Rubénerd!

This. Is the single greatest video. I've ever seen.

I'd react the same if I were given a mint Commodore 64 box! I got my 64 (and 16, and Plus 4) second hand on eBay when I was 18, and have loved them. Born too late for the home computer revolution, too early to have the internet in primary school. Never used datasettes, but had 5.25" floppies. Feeling sorry for me yet?

Found by @elkeee on The Clearly Dope. C=

Via this article on the American ZDNet. A shame, because I really was desperate to see why I'd be using Chrome OS in three years.

An exerpt from the Multiple sub-Nyquist sampling encoding article, under Cultural and geopolitical impacts:

One could say that without Hi-Vision, there would be no modern digital HDTV. There is some latent truth in this, but you must look back in time 20 years when Japan was the world's "consumer electronics research heaven".

I am a passionate Wikipedia article creator, contributor, template code writer and defender, but... I guess we can all afford a little downtime ;D

They'd have my vote, particularly for lumberjack fashion.

I'm waiting for confirmation before believing it given The Herald Sun and The Australian are reporting it, but apparently insulting the Victorian Gaming Minister Michael O'Brien will now land you a fine of roughly $12,000. I'm safe given I'm in New South Wales, right?

Interestingly enough, if you do a Google search for $12000 fine O'Brien, you get to this Wikipedia article that states that: "during his imprisonment at Crow Hill, O'Brien's mother died and left him $12,000." I'm not sure if this is related.

An incident on Twitter this afternoon has given me food for thought. Barbera Streisand.

(Adorable blue troll photo by Jacopo Prisco on Wikimedia Commons).

Saga is a Proton car

For those of you who didn't see the saga unfold, a couple of days ago I tweeted a fairly innocuous question on Twitter about how safe it was for freight and passenger trains to be sharing the same lines in Sydney, after a derailment of a freight train caused large delays on the Eastern Suburbs & Illawarra Line, which I blogged about.

I'm used to getting nasty messages online, for some people they just seem to get off on it, and the cloak of anonymity gives them the confidence to do so. None of this is new, and I've stopped taking them personally a long time ago, as I'm sure you have too. So when [redacted] rudely tweeted me about how I hadn't been using my head [link redacted], I quoted his tweet in a blog post and made a joke about how I'd been thinking with my elbow!

Low and behold, a few hours later [redacted] tweeted me with this:

@Rubenerd_Blog - Remove the links to my account now, I do not authorise any of that being on your site. This is your first/final warning.

Adjusts his suspenders

Now I'm no big city lawyer! Aside from several flirtations with macroeconomics in high school and university, I have no legal training and am unsure as to whether a link to a public resource is owned by that person. I'd hazard a guess and say it's not. Still, I took the high road and granted his request by removing all links to his rude message.

I have some theories. He either:

1. likes trolling people in public, but not when his trolling is used against him.

2. wasn't aware his tweets were public.

3. doesn't understand how Twitter works and/or the architecture of the Internet.

4. didn't want his name attached to such a bad joke about an elbow. I'm leaning towards this.

In any case, [redacted] and other trolls simply need to learn to only troll people if they have the balls to be called out for it, and to realise that any attempt to hide their trolling only results in the Streisand Effect. Mmm, Duck Sauce. As @omegatron pointed out... and I'm sure he's okay with me quoting him!

[redacted] should think about privating his account if he's going to get precious about what he's said in a public sphere.

As for me, I've learned simply not to feed them. They're just not good sports.

Big thanks to @djackmanson in Brisbane and @omegatron in Adelaide for their support :).

Some pictures are just so epic they deserve a mention, despite the fact they have nothing to do with the content of the blog upon which they're being published. In this case, the photo is of a Sydney suburban Tangara train, and the blog in question is the one you're reading right now. See what I did there?

G30-G28 bursts through the 'wall' as the first official train on the new 'Y-Link' between Harris Park and Merrylands [in Sydney]. 2/11/96.

There are so many puns I could break out with this, but I can't bust out any good ones. You'd think I'd be able to make light work of the walls surrounding this picture, but I'd probably crumble at any attempt. No breakthroughs here, I'm afraid. Herp derp. Hey look, a train!

My Saturday is made... Slashdot is quoting today one of my favourite poets and purveyors of delightful nonsense! My favourite of his is still "The Lord in His wisdom made the fly, and then he forgot to tell us why."

This is why I still avidly read Slashdot :)

"A wind-powered car has been clocked in the US traveling downwind 2.85 times faster than the 13.5 mph wind. The definitive research by Rick Cavallaro of FasterThanTheWind.org is being funded by Google and Joby Energy.

And thoughtsatthemoment's response:

Let me know when you have a solar powered car traveling faster than light.