Action Figure Insider reports that Bif Bang Pow has received the rights to make licensed merchandise based off of Showtime’s serial killer series, Dexter. The company plans to start off with a Dexter Morgan bobblehead. ZOMG WTF. I wonder if they’ll make an Ice Truck killer chopped up body action figure like the one left in the emptied pool.
Month: February 2008
The Harikikigaki
Japan’s Kyushu National Museum holds a copy of the Harikikigaki — a 16th century medical text of unknown authorship which claimed that diseases were caused by tiny bugs that crawled into the body. The Harikikigaki advises using acupuncture and herbs to deal with the bugs, like the Haisyaku to the right.
Pink Tentacles has scanned illustrations of some of the bugs along with an English language summary of the book’s description of the particular bug and how to fight it. The Kyushu National Museum also has a web page with images of the various bugs, and accompanying text in Japanese.
According to The Japanese Times Online,
Until the late 19th century, Japanese people believed illness was spread by evil gods called yakubyogami. At first these gods were thought to take human form, but later, influenced by thinking in texts from China, some people came to think of them as little beasties small enough to enter the body. The Kyushu National Museum in Fukuoka, which opened a year ago as Japan’s newest national museum (the others are in Tokyo, Kyoto and Nara), owns a very interesting book called the Harikikigaki. Written in 1568, mostly about acupuncture, this rare text includes 63 color depictions of the various mushi (bugs) then believed to cause disease.
Justice League Trophy Room Replica – Multi-Colored Kryptonite Display
A few weeks ago I mentioned DC Direct’s Superman cap replica, but this DC Direct Trophy Room Replica is even better than that. Yes, a multi-colored kryptonite display,
If you believe my wife, I’d have to worry about the effects of the Blue Kryptonite. Of course I’d be sleeping on a Green Kryptonite couch for a long time if I plunked down the $200-$250 that this baby goes for.
WebMynd
For the past 5 years I’ve been using Ken Schutte’s Slogger plugin for Firefox to keep archives of every website I visit. But lately I’ve run into installation issues with Slogger, plus there are a number of important features that I’d like that Slogger doesn’t offer.
The other day I happened to run across WebMynd. WebMynd does pretty much what Slogger does. It keeps a local archive of all the web pages you’ve visited. It also uploads the text to its website. The business model here is that they hope you’ll pay to search that archive online. I suspect the number of people who actually want this sort of service is fairly small, so I’d be surprised to see if they actually succeed at monetizing this.
However, if you are the sort of person who finds making local archives of every web page useful, the plugin does a great job. Unlike Slogger, for example, WebMynd will accurately make copies of web pages loaded in non-focused tabs (Slogger typically will save a copy of the currently focused tab). WebMynd also does a better job of capturing every element on a page.
Plustek OpticBook 3600
Plustek makes this interesting scanner, the Opticbook 3600, which is designed and marketed specifically for scanning books. According to the comments from buyers at Amazon, the included software is sucks, so expect to buy third party OCR/etc software on top of the $280-$300 price for the scanner.
GoToMyPC.Com
There are certainly cheaper ways to access computers remotely, but for me the dollar cost of using GoToMyPC.com is more than made up by having someone else worry about the details, along with a couple of special features that I haven’t seen in VNC-style applications.
I’ve been using GoToMyPC.com since 2005 to connect to various computers I have in my home and office. Currently I have a 3-PC subscription so I can access my home server, home desktop and work desktop from anywhere. The 3-PC subscription runs $45/month, but most months it saves me far more money than that. In a few cases, it has really saved my ass by allowing me to access important project files and meet project deadlines that otherwise would have not been met and likely result in catastrophic failure (i.e., someone would have been seriously bitching me out on the other side of the phone instead of thanking me for being able to come through under trying circumstances).
I really like the security model that GoToMyPC.Com uses, including its ability to create one-time passwords for each machine. I also like that GoToMyPC.Com takes care of that the security end of things. I know how to use VNC and SSH to create a secure remote connection, but that’s more time and hassle than I want to put up with, especially given the significant risk that I’d screw something up there (or fall behind any updates to security holes found in either of those two applications).
Also, I am a printing fanatic. I print pretty much everything of interest I stumble upon on the Internet for later use. I love the fact that I can call up a file or web page on a remote machine but print that file to whatever local printer is nearby. That’s just huge for me.
The other features of GoToMyPC.Com are fairly standard and work as they should. I use the file transfer option fairly often and it works fine. Occasionally I’ll listen to some audio file on my local machine that is essentially being streamed by GoToMyPC.com from one of my local machines, but frankly I’ve got an iPod for making my audio portable and don’t use that option very often.
Overall, GoToMyPC.Com is a very solid service that has proven its worth many times over for me in.