Awesome.  This guy had 2 huge neodymium magnets (the kind that are decidedly not toys) and somehow let his finger get in between them.  WHAM.  

These monsters shattered the bone, tore the nail off, lived up to the warning on the packaging.  Lessons that end in a little gore are lessons that stick.  Note the size of those magnets in the picture and don’t miss the fingernail and bits of Dirk stuck between them.  

Buy your own and crush you fingers here.

Don’t take my word for it, check out Dirk’s full harrowing tale.

The neodymiums your mom warned you about.

I finally wearied of the stock screensavers on my Kindle and decided to take matters into my own hands, replacing what Amazon provided with a few of my favorite Science, Science Fiction and Fantasy authors instead. Instructions to change out your screensavers are below as are the pics I slapped names on to use on mine. The Lovecraft is actually a drawing by Bruce Timm, one of my favorite artists. Anyway, here is the collection I went looking for when I decided to upgrade my Kindle’s images and, when I could not find them, I whipped them up myself.

Brief instructions:

Note that this will remove all of the native screensavers, if you hate that you can restore by removing the Kindle folder //system/screen_saver and restarting the unit. That’ll restore the native savers.

1. Attach the Kindle to your pc using a USB cable, you should see a drive named ‘Kindle’
2. Create a new folder in the Kindle’s root named ‘pictures’ and one under that named ’screensavers’
3. Copy your new image files into the screensavers folder (they have to be 8bit greyscale 800 x 600)
4. Disconnect Kindle
5. Go to the Kindle’s home menu and press alt-Z. This will create a new book called “screensavers” at the end of your book list, open that book
6. Flip through the pics in that new book and press alt-F to go into Full Screen mode then press alt-shift-0 (i.e., alt-shift-zero) to export as a screensaver . After a short delay, you’ll get a message that your picture has been exported as a screensaver. Close the message and go to the next one.

So I upgraded today from an earlier version of 3 to the new beta 5.  Biggest difference?  Not one, not two, but three sets of navigation buttons!  Yeah, behold the future of surfing UI you chumps.

So I checked and IE 7? One back button.  Opera v9.27?  One measly back button.  Safari 3.1?  Yep, only one.  Losers.  Once again the folks at the fox are blazing trails with usability.  Baby got back x 3.

Navigating backward has never been easier or more fun.  Thanks Firefox!  After being Rickrolled earlier tonight (thanks Grandma) I navigated back so fast that I pulled a muscle in my neck.  This is like my browser going to 11, only 8 less.

Upgrade today and I’ll see you somewhere back there, ’cause that’s where I’ll be.

I’m going to be participating in the (standby for the adjectives) online, ‘radio-dramatized’, fan driven, Buffy the Vampire Slayer project known as ‘Buffy Between the Lines’.  Season 2 is just gearing up and I’ll be playing the mysterious character known as ‘Keith’ though I think that they are going to kill me off.  Because they can.

You can listen to season I and read about the project here: http://buffybetweenthelines.com

Also available via podcast.

I’m pretty psyched about participating and it came as no surprise that the part I got has no singing…