IcedRaktajino

You give it a weigh, give it a weigh, give it a weigh now.

The DVD screensaver was perfect: unobtrusive and did what it was supposed to do: prevent your CRT screen from burning-in an image. On top of that, it gave you something to look forward to when it would perfectly hit a corner (which some people thought was a myth; sadly the GIF version does not).

Now, any screen in your home is fair game for intrusive ads. Why make something simple, elegant, functional, and unobtrusive when that otherwise idle (or even in-use!) screen can be crammed with ads.

In case you thought I was joking...

mplayer handles filesystem wildcards beautifully. This is playing anything by STP in any subfolder of my main "Music" directory. I use wildcards between words because it's lazier than escaping the spaces.

Raktajino@laptop:~$ ssh rak@media-pc

rak@media-pc:~$ mplayer -shuffle /media/Music/*/Stone*Temple*Pilots*
MPlayer 1.5+svn38446-1build5 (Debian)
Playing Acoustics/Stone Temple Pilots - Plush (Acoustic).mp3.
Clip info:
 Title: Plush
 Artist: Stone Temple Pilots
 Album: Simply Acoustic
 Track: 10
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [mpg123] MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 layers I, II, III
AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 128.0 kbit/9.07% (ratio: 16000->176400)
Selected audio codec: [mpg123] afm: mpg123 (MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 layers I, II, III)
==========================================================================
AO: [alsa] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
Starting playback...
A: 233.8 (03:53.7) of 234.0 (03:54.0)  4.5% 

Playing Rock/Stone Temple Pilots - Dead and Bloated.mp3.
Clip info:
 Title: Dead & Bloated
 Artist: Stone Temple Pilots
 Album: The Best Of Stone Temple Pilot
 Track: 7
 Genre: Grunge
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [mpg123] MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 layers I, II, III
AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 128.0 kbit/9.07% (ratio: 16000->176400)
Selected audio codec: [mpg123] afm: mpg123 (MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 layers I, II, III)
==========================================================================
AO: [alsa] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
Starting playback...
A:   9.1 (09.1) of 310.0 (05:10.0)  4.5% 

Once controversial and now greatly influential, 'Battle Royale' is now in theaters to celebrate its 25th anniversary.

Before there was The Hunger Games and the popular video game genre, the term “battle royale” applied to the popular 2000 film. Director Kinji Fukusaku’s dystopian thriller casts a wide shadow over media these days, and in honor of its 25th birthday in December, it’s coming back to the big screen again.

Based on Koushun Takami’s 1999 novel of the same name, Battle Royale centers on a group of Japanese high school students living under a totalitarian government that’s enacted a yearly game where students fight each other to the death over three days, and anyone who refuses gets their head blown off. At the time, it was controversial enough to get banned or excluded from distribution in some countries, and couldn’t be sold to American distributors for over a decade out of concern for lawsuits. (It eventually did in 2010, albeit as direct-to-video.)

This year is a boom time for comets. Not only did we have the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS gracing our skies (and Mars’) earlier this year, but now we have another brand new comet to look out for.

Expected to be at its brightest on October 21, this month you might have the chance to spot the comet Lemmon (C/2025 A6) blazing across the night sky—no telescope or binoculars required.

This has lived rent-free in my head since this episode originally aired back in the stone ages.

Congratulations, the bank gave you a credit card. That doesn't make you better than me. But, you see, nobody gives me credit because I'm a bad risk and I don't pay my bills on time. SO I HAVE TO WORK FOR WHAT I HAVE!

Psilocybin is so nice, mushrooms evolved it twice.

Scientists found that the magic behind so-called “magic mushrooms”—psilocybin, a psychedelic compound—has evolved at least twice in mushrooms, and in very different ways.

Researchers in Germany and Austria examined two different types of magic mushrooms. They showed that while both kinds make psilocybin, the biochemistry each relied on to produce the natural compound were entirely distinct. The findings suggest psilocybin may be an example of convergent evolution, in which two, unrelated forms of life nevertheless evolve to develop similar traits or features.

“Mushrooms have learned twice independently how to make the iconic magic mushroom natural product psilocybin,” the authors wrote in the paper, published last month in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.