Mr. Speaker

Let’s get this straight - I ain’t nobody’s shill. I don’t shill. But I am a half-decent consumer and I can appreciate a good product. As rare as they might be.

So I’m lending some valuable Mr Speaker cyber^* space to The PlusDeck 2c Cassette Player - which transcends the status of mere “good product” and reaches towards the realms of the consumer-good God.

It takes a couple of minutes to comprehend the genius that is the PlusDeck 2c: A 5.25″ front-loading drive that plays cassettes. Cassettes!

CASSETTES!

Anyway, I can’t stay here yapping about it all day. I’m only up to 1985 Bustin’ Thru. After that I’ve got 1986 Way To Go, then some He-Man, JEM and the Holograms, and Amway motivational tapes. What an afternoon.

After I figure out a killer set I reckon I’ll be ready for the 2007 Cassette Jockey World Championships. I just need another PlusDeck, and a microphone.

^*Cybernetic.

Tags: tapes, shill

Yes, yes, yes… It’s been a LONG time since the last post in the Earwax category. It’s not that I haven’t been doing any tracks - It’s that I haven’t been finishing them. I’ve explained about my attention span before, I’m sure.

Anyway, here I present to you a glitchy, bell-y piece I’m pretty happy with - I’d been toying with the ideas in it for a while, and plopped it out on the long weekend (which seems like it was oh-so-long-ago now).

It’s called Happy (Hardcore). But it’s not particularly happy or hardcore. And certainly isn’t Happy Hardcore. Pffft. Whatever.

Download Happy (Hardcore) 192 kbps version - 8.3mb

Tags: mr speaker, mp3

It makes me sad every time, but summer is drawing to a close around these parts. Not that the cold days ahead won’t be filled with merriment and valid excuses not to do anything on the weekend, but winter does put a stop to festive times of the summer staple: a good old barbecue.

Of course, the communal nature of a BBQ means your not-products can be in danger of being infected by the fats and flavours of the not-so-not-products that surround them. This means you can enjoy the taste sensations enjoyed by the normal person, yet still take the moral high-ground of the vegetarian! Win-win!

Read on for more »

I was getting scared there for a minute. It had been at least a few weeks since I last found something on the interweb that rocked my web-based world.

Things were getting desperate, and for a moment I feared I might be forced to go back and work on one of my half-finished projects or something. But I was saved. Saved by the crunchy goodness of Chickenfoot. Yes, Chickenfoot will (slightly) change your life.

Chickenfoot must be compared to Greasemonkey. Indeed, from the vague description I was given at Sydney BarCamp (I was told the wrong session time, and missed the actual demo) I assumed it was just someone re-inventing the monkey.

But I was wrong. Slightly wrong.
Read on for more »

Web Sequins have been infesting and interestifying the Web almost since its inception. They can delight, astound and disgust us. They make us dream of the Web that could, but probably shouldn’t, be…

What is a Web Sequin?

Let’s start with the concept of a Web Sequin: Like the much loved real-world sequins they are shiny and tacky and, despite our better judgment, can sometimes seem impressive at first glance.

Web Sequins are design elements or page widgets that utilise an existing technology in a creative, novel and terrifying new way.

They are not inherently bad - but merely a tool. And like pretty much all tools in the hands of the inexperienced, will be used for the purposes of evil, rather than good.

Read on for more »

Ooops. I accidently went and won WebJam 2 with little more than a handful of Web Sequins. Sorry about that! Well, what’s done is done; just be sure to carefully consider your voting choices in the future. When I’m a bit more sober I’ll get a write-up up here. Is that right? write-up up?

In the interim, such notoriety is likely to drive hordes of intrigued web nerds this way, so perhaps I should provide you all with a quick-start guide to the magical journey of Mr Speaker: The blog.

Now… I do try to make every post informative and mesmerising, but mostly they just turn out frivolously irrelevant. There have been very few highlights over the years. Here they are:

Hacking Windows Pinball
A cool cheat mode I found buried in the Windows Pinball code, along with a helpful guide for figuring this stuff out for yourself - an introduction to reverse engineering.

The Fonz uses AJAX to spy on you
Oooh… controversial stuff here! Well, not that bad, but at least it includes a damn sweet text adventure game to illustrate a point!

Beer o’clock - the Firefox extension.
A popular Firefox extension for counting down the minutes/work-in-progress-meetings/Simpsons’ quotes until that delightful beer o’clock.

Air CSS Battle
Using the same technique as my award-winning sequin, here is a DOM scripted version of the Atari 2600 classic - Air Sea Battle

Kentucky Fried Chicken Feen
Quite possibly the greatest food known to man. As invented by me.

Ok, maybe there are a few more nuggets to be found around here. I dare you to dig them up.

Tags: webjam, websequins, suckers