I really love having my OSX apps launch as enemies from Megaman, complete with the starfield and the bad video game music.

[link] to MegaMan Effect

From the EA official forums:

“Well, what a wonderful few days it has been. Since EA didn’t take the time to respond (or maybe even read) our emails about various stats-server security holes, it clearly showed us how much they care. Therefore, we came to the conclusion that modifying 5 million accounts wouldn’t be that big of a deal.

That being said, accounts with ids from 40,000,000 to 45,000,000 now have all of their weapons unlocked.

I need to remember to look at these photos of Gosford Castle, in Ireland.

[link]

For some reason, I really want this suction-powered bug-sucker “Bugzooka” thing.

[link]

Here’s a neat tip: iTunes can manage PDFs, which is handy if you keep a lot of ebooks and reference manuals saved on your system. You can edit the PDF’s ID3 tag for author and genre info, and set up smart playlists as you would for MP3s.

[link]

It’s always handy to hand out dedicated email addresses to sites that make you register. This way, if you get spam to that address, you’ll know who sold you out.

In other news, Mediafour is a bunch of spammers.

Yesterday I helped Simon remove about a billion nasty spyware maggots from a freshly-installed Win2k machine. He thinks that over the course of time, Microsoft OSes will come to have “allowed” spyware — effectively spyware that is not detected by Microsoft’s built-in, “approved” spyware detector. the question is, how much would Microsoft have to stand to profit before it compromised on protecting its customers? (I’d say somewhere around $2, at least.)

Heather and I donned battle armor and braved the new Ikeastore on Monday morning. The store is like an enormous theme park for trendy-but-thrifty adults, complete with a neato magnetic-locking freight escalator as a ‘ride’. I could’ve blown a lot more money than I did, but I managed to escape with only a TV stand.

[link] to Mark????r TV stand

If you guys haven’t seen Google Earth yet, go get it now. It’s awesome.

Even better, Weathermaps lets you overlay a realtime-updating radar image over any US area. You’ve gotta see it to believe it.

[link] to Google Earth
[link] to Weathermaps

PTCHiker.com has posted instructions for building a really neat soda-can alcohol stove.

[link]