House made from matches

Learn how to build a miniature house from matches and then go impress your friends. The evil in me just wants to light up those matches and see the house burn in flames. Wahahaha!

Steam buns with pork flavoured cardboard is a hoax!

Remember I blogged about the Chinese steam bun seller who was caught trying to rip his customers by stuffing pork flavoured cardboard in them? Apparently the story was a hoax done by a temporary employee of Beijing Television who felt pressured to produce a story for the station. But still, I'm not buying food from any Chinese street stall! From Xinhua:

Under the name Hu Yue, Zi twice went to the No.13 courtyard inside Shizikou Village, Taiyanggong Township of Chaoyang District, and asked four migrant workers who had been preparing breakfast there to make meat buns for other migrant workers at a construction site.

The four meat buns makers were identified as Wei Quanfeng, Zhao Xiaoyan, Zhao Jiangbo and Yang Chunling, all from Huayin, a city in northwest China's Shaanxi Province.

Zi allegedly invited a friend to act as the boss of the construction site, and bought pork and flour from a market in Chaoyang District and brought the materials to the courtyard.

In order to film the process, Zi is alleged to have instructed Wei and his fellow villagers to make "baozi" or meat buns by soaking and crushing discarded cardboard he had collected and mixing it with pork. The baozi were said to have been fed to dogs.

Zi used a home DVD camera to film the entire process and turned in his report after he edited it.

Previously: Steam buns filled with pork flavoured cardboard!

The Simpsons and Linda Evangelista Fashion Spread

The Simpsons go to Paris with Linda Evangelista is a cool fashion spread illustrated by Julius Preite. It features them in various designs from Fall 2007 collections. I dig them in the Versace and Chanel clothes. Oh, and Linda E is hot!

Silent Home Appliances

Have you ever wondered how it feels to use your food blender or vacuum cleaner without all the noise that it generates? For her thesis project, design student Lise Levebre created acoustical skins that wrap around noisy home appliances to drastically reduce their noise. Her thesis explores the potential of sound as a criterion for design and the subsequent effects it could have on the look, feel, texture and overall experience of an object. Direct link to pictures here.

The Vader Project

"Luke, I'm your father. It's me, Darth!" Darth Vader goes all artsy at The Vader Project. Check out some of the other Darth Vader helmet/mask redesigned by professional artists.

(Thanks Joshua)

Thou shall not start an office romance

Not being a team player, conducting personal business on company time and starting an office romance are some of the mistakes that one can make to kill his career. From CNN:

6. Starting an Office Romance

Unless you're in separate locations, office romances are a bad idea.

If you become involved with your boss, your accomplishments and promotions will be suspect; if you date a subordinate, you leave yourself open to charges of sexual harassment. And if it ends badly, you're at risk of everyone knowing about it and witnessing the unpleasantness.

Transformers collection sold for US$1M

Any Transformers fanboy (or girl) will surely get excited by this Transformers collection: 275 Tranformers from the '80s (101 Autobots and 81 Decepticons!) and 92 licensed products. Lady who owns this collection sold everything on eBay for US$1 million. Crikey! It's an awesome collection but I don't think it's worth US$1m aye. Oh well, congrats to the person who bought the collection. Mmm. Can I be your friend?

Odex vs Singapore Anime Fans

Odex, a Singaporean company that licenses and releases anime here, has started to take action against people who download anime fansubs of series from Japanese companies that it represents. The letter threatens legal action. Here's a copy (PDF). I understand that several letters have been issued to downloaders since June this year. One of those who got the letter is this anime fan. From Lawliet Shi Hao:

Oh god. I feel so guilty now.
My mum called AVPAS ytd.
They say that if my mum admit guilty now.
They will settle it out of court.
And yeah, this has become my mum's case. Cause she was the one that signed for the internet line. I feel so sorry for her. Cant really express my feelings well now.
Anyway if she admits guilty, it would be depend on whether the japan anime company wants to charge her.
If yes, she might have to go to jail, and pay a fine of near 10k.
Shit, god please dont make this happen. Please.
Anyway if i admit guilty i will have a high chance of going boys home.
Either way it sucks. Having really bad thoughts on life now.
I still want to take my exams peacefully and go up to poly all these one leh.
Dont want to have any record in my life...

And for all the sgreans here. Tell you something.
Its totally totally not worth it. Please stop dling anime now.
Now i dont even dare to ddl. Cause i have no idea what odex will do to contact with several ddl provider.
Its hard its hard. But please try to curb your anime addiction.
And if you think that "ah ya wont so suay kana me one la"
Please just dump your mentality into the rubbish bin.
Cause thats what i thought, and i got owned now.

So far, Odex's crackdown is directed at people downloading anime using Bittorent. Here's how Odex caught these people. From Darkonlore:

We(referring to the anime community) has noticed that the ones caught are all using bittorrent. This is due to the fact that each bittorrent client keeps info of who it is connected to (IPs), and is easily accessible by anyone who use the same .torrent file. There are also trackers that would list the IPs of users who are currently connected to it. So just take down the SG IPs and ask the ISPs for their info. Encryption of data in that aspect is pointless.

Odex's actions have created a furore among the anime community in Singapore. Anime fans feel that by preventing people from downloading fansubs, Odex is slaugthering anime in this country. Many also said that they have no choice but not to buy Odex VCDs because they are of a very poor quality. From MavericK:

Well, let’s see, ODEX basically has almost monopolized the distribution of anime in Singapore, so we kinda have no choice but to go to their goods. But what do they do in return? Lousy resoultion/quality, seriously bad dubbings (though they’re in dual-sound), and exorbitant prices. How exorbitant, you say? Let’s see, S$29.90 for a vcd box…which contains only around ~10 episodes. That’s like $3 for an episode. Is it worth the money then? The resolution is so bad, you dun wanna maximise to full-screen when watching them on your computer. The dubbing, the hell, you would RUSH to set the audio to the original Japanese before the characters start to speak.

I'm not a hardcore anime fan (I do watch a few now and then) but I just had to highlight this after reading that so many people are furious with what Odex has done. Yes, piracy is wrong but I don't think we can include downloading anime fansubs in the same category as downloading a movie or music. Most anime titles are not well known. It is only through fansubs that people in Singapore will watch them. By preventing the downloading of fansubs, the chances that people will go to a video store and buy a new title or series are slim and that means in the long term, Odex will suffer. Now that Odex has infuriated the small but closely knit anime community in Singapore by threatening them with ridiculous fines or even jail term, many people have decided to boycott the company. Who's going to buy your poor quality VCDs now Odex? Smart move? I don't think so. Lawliet Shi Hao, the guy whose mum has settled his case with Odex out of court, said it best in his post:

BUT STILL. I NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER WILL BUY ANY PRODUCTS FROM ODEX.

Good luck Odex.

Beep Beep! It's the Road Runner!

It's things like these that make me love YouTube. Beep Beep! Darn. There goes my Wednesday afternoon. Anyway, don't you guys pity the Coyote? It keeps trying and trying but never seems to be able to get an upper hand over the Road Runner. Poor Coyote.

The 50 Greatest Muppets

I love the Muppets so much ever since I was a little boy so it's an extreme joy for me to read this list of the 50 greatest Muppets (part 1 and part 2) compiled by the folks at Progressive Boink - especially when my favourite, Kermit the Frog is at number 1 on their list. "Kermit the Frog is number one because we love him, and we always will." Sweet!

HTTPanties

HTTPanties by ThinkGeek are ideal for the discriminating woman who would prefer a web-savvy and somewhat-direct approach in the romance department. For example, if you wear a "403 Forbidden" it means, "no, you can't have me for the night".

(Thanks GeekGod)