos collected from around the web, some rubbings of the sculpture, links to other articles and Kryptos discussion groups here and there, and information about other encrypted sculptures which have been created by the sculptor, James Sanborn.

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Site of the Week

The people at Camp Quality are dedicated to bringing fun, hope and happiness to the lives of children living with cancer, their families and communities, through provision of high quality recreational experiences. Their goal is to provide fun and comradeship combined with achievable challenges to encourage the children to focus on the positive aspects of their lives.
Camp Quality passionately believes in the power of fun to help children and their families overcome the challenges that cancer brings.

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Secure Data Deletion

Need to get rid of files on your computer completely and irretrievably? Eraser is an advanced security tool (for Windows), which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. Works with Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP and DOS. The patterns used for overwriting are based on Peter Gutmann's paper "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" and they are selected to effectively remove magnetic remnants from the hard drive.Other methods include the one defined in the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual of the US Department of Defence and overwriting with pseudorandom data. You can also define your own overwriting methods. Best of all, the software is free!

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Practical Painting

Practical Painting is a site designed to help you brush up on your painting skills. Each month the author adds new content, such as interviews with painters, analysis of a historical master's painting style. and tips and guides on painting techniques.

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Searchable song lyrics

GetThatSong.org is a searchable database of song lyrics. Simply enter artist, title or a fragment of the lyrics into the search field to find the song whose name has been eluding you...

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On The Net Blog

With the huge popularity of blogging and RSS feeds, I've decided to post my articles as a blog as well. What this means is that you can search and explore earlier articles, leave comments and feedback, and follow links without having to type them in (which for some of the longer links I've posted in the past should be quite a relief).
The blog is published at http://www.digitalus.co.nz/onthenet/ and will be online each week by the time you read this. If you have any sort of RSS aggregator or XML feed reader, you can subscribe to the blog using the url http://feeds.feedburner.com/OnTheNet and be notified whenver it's updated

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Site of the Week

President Bush once said, “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” You can check out this and other mutilations of the English language at http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20050612

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Futurama and Simpsons maths

Futurama Executive Producer David X. Cohen and Simpsons creator Matt Groening are both science and maths buffs, and where possible they sneak scientific jokes and references into their shows. David X. Cohen, who has a master's degree in computer science from UC Berkeley, explains: "We wanted to get in as much science as possible where it didn't clog up the gears of the story... Our hope is that, although such material will fly by most people unnoticed, it might make die-hard fans of the people who do appreciate it." Check out http://www.mathsci.appstate.edu/~sjg/futurama/index.html and http://www.simpsonsmath.com/

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100 Best products of 2005

PC World magazine has listed the 100 best computer-related products of 2005, including hardware, peripherals and software. Check out http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,120763,pg,1,00.asp

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Dana Elcar

Actor Dana Elcar, who played MacGyver’s boss Pete Thornton in the TV series MacGyver, died on the 6th of June. He’d been blind since the fourth season of MacGyver, and producers wrote that blindness into the show. If you’re interested in knowing which other celebrities are with us, and which aren’t, check out http://www.deadoraliveinfo.com

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The Downing Street memo

The Downing Street "Memo" is actually a document containing meeting minutes transcribed during the British Prime Minister's meeting on July 23, 2002—a full eight months PRIOR to the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. The Times of London printed the text of this document on Sunday, May 1, 2005, but to date US media coverage has been limited. This site is intended to act as a resource for anyone who wants to understand the facts revealed in this document.
The contents of the memo are shocking. The minutes detail how the British government did not believe Iraq was a greater threat than other nations; how intelligence was "fixed" to sell the case for war to the American public; and how the Bush Administration’s public assurances of "war as a last resort" were at odds with their privately stated intentions.
When asked, British officials "did not dispute the document's authenticity." and a senior American official has described it as "absolutely accurate." Yet the Bush administration continues to simultaneously sidestep the issue while attempting to cast doubt on the memo’s authenticity.

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Site of the Week

A range of fashion clothing for chickens has been launched by a group of designers working in Austria and Japan.

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All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Video Games

Jane Pinckard applies 3D first-person gaming techniques to real life as a guide to survival… for example, “always, always be moving. This is most true in multiplayer. Don't hang around waiting, because even though you have the sniper rifle, they might have the shotgun. You're just asking to be sneaked up on. This is a great technique to apply to the office. Walking around, everyone sees that you are there, but you always look busy, on your way to doing something else. They can't pin you down to ask you to do stuff.”

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Taranaki Regional Xplorer

Taranaki Regional Xplorer is designed to provide public access (especially for ratepayers) to district and regional council information. Urban aerial photography is available for Stratford, Hawera and Normanby and can be viewed to a minimum scale of 1:250 and a maximum scale of 1:4,500. Aerial photography for the remainder of the region can be viewed to a minimum scale of 1:1000 and a maximum scale of 1:45,000.

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Taranaki Festival of the Arts

This is the first time the Taranaki Festival of the Arts has been held during the winter and the organisers are “warming the region up with a programme of shows and activities that will thaw even the coolest of hearts!”
This year’s performances feature a circus, contemporary and classical music, dance and thought-provoking theatre and comedy.
Check out the official website for the calendar of events and booking information

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Mt Taranaki Volcano Cam

The New Zealand GeoNet Project provides real-time monitoring and data collection for rapid response and research into earthquake, volcano, landslide and tsunami hazards. The GeoNet website also has “volcanocam” images on Mt Taranaki. The last twenty four images are shown and the images roll over approximately every hour.

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Site of the Week

How will you die? Take this light-hearted test and find out!

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Wikipedia

I found out today that that the spacecraft Voyager 1 has crossed the termination shock. In astronomy, the termination shock is theorised to be a boundary marking one of the outer limits of the sun's influence. It is where the bubble of solar wind particles slows down to below supersonic speed and heats up due to collisions with the galactic interstellar medium. It is believed to be about 100 Astronomical Units from the Sun. Check out Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, at

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Podcasting

For anyone who loves listening to the wide variety of internet audio programming, but can't always listen to their favorite shows when they're scheduled or take the time to download them manually, help has arrived. Known as podcasting, the technology is a new take on syndicated content feeds like RSS and Atom. Podcasting sends audio content directly to an iPod or other MP3 player. To get audio feeds, users simply connect their MP3 player to their computer, go online, and subscribe to feeds they want the podcasting service to provide. Audio content is then pushed from the original source to an aggregator and then to the subscriber. Popular feed sites include Podcasters.org, Podcast.net, iPodderX and iPodder.org

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11 Steps to a Better Brain

It doesn't matter how brainy you are or how much education you've had - you can still improve and expand your mind. Boosting your mental faculties doesn't have to mean studying hard or becoming a reclusive book worm. There are lots of tricks, techniques and habits, as well as changes to your lifestyle, diet and behaviour that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your brain cells. And here are 11 of them.

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Flickr

Flickr is one of the most popular online photo storage and sharing sites on the net. A free account allows you to upload photos, categorise them and share them. You can add tags or keywords to each photo, so you and others can search for a particular image. You can make photos private or public, and you can upload photos from the website, via email or mobile phone.

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