Tape drives!

Oh yeah, I need one of these.

Whenever we travel we look for unusual stuff. We also like street art and popping into art galleries and interesting stores. This album is mix of all that from a trip we took to Barcelona, Spain, in January 2025. What a beautufil city - I would go back there again!

Some random mannequins and statues I came across in New Hope, PA.

I always think stuff like this is going to come alive.

Museum of the Weird in Austin, Texas

I'm not sure if Klong is supposed to creep you out or be your friend. Even the ad is ambiguous. "Klong cannot hear or see you but senses your kindness". Klong is also packaged in a plastic cylindrical tube that resembles preserved specimens in a laboratory jar.

The absence of facial features is so that Klong can provide nurturing, peace and calm without beady eyes judging you.

This is what secretaries and legal assistants used to use (and perhaps still do?) when typing up spoken word by lawyers and other people who would perhaps rather speak than write themselves. ;)

Austin dyed his hair for the swim team. It was supposed to be blonde, but somehow ended up blue?

Hi!

The Bear Committee (see

http://greta.electric.gen.nz/~nikster/bearcom.html if you're not

familiar) has decided to run a fun competition to name their newest

bear cub minion/crony/ally that signed up over here. Answers please to either

nikster@greta.electric.gen.nz or www.flickr.com/photos/ahkitj/82419215/ -- a prize of a Committee-endorsed lunch

(bought from The Kiosk at VUW, or other Committee-approved

establishment of course) with Nikster, Little Albert Kenby-Bear, new

cub and their hēkeretari is on offer to the winner. If the names are

good.

In order to help you select the best name, fourteen photos (taken with

Tiny Albert Kenby-Bear, one of its brothers) is attached; [the] new cub is the white-furred bear with the blue scarf. Deadline for

entries is when the bear's named. Which could be in the next five

minutes, so you'd better hurry.

Good luck!

Bear hugs,

Nikster's hēkeretari (for Nikster, who's actually on holiday somewhere

in Wellington).

NB: no shaggy fur from [the] new cub was lost in the shooting

of the pictures. Just so you know; new cub wanted that mentioned.

--

Jonathan Ah Kit - Lower Hutt - New Zealand - hydro@electric.gen.nz

jonathan@metalab.unc.edu - http://www.ibiblio.org/ahkitj/

Ettie Rout: 'the basis of marriage is obviously mating[...]'.

And again: 'A marriage may be legal [...] and diseased.'

The Dead Detective takes on the evil. A zombie detective that hunts down the greedy corporation - PlanetSplat fun, horror, sex film-noir.

Watch thedeaddetective - youtu.be/TePTWjI47Aw

VCRs!

He has a big stick!

Seen at Weird Stuff Warehouse, taken with a camera phone.

This is a black and white negative of a lamp going in my room at night. It looked better than the black and white positive in my opinion.

More tape drives!

Computer vendors used to rip you off by requiring you to buy their expensive and proprietary drive caddies if you wanted to add more hard drives to a system.

Insert Internet-related joke here.

Where Apple 1 was born

Is the penguin blind? Can it see?

What?

This is a picture of the phone box with my alterations. As you can see, I added a second wire block ($3 at weirdstuff warehouse) and terminated the phone jacks. I did this in corresponding order to the ethernet jacks so that the numbers match up.

The white wire you see is a patch cable that I already put in place before I decided to take a picture.

Now I have working ethernet jacks and phone jacks around the house.

BTW, they used plenum phone wire so my hands were sticky for hours after this...

Overall, Tiny Albert would rate Pacific Coffee Company somewhere around 2 out of 5. However, the free Internet was good, but the powerdery feel and taste of the hot choc near the end was greater than one might usually expect from even a home brew. Pity.

All it needed was a ", dude!", and they'd be set. "... man."

Given this still apepared to be shrinkwrapped, it looks like this attempt at mid-nineties marketing failed in the long run. Wonder if Steve Ballmer was involved in this, too. (Microsoft originally developed OS/2 for IBM, while somewhat secretly working on Windows.)

The bathroom light went. I decided to replace it and the actual bulb came out leaving the screw base still in the fitting. I'd never heard of this happening before however when I mentioned it at work, a colleague said it had happened to them. Apparently this is common with screw bulbs not bayonet bulbs. If the bulb is high strength (say 100w) it will last so long that the plastic melts/fuses/whatever and on trying to remove the bulb, only the bulb light comes out.

If this happens, you must switch off the power and try to pull the base out. The tip is to use only 40w or 60w screw bulbs.

So that's my health warning and top tip of the day.

This was from the amazing Chinese shop in Oxford that has since sadly closed down, but whilst it was there, I certainly stocked up of inexplicable stuff. This is a china sandwich with a banana garnish that isn't very well to scale (it's either a huge sandwich or a tiny banana). It has a candle inside it.

These are my eyes, I really like the picture. I wish my eyes had shown up in my natural green though.

Amish Computing?!?

well this is me, what more can i say, I thought i really ought to have something on here so all the outsiders knew what i looked like.

I now have a mission for myself, to find a portrait of me that i really like and i feel looks like me. I quite like this one.

Corrugated cardboard overlay taken off for a moment, Tiny Albert looks at the corporate logo of Pacific Coffee Company, which looks oddly like a Starbucks clone.