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June 29, 2006

The Incredible Shrinking Artwork

If you've spent any time on the internet you have undoubtedly received spam mails from people professing to have huge sums of money they are willing to share with you if only you can help them get it out of their country. Perhaps a long lost relative of your has died, or perhaps an unscrupulous lawyer is trying to sneak the contents of a large unclaimed bank account out of the country.

These are all scams of course, and they have earned themselves the nickname of '419' after the section of the Nigerian penal code which addresses fraud schemes. They basically try to butter you up into giving out your personal details, bank account numbers or even sending them some form of processing fee to free up this huge amount of cash. Its a big business and thousands of such messages get sent out every day. Sadly, some people are taken in by them and end up losing a great deal of money. There have even been reports of people flying out to Nigeria (where most of these scams seem to originate from) and never being seen again....

There has sprung up a counter-movement to these scammers who respond to their mails in an attempt to waste as much of the scammers time as possible. There are a number of sites dedicated to this practice but the most popular is 419 Eater . They often post up the results of their email exchanges, revealing the lengths that scammers will go to if they think they're about to get sent some money.

One of the best examples of this Scam Baiting has been posted to the site. Ever thought you could get a scammer to carve a wooden Commodore 64 keyboard and post it to the UK...? Neither did I, but click below for details on how it was done.

The Incredible Shrinking Artwork

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June 27, 2006

My fear of mustard and pickles is ruining my life

Possibly the most bizarrely titled Chat Show ever...?

YouTube - Maury Show - Phobias - Pickles

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June 26, 2006

Carboot Bargain

I did a trawl of a local carboot sale Sunday morning and found a fantastic item.

It was a compilation of cult kids TV shows, featuring Danger Mouse, Count Duckula (which is rubbish), Jamie and the Magic Torch and the main reason for buying it... Chorlton And the Wheelies , Complete first series!

All this for a mere 200 pence!

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June 19, 2006

Ghosts Of Mars

Well, thats two hours of my life I'll never get back.

Why did no-one warn me it was so very rubbish...?

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Magic update

For those amoung you who were wondering how my journey into the world of Magic has been going, here is an update.

I'm practising a few sleights of hand at the moment, without knowing any real 'tricks' to go along with them. I'm trying to get the basics learnt properly so I can concentrate on remembering the stories and procedures for the trick, instead of fumbling at the super-secret-snazzy moves at the same time.

I've alos been putting a lot of study into the Mallusionist site as they details the workings of lots of tricks.

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Project Paradroid

Remember Paradroid? A classic Commodore 64 game whereby you had to destroy a shipful of robots by either zapping them or taking them over and controlling them directly. I used to love it!

Now, some clever fellows have remade it to run natively on modern PC's. It uses authentic sound effects from the original and plays pretty well. Thre were a few control niggles when I tried it (delayed keypresses mainly) but it certainly brought back the memories. Better than Paradroid 90 on the Amiga

Click here to take a look for yourself.

Also, if you are interested in the original Paradroid then take a look at this page detailing the process behind the making of the game.

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