So right now, any non-gtk applications using flash, e.g. Konqueror, freeze solid on ``flashed'' websites. Firefox, being a native gtk application, is ok however ... waiting for Debian.

Last.fm is doing a great service! They've sent me an email notification that these videos are available on the base of my listening habits. All of the site is based on profiling their users, collecting data which song you played when etc. Maybe some day I will discover iTunes but it seems I am not ready for that hype.

And did you know last.fm has got a wiki too? Here's what they write about The Brand New Heavies. The Brand New Heavies are an acid jazz and alternative hip hop group formed in 1985 in Ealing, a suburb of London, England. Originally an instrumental rare groove group, the Brand New Heavies gained a cult following in the London club scene and soon signed to Cooltempo as acid house replaced rare groove in clubs. Lots of their content is carried over from WikiPedia. Let me guess, they don't sync their wikis if users write in one or the other places.

This site, is dedicated to the origins of music videos presented in a kind of jukebox. The Scopitone Machine was invented in the early 1960ies in France using surplus World War II airplane parts. There was some forerunner of those ``color sound film viewers'' invented in Italy shortly before that. You can still buy a scopitones machine at ebay for ca. $1,200.00 ... Or download some of the clips from scopitones.com (is this legal?) and play them back using your laptop and a beamer on your next 60ies party.

The funny thing about this video jukebox is that the players in those movies had to act in a rather restrained way because of the very narrow visual boundary of the video format. They are obviously not supported by nowadays professional choreographers ... even though those are also funny from a certain perspective. In the end, the machine was arranged in a corner of a bar with a little display on the top, not comparable with today's MTV productions (multiple cuts per seconds, fast moving cameras). After all, this is exactly the appeal of those old clips fanning your addiction to trash. I don't want to say that those clips are really trash. They are, but in a charming way. There's good trash and bad trash. Bad trash is one that you can't stand because it is so trashy. Good trash is cult. Maybe today's MTV trash will be cult in 40 years from now on. I don't know.

Well, go ahead and give it a try and see for how long you can stand it.

You may either work completely from within the office suite that will take care of basic workflows as well as versioning of documents you work on during a session. It also comes with an AJAX base web client. In the background there's a J2EE based server built on top of Apache Tomcat and the PostgreSQL that takes care of the document store.

They've got a time restricted demo VMware appliance that you can download here. They've got a short presentation video that shows the basics of the web client.

A nice idea is to deliberately open a workspace and get a tab at the bottom for it. A workspace in a way maps on TWiki's webs. But instead of having to deal with all webs at the same time every user can just open ``his'' workspaces in O3Spaces and concentrate on them. Despite all the technical merits that come with O3Spaces I like those little usability improvements that make a big difference.

The portal page of a workspace is build up from little areas where specific information is listed (latest changes, recent comments, etc). But why do they have to create yet another XXXlet name for it: ``Spacelets'' from the outer regions of Ursa Minor. So spacelets are in a way portlets. Besides other conceptual parallels, they share the same potential for gooseflesh.

The screenshot shows three pulldown menus to select a workspace, files and discussions in it ... which makes me wonder how this interface scales when the number of documents and discussions in it grows. Unfortunately the presentation does not show how documents can be organized, e.g. classifying and tagging them. The spacelets only show latest changes but don't provide a path to find ``relevant'' information whatever that is. So as good as O3Spaces might be in collaborative document creation it may lack components essential to manage long-term knowledge.

Anyway, go ahead download the test version and make up your own mind.

From wikipedia Ripley's Believe It or Not! is a franchise which deals in bizarre events and items so strange and unusual that readers might question the claims. The Believe It or Not franchise started in 1918 as a newspaper cartoon panel featuring unusual and startling facts from around the world. Conceived and drawn by Robert Ripley, the panel proved popular and was later adapted into a wide variety of formats, including radio, television, a chain of museums, a book series and a pinball game (produced by Stern Pinball, Inc.). The Ripley collection includes 20,000 photographs, 20,000 artifacts and more than 130,000 cartoon panels. With 50-plus attractions, the Orlando-based Ripley Entertainment, Inc., a division of the Jim Pattison Group, is a global company with an annual attendance of more than 12 million guests. Ripley Entertainment's publishing and broadcast divisions oversee numerous projects, including the syndicated TV series, the newspaper cartoon panel, books, posters, games and mobile phone content.

And more so from here: Robert LeRoy Ripley (December 25, 1890 - May 27, 1949) was an entrepreneur, anthropologist and cartoonist who created the world famous Ripley's Believe It or Not! series.

What's your favorite Believe-It-Or-Not story?

This Human Space Invaders video is really funny, granted to be mind evacuated and an intricate retro ode to the beginnings of computer games. They even managed to mimic the long-forgotten space invader ``sound track'', you know these three repetitive chromatic tones accompanying your bustling activities.

NOTsoNOISY is a group of french swiss graphics, videos, photos, webdesign artists whose recent video on YouTube is quite appetizing to go and see some more of their output. Unfortunately their site is currently in a state of maintenance. So they managed to get lots of attention mostly due to a recent posting on BoingBoing but didn't get their site fit for service in time. I'm even not able to get a contact address. Maybe they just want to protect their servers from being slashdotted. Anyway, hope I remember to check back occasionally, not only for entertainment.

Update: Ah, they just realized the grown attention and replaced the single photo on their homepage with a contact address.

Update: Ok, YouTube has a hard time recently with all these videos being uploaded by someone not allowed to do so ... or was it the original artists of the videos which have been duped? Anyway, the space invaders video isn't hosted on YouTube anymore along with some others of my favorite clips. Check the creators place for more information.