I hate it when my browser goes belly up on me. It shows how dependent I've become on the thing. Thank $DEITY it happens only twice a year or something, but it just happened to me. I only had about 35 tabs open [all very interesting stuff, really], and then I did a Ctrl+Shift+Tab to go back a tab and it just started eating CPU cycles. It's doing it for some minutes now, so my hope on it recovering itself is gone. That's a quick killall firefox-bin then, but that means I loose my opened tabs [all really interesting stuff I wanted to use for this blog, really]. So...

I killed Firefox and went straight to opening my bloglines page again. Good that they support showing all posts from now till NN hours ago. So, opened the engadget feed again for some new creepy/neat/scary/cool stuff. First this creepy robocat. I guess our cat is cooler in that it knows how to open doors and jump on your bed when he thinks you're supposed to wake up. Talking 'bout my bedroom: this rug would be a really neat add-on, in contrary to this kinda cute Kenny inspired webcam or this creepy Japanese sleep doll. I hate it when I don't wake up myself. Talking about creepy and Japanese: this robot has to secure shopping malls. Check out the captions in the reactions on the article. I'd rather have one of these build-it-yourself robots. Now if I didn't have a nice Sony PDA and cellphone already, this Samsung PalmOS based cellphone would surely be one of my items of choise. Combine that with Caller ID spoofing [too bad it's only in the US] and I would have a lot more fun on my daily train rides. Another neat gadget [too bad it's from microsoft], is this designer optical mouse.

To make sure that you fully are aware that Japanese people are weird, they invented the boyfriend arm pillow. I surely hope that it won't a big hit with the ladies there, otherwise I would heartily agree with all those Japanese men playing Hentai games... They would have to go to great deals for impressing the ladies with stuff like this gold-plated transformer robot thingee.

In other news, people try to get themself killed in a jet-powered wheelchair, on a sideways mooving bicycle, eating sushi with these glasses and in a very funny casting movie [quicktime, rightclick, save].

Anyways, do I have other things to write about except a shitload of gadgets? Sure. Here in The Netherlands, we had the government financing projects where people could buy computers and computer gear and get a tax refund calculated with their salary and stuff. Anyways, it's purpose was to make everybody able to purchase a PC. Everybody with a job that is, but whatever, because they pulled the plug out of it. Now, everybody seems to think this is bad [whole companies depend on large companies doing their yearly "pc-prive project" as it's called], but I think it has it's good sides. First, people now don't go out and buy expensive, sometimes crappy, computers with windows preinstalled. They won't stop buying computers [like the media are shouting], but they of course will want to spend less on them. So, lots of people will turn to their hardware savvy nephew/son/neighbour/alien-of-choise to build a cheap-but-capable pc for them. Now, if those computer savvy people are smart and _don't_ pirate microsoft software but instead tell everybody how freaking expensive windows, office and all those anti-virus software is, people will begin to start looking for alternatives. Of course, few will immediately dump windows [they want to continue playing the Sims and stuff], but at least they will look at software like OpenOffice.org and [if those internet savvy nephews push it right] Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. If enough people are liking those cross-platform programs, they are more likely to try out other OS'es where they can use the same bundle. Like GNU/Linux and the BSD's. And then the world will slowly start looking better again, because we will be spammed less by trojan-infected non-patched [or even patched] windows machines. And being asked about getting hardware working with GNU/Linux sounds more fun to me then cleaning up a windows system from spyware and bots for the third time in a week. I've stopped doing that a long time ago.

There's a downside to lots of people switching to GNU/Linux. It won't be cool to run it anymore. However, it will still be a very more convenient environment to do your work in than whatever windows flavour you're trying to run.

And then a short blurp about sports. Yesterday while reading the free Metro newspaper in the metro to my work, I scanned the letters readers had send them [always a good source of entertainment]. There was one from a sports hater. He complained about the solution from our government that they want to push sports [like in the US] and that there's so much sport on television. I agree a bit with him. I'm no sport hater [I love to watch women basketball], but the overkill on football on television starts anoying me. Like I want to watch football the whole summer [first the European Championship and then football in Athens. Like I care. Just give me those gymnasts and swimmers]. I think it's a good idea to push sports a little more on schools, but please let the scholars choose for themselves. And don't push football anymore. Try basketball instead or something. And put that on the telly. Maybe I will start looking at that thing again then.