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Ravalox writes "Eric Harshbarger has built a 7-foot-tall grandfather clock exclusively from Lego. It keeps accurate time and needs no electricity; it needs to be weight reset every 13 hours. Other pictures include the gears, numbers, the face, and the pendulum mechanics."

Ravalox writes "Eric Harshbarger has built a 7-foot-tall grandfather clock exclusively from Lego. It keeps accurate time and needs no electricity; it needs to be weight reset every 13 hours. Other pictures include the gears, numbers, the face, and the pendulum mechanics."

Ravalox writes "Eric Harshbarger has built a 7-foot-tall grandfather clock exclusively from Lego. It keeps accurate time and needs no electricity; it needs to be weight reset every 13 hours. Other pictures include the gears, numbers, the face, and the pendulum mechanics."

Ravalox writes "Eric Harshbarger has built a 7-foot-tall grandfather clock exclusively from Lego. It keeps accurate time and needs no electricity; it needs to be weight reset every 13 hours. Other pictures include the gears, numbers, the face, and the pendulum mechanics."

Ravalox writes "Eric Harshbarger has built a 7-foot-tall grandfather clock exclusively from Lego. It keeps accurate time and needs no electricity; it needs to be weight reset every 13 hours. Other pictures include the gears, numbers, the face, and the pendulum mechanics."

An anonymous submitter, who might be Eric Harshberger, writes: "Some of my past LEGO whackiness seemed to make a few Slashdot readers chuckle, so I thought I'd pass along this link to my latest creation: A mosaic built of thousands and thousands of tiny little letter bricks. Kind of a weird turn on the ol' ASCII artwork." You may remember this guy from the famous Lego desk.

How to get a cheap, slick box that can run NetBSD; more on what went down under there, down under thanks to modern Rennaisance man Marc Merlin; and a note from the world of corporate English. Read on, soldier.

But are there any good submarine games for it? Tairan writes: "In an effort to sell off 2 million Dreamcasts before jumping out of the hardware business, Sega has lowered the prices of Dreamcasts to $99.00. If you don't already have one, better get down to your local gaming store now!"

Frankly, I'd really rather have an Aeron chair The tri-voweled reader nettdata writes: "Remember this old article that talked about a dot-commer including a Lego desk in his contract? Well, I think I've found the guy! Sun's Dot Com Builder page is doing a feature article on Blue Nile, and the picture in the article shows their CTO sitting at a Lego Desk.

Look here[1][, then look here[2] and tell me they aren't the same!"

Mr. Harshbarger's work continues to amaze, astound and befuddle. Where are all the Lincoln Log sculptures, and desks made of bright yellow Tonka truck metal?

Tell me again how sheep's bladders may be used to prevent earthquakes ... Geoffrey S. Zub of Vistaource passed on that company's Official Word on the Applix spinoff, which he says "can be attributed to Allison Antalek, Marketing Communications." It reads thus:

"In December 2000 the Company entered into discussions with several possible buyers and expects to consummate a divestiture or otherwise discontinue the business in the first quarter of 2001.

If you have consistently followed VistaSource through 2000, you will recall two key announcements:

• April 24th press release launching VistaSource as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Applix.
• October 19th press release announcing the engagement of FAC/Equities to explore strategic alternatives for VistaSource, including its possible divestiture.

VistaSource has been on a path to divest from Applix throughout the year 2000. In December, this culminated in discussions with possible buyers. The term 'discontinued operations' is a common legal and finance term used in these situations and should not raise concern about VistaSource's long term viability. Our Anyware offering is a leading technology from which we offer customizable, web-enabled, server centric, real-time solutions, and we will continue to focus our business to grow in this market segment. The exercises over the past twelve months have further focused our business on our key differentiators as we look to grow to prominence in 2001. We look forward to your continued support and to your business in the future.

Best Regards,
Allison Antalek
Marketing Communications
VistaSource, Inc."

Pop quiz, no cheating: Would you be likely to buy a new car from a company that had just "discontinued operations"?

Please don't throw another penguin on the barbie, 'K, mate? Last but not least, the indefatiguable Marc Merlin posted word of his newest wrap-up / conference report, with pictures, of the recent linux.conf.au 2001. Marc braved jetlag, the dangers of flying, and proximity to dangerous creatures like kangaroos and awful jellyfish to bring you these pictures and words, but he's dedicated. (Check out his license plate for proof.) As his report puts it, "If you noticed the absence of Showfloor pictures, it's simply because there was no Showfloor. This was a hacker's conference, not a tradeshow, and I'd say that it was just as well." Some great pix in here! Thanks, Marc.

More Lego Sculptures! More game collections going to the highest bidder! More ... P4 benchmarks. Updates below to recent Slashdot stories, and a few tangents not yet here explored. Go crazy!

Ma'am, I'm afraid that Ritalin by itself won't help in this case. Somehow this email from Lego madman (insomniac?) Eric Harshbarger ended up in Hemos's hands, and it's hard to resist. Here he confirms the suspicions of a number of Slashdot readers who looked closely at his previous efforts featured on these pages.

Well, A few weeks ago when I announced my LEGO Mona Lisa, a few folks from Slashdot.org noticed the lower half of a statue ... and some guessed what my next project announcement would be. I've now finally completed a statue of 'San' from the Japanese Animation film Princess Mononoke.

I wrote quite a lot about this model ... and took many, many pictures, so I hope you enjoy browsing.

I also recently finished a much smaller model of the BSD Daemon mascot.

cheers,

eric

Enough already! crizh writes "Anyone interested in another arguement about the merits of the P4 and whether Tom Pabst is biased against Intel/AMD might want to check out the further update he posted on P4/MPEG4 this morning."

Further submissions in this category must be accompanied by sizeable bribes or at least juicy blackmail. Let's see what people think of the P4 vs. whatever Athon variety is cool in 12 months from now and talk about it again then;)

Sore thumbs, perhaps. An unnamed correspondent points out this enormous videogame auction, venturing as he does so: "Seems to be as big if not bigger than the previous one posted."

I dunno about that, but it sure is a lot of games. Is everyone dumping their consoles to spend the proceeds on exotic vacations, or what?

fuuzy math for a new era Erik Inge Bolsø writes "Earlier this year, slashdot had a scoop about a 1990 and 1995 study called fuzz, which tested the quality of UNIX utilities.

In july this year, a followup study was published, in which they did subject a collection of common apps on Windows NT (and 2000) to the same tests. The results are interesting... Full paper available here."

Brother, can you spare some time? swgill writes "After reading about Microsoft's attempt to reach beginner programmers with free copies of Visual C++ for schools I thought about the main problem that was found: Visual C++ and the related teaching material is all based on the Windows API, and algorithms are treated as secondary as best. I am actually in college in England doing an A-level in Computing where I can see the effects of this educational policy (although we use VB6 instead of VC++6). I have decided to found the libteach project at sourceforge. The idea is to prevent people learning to program in school from being forced to relearn their skills when Micro$oft switches focus again and to also give them an idea of programming for another type of system (RT-Linux anyone?)."

Sounds like a worthy project, albeit for now still in the planning stages. Of course, it's helped by the fact that there are several Open Source OSes chock full of programming languages out there, but not by the lack of decent IDEs available for them.

Update The latest in our Hellmouth Revisited series is now online .

More Lego Sculptures! More game collections going to the highest bidder! More ... P4 benchmarks. Updates below to recent Slashdot stories, and a few tangents not yet here explored. Go crazy!

Ma'am, I'm afraid that Ritalin by itself won't help in this case. Somehow this email from Lego madman (insomniac?) Eric Harshbarger ended up in Hemos's hands, and it's hard to resist. Here he confirms the suspicions of a number of Slashdot readers who looked closely at his previous efforts featured on these pages.

Well, A few weeks ago when I announced my LEGO Mona Lisa, a few folks from Slashdot.org noticed the lower half of a statue ... and some guessed what my next project announcement would be. I've now finally completed a statue of 'San' from the Japanese Animation film Princess Mononoke.

I wrote quite a lot about this model ... and took many, many pictures, so I hope you enjoy browsing.

I also recently finished a much smaller model of the BSD Daemon mascot.

cheers,

eric

Enough already! crizh writes "Anyone interested in another arguement about the merits of the P4 and whether Tom Pabst is biased against Intel/AMD might want to check out the further update he posted on P4/MPEG4 this morning."

Further submissions in this category must be accompanied by sizeable bribes or at least juicy blackmail. Let's see what people think of the P4 vs. whatever Athon variety is cool in 12 months from now and talk about it again then;)

Sore thumbs, perhaps. An unnamed correspondent points out this enormous videogame auction, venturing as he does so: "Seems to be as big if not bigger than the previous one posted."

I dunno about that, but it sure is a lot of games. Is everyone dumping their consoles to spend the proceeds on exotic vacations, or what?

fuuzy math for a new era Erik Inge Bolsø writes "Earlier this year, slashdot had a scoop about a 1990 and 1995 study called fuzz, which tested the quality of UNIX utilities.

In july this year, a followup study was published, in which they did subject a collection of common apps on Windows NT (and 2000) to the same tests. The results are interesting... Full paper available here."

Brother, can you spare some time? swgill writes "After reading about Microsoft's attempt to reach beginner programmers with free copies of Visual C++ for schools I thought about the main problem that was found: Visual C++ and the related teaching material is all based on the Windows API, and algorithms are treated as secondary as best. I am actually in college in England doing an A-level in Computing where I can see the effects of this educational policy (although we use VB6 instead of VC++6). I have decided to found the libteach project at sourceforge. The idea is to prevent people learning to program in school from being forced to relearn their skills when Micro$oft switches focus again and to also give them an idea of programming for another type of system (RT-Linux anyone?)."

Sounds like a worthy project, albeit for now still in the planning stages. Of course, it's helped by the fact that there are several Open Source OSes chock full of programming languages out there, but not by the lack of decent IDEs available for them.

Update The latest in our Hellmouth Revisited series is now online .

It's backpedaling time when it comes to the alleged Sega / Nintendo joint venture ... just goes to show how easy it is to get signals crossed in a business where no fact is necessarily stranger than fiction. Words from our recent FBI visitee. More Lego madness too, combining modern technology with that funny smile that haunts even we scoffers. All below -- smile!

It was still an interesting concept, though. Gemini writes: "Just thought I'd let you know IGN made an error regarding Sega and Nintendo forming a joint company. Their retraction is [here]"

Tenryujin adds: "IGN DC reported that Sega has not stated that they will be developing software for rival consoles. They also have already stated in the past that their next generation console beyond the Dreamcast is already in development (as I'm sure Sony's hard at work on their PlayStation 3), but that's far in the future. "shifting focus" and "moving away completely" are two entirely different things. :)

Nowhere have they announced that they are getting out of the hardware business. This time next year, we'll have X-Box, PlayStation 2, Indrema, Gamecube and Dreamcast."

Marge, your child is so artistic. Keep him away from my family. You've seen a massive lego train layout, and you've seen the lego desk, but are you ready for ... something more inspiring and enigmatic? Eric Harshbarger, reknowned sculptor of the Lego Desk is at it again. He circulated an e-mail saying, "... I have finally finished the 'LEGO Mona Lisa'. It is viewable at: [this link] whew..." Yow. If you are anywhere near Auburn, Ala. this week, perhaps a polite e-mail to Eric will let get you a close-up look, but he will be packing it up this weekend (Nov. 5th).

The mind boggles.

And the fastest update in the West -- hwaara writes: "The guy who got ruined by FBI has updated his page with answers to common questions by Slashdot readers, check it out here." That includes questions like: 'What the heck were you doing visiting a just cracked site and port-scanning?!' to which Andreas has some pointed words.

Thinking (witch) caps for next year ... Karl writes "Halloween: the perfect opportunity to share the software. Instead of handing-out shrink-wrapped candy, give out the ole' stack of Debian GNU/Linux CD's when those trick-or-treaters ring at the door. The implications and possibilities are endless. If anyone wants to be part of this GNU/Linux Halloween give-away distribution rampage, please e-mail me. I'll probe all sorts of sponsors and get the CD's to give out in 2001. We can print CD labels that have helpful URLs, or LUG URLs and stick them to the CDs. E-mail me with any enthusiasm, ideas, or comments: your input will steer the project. (NOSPAM: karl-at-tux.org)"

This sounds like a great idea to me. Save up all those nice boxes that America Online has been spamming you with, remove the inner label, and re-use. ;)

It's a prety amazing sight to see. Check out how a full size desk is made of LEGOs - complete with drawers, and holes for wires. 35,000+ blocks of joy, and a lot of glue. Yum.

Let's start this off with some Microsoft parodies: Polo pointed us to a version of office2000 that many Slashdotters might prefer to the Microsoft version. Lexie (ask out CowboyNeal!) sent us a Microsoft Monopoly that you probably won't see in stores. G. Crisp sent us a Lego Penguin: proof that someone has both too much spare time, and too many legos. An anonymous reader noted that you can get AccuWeather®5-Day Forecast for AREA 51. Forecast calls for black helecopters and Gillian Anderson. witten sent us a random Jon Katz story generator called (not surprisingly) Katzdot. While we're on the subject of Slashdot, it's worth nothing that ThinkGeek is now carrying new Slashdot T-Shirts. Of course personally I'd prefer the 'Kernel Panic' shot glasses, but then again, I've had a pretty long week. dayeight sent us something that is pretty indescribible. It involves video games, but presumably it also involved some sort of illegal substances too. I think its a metaphor for something. How about a few 'True Stories' to brighten up your day (no I'm not talking about zany Talking Heads movies). First zentropy sent us what seems to be a true story about why sports and Taco Bell just don't mix. An anonymous reader showed us a woman who is trying to get workers comp from her employer since she got carpal tunnel... her job involves phones, but it wasn't dialing them that caused the *ahem* injury.