PigPog

Birthday picture for tBlackstar, aka Velvetqueen, who celebrates her birthday on 1st August. Many happy returns to you from all your buddies on the All Things Considered forum.

Innowen shares my sad obsession with good bags. I really don’t like the idea of having multiple bags and picking the right one to take each time, though – moving all the stuff from one to another is just too time-consuming and too prone to forgetting things.

I’ve not quite found the perfect bag yet, but I’ll post soon about the Targus one I picked up a while ago that comes pretty close.

The Bloglines Plumber is here at the moment, so I can’t get to any of my feeds. It feels almost like the whole Internet has fallen over at first – since it’s the way I get pretty much all of my information. I’ve just taken the chance to go through all the stuff I had sitting in open tabs in Firefox, waiting to be looked at – might as well make some use of the Plumber’s visit.

Some fantastic photos of an abandoned Russian submarine base, carved out of a hillside. As Boing Boing say, they look kind of like backgrounds from video games. The sheer scale of some of the shots is quite amazing.

• Russian Submarine Base
• (Via Boing Boing.)

Mitsui Engineering have managed to build a pool that can display letters and pictures. It’s intended to be sold to amusement parks at the moment, but I’m guessing advertisers will find uses for it too.

Bob Ross is famous for his Joy of Painting line of painting tutorial videos, though admittedly, it’s more for his voice and presentation than for the real learning value.

That’s not to say that there’s any lack of learning value, but that slow, deep voice, that huge afro, and all those “happy little trees” added up to one of the most potent relaxants around.

YouTube user MadChonzer has posted a collection of Bob Ross’ Joy of Painting videos for all to enjoy. No idea how long they’ll last – I doubt he has permission of the copyright holder, so if they step up and complain, YouTube will soon remove them…

• MadChonzer’s YouTube Videos – there doesn’t seem to be a way to link to just the Bob Ross ones, but they’re not too hard to find from here.
• KeepVid – lets you download YouTube videos to enjoy at your leisure. Go to the video’s page in YouTube, copy the URL, and paste it into KeepVid. Once it gives you the download link, right click it and download it. The result always seems to come down with the wrong name, so rename the file to a .flv file.
• VLC Player – the best video player around for playing FLV files. Available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
• (Found via Boing Boing, because I somehow managed to miss it at Cute Overload.)

With running a site like PigPog, obviously we care how we do in Google searches. The act of trying to rank better in a Google search than other sites is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. I’ve long adopted a pretty simple tactic with it, of optimizing for people, and assuming that Google can look after itself. It seems to work ok.

Nick at Performancing has written a post about The Big SEO Secret, which boils down to a broadly similar idea.

Monopoly money is finally being phased out, in favour of a new card-based system, where the banker has a little machine that reads and writes financial data to each player’s card.

I’m not sure if I like this at all. I’ve always had a soft spot for Monopoly, after spending hours during long summer holidays playing it with friends. Even if Barry did always win, to the extent that he’d be giving money to the rest of us, just to make the game last longer, until he finally felt the time was right to take us all down. With this system, we’d have been playing with a little Visa advert, and we’d have been stuck when the batteries ran out. And it just wouldn’t have been the same without Barry waving his thick wad of pink notes at us.

Sacha has an interesting new plan – themed days – Thursday is for Creativity, so there’s still time for PigPog in her plans

I like the idea, and the themes she’s chosen feel right – they fit into the natural flow of a week.