planet nifty .co.uk

Over the years many people have passed comment on my trusty Suzuki Wagon R+

They were usually something along the lines of “what kind of funny-lookin’ green house is that?” of course, but there’s no denying that the old wagon certainly got noticed. Well, now’s a chance for all those people who said “Aw No, Don’t get rid of it, it’s too unique!” To put their money where ther mouths are and cough up a small sum for the green machine.

Yes! It’s on eBay. You can own this stunningly surreal vehicle for as little as £50.00
Of course if you’re thinking of bidding you should read the ebay auction in detail to learn why I’m willing to part with this super little car for such a small sum.

The auction ends 20th July 2008 at 16:57 BST so Good luck kids!
Happy bidding.

While I am striving to keep work and play seperate; I wanted to tell you, dear reader, about Tengu.

Tengu is a nifty little gadget - it doesn’t really do anything practical and, if you only ever read about Tengu, you might not really appreciate it so I’ll be tagging on some youtube videos to help you understand.

Tengu is a little pixelated character that lives by your computer. He gets his name from characters from Japanese folklore but he looks like an over-sized ‘demonstration-tooth’ from the dentists office. Of course I have a well documented love of catchy Japanese wierdnes, so naturally, I picked one of these babies up just as soon as they drifted in the door.

So just what does Tengu do for you?
Well, besides looking like the evil encarnation of the iPod shuffle, Tengu is surprisingly efficient at looking hysterically cute. Blow on his face to wake him up and he’ll yawn and blink. Once he hears some music he’ll begin to lip-synch along - even to regular conversation.

Tengu has over a dozen facial expressions and he will step through them every time you blow on his face. Each face has a different way of visualising your music or whatever other sounds are going on nearby.

My personal preference is for his ‘Square mouth’ face - mostly because of the song it mimes along to in the demo video.

Tengu Demo Video

I don’t often do stuff out of the kindness of my own heart, but, in one of those rare occasions where I do agree to do something for someone else, I have had a little fun making a template for the International Men of Mystery blog.

These guys are taking part in the Dumball rally; they’ve picked up a Toyota Camry for less than £400 and plan to run it all round Europe while dressed as characters from the Austin Powers movies in a bid to raise “one billion dollars” for Leukaemia Research.

Of course I didn’t put the whole thing together; The blog engine works in some alien.NET language that I can’t understand (yet) and was set up and hosted by Tim, Sammie produced all the groovy graphics for us and I just fiddled around a bit in the background pretending like I knew what was going on.

I did have a little fun learning experience though revolving around transparent PNG’s. Now up until ie 7 Internet explorer ignored the transparency in a PNG image unless you use the Microsoft Image Alpha Loader filter. Which really is a shame. Thankfully ie 7 now will actually render transparent PNG images for us without all this messing about with css hacks and bug-exploits. Albeit without proper PNG Gamma ((roll my eyes)) Even so, I did have endless cross-browser-fun making the images in the header layer up transparently correctly for ie browsers. I may put up an article on making this work a little later on.

Check out the International Men of Mystery website. you too can help and make a difference with their cause; just push that big Donate button and make a contribution.

Okay, Joomla didn’t do too well as the planet nifty website. So once again I turn to wordpress as a quick and good solution.

Wordpress is doing a fine job of running a couple of other sites for me. I know, Wordpress is a blog engine and Joomla is a CMS, nontheless I find that Wordpress is better at doing what joomla should on a small scale like this.

I still want to build my own modular content management system. I’ve been talking about it and attempting it on and off for months, if not years, and I’ve come close on more than one occasion. I’ll be keeping a record of things here as I continue down this road.