HP Printers Ready Message

I learned of a great way to bug people (or at least get a few weird responses) using an Printer Job Language-capable printer's LCD display. Telnet to your printer on port 9100 (default) and send it the following commands:

\e%-12345X\@PJL RDYMSG DISPLAY="INSERT COIN"
\e%-12345X

*I believe the \e% is interchangeable with ESC%, but I've only tested this on one printer.

Photoshop Express

Adobe has released a free online version of Photoshop, Photoshop Express. I'm undertaking a "test drive" at the moment, and will update after I've formed some opinions on Adobe's new webware.

-=[:::: OTAKU NO DENKI ::::]=-

Drop by this website for an utterly different (and amazing) music experience. This Liverpool artist's music definitely matches the title, Japanese which I interpret as being for House of Electricity.

BigDog

Boston Dynamics has posted video of the latest version of their quadrupedal robot BigDog to YouTube. Powered by a small engine, the robot uses a gyroscope and stereo vision (and probably a myriad of other sensors) to guide itself across various surfaces and even recover from unexpected impacts and collisions.

Urban Exploring: The Ozarks

I stumbled on an Ozarks urban exploring website whilst doing some researching on Arkansas ghost towns. Some good bits there. I'm trying to find info on Ledwidge, AR...

Wallpaper: Firefox background

I made a Firefox background! I'm usually not much of a graphical artist, despite the fact I love trying. I had an idea itching in my mind and wanted a background to go with the Windows Zune Theme so I decided to spend a few minutes doing some image editing. I pulled up a huge render of the Firefox logo SVG (I'm too lazy to do it myself?) and found a nice felt-ish texture.

My work:
JPEG, 1280x1024, 108KB
XCF, 1280x1024, 5.88MB

The font used is DS-Digital (Italic).

Update: Internet Explorer redirects to Firefox?

I've yet to figure out why my Internet Explorer crashes on half the web pages I visit, and I know now its definitely a specific type of code causing it fail as the problem persists if I go to the same website multiple times. I've done some digging and found a similar error that was caused by KB918899; which applies to IE6 with SP1, but this isn't helping me (I'm on Windows XP Media Center ver. 2002 with SP2). SFC didn't help. And reinstalling with ie.inf didn't help. I've even gone as far as doing a repair installation of Windows, which didn't help. Anyone have suggestions?