Xander’s Ponderings

"Bill Waterson, creator of the timeless comic classic Calvin & Hobbes, looks back on the strip with no regrets in his first interview in 20 years. Short, but definitely worth reading."

Short indeed, but I'll take what I can get. Calvin and Hobbes is to this day still my favourite comic strip, syndicated or otherwise.

One of the most brilliant and well-executed jam session videos I've seen- layered separately but it all came together so well. Piano, Bass, Guitar, Beats, mixing and three vocalists. Watch it.

Been meaning to post this for a while, it just got lost in a sea of Firefox tabs. If you're into drum and bass, jungle, or just interested in music history, (I fall under this latter category) then it's worth spending the fascinating twenty or so minutes the video narrator uses to explain the history of the 'Amen Break'.

A pretty interesting look into the filming and creation of Avatar, with some amazing new tech- hardware and software. If you've seen the film, take twenty minutes and check it out.

Lovely new advert from Lego showing the inspiration that Lego can give- I nostalgia-ed to when I had a huge box of the stuff. We gave it away during my teenage years, and of course it's only now that I have the urge to build something again. Guess I have to make do with the Lego Digital Designer.

By the awesome Dan Bull of the Dear Lily fame.

This is how you take firework photos... I got some pretty neat shots of the London Eye from where I was standing on the bridge down river, but they don't match up in any way to this one!

Click through to the Big Picture site for a load more shots from the New Years' celebrations, I especially loved the shot from Uruguay- throwing water from windows is an awesome tradition!

This is truly awesome. Someone's taken the time to make a fully functional Space Invaders clone for Windows in the style of the Season 3 episode of Futurama, where Fry asks the "What-If" machine what life would be like if it was more like a video game. It's probably breaking three or four copyrights in the process (including the Rush soundtrack) but the gameplay is brilliant. Grab it while you can.

If you haven't heard of RAC before, (and I don't mean the Breakdown Cover Company...) they're a small group of remix artists who frequently give out free tracks from various musical genres. The other day they put out a mini volume, including a U2 remix, for free, which is definitely worth downloading.

This is cool- the NRK, aka the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation have put out a 22gb torrent of an over seven hour recording from the front of the train running between Bergen on the Norwegian west coast, to the mountains to the capital of Oslo. It's the raw video that they used for a documentary about the journey, using a camera filming out of the front window, and has been put out with a Creative Commons license. Remix time...