commafruit.co.uk. welcome.

Standards schmandards

Licorne is a set of four photos taken on August 24th 1970, depicting French nuclear bomb testing. I didn’t realise they look so much like mushrooms, or that they lift off like that. [via] (Now defunct.)

Simple questions get simple answers: Is it Christmas? I love the way they’ve got an RSS feed for it.

When I was working in an office last year, one of the ‘net memes that stuck around was Lolcats. These are odd pictures of cats (usually highly saccharine), with bizarre captions added, and I found that although they can be quite funny, once you’ve seen a couple (of dozen) you’ve seen ‘em all. This one came to my attention recently though, reminded me of laughing at them last year.
BTW, look at the comments on that page - all written in the same style as the captions.

One day, when I’m super-rich, I’m going to have my house set up with Kaleidescape gear.

Boomshine, a cute little flash game. Found it quite difficult toward the end.

I don’t want to post every optical illusion I find online, but this one is very cool: is the animated dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise? Which way you see it apparently determines whether your brain is dominated by the left side or the right side. At first I saw it spinning clockwise, but didn’t have much difficulty in making it go the other way.

Incredible photoblog entitled Stuck In Customs, showcasing some stunning travel photography. Notably, requires widescreen (or some higher res), as title logo is: 1,230px × 185px.

The Onion: not funny because it’s true. See also for reference.

Using a tilt-shift lens is a way of taking pictures of miniature scenes (like a model railway for instance). In this group we fake this by taking photos of real-life scenes, then adjusting the photo in Photoshop (or whatever) and de-focus parts of the scene to make it look like a miniature.

These images are so cool!

I’ve had this page in my del.icio.us for some time, but some trouble building a header which changes width depending on the user resolution for a new website reminded me of it. Internet ‘96 takes a wry look at (now major) websites from 1996. My favourite, from the New York Times:

Web design in 1996 is very easy–you just format a page however you want and say, “Please open your window to the width of this line of text.” No, don’t worry what type of monitor your visitors have. They won’t be seeing any awkward white space so long as they manually line up their windows to a specified line of text like the little jackasses they are. If they’re so intent on preening around with their own specialty window size they can go make their own goddamned website.

Great example of a niche blog: one dedicated to recording sightings of lowercase Ls, when all other letters are written in caps. Now that I think about it, why do people do that?

Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong is releasing a solo album free to download via the Epitaph website, one song at a time. The album is called A Poet’s Life.

Just found this brilliant webcomic for geeks, xkcd. A few strips to start you off: 1, 2, 3.

The next time you find yourself on a plane, sitting next to someone who cannot resist chattering to you endlessly, I urge you to quietly pull your laptop out of your bag, carefully open the screen (ensuring the irritating person next to you can see it), and hit this link.

[via]

Round up of “X takes a photo of themselves every day for Y years”

The BBC have a series of user-submitted photos of the recent foggy weather we’ve been having in the UK. I really like number 3.

More strange stuff that people have posted on del.icio.us: 56 users have bookmarked “localhost”, and plenty of others have created similar bookmarks.

I did find a couple of other amusing entries in there though, including locahost.com, a service for those who frequently misspell localhost as locahost, and end up there…

A series of videos which appear to have been made by Nike, and which show objects being hit at 200mph with a Golf-ball, and then the resulting impact/explosion in slow-motion.
Not sure if this is educational at all, but it’s amusing enough.

Check out IE7.com - subtle!