the newts.net

Remember the post about the mystery giant robot from 4 1/2 years ago??

Well I think we may have found out what it was!

Read on…

Well, Madonna is looking like a skeleton and the only thing she’s getting out here is her bones. Amy Winehouse has fattened up but you still wouldn’t touch it with a huge barge pole and Lilly Allen with blonde hair just isn’t right, tits out or not…

…But the good news is the very lovely Jennifer Aniston has bared all for the lads.  Wey Hey for Jen!

Happy New Year one and all.

Peace be with you all ;O)

//\\//ewts.

I sincerely hope the London 2012 Olympic Naming Committee are going to show a little more sympathy when handing out the name vests as this kind of behaviour is quite simply not warranted in the 21st century.

Just a brief note to wish you one and all, a very Merry Christmas!

Spare a thought for those less fortunate than yourselves (like the poor old newts stuffed up with the flu all Christmas!) and then have a great family fun filled time!

And for the more sadistic amongst you, all images enlarge on click for further gratification.

“Considered by many the most beautiful country in Eastern-Europe, Romania still claims regions that seem bastions of a medieval past long since lost elsewhere.”

A quote taken from Fodor’s Eastern and Central Europe.

I thought however even in the Middle Ages they had the decency to crap in the privacy of their own homes and then throw it in to the street!

There’s some pretty gruesome stuff on the net and this little vid definitely falls into that category. A guy on a moped gets run over and then scraped along the road by a lorry.

squished

The original hot tub, where the last one out wins a beer :0)

And don’t forget kids, don’t DRINK & DRIVE…

…And don’t DRIVE & WANK.

(There’s bloody cameras everywhere!)

Christmas best wishes to one and all!

Have a great time, remember those less fortunate than yourselves, then party into 2008 in style.

Peace,

//\\//ewts.

Nissan’s new battery powered Pivo2 includes a nodding monkey on the dashboard. She can converse in English and Japanese, give you directions and scan your face for signs of tiredness. She can also criticise your driving and nag you for getting home late. So, buy the new Nissan and there’ll be no need to get yourself a wife!

Click to see video.

Kites & People a plenty. I was especially impressed by this fella…

A rough calculation by me had it at 200 metres or over 650 feet long. It was also subject to permission from the aviation authority before it could be flown, it was that long!

Although Ben seemed more impressed with the motorbikes…

Me, Rach, Ben and Rio are having a compo to see who can grow the tallest sunflower. We have 4 sunflower seeds each chosen from a selection of 16. Rio got first pick, Ben got second pick, Rach craftily chose her four candidates next and I got the remaining four seeds. You can see our selections below:

Once chosen, each seed was planted at random by Ben in it’s own organic plant pot. Some went in vertical, some were on the horizontal, some were on an angle. A real random planting process :

The only seed that stood out from the others was one of Ben’s. It’s the second from the left in his picture. This seed was a big fella. It was like a twin sunflower seed. It’s one of Ben’s but we don’t know which number it is.

So all the seeds are now planted, watered and sitting on the window sill awaiting germination and outdoor planting.

So now it’s YOUR chance to make an easy £6. I’m selling a £1 bet on each of the 16 plants, the winner being the TALLEST sunflower at a pre determined date. £6 will go to the winning bet, and £5 each to Rach’s & Toni’s sponsorship of the Cancer Research Uk’s ‘Race For Life’

YOU can pick any of the seeds you like, and to keep it fair, Me, Rach, Ben & Rio will each have the one remaining seed in our name. So drop me a line and let me know which seed you want your £1 on and don’t forget people, not only can you win six notes, you’re doin your bit for CHARIDY MATE!

Rio 1 - Steve Courtney
Rio 2 - Trish Courtney
Rio 3 - C.J.
Rio 4 -Rio

Ben 1 - Wesley Brown
Ben 2 - Chrissy
Ben 3 - Ben
Ben 4 - Lee Ornsby

Rach 1 - Jenna Ornsby
Rach 2 - Donna
Rach 3 - Garry Ornsby
Rach 4 -Rach

Scott 1 - Oli
Scott 2 - Ellie Ornsby
Scott 3 - Scott
Scott 4 -Steve

Just to wish you and yours a happy and prosperous 2007. Have a great night tonight and many more throughout the year.

To the 280,000 visitors to the newts.net, and your 11.5 million hits throughout 2006, thanks for visiting the site, and I hope you’ll be checking back at the newts.net regularly in 2007.

Just a short note to wish you and your loved ones a wonderful Christmas. Be good, have fun and spare a thought for those less fortunate than yourselves.

newts.

Detecting Santa all starts with the NORAD radar system called the North Warning System. This powerful radar system has 47 installations strung across the northern border of North America. NORAD makes a point of checking the radar closely for indications of Santa Claus leaving the North Pole on Christmas Eve.

The moment our radar tells us that Santa has lifted off, we use our second mode of detection, the same satellites that we use in providing warning of possible missile launches aimed at North America. These satellites are located in a geo-synchronous orbit (that’s a cool phrase meaning that the satellite is always fixed over the same spot on the Earth) at 22,300 miles above the Earth. The satellites have infrared sensors, meaning they can detect heat. When a rocket or missile is launched, a tremendous amount of heat is produced - enough for the satellites to detect. Rudolph’s nose gives off an infrared signature similar to a missile launch. The satellites can detect Rudolph’s bright red nose with practically no problem. With so many years of experience, NORAD has become good at tracking aircraft entering North America, detecting worldwide missile launches and tracking the progress of Santa, thanks to Rudolph.
So kids, If you wanna know where Santa’s at this Christmas Eve, you can track him right here!

“Off-licence chain Threshers is braced for an onslaught of bargain-hunting drinkers as an online discount voucher is downloaded by millions of people.

The 40%-off wine and champagne voucher was intended for suppliers and their friends, but has been distributed widely via blogs, email and chatrooms.” Read more of the BBC News story here.

In the meantime, download and print your own voucher, and bag yourself some cheap wine & champers this Christmas.

The offer is only valid until 10th December so act fast and pass this message on!

I’ve had the installer file for the web browser Opera 9 Beta on my desktop for a few months now. It was only yesterday during a much needed desktop thinning out session that I came across the file and decided to give it a whirl. I downloaded it originally just to have it on my pc for checking the rendering and compatibility of the newts .net. I’ve had older versions of Opera as my default browser before, but for a while now, Mozilla’s Firefox has been my personal browser of choice. For lots of very good reasons.

Since the beta version of Opera 9 installer had been on my desktop for a while, I thought I’d just do a quick check to make sure there were no new releases. Good job I did. Opera 9.0.2 stable release was already available for free download. So I got latest version and whipped it on my pc sharpish.

First impressions are very positive. Vastly more impressive than the bog standard latest release of Internet Explorer, but that’s not saying much! There’s a number of features that Opera 9 shares with Firefox, most importantly the fabulous tabbed browsing, but there’s also a couple of new ideas that look very exciting and useable.

Firstly about tabbed browsing. It’s the ability to have several web pages open in the same browsing window. They line up in tabs along the top of the browser window where you can flick from one to another quickly and easily. It’s all very well me talking about it, but you have to try it to see what it’s like for real. If you have never experienced tabbed browsing you must try it out for yourself. Get yourself a free copy of Firefox or Opera and have a play with it. Tabbed browsing is not yet available in the very bog standard Internet Explorer browser, although I see it’s being written into the new v7 release, and once you’ve tried it, I’m 99% sure you’ll never want to be without it again.

Another feature that’s new to Opera and not in Firefox is called Mouse Gestures. Mouse gestures exist for most frequently performed operations like next page, previous page, fast forward, rewind, home, reload, stop, panning, zooming and many more. Gestures work on the tiniest movement of your mouse in various directions with various combinations of button clicks. For example, hold the right button down and move the mouse a fraction to the left and you go back a page. Similarly, a right click and move to the right moves you on a page. As I described with tabbed browsing, it’s a feature that you need to try out for yourself to fully appreciate it’s ease and usefulness.

Opera 9 is fully customisable, right down to how it looks using skins. There’s also a huge amount of addons, or ‘Widgets’ as they are called in Opera, that add even more user personalisation and functionality. All easily added to your browser with a dedicated widgets button and a few clicks.

And finally, one very inventive feature of the new Opera release is Voice. For the serious web surfers among you who have a headset microphone, it basically means you can talk to Opera and tell it what to do. Sit back, feet up, leave the cordless mouse on charge and talk your way through your sites of choice. Very clever stuff! But it doesn’t stop there. Probably the best and most useable feature of Voice is it’s ability to talk back to you. Highlight any web page or paragraphs of text, hit V on your keyboard, and Opera will read it all back to you!

Innovative? I haven’t seen it in any other browser offering. Clever? Very. Lazy? Quite possibly. Fun? Abso fuckin lootley!

It’s just a shame you’ve had to read all the way to the bottom of this post, because with the new Opera 9, it would have sounded like this.

You can download Opera 9 for yourself by clicking the Opera logo above.

You may have noticed in the bottom left menu of the newts.net that there’s a link to Geo Visitors.  A cool little site that shows where visitors to the newts have come from in the last 24 hours.  If you click on the link it looks a little like this:

You can click on any of the map pins and zoom in on it to street level with Google map.  You can also view the location in Google Earth if you have it installed on your pc; and if you haven’t, you ought to because it’s fantastic, it’s free, and it’s here.

A spooky thing happened  to me tonight though.  Out of the hundreds of pins on the map I just thought I’d pick one at random and zoom in to have a look where the visitor was from.  I picked a pin in Los Angeles, zoomed in on it, and found:

SPOOOOKY :(