Blogging is so popular today it seems everyone on the planet has one. No surprise there's at least one blog site to suit every possible taste. Even the weird ones.

For instance, there's the The Stinky Meat Project which chronicles what happened when the blogger took three kinds of meat, let it "ripen" for 19 days until 1,000,000 maggots moved in and stuck them in the yard of his unwitting neighbor. And you thought living next door to a strange lady with 1,000,000,000 kitties in her house was bad. Did you hear about blogger Stinky Feet? His impossibly gross mission is to infect himself with athlete's foot.

On the other end of the blog rainbow is this piece of gold called iFizzle. It's a blog site made to look like Mac OSx interface using macromedia flash. The owner of the blog said he came up with the idea for iFizzle because of the "immeasureable amount of hate" he feels for MySpace and all other "poorly designed automated blogs." This is his most complicated flash project to date.

We have to say, it's one of the best-looking blogsites we've seen. And we've seen a lot. Even Stinky Meat and Stinky Feet would look fresh and appealing if they had iFizzle's super eye-candy look!

View: [iFizzle]

Who knew that an iSight Camera could be combo'd with a telescope to produce a contraption that would be perfect for star gazing with your significant other? This was actually done before with the aim of taking a smoking picture of Saturn, but the problem was the camera had to be held still and holding something still for a long time, could be quite a challenge. So with that, the guys responsible for this decided to embark on a mission-- produce an iSight Telescope Mount and capture the biggest planet in the Solar System-- Jupiter.

Mounting an iSight camera is no easy and cheap task...it takes tremendous amounts of patience, time, and money. When the mounting part is over, you'd have to slave for quite a while as you locate celestial bodies that you may want to capture, and sometimes the weather is a bit uncooperative so you'd have to wait for a proper time to take 'em photos.

This is the finish product of the iSight Telescope mount. As you can see it is plugged into the PowerBook and ready to take pictures. Fortunately, their hard work paid off as they were able to take a picture of the giant planet. Kudos to these guys!

 

Adium X is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that allows user to connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger and lot more chat applications. Adium X was voted on of the top ten freeware for the Mac OS! But almost as popular as the application itself is the duck that represents it. Originally apple green, the Adium Duck now comes in a variety of colors. Now that the Adium Duck is starting to bloom into a beautiful pop icon, we felt this is a good time to tell you the true story behind the little green duck.

The duck hatched from Adam Iser's (the author of Adium X) imagination. And he wasn't green then. In fact, he wasn't that cute! The Adium Duck was kinda like an ugly blue duckling. Yes, that's him above. The one that looks like a wooden decoy duck choking on a snail. Thank goodness Iser is better at making applications than drawing icons.

Anyway, Adam Betts gave the blue duck a drastic make-over. "I loved the posture and felt that I can give it a much needed soul and feathers. I donÂ?t remember exactl y how Adam Iser reacted, but I do remember that he disliked it at first but it grew on him later." Yeah, what is it about this duck that makes you stare at it longingly..filled with animal passion...or is it just us?

According to Betts the key element of the duck is his eyes which seem to say Â?Why me worry?Â? The duck's job is to transport your messages to your friends/families, he wants none of your attention. Awwww...but we have so much love and care to give him!

But those come hither eyes are now proving a challenge for Betts. It seems the duck is due for an update to keep up with the new Apple app icon family. Bett tried to turn him into photorealistic graphic but says that "destroyed that message by being in your face with a three-dimensional head. The original Adium soul you know and love would not exist anymore. Another thing that did not work is real feathers."

Betts also took the OS X icon route (documents lying on desk, speech bubble, etc.) but he thinks those icons are beneath the duck. After trying out several ideas, Bett had a lightbulb moment: "Why should I change something that had a strong hand in developing the strong Adium community?" And what about us Adium Duck fans who spend hours customizing our duck with costumes instead of doing things like making this world a better place?

Have no fear, Quack Patrol! The shape of refreshed Adium icon will be nearly identical to current one so there wonÂ?t be much changes needed!

After all, they both went through the same "humble beginnings."

Here's an evangelist who's so hell-bent (pardon the pun) on getting Apple computer founder Steve Jobs to "need" Jesus, and eventually accept him. How fixated is this man? Well, he even distributed this evangelical tract to help Jobs realize he should be humble enough to accept Jesus.

The image you see is the tract that has been circulating all over New York's subway system, which is relatively close to Steve Jobs' home in California. The author of this one is Rich Robinson from Jews for Jesus. And yeah, he's really going all-out to convert the iPod guy to a believer.

Let's see how far Robinson gets.

With so many fake screenshots of the upcoming Mac OS 10.5 Leopard leaving their tracks all over the Net, one guy with a lot of time on his hands (and a few stuff he wants to get rid of) woke up one day and said to himself, "Why not make a contest out of it?"  And that's how The Fake Leopard Screenshot Contest was born!

Phil Ryu isn't joking he assures all wanna-bes out there. He even has a tagline to go with the contest: A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a fake one is worth nearly a thousand bucks of software! Not exactly the kind of money Taylor Hicks brought home from AI but it IS something.

First the rules:

• All entries must be ourageously awesome fake screenshots of the MacLeopard.
• Entries can include multiple screenshots (limited to 5), with one entry per person.
• The contest deadline is Saturday, July 22nd, 12 PM EST.
• The winners will be announced on Monday, July 24th.

Entries will be determined by a panel of judges on believability, creativity, and the Â?insanely greatÂ? factor, made-up features and applications. "In other words, just make it really cool."

Now the prizes:

• iPulse ($12.95), IconBuilder ($79), Xscope ($16.95) and a free StockIcon set of your choice ($349) by The Iconfactory
• Delicious Library ($40) by Delicious Monster
• ShapeShifter ($20) & WindowShadeX ($10) by Unsanity
• NewsFire ($17.99) by Dave Watanabe
• AppZapper ($12.95) by Austin Sarner & Brian Ball
• NotePad ($7.95), VoiceNotes ($5.95) & FTP Drop ($4.95) by Widget Machine
• Menuet with bundled Art Collector ($12.95) by Specere
• iClip ($19.95 /w free upgrade to v.4) by Inventive
• Interarchy ($39) by Stairways Software
• Podcast Maker ($29.95) & Voice Candy ($12.95) by Potion Factory
• Soulver ($12.95) & World of Where ($11.95) by World of Worlds
• Picture Framer ($5) and To Do Tracker ($5) by Monkey Business Labs
• MacUpdate 1 Year Membership ($20) by MacUpdate
• Catalog ($20) & PHP Studio ($25) by Neometric Software
• DomainTracker ($24.95) by Icecold Software
• Tag ($19.95) & Site Soap ($12.95) by Talacia
• CSSEdit ($24.99) & DeskShade ($12.99) by MacRabbit
• Awaken ($8.95) by Embraceware

Phil says if you tally up the cost of the prizes it comes to just under $900. But add the trophies (below) for the three winning faux screens and you can make that an even grand. So far, Phil has received 10 entries.

Imagine if you could conceptualize your own Apple product, and by that I don't mean simply customizing your iPod or MacBook, but actually conceptualizing the product from scratch. A nice but really challenging task. But since a lot of people are into taking challenges, it isn't surprising that people usually come up with concept products -- some are senseless, while some of them we wish could materialize in the shelves of Apple stores.

One of those concepts that I would pay good money for is the MacPod Pro which looks to me as a perfect mix of an iPod, UMPC, and a PDA. No, this is not a leaked Apple patent for some product or something of that sort. This one is from the UK Magazine called iCreate, an Apple magazine which has a "What if Apple made..." section.

Thus the birth of the MacPod concept which aims to be your one-stop portable device and a Mac for your pocket. Nifty contraption this one is, but I can't help but think of the Sony 's UX50 Handheld PC.

But still, this one will add to my long list of wishful thinkings. The concept MacPod can put 1000 songs in your pocket and has a built-in iSight and iLife. Perfect for anyone...who has the money to avail of such luxury. Too bad it's only an unofficial concept, but who knows, maybe Apple could get some ideas with this one.

If you have a strange gut feeling that your boyfriend or girlfriend is cheating on you, but you can't just find any proof, then maybe this little trick using Quartz Composer will be of some assistance. It only works if you have Tiger and an iSight or another webcam.

Quartz Composer is a development tool provided with Mac OS X v10.4 for processing and rendering graphical data. There are only two components to this trick - the video input and the billboard to render it. Now what you do is drag a line from the video's input "Image" on to the Billboard's "Image" input. After that, use the inspector to set the width to two.Export this to a QuickTime movie, 320x240. Since only one application can use your camera at a time, you'll have to close Quartz Composer for QuickTime to play the video. When you like what you have done, just embed it in HTML. I'm sure he/she will make a confession in no time.

A 17 year old dude from Colorado, truly rode the lightning and maybe even felt like he's strapped in an electric chair. Jason Bunch was listening to some Metallica in his iPod while mowing the lawn when Metallica's Ride the Lightning furiously came to life in the form of a lightning that hit him dangerously.

The teen vaguely remembers what happened, what he knew is that a storm was coming from the north and he has to go inside in a few minutes. The next thing he knew, he was lying in his bed, bleeding from his ears and vomiting his guts out. He has no idea how he managed to crawl back in the house.

Bunch was taken to Sky Ridge Medical Center and placed in intensive care and was sent home a few days later. Apparently, after the hospital stay, he called a girl he was supposed to hook up with and explained his absence -- "'I did not stand you up. I was struck by lightning". Nice manners.

His ears were burned on the inside, and he's lost some hearing, mostly on the right side. His hair was also toasted and his other wounds follow the line of his iPod, from his ears down his right side to his hip, where he was carrying the device. The iPod has a hole in the back, and the earbuds dissolved into green threads. Is it just me or do I smell another lawsuit coming at Apple's way?

The last time Mac OS 6 was commonly in use, most of today's high-school students hadn't even been born.

The System 6 machines - the Mac Classic, Mac Plus and the Mac IIci - were ludicrously underpowered by today's blistering standards. For an age in which RAM, HD space and processor speed are measured in the "giga" range, using a Mac Classic with 4 MB of RAM running at 8 (that's eight) MHz would seem tantamount to driving a Ford Model T (last built in 1927).

Despite this difference, some hard-core Mac fans insist that System 6 is actually  better for some computing tasks - particularly word processing. Is it possible that a vintage 1990 Apple running OS 6 can open a Microsoft Word document faster than a new PC running Windows 2000? You may be surprised.

According to "Moore's Law," computer performance grows exponentially, doubling about every two years. It therefore makes sense that the latest computer would perform  tasks at least 500 times faster than something built sixteen years ago. All other factors being equal, this is true...

But.

Anyone who has used computers for any length of time has no doubt noticed that file size has expanded as much as horsepower has increased. When I started using the popular 3D figure modeler Poser back in '95, a file was typically between 200 and 500 KB. Today, a single Poser model (such as "David" or "Stephanie") can run over a 100 megabytes. Same with the applications - the correlation to Moore's Law is that software expands to consume all resources available to it. If you've used MS Word for any length of time, you know what's being talked about, here.

For kicks and giggles, some hard-core vintage Mac geeks ran some tests, putting various System 6 Macs up against an "average" modern PC. The Mac models - a Classic and a IIci - were tested both in their "stock" forms and with some processor upgrades (none running faster than 40 MHz). The Windows machine was an IBM Think Center with a 3 GHz Pentium 4HT processor, 512 MB RAM, running MS Word 2002 with Windows 2000 Pro.

The results are shown on the charts below (click thumbnails to see full-sized images). Who'd have thought?

   

And I thought the rumor about Microsoft creating an iPod rival was long gone. Apparently, it isn't...and that rumor's back, providing us with some believable info on Microsoft's plans for this Apple iPod rival. "Sources" close to this matter are saying that the company does have a plan to start the sale of digital music and video players by Christmas.

Since it's aiming to compete with the iPod - which inevitably means also competing with the iTunes Music Store - Microsoft plans to have a wireless feature which will enable the downloading of videos and music over-the-air.

Aside from this, the company has also been reported to be talking with several record companies these past weeks and has been said to be developing a media software application similar to the integrated ecosystem of iTunes for this rumored media player. If Microsoft is going to push through with its plans to go head-to-head with Apple's iPod, it really needs to build an "integrated seamless ecosystem for digital media" like the iTunes.

We'll see soon enough if this rumor turns out to be true.