So you’ve bought a Sony Aibo, but don’t have time to walk it? Fear not, Sony have built an anthropomorphic robot to walk it for you - enter QRIO. You have to check out the video collection to reach hype super-saturation nirvana.

Prices aren’t yet available, but you can be sure this thing will cost as much as a small car.

(MESSAGE FROM TRANSLATION COMPUTER: INCOMING MESSAGE EXTREMELY UNORTHODOX IN COMPOSITION.
TRANSLATION INCLUDES MANY LINGUAL BEST-FITS. FOR CLARITY, BEST-FITS ARE DENOTED BY ASTERISK PAIRS.
OVERALL ACCURACY OF TRANSLATION: UNKNOWN.
(MESSAGE BEGINS…)

YOU: “Who are you? What can you tell us about yourselves?”
ORZ: Who are you? You are not Orz! We are Orz! Orz are happy *people energy* from the outside.
Inside is good. So much good that Orz will always *germinate*.
Can you come together with Orz for *parties*?

YOU: “Okay, right. Uh… maybe you could tell me why you are here.”
ORZ: Here is *bright* and *smooth*. The other place is *hurt* Orz too much tired for keeping together.
Other place is **Frumple**. Orz are here now, but almost not yet.
Soon Orz are really here! You are help Orz with *parties*.
Orz looking for you, and find you. So much joy!!
Now *smooth* place all the time, and after now never going back to outside.
Never!!

If you don’t recognize the dialog then you’re missing out - it’s from Star Control II - a space adventure game published for PC and 3DO in about 1992. Original developers Toys for Bob released the source under the GPL in 2002 and it is now available for free on Mac OS X, Linux and recent versions of Windows. So, if you have a computer and any degree of video gaming dorkery, I urge you to download The Ur-Quan Masters today!

It is, without any doubt, one of my all time favourite games. It has frantic two player melee combat, good music, stupid jokes, a great single player story and dozens of bizarre and interesting alien races to search for and fight against - I’ve played through the story mode twice and spent most of my sixth form lunch hours fighting hyper melee battles against Dave B and Hugh.

The reason I’m babbling about it today is because, nearly ten years later, Dave B is noodling around with a version of the melee combat segment for the Game Boy Advance - sc2gba. It’s very early days yet for his project, but he already has something recognizable working. This could be the excuse I’ve been looking at to buy a flashable GBA cartridge… Go Dave!!!

The knowledge that I’m going out tonight let me aim for a new level of sloth over the weekend. In preparation for the start of the new Sopranos series Sarah and I watched 12 hour long episodes from the last season. This time round I’m Tivo equipped, so I shouldn’t need to grumpily buy the dvd set after missing an episode. My brain is now brim full of gangster quips and practical methods of corpse disposal - must try and forget those fast before I try and use them to solve problems at work.

Also watched The Twilight Samurai on Friday night, which is a fantastic film I’d strongly recommend to any cliques of Aikido lovers reading this.

Obsessive compulsive visitors to this site may notice some minor decorating has gone on, changing fonts and colours away from the WordPress defaults. This is down to a proliferation of fresh and unspoilt WordPress installations around my corner of the internet, namely Phil, Guy and Chris. Since I’m a beautiful unique snowflake and they’re not, they can gang together and drive me bonkers by stealing my style sheet.

Another selection from the series “Blurry pictures taken at End Of The New gigs”

#8: It’s better in the Bahamas!

#9: Diiiiiiane!

DJ Fenn of the 0898z:

Now picture a large man on a huge black and chrome cruiser, dressed in jeans, a slightly squirrel torn t-shirt, and only one leather glove roaring at maybe 70mph and rapidly accelerating down a quiet residential street…on one wheel and with a demonic squirrel on his back. The man and the squirrel are both screaming bloody murder.

Biker VS Squirrel

Yeah, so nobody is impressed that I wrote a tiny Linux program and posted it on Freshmeat. I’m not that impressed either, though getting into the habit of publishing things without worrying about it seems like a good plan.

My real claim to fame is that I’ve been featured in ….. wait for it…….. a Canon advertising overlay on some mtv.com sites. I was asked a month or two ago by Justin S (supreme banner monkey @ incline) to rock out in front of a green screen for a few minutes with my bass guitar - since it meant ten minutes break from sitting in front of a computer I agreed. The video was duly traced in flash and filled with virtual fire before popping up to annoy a few million people surfing on music web sites.

Since the flash overlays don’t work on Mac or Linux I haven’t seen my overlay of fame in the wild, but I have been given this custom flash movie using the same graphics. Without further ado I bring you: Flaming Pete Rocks Out!

Did my first release (version 0.1) of Asparagino’s Comic Viewer yesterday evening, though this won’t be of any interest to you unless you want to view a zipped up comic book scan, or .cbz file, on Linux. It’s a few hundred lines of java I cooked some months ago to view the contents of some cbz files I found, but it works well enough to share with anyone else who wants to do the same thing.

I had 20 seconds of glory on freshmeat.net while I was sleeping this morning.

A few short announcements to make, to anybody out there listening.

I’ve added Sarah’s Dubrovnik pictures to my photo album.

The mighty Guy Lawrance has installed WordPress and has been added to the links bar. Hopefully he’ll start posting interesting things real soon now - register your interest by adding comments to his “Hello Interweb!” post.

Free plug: End of the New are playing in Picadilly on Friday, followed by a dj set by “eotn and the 0898z”.

If you don’t know the 0898z, don’t worry - so few people have heard them that it’s hard to work out if they’re an in-joke or a band. There used to be a few entertaining 0898z web pages out there, but it looks like Tim (of EOTN) has unplugged the www.fredric.co.uk server. I can only speculate, but it seems likely this is either to save funds for another Hagstrom guitar or to hide the dark and sordid history of his band members from prying eyes. At the time of writing, an 0898z discography still persists in the google cache.

Update: Apparently the www.fredric.co.uk outage was temporary. My speculations were, as usual, idle and unfounded in truth.

Peasant’s Quest, from www.homestarrunner.com.

Take the role of a peasant getting revenge on Trogdor the Burninator in a retro text adventure.

KAPER Article - $10 KAP - by Gary Vigue - Kite Aerial Photography Electronic Resources-

Nice. Now to find a really cheap old digital camera on ebay….