Chocolate Cake In 5 Minutes!

Since just about everyone else on the internet has already tried this (or been too disgusted to bother) I thought I would too. I happened to have all of the right ingredients and followed the Chocolate Cake recipe to the letter.
Surprisingly, it tasted OK. If you were utterly desperate for chocolate cake, you could do worse. The 5-minute timing gives it a distinct advantage over many other recipes.

Notable points:

• It doesn't taste very chocolaty. I used Ghirardelli cocoa, which apparently included ground chocolate rather than being pure cocoa. Next time, something better?
  
• It tastes a bit oily (I used rice bran oil, which doesn't taste of much). Melted butter ought to be a good substitute. Cake must have butter in it!
• It could do with a bit of salt. Just a pinch.
• The texture is surprisingly good. Steam leavening, apparently.
• It could do with frosting... Nutella, perhaps?
• This cake is for times of cake starvation, not for weddings or similarly special occasions.
  

This must be LEGO week

Gizmodo takes you Inside the Lego Factory. The whole thing is run by 3 people and 10,000,000 robots. Approximately.

Classics in Lego - a set on Flickr

Famous old photos, remade using LEGO.

James Blunt on Sesame Street

Words escape me.

Buy n Large : they're here

If you haven't watched WALL·E then this will make no sense.
For those that have, you'll be pleased to know that Disney bothered not only to register the domain, but they put content there too.

Lustro - Mac address book exporter

Lustro is open source and lets you export to CSV or Gmail. I haven't tried it yet but it looks good.

Short addictive game of the week

Hedgehog Launch - you have to launch a hedgehog into space in as few days as you can.

Journal of Misheard Lyrics: Joe Cocker

I always had trouble understanding what Joe was singing. Now, thankfully, we have subtitles.

Dreamworks Laziness

As Phil Plait recently pointed out, Dreamworks has a giant continuity glitch in most (all?) of their movies that feature the boy fishing from the moon. We all know that he can't be sitting on the crescent like that, and that he'd have trouble casting a fishing line that far*. There's something more subtle that you might not have noticed: The moon and clouds reflected in the water are the same as the ones above - but they didn't bother to do the required vertical flip. Observe these two frame grabs, a few seconds apart:




Unfortunately, I'll probably never be able to watch one of their movies again without this bugging me.

* To get the line from the moon to the earth, the boy would have to launch it at 2.28 km/s (over 5000 miles per hour); and it would probably burn up in the atmosphere; oh wait it's a movie, never mind.

Down for everyone, or just me?

Example: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/amazon.com

Buy something

If you like surprises, buy something. They make great gifts for somebody.

Subway Living Room in Prague at Improv Everywhere

The really strange thing is that this parallels a dream that I had a few nights ago, in which people built a plush waiting room in an otherwise sparse station.

The Century of the Self

Interesting BBC series about how the research of Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays laid the ground for controlling crowds based on the desires of their subconscious rather than rational thought. The series follows this thread the way to present methods in Public Relations and Marketing in both business and politics.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Best. Subtitles. Ever.

Sorry I didn't post this weeks ago when I first saw it.

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

The Conet Project

Out on the short wave radio bands are (or were) radio transmissions that could be described as dull and pointless, yet which are at the same time fascinating. Some possess a peculiar kind of beauty, particularly when combined with the other short wave transmissions that weave in and out of them.

I have no idea how many of these stations are still transmitting (and don't have the time to poke around on the short wave to look for them), but you can download 150 of them for free from the Conet Project. If you do nothing else, at least read the booklet. Apparently I'm 10 years late on this, but this is a very interesting resource and I just recently discovered it; maybe you're even later to the game than I am.



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I went to the tech

And all I got was this lousy web page.



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Ron Giles unleashed

Many readers of this blog don't know Ron Giles. Those of you that do know him will be delighted to see him displaying his awesome moves here.

Awful Infomercial Of The Week

The infomercial is entertaining enough, but the Ellen Degeneres show piece is priceless.

Proof that the Mars photos are fake (and that bigfoot is real)

1. Go and grab the Mars panorama from NASA.
2. Open it up in Photoshop or equivalent.
3. Delete the black background:

4. Crop out the obviously fake spacecraft:

5. Now you have nothing but land and sky.

6. Use "Auto Levels" to fix the obvious problem with the white balance and contrast.

7. Yes, that's right, the sky turned blue! Zoom in (left foreground) and check out Bigfoot.
Clearly these pictures were taken in the Canadian desert, then manipulated to look like they were taken on the Red Planet.



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