After seeing a couple of other people post their results on Flickr, I thought I’d give a go of FaceYourManga. It’s an manga-avatar creation website, where you can choose from a whole range of different features to build your own manga face. Here’s what I came up with:

So… does this look like me? In my opinion, kind of. I wished you could specify your own colours (I mean , how hard can that be?). My hair and eye colour aren’t right at all; they’re a much warmer brown, while this is just bland. Anyhow, it’s a nice little app to play with.

Check out some other people’s Manga Faces: Cristiano, Alper, Dan, Eelke and Jo.

Have you played aroung with Wordle yet? This fun tool has been popping up everywhere the past week, so I thought I’d try it out and see what all the fuss is about. It basically generates a word cloud from whatever text you provide, giving prominence to words that appear more frequently in it. You can play around with all types of setttings, like Font, Layout and Color, creating your own personal tag cloud.

This is what it came up with for my del.icio.us account.:

Pretty cool, huh? I’d love to have a T-Shirt with this on it! I’m not sure what else I’d really use Wordle for, but I can imagine you could create some pretty cool presentation slides with it. If you want to make a cool word cloud yourself, just head on over to the Wordle site.

Until about a year ago, I didn’t really have a daily morning ritual. I wasn’t so addicted to my computer that I had to check it the moment I woke up. At the time I didn’t even follow any blogs or other news sources. Since I got a laptop though that kind of changed. My laptop is with hand’s reach of my bed and every morning I sit at least half an hour in bed, slowly waking up and reading all the items in my news reader. Among those items are a great collection of geeky web comics. I’ll share with you a couple of my favourites.

xkcd

Every geek should read xkcd; it’s a weird mix of humor, math, romance and language.

Geek and Poke

Cute comic with some great humor on blogging, Twitter and other “social media”.

Applegeeks

Surprisingly it’s not always Apple related.

Sinfest

I mainly like the cat and dog comics here. The rest can be funny at times, but the cat and dog are always hilarious.

Real Life Comics

Funny comic about a geeky couple, Greg and Liz.

PHD Comics

While I’m not doing a PHD, I am still trying to finish my master’s and this comic sometimes captures exactly how I’m feeling.

I can’t believe this new IMDB feature slipped by me. If you’re reading this blog, then I assume you have at least an inkling of an idea of what IMDB is. If not, it’s the Internet Movie DataBase and contains info about movies, actors, directors, producers, etc. Pretty handy, if you want to know everything about movies and tv as I do.

IMDB has two main cornerstones: Name pages, for all the people (actors, producers, etc) and Title pages for, ehm, all the titles (movies, tv-series, videogames, etc). Last week they added a new type of page to the mix: Character pages. Every character from a movie or tv-series or video game can have their own page including biography, quotes and appearances. The IMDB staff have already created 20000 character pages of the most well-known characters, but the idea is that users can add and edit pages.

This feature starts to get interesting when considering characters that appear in multiple series/movies or have been played by different people. For instance, did you know that Ursula Buffay, the sister of Phoebe in Friends first appeared in Mad About You? Or that Jack Ryan, a main character in books of Tom Clancy, has been portayed by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck?

Sadly, I have noticed some problems with this new feature. Because the content is user generated, you only need one lazy user to create a new page for someone who already exists. IMDB gives a nice disclaimer:

The content of this page was created by users. It has not been screened or verified by IMDb staff.

But does this mean that there are also pages that are screened and verified? I’ve already stumbled on multiple pages for one person (King Arthur) and I wonder how IMDB will deal with this.

It’s an interesting new feature and it gives IMDB that extra dimension to create an even more complex network. If you’re looking to procrastinate, you can easily spend some time just clicking from one page to another. Don’t look at me like that; I never do that !

A couple of weeks ago I ordered some T-shirts for Cristiano and me from Threadless, when they had a “all-Tshirts-10-dollars” sale. I finally have got them, after having to go to a Delivery Office and pay 3 pounds extra import tax and 8 pounds handling fee. I find the handling fee a bit ridiculous, cause if they hadn’t checked it and just sent it straight to me, they wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of handling it. Instead they decide there’s an extra import tax on it, giving me extra trouble to have to pick it up and adding a handling fee on top of that! Now I haven’t been that long in the UK, but does this happen often? Do they always check everything? Or is it (like in Holland) that once in a while you can be unlucky and they check what it is?

Anyhow, I finally have my T-shirts and I just love them (see pictures)! I really like the whole idea behind Threadless; everything is basically user-generated. Anyone can submit a T-shirt design and people can score the design. Based on the number of scores, the average score and the comments people leave behind the Threadless team decide which designs will be printed. Next to that you can collect points by submitting photo’s of you wearing Threadless T-shirts, with which you get extra store credit and thus, more reason to buy more T-shirts. The T-shirts themselves are funny and pretty, in a very unique type of way. I have a lot of Emily Strange T-shirts, but these are just so much cooler.

So what are you waiting for? Get some T-shirts!

I’ve always liked the idea of del.icio.us and do kind of use it, but the website itself was never really “delicious”. Yes, it did do what it had to do, but you wouldn’t really consider it a pretty interface. This all is seeming to change though. Techcrunch showed some screenshots of the new website here.

I really like the new look; it seems much more userfriendly. They’ve also added some needed searching and tagging functionalities. You can request an invite, but at the moment they’ll just put you on the waiting list.