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Autographed Valentino Rossi suit for sale on eBay

Dainese is auctioning the leathers Valentino Rossi used in the Sachsenring race back in July. The suit is autographed by the Doctor himself:

All the proceeds from the eBay auction will go to a research project on motorcycle rider safety conducted in conjunction with the University of Padova.

The auction has only been open for 30 minutes and the price has already gone up from a starting price of 1 euro to more than 3.000 euro. Wonder what the final price will be in a week...

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Watermelon art

Impressive what you can make from a simple watermelon:

Gallery

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The Dilbert.Blog by Scott Adams

This is way cool; Scott Adams just started the Dilbert.Blog

Be sure to leave a comment on the "the nerdiest thing you ever did":

I’m talking about thoroughly unnecessary nerdiness, i.e. the highest level of achievement. Recently I bought a projector that takes a signal from just about any source and shines a big picture on any flat surface. I hooked it up to my laptop and watched a wall-sized movie on my white office wall while I paid my bills.

You might ask why I bought the projector in the first place. No reason. I just couldn’t resist the urge to project large images on walls. It’s exactly the sort of device you have to acquire first and later figure out why you did it.

The nerdiest thing I have ever done? I guess I have to check with my friends and family on this as there is a lot of material to choose from. The “worst” one I can think of now was writing a screen saver for my girlfriends birthday. Creating e-mail accounts for the kids the day they were born isn't exactly “normal” either...

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Marco Melandri wins his first MotoGP race

The engineers of Marco Melandri did the right thing at the pre-season tests: they covered the computer that displayed the lap times and position, forcing him to focus on what felt right not the lap times of other riders. The results were immediate and he has had a lot better season this year, winning his first ever MotoGP race yesterday

The engineers went one step further yesterday as they never displayed the name of the person behind him. Marco never felt the pressure of Valentine Rossi and continued to make lap record after lap record even though he had more than two seconds advantage.

The 2006 season should be great fun:
March, 26th - Spain, Jerez de la Frontera
April, 8th** - Qatar, Doha/Losail
April, 30th - Turkey, Istanbul
May, 14th - China, Shanghai
May, 21st - France, Le Mans
June, 4th - Italy, Mugello
June, 18th - Catalunya, Catalunya
June, 24th** - Netherlands, Assen
July, 2nd - Great Britain, Donington Park
July, 16th - Germany, Sachsenring
July, 23rd* - United States, Laguna Seca
August, 20th - Czech Republic, Brno
September, 10th - Malaysia, Sepang
September, 17th - Australia, Phillip Island
September, 24th - Japan, Motegi
October, 22nd - Portugal, Estoril
October, 29th - Valencia, Ricardo Tormo

*: Only MotoGP class
**: Saturday

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Walking hand for Halloween

A scary gadget for Halloween; a walking hand.

The sound activated beast hand is the same size as a normal hand. Clap your hands to send it running along by itself:

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Flash game: Road Blocks

Road Blocks is a challenging flash puzzle game with simple rules; move the ball around using the arrow keys on the keyboard, use walls and other objects to get to the red end point

The Flash Games adds a new game each day. All free of course

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Paper View: cheap paper-thin TV screens

No; not Pay Per View, but Paper View

The Guardian has the full story on the cheap Paper View technology by Siemens:

Siemens spokesman Norbert Aschenbrenner claimed the new screens, which are literally paper thin, can do everything a regular TV screen or computer monitor can do, but cost a fraction of the price.
...
"The technology makes it possible to put moving images directly onto paper ... at a cost that would make it economical to use on everything from magazines to cigarette packets ... where the moving images would give more detailed instructions than any photo could ever do," he said.

The color images can display anything that a normal monitor or TV can, at a slightly lower quality, for about £30 per square meter.

Cool Or What?

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Get your own SkyCar for a cool $3.5 million

If I had $3.5 million to spend I would get myself one of these:

A flying SkyCar that is able to take off and land vertically that has a top speed of 350+ miles an hour! Read the fine print though, delivery is not included so you have to drive fly it home yourself :-)

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Cool Tool: TaskSwitchXP Pro 2.0

TaskSwitchXP Pro is a great time saver if you frequently run a lot of applications and spend forever cycling through them with Alt + Tab. It has a lot of configurable hot keys which makes it a snap to find the application you need. TaskSwitchXP displays a small screenshot of the currently selected application in addition to the associated icon and caption:

The static screenshot does not give the tool much justice as the snapshot changes as you use the mouse, mouse wheel, arrow keys or Alt+Tab to cycle through the list.

Via [Coding Horror]

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Paper toys

PaperToys has a nice collection of free paper models. What about building your own Porsche 911, the White House or Bill Gate's house:

Fun for kids of all ages

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Google Reader: goodbye Bloglines?

I just imported my Bloglines subscriptions to Google Reader. It took a while as I have hundreds of subscriptions but the wait was worth it. It  uses the same labeling system as gmail so if you are familiar with gmail you will feel right at home with Google Reader:

I particularly liked what it did with my Bloglines folders. I had built a fairly large hierarchy which it converted to labels so the feeds in the "security" folder in Bloglines all have the "security" label in Google Reader.

The only feature I miss of Bloglines is the newspaper like view that listed all the posts in one folder in alternating colors. Luckily there are simple one-key shortcuts in Google Reader to quickly navigate the posts. No need to use both hands to press Ctrl + another key. "j" is enough to go to the next post, "s" to star it etc.