Feel like walking around London, but our Mickey Mouse money prevents it? Why not do it online (I know it’s not the same, sorry) at London Streets: www.digistreets.com
If, like me, you worry about one day being attacked by hordes of the living dead in search of fresh brains to eat, there’s a company that offers a guaranteed zombie early-warning system. Breathe a sigh of relief as you run towards Zombie Alert Home Protection!
For those two or three of you out there interested in privacy online, begin by browsing through the free software on offer to fight off invasive junk mail, cookies and more at Junk Busters — and pause by some of the online reading to be found at The Privacy Clearinghouse.
Then to test drive some encryption software that can permanently hide data on your PC, as well as provide text encryption that prevents any Big Brothers from intercepting important messages — this piece of software is so serious it’s classed as ‘munitions’ by the US State Department — try Kremlin.
Geek stuff. So you think you’re a programmer of note, do you? Then try taking part in an online competition to ‘design a program to play and win a game, without knowing either the rules or the identity of the opponent’. How’s that for a challenge, all you so-called hackers out there? Go show them your skillz at The Learning Machine Challenge.
If you have a DVD collection of note, then why not start browsing online to find some of the tools available to fiddle with all that multimedia. Browse through the info and goodies on offer at DVD Software. And getting very geeky, Real Media isn’t a great quality format, so if you have some files trapped in .rm or .ram format that you’d like to convert, there’s a new killer app to convert Real Movie files directly to .avi. Go to TINRA (That Is Not Real Anymore): evc.to/tinra.
Staying with movies, there are some cool horror films on the way to local screens. The first is a deceptively simple ghosts-in-house type of story, starring Nicole Kidman, sporting a fairly nifty Brit accent. Be ready to start screaming at The Others. The second is far more complex, and not strictly horror in the traditional sense. Imagine if the retards you watched on Survivor had been given guns and told to hunt each other down. Now put it in an urban setting, with a heavily pregnant and violent heroine, trying to stay alive for one last season of this show. Keep your gun with you at all times on Series 7-The Contenders.
Curious about the world in which you live and specifically with pop culture? Then you’re going to spend lots of happy hours at this next site, devoted to debates, articles and essays on a wide array of topics, all to do with popular culture. Try Plastic!
If you’re into music, you’ll be wishing you had taken that job offer in the US after a while of browsing through the huge list of concert pix taken by a freelance photographer. Everyone from Devo to Bauhaus to the Cocteau Twins never died when the Eighties ended, they’re all touring America. Go wish you were there, at Live Concert Pix!
If you have the bandwidth, there’s a huge online collection of amazing radio shows featuring interviews and live in-studio performances with assorted musicians and artists as diverse as Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Tom Waits and more. Listen up at the archives of Morning Becomes Eclectic — and specifically to find programs with artists you’re interested in, use their Search Engine.
Finally, and utterly unrelated to any of the above sites – if you’ve ever listened to streaming audio online, and wished you could easily and simply record the audio for later listening, a great program for doing exactly that is Total Recorder.
Until the next time, if hackers and the music industry don’t get me.
Ian Fraser is a playwright, author, comedian, conspiracy nut, old-time radio collector and self-confessed data-junkie. Winner of numerous Vita and Amstel Awards, he’s been an Internet addict and games-fanatic since around 1995, when the Internet began to make much more sense than theatre.