One of the charming aspects of the new Civ 5 game is the number of pop culture and comedy references the developers have included in it. Everything from Battlestar Galactica to All Your Base makes an appearance in the achievements, instructions and in this particular instance – the quotes you get when unlocking a new Technology. The important thing to remember however, when referencing a sacred cow is to not bloody cock it up! Sadly Civ5 has managed to do just that several times throughout the game – the worst offence in our eyes is against the exceedingly talented Tom Lehrer.

Ok so this probably didn’t deserve a whole post to itself but Mr Lehrer is our very own particular sacred cow and well… it’s given us the chance to turn you on to him and his works now too. We thoroughly recommend you give him a listen here.

Pokémon Apocalypse – Live action Pokemon Movie (Fan made and awesome).

Watermelon App – Testing an app for judging watermelon ripeness (NSFW).

YouTubeSocial – How YouTube will let you simultaneously watch videos with friends.

List Of “Asia’s Top 50 Apps” – Far eastern insight.

No One Likes M. Night Shyamalan – Very funny, one for the film buffs.

Minepedia – The Wiki for Minecraft.

My Friend Fernando – The Fernando Rizo Press photo diary.

Sensing an opportunity to capitalise on the  imminent release of The Social Network this new Greenpeace, anti-Facebook campaign is both well timed and excellently produced. The compelling (and very shareable) video is not only  cute, funny and clear but also very hard to argue against, tapping as it does into a real and growing area of consumer concern. It’ll be interesting to see how Facebook respond to this, if at all.

The aim of the video is to get Facebook to ‘unfriend coal’ and to start powering their electricity hungry servers with energy from a more renewable source (namely wind). Give it a watch and make up your own mind as to how effective you think it’s going to be.

Another excellent one take music video from OK Go and it’s filled with cute (and clever) doggies. Win!

swarmation.com – Cooperative flash game where you play through life as a pixel. Say goodbye to your productivity.

mapenvelope.com – Print your own “wish you were here” envelope.

Low Orbit Ion Cannon – The 4Chan DDOS tool.

stickybits.com – Customise and print your own meta barcodes.

gazopa.com – “find similar” image search engine, quite good ackshully.

Cool steampunk iPhone Dock – Nice!

Nooooooooooooooooooooo! – Click in times of great stress.

hyperboleandahalf – We just discovered this excellently written and very funny, personal blog, check it out.

photomacrography.net – Excellent community for fans of macro and micro snapping.

In a new blog post titled “Six things you didn’t know about Twitter direct messaging” @timwhitlock has very helpfully highlighted a few often overlooked facts about the world’s favourite Micro-blogging site’s Direct Messaging system. The most surprising of which is that DMs you send over Twitter are not private, they are simply direct.

As he points out, all third party applications you authorise can read your DMs. Once you authorise a tool that’s it – they’ve got access until you revoke permissions. That means any phone numbers, email addresses, passwords or even account information that you might have shared by DM can be seen and you’ve just got to trust the 3rd party developer to treat your privacy with some level of respect.

While not necessarily a problem in and of itself it’s likely to come as a surprise to a great many web users who are used to having popular web services manage privacy features that are tougher to crack and Tim’s post isn’t all bad news either. He’s very kindly come up with a solution for concerned users by creating a tool for backing up and then deleting Twitter DMs – the Twitter DM Cleaner.

Once authorised (irony noted) the tool presents you with two functions; backup and Delete. Backing up has the tool email you yourt hreaded message conversations and the Delete… well it’s an all or nothing affair so be sure you really want to do it first!

It also comes with a helpful reminder to regularly go through your account settings and revoke permission from apps you no longer want to use, you can do that in your connection settings here.

Thanks Tim!

This helmet-cam video shows engineers climbing a 1,768 foot broadcast tower – seriously, we were scared just watching it. Be warned, this video is not for anyone with a fear of heights!

The people that do this job must get paid a bloody fortune, also where are their parachutes!

Got a song stuck in your head? Been humming it all day even though you can’t stand it? Well finally there’s a solution… sort of.

From the blurb: “We created this site for those of you that have a song stuck in your head and you can’t get it out no matter what you do. Using the latest in reverse-auditory-melodic-unstickification technology, we’ve been able to allow our users to “unhear” songs by hearing equally catchy songs. So really all we’re doing is making you forget your old song by replacing it with another one… sorry. “

Ok so it’s not a perfect solution but at least it’s good to know that there are people out there who care, People who are never going to give you up, never going to let you down, never going to run around and hurt you…

Click!

There’s trouble @Twitter – Guardian article about sports stars getting in trouble on twitter.

How the homeless use credit cards – Results of an interesting social experiment.

Animal Carcass Punching Bags – Extreme taxidermy.

Recycled Island – Visionary idea about what to do with the collected plastic junk accumulating in the Pacific.

Africa in perspective – revealing infographic about world geography.

Life-Size “Aliens” Power Loader Costume – Want something special for Halloween? Try this instructable!

Awwwwwwwww.

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