In honor of iGirl, here’s another installment of our weekly endeavor to make you laugh, have fun and in all cases waste time.
The Infinite Cat Project: A cat looking at another cat looking at another cat looking at another cat looking at another cat looking at another cat looking at another cat… Do I need to go on?
You can even add your own cat — just follow the rules.
And if you’re really trying to waste time, check out The Infinite Cat’s games page.
In honor of iGirl, here’s another installment of our weekly endeavor to make you laugh, have fun and in all cases waste time.
I wrote about how to send an upside-down e-mail a few weeks ago and then I ran into the sideway screen. Hit the Ctrl+Alt keys and then either the left or right arrow. Your screen’s orientation will rotate sideways. You can likewise hit Ctrl+Alt and the down arrow and your screen flips upside down. The Ctrl+Alt and the up arrow key rights everything.
In the back of my mind, I knew about this Windows trick. But it wasn’t until Widget, my 5-month old, had her way with my laptop that I remembered it existed. I resorted to Google to find the cure and stumbled upon Eric T’s Internet Duct Tape, a tech blog. His post has 174 comments and quite a few are from people mention their kid did this.
Eric goes on to say that this feature was built into the Windows XP Tablet PC edition where flipping the screen is a useful feature. But Intel added the same feature to its video card drivers so if you want to disable it, you’ll need to get into the card’s menu.
But why disable it? I say try it on an unsuspecting colleague and stand back and watch the results. Maybe I should call this prank day?
(Attention Mac users: Widget doesn’t want to leave you out. She figured out VoiceOver, Mac’s screen reader. It’s Command+F5.)
In honor of iGirl, here’s another installment of our weekly endeavor to make you laugh, have fun and in all cases waste time.
I mentioned this on my blog way back when, but it’s a classic that I feel new readers should be exposed to: Just Letters Developed by Flashcomguru, this Flash distraction lets you rearrange retro alphabet refrigerator magnets. Fun fun, right?
But there’s more.
It lets other people join in on the fun at the same time. They’ll steal your letters, they’ll write corny phrases. Oh wait — that was you?
When I first blogged about this years ago, my Register colleagues had a mad time spelling out OCRegister (captured on right). If you’re able to manage something clever, send it my way to share with readers.
One parental warning: Lots of potty mouths in the room.
Yes, Hump Day Timewasters are the total opposite of the new focus of this blog but hey, I hear people love it. And I am very grateful to iGirl for maintaining this blog in my absence. So, in honor of iGirl, here’s another installment of our weekly endeavor to make you laugh, have fun and in all cases waste time.
Freak friends out and send them an upside-down e-mail. Sites like Flip, by Reverse Fad Productions, turn anything you type upside down. Just cut and paste the reverse text into an e-mail and you’re sure to get a ‘How’d you do that?’ response.
It uses Unicode, the computer “language” that assigns a number for every character. But beware, upside-down lettering doesn’t work with everything. Some e-mail and instant messaging programs I tried resulted in gibberish. But it does work in Lotus:
To waste even more time, visit the Hump Day archive.
Here’s another installment of our weekly endeavor to make you laugh, have fun and in all cases waste time.
Ever wondered what you’d look like as an endangered species?
Well, no I didn’t either, but morphing into an animal sure is a fun way to waste time.
The photo project, YouWild.org, is made by Defenders of Wildlife. The non-profit set the site up as a way to attract attention on the threats to animals such as wolves and tigers.
The transformation involves uploading a photo of yourself, choosing an animal and lining up your eyes, nose and chin with the animal’s same features. Then, a short video is created that shows your face’s transform into that of the animal’s face.
And, if you’re proud of your creation, the site allows you to save your video. Those are then sent to the site’s Hall of Fame where all the best morphs are displayed. Though my transformation into a shark (shown at the right in three steps) is interesting, I’m not quite sure its good for the record hall.
Here’s some other earth-friendly, free games also found online:
Here’s another installment of our weekly endeavor to make you laugh, have fun and in all cases waste time.
This week’s waste of time puts you on a construction site, but no hard hats are required.
The online game is Tower Bloxx and it has the player build either one skyscraper (in the quick game option) or a city full of skyscrapers.
The skyscrapers are built with the click of a mouse or space bar as blocks of the towers sway from a crane and the player aims to stack the blocks on top of each other as straight as possible. Straighter towers mean more residents and more points. The single-tower game ends once you’ve let three blocks fall off the tower.
And for those always on the go: the game’s San Mateo company, Digital Chocolate, makes a cell phone version available for some phones here.
Here’s another installment of our weekly endeavor to make you laugh, have fun and in all cases waste time.
This week’s timewaster is a Web site created as a tribute of sorts to the artist Jackson Pollock. Jacksonpollock.org is a blank page that lets people move their mouse around the screen/canvas to create Pollock-like drips and splashes. Clicking the mouse changes the color and pressing the space bar clears the canvas. I used the tool to create the bit of art below.
Pollock was an American painter who created “drip and splash” paintings. According to a biography of Pollock by a site called WebMuseum Paris, he was “the commanding figure” of the abstract expressionism movement.
The jacksonpollock.org site was created by another artist, a 43-year-old Greek-born and London-based man, Miltos Manetas. According to the Dazed Digital (a site on which the artist is nominated for a Web design award), Manetas “explores the worlds of computers through everything from oil paintings of cables and hardware to video pieces featuring Tomb Raider and Super Mario, which he uses to comic effect.”
Manetas’ other sites include:
We’ll leave you with a quote from Pollock from his biography page:
On the floor I am more at ease, I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around in it, work from the four sides and be literally ‘in’ the painting.
— Jackson Pollock, 1947.
Here’s another installment of our weekly endeavor to make you laugh, have fun and in all cases waste time.
I know you’re out there. You’re the one at work with black pants covered in fur, wearing a turtleneck to cover neck scratches, busy scribbling notes on your pet calendar.
This is the kitty and cat (no age discrimination here) edition of the Hump Day Timewasters!
We’re going to start off with a pure timewaster sure to cheer people’s spirits even during the foulest of times. It’s Kittenwar! Don’t worry, there are no cats battling each other with claws and teeth. These Web cats are dueling it out to be named the all-time Cutest Kitten. Yep, these kitties will kill you with kindness — sleeping in bathroom sinks, sleeping on beds and yawning in the oh-so-cutest ways.
Just go to kittenwars.com and you’ll see two image of kittens. Stop, smile, laugh and then click on what you perceive to be the cutest of the two. Once you’ve wasted enjoyed a few hours of that, you can look at the winningest kittens, losingest kittens, newest kittens or even upload your own cat’s image. The site even has a presence on Facebook group and a MySpace page.
The founder of kittenwars, Fraser Lewry, also offers other great kitten sites: catsinsinks.com (like the name), the random kitten generator that shows a fresh photo of a cute kitten with every page refresh, and a similar site called The Daily Kitten that shows a new photo of a kitten every day at 3:07 p.m.
Other sites sure to make you purr include Catster, a cat-version of social networking site Friendster; Catbook, a Facebook application that lets you make Facebook-like pages for your cats; and ICanHasCheezburger.com , which shows funny cat pictures along with misspelled, yet comical captions (like the image at left from the site).
Finally, YouTube’s cat offerings are not to be missed. There are far too many for me to round up and mention here, but please add your favorites. A good starting selection includes: The Mean Kitty Song, It’s Oh So Cute — with a contrast of sleeping and frightened cats set to Björk’s “It’s Oh So Quiet” song and this round up of many famous cat videos into a hilarious minute and a half video.
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