☠️The Death Dialer, RSS Madness, and a Keyboard Computer
yeah you read that right
Hello! and welcome to another week in The Land of Random.
What a historic weekend that was - wasn’t it?
I just glanced through the ole’ archive, and I’ve written over 260 issues of this newsletter. That’s crazy!
Through rain, shine, sickness, birth of three children - this newsletter has not ceased to come to your inbox on Mondays.
The fifth anniversary of The Land of Random is coming up here in August. I’m not sure if I’m going to do anything special yet. Hmmmm.
I do have a dream of making a Land of Random Physical ‘zine - maybe that’ll be a goal for next year.
The latest season of The Boys has been pretty crazy. They managed to tie in the Gen V series pretty well, which I feel like I rarely see with tie-in shows.
ALSO - Suicide Squad Isekai is AWESOME. When you have opening credits that go this hard - you know it’s gonna be good.
Seriously - why don’t they just put all the DC characters off into “anime land” forever because it would be sooooo much better than watching the whole DC universe get remade.
Here in Tennessee, I had a little College reunion over the weekend with a ton of old classmates. It was a wonderful time seeing everyone after so long!
Time has flown by so fast! Where have the past eight years gone?
Let’s dive in shall we?
☠️ Death Dialler
One day we will die.
Usually, we’ll leave a will behind - maybe even a videotape (private yt video link? USB drive?)
Even less likely - a few will even create scheduled emails that get sent out 1-2 years after they die.
What if . . . you could just have a prerecorded phone call that happened after you died?
That’s the idea behind the Death Dialer - an ancient Windows program for recording a message to be played in the event of your death.
Sounds like a fairly modern program right? Well, this website is from 2005.
Can you IMAGINE how creepy it would be to have a phone call from a deceased loved one especially when . . .
“It can be set to retry dialling a fixed number of times at specified intervals, and to repeat the message a fixed number of times.” (source)
Yeah. Back in 2005 that would’ve sounded crazy.
At least TODAY we’d assume “oh! must’ve be scheduled - but CREEPY.”
I have no idea if the Death Dialer still works - as the program is designed for Windows 98 and above.
Check out this creepy little program at the link!
🛜 RSS Madness
You may have noticed that I’ve stopped adding the “Walled Garden” section to the newsletter.
I’ve pretty much stopped checking Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.
I only have Pinterest and Twitter on my phone now.
I’ve been going all in on RSS feeds these days. Inoreader is my tool of choice for this mission, and I don’t see myself changing RSS providers anytime soon . . .
My current goal is to get to 1,000 RSS feeds within the next few years.
I’m not sure how many links that’ll mean a week to look at - but I currently have anywhere from 10,000-15,000 a week to browse.
I only browse like 7,000 of those a week, butttt I’m always hunting for more sources to browse.
“Collect RSS Feeds like Pokemon Cards. The more, the better.” - Quote by me
I’ve been archiving some interesting RSS materials over the past few months, and thought I’d share!
RSS Tools
RSS Bridge - Create RSS feeds for websites that don’t have one.
Feedle - It’s a search engine for RSS feeds. Oooooh.
Vcard RSS - Really intriguing idea for creating personal update feeds
RSS Feed Extractor - Extract RSS feeds from sites!
RSS Dump
Discover RSS - A collection of RSS feeds
Oooh Directory - A collection of over 2000 blogs
Extra Mundane Guide - An epic guide to RSS stuff. (Rip to unofficial Twitter RSS)
RSS Theory
What is RSS like? - some interesting thoughts.
💻 The Keyboard Computer
Hear me out . . . what if your computer WASSS your keyboard??
The whole computer . . . crammed into your keyboard.
That’s the idea behind LingLing’s keyboard PC.
It’s just a CHONKY keyboard but inside that keyboard is a WHOLE PC.
Linglong says this key-puter (you read it here first) will last up to ten hours for light use, and nearly six hours for watching movies, but heavy use will have you down to four hours, which really isn’t that bad. Spec-wise, it looks pretty good, with an AMD Ryzen 7 and either 16 or 32 GB of memory and a half- or full-terabyte hard drive. The whole thing is around 4 x 6″ (15 x 10cm), presumably in the folded orientation, and weighs less than two pounds (800 g). The projected cost is $400-500 depending on specs. (source)
Pair this with a portable monitor (the kind with a battery maybe), a mouse, and you’ve got yourself one heck of a portable setup!
Side note - It’s crazy that you can stick 32 gigs of RAM and 1000 gigs of storage in a keyboard.
You could hypothetically use this as a “one device” laptop + desktop replacement.
Use it with a portable monitor at a coffee shop - or set it up with a monitor at home!
Watch the Keynote here.
Check out this article at Tom’s Hardware for more specs!
🐙The Land of Random
Downnnnn into the internet we go. What will we discover?
Teranoptia
Want to decorate your docs with medieval monsters? strange mythical beings? download this neat fontless font.
Visiting Some of the Last Sears
Yo I didn’t even know there were any Sears still open in the States!!!! This guy explores three of them. They’re just as sad as you imagined.
WOW!
Click the Wow button → Get Wow from a different movie.
Vertex Meadow
Transform a 2D image into a 3D world that YOU can explore!!! Oooooooh.
Biblically Accurate Lofi HipHop
The genres continue to amaze me. like. why. what.
Make a Mini 3D-Printed Press!
Seriously - this does look like a fun project to do. Could you imagine printing ads with one of these???? (aside - there’s actually a project dedicated to 3D printed printing presses)
The Taser 10
A Taser that shoots not one, not two, but up to 10 taser probes. Crazy.
Explore Satellite Images of Earth
Looking for lost pyramids? cities? old abandoned towns deep in the woods? Get to work.
That’s all for this week unless you wanna see a cool lighthouse for sale.
(Wouldn’t living in a lighthouse be cool?)
or how about some nightmare fuel?