Sparkie's Junkyard - www.sparkie.name

Civiballs

7th June 2009

While waiting for the weather to improve so we can go to a garden party, I found this. It's not particularly taxing, nor is the music gentle on the ears, but it's relaxing enough and worth a couple of minutes. Put the coloured balls into the correct vases (should that be amphora?). If anyone really cares (Adam) my total score was 16566.

Come on sunshine, find a way through the clouds :-(

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Top Spinner Cricket

8th January 2009

A nice little time-killer. Try and score as many runs as possible in ten overs, using someone who responds about as well as a Skoda on a skidpan. I'm sure one of you can beat my top score so far of 174.

Click here to play

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Orbitrunner

9th September 2008

I'm not sure if this counts as a website or a download, but I felt it was time to put something in a section other than the blog. Here's something to procrastinate with while the "summer" washes by outside us.

Orbitrunner is an infuruating (aren't they all) flash game for the physicists among us. The basic premise is to use a movable sun (yes...) and an in-depth knowledge of General Relativity to constrain the orbits of some errant planets in your little section of space. You're not allowed to crash things together, or let them wander of the screen. Once you've got the hang of that, they then start sending planets careering in from offscreen. Fun.

Even the tutorial levels can be a pain, and if you can get past level 12 then you're doing better than me. The comments section is open for bragging rights.....

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Zero Punctuation

1st October 2007

I seem to have missed the boat on the feed-reader invention, and any review / explanation / group roundup would have some similarities to the bolted horse, the shut stable door, and the complete anticorrelation betwen the two. Instead therefore I will review a website with no discerenable feed for the information I want, which I have to check on the old fashioned way - by actually visiting the damn thing.

Zero Punctuation is a weekly flash animation by Yahtzee, a british gamer living in Australia. Narrated as the title suggests, in a monotonic deluge of information, he uses his two minutes to pour scorn/praise on his chosen game with the help of animated stickmen.

That probably didn't sell it too well, but it's definately worth a look - new issues arrive each Wednesday.

Recommended - Console Rundown

Not Recommended - Buying Peggle

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Ironic Sans

6th March 2007

Procrastination time! IronicSans.com challenge you to name all 50 US states in 10 minutes. You aren't allowed to look them up of course (I'm looking at you here Adam).

It seems like an easy challenge, but I only managed 28. Once you've had a go, you can put your score up here and see how everyone else did.

Photobox.co.uk

5th January 2007

Armed with 9800 digital photos and two cheap photo frames from the sales, it was time to take my first blinking steps into online printing services. Photobox.co.uk caught my eye because they were offering 30 free prints if I signed up. Print prices vary depending on how many you order, from 10p to 5p for standard 6x4s, although you can buy 600 credits in advance at only 3p each, which is sorely tempting. Postage is £1.50 per order, which made my initial 10-print foray cost 15p each, despite being 'free'. Despite this stealth tax, the prints are still much cheaper than going into Boots or Jessops, and handier too for those of us living a la campagne.

Delivery and service were excellent. I ordered the prints at 11am, and they arrived in the post the next morning. Print quality was better than from our home printer, and seeing as printer ink is more expensive than perfume, it is cost effective too. With print prices this low, it is almost cheaper to buy a digital camera and use 600 print credits than it is to get that many film-based photos developed despite the initial set-up costs of the digital camera.

Really Slick Screensavers

24th May 2006

Typing "screensaver" into a search engine is usually a fairly silly thing to do, as you are likely to return results that direct you to spyware central. Luckily I was using SiteAdvisor (reviewed here) when I did it, and so managed to avoid the 95% of sites that wanted to steal my browsing habits (or worse) and found this little gem instead.

Really Slick Screensavers are a series of psychadelic if processor-hungry screensavers that are guaranteed to distract your attention whilst trying to work. Written as a bit of fun they model situations from fireworks displays to crystal lattices, hyperspace vortices to cyclones, all in hippie 3-D. The links section also contains other screensaver websites if the colour scheme is slightly too freaky for you.

However all this rendering is quite CPU and graphics card hungry, and use with onboard graphics might not be successful.

Solar Death Ray

12 December 2005

www.solardeathray.com is one man's crusade against anything and everything that will burn or melt. Although he lives in Seattle (schoolboy error?) he feels it his duty that every time the sun shines he must destroy something. "With what?" you ask (well probably not, it's fairly self-explanatory really). Using 112 carefully positioned mirrors sunlight is reflected and focussed onto one spot, with the desired pyromania resulting quickly. I particularly enjoyed the Aol CD and the shoe.
When the sun is hidden (apparently quite a lot of the time in Seattle there can be no burning, so the latest destruction method is the Gravity Death Log, a slightly less refined invention, for those of us who prefer old-fashioned engineering.

The death ray also provides a more interesting and significantly cheaper alternative to going to a cinema and buying popcorn