Show off your tricks

2003-04-27 08:05

Louis Nel

Cape Town - Roll up! Roll up! We've got a show full of wonderful magic and illusion! Learn a few tricks yourself and amaze your friends.

And speaking about amazing: it's quite amazing what some celebrities let slip when caught off guard by microphones, when they're just having a "duh" moment and when they're ... er ... not quite sober.

We'll listen to some of them saying things they sure wish they had never said.

Cool sites

Nothing like a bit of illusion to soften the harshness of reality. At Grand Illusions there are a nice collection of fascinating illusions to put some magic back in life.

Explore optical illusions, scientific toys, visual effects, and even a little magic at the site. See the Jolly Jug used for an "old-fashioned" trick; find nine missing people in a picture; be amazed by the effect of "the intriguing after image"; try and count disappearing dots; explore the moon illusion; and learn a wonderful new card "trick" that actually has a scientific explanation.

And if you want more card tricks, head over to this site for more than a magician can pull out of a hat.

There are categories for easy, intermediate and hard card tricks, as well as for impromptu, mathematical, mental and memory tricks, and of course, different sleights of hand. After all this, you're ready for Vegas (or the local childrens' parties ...)

"Wish I hadn't said that." That must surely be the fervent wish of some celebs. Spare a thought for these poor suckers when you listen to what they had to say in front of those ever present microphones.

A site called Rants has a whole archive of recordings. "These recordings have been lovingly collected from industry insiders, disgruntled employees, voice-over out takes, and banned material," according to the site.

Listen to captain Kirk of Star Trek fame butcher The Beatles; John Wayne giving a drunken speech; and Elvis threatening to "rip out the tongues" of people who accused him of being "strung out", saying it's an insult to his parents, his family, his friends, his doctor and who knows who else. This a mere year and a half before his death ...

Hot software

Maybe this one belonged under "Hot sites", but there are so many great games for the taking at Home of the Underdogs that I thought I'd put it in this section.

The site is dedicated to "underrated" PC games - no less than 4 374 of them. They are games that never quite made it (but deserved to) - freeware, "abandonware", and commercial underdogs.

All the downloads are free "because our intention is merely to preserve underrated games before they are lost forever, and it is definitely not our right to charge fees for something we neither own nor created".

Pick a game by title, year, theme, company or randomly. Or browse by genre: applications, action, adventure, education, puzzle, simulation, sport, war, strategy.

Here's a nice and useful add-on to your browser if you use Internet Explorer. Irondust QuickSend allows you to e-mail text selections with the click of the mouse button.

After selecting text on a site, use the right-click context menu to e-mail the text using your default e-mail client (Outlook, Outlook Express, etc.) The selected text has to be less than 300 characters.

It's free, only 39 KB big and runs under Windows 98/ME/2000/XP.

Latest updates

WebCopier 3.3
Download websites and view them offline (1.5 MB; shareware; all Windows versions)

Bug and virus watch

Wow! Four more security holes have been discovered in Internet Explorer. How many more before it becomes one big black hole?

Microsoft have brought out a cumulative patch for IE to take care of the four newly discovered vulnerabilities as well as of all previously announced ones.

The worst vulnerability could allow an attacker to run code of his/her choice on a user's machine.

Microsoft has given this a risk rating of "critical", so you had better grab the patch.

Go here for more info and the patch.

If you use Outlook Express, you had better also get the latest cumulative patch for that. It also plugs a hole that could allow an attacker to do his/her thing on your PC.

More info about the hole and the patch is available here.

Tip of the Week

Ever watched a great movie on your PC, only to have the image freeze while the sound continues? I have (just the other day) and man, it's "really" frustrating.

I rewound, forwarded, restarted, tried every trick I could think of, blasphemed ... I watched to the (bitter) end, but I was a wreck. If only I had DivXRepair.

If you have the same problem, or have "disoriented or equally coloured blocks of pixels distorting the image for a time", feed the offending AVI file to this programme choosing "Add File". Then click on "Repair files" and DivXRepair will cut off the bad parts and save a new file in the same directory with the old file and generate a report.

Download size: 425 KB. It's free and works with Win 9x, W2K and XP.

Have another nice long weekend ;-)

Louis

- News24