TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Watch this YouTube Short video by Unstopable Gadgets. R ecently a video,  This robot has impressive body control , came up in my YouTube homepage showing a mini, realistic walking, and automatic stabilising, humanoid style robot. For a brief moment my mind got a little excited that maybe someone had cracked a consumer friendly, sized human robot that anyone could afford. Now I wasn't thinking this thing was going to be your next household chores assistant, since it was barely the height of a toddler but, to have something that good, that anyone could afford and experiment with. Maybe you've got a kid into robotics who wants to upgrade from Lego Mindstorms for example. Anyway, it turned out the video I was watching was from about 2020 and is of a robot that's been in constant development, by Dr Guero ,  since 2012/13 and could walk like a human by 2014/15. Back in around 2013 a robot that could walk, at all, on two legs, let alone one that could walk like a human was still v...

W riter/director Kevin Smith's, The 4:30 Movie plays like a prequel to his original first film, Clerks (1994). While the main cast are not the same characters as those in Clerks, if you renamed them, and squinted a bit, they're not that far removed. That and, if you've listened to Kevin's many podcasts for a long time, you'll know the central character here, Brian (Austin Zajur - who recently became engaged to Smith's daughter Harley Quinn Smith - playing Sister Sarah Wallace in this film), draws inspiration from teenage Kevin Smith, who also liked recording his thoughts randomly throughout the day - and see movies. To make the final case, it could be a prequel, you'll have to see the ending. With that out of the way, I'm getting around to reviewing this now because the film only recently came to a streaming service I'm subscribed to (Prime Video). I wouldn't have minded to see it in a theatre when it was originally released but, if it even cam...

I f I'd known  Superman: Man of Tomorrow  (2020 WB Animation) was essentially a Superman origin story I would probably have skipped it. I'm sure anyone who reads comics would've known that but I make no secret of not reading comics. I used to read them as a kid and, even in my early teens, however, the comics I read were all given to me, and not that many were superhero comics. The only 'comic' I bought regularly was 'Heavy Metal' because it had grown up stories, and such a wide and varied range of artists. My fandom of superheros came through Saturday morning cartoons and the Batman, and Superman 60's TV shows. At that time I was too young to know there were comic books of these characters, and I didn't have any money to buy them with anyway. When my Dad did buy me a comic book of Batman, it was all in black and white, with a story that was completely inaccessible to me as a 7 year old. Not to mention that Batman looked nothing like the TV show and ...

Dias's drop-in from one of the lower platforms for practice. Image: © Marcelo Maragni/Red Bull I f you're a skateboarder living in a city you've probably looked at a building that has skate ramp vibes and imagined dropping in on it... well Professional Skateboarder, Sandro Dias didn't just imagine. The Perth Telstra Building as depicted in this fantasy poster print, Forbidden Skate Ramp by  Harry Young. If you lived in Perth, Western Australia, any skateboarder who saw the top of the Telstra Building likely had the same thought about the ramp like quarter pipe at the top. Also, back in the day there was a classic skateboarding poster going the rounds that depicted Sydney as a literal skatepark with ramps built up, down, and over numerous buildings. Sandro Dias, who broke the record for the world's tallest drop-in on the 26th September 2025 by dropping in on a mega ramp built on the side of the curved façade of the 22-storey Centro Administrativo Fernando Ferrari (C...

Commodore 64 Ultimate: Starlight Edition. An updated C64 for today. C hances are, if you grew up in the 1970s and 80's, the first computer your family owned was a Commodore 64 (or possibly the Vic-20, also by Commodore, that preceded it). I taught myself to code in BASIC on our Commodore 64 (C64), making ASCII based games (i.e. graphics made from the letters and symbols assigned to the various keyboard keys). I coded a Tic Tac Toe two player game, a simple shooting gallery game, and a flash card game to help me learn the Periodic Table, which (much to my... I want to say horror... got me bumped up to an advanced science class in high school). Later I'd go on to dabbling in true 8 bit, and 16 and 32 bit, graphical games, when we upgraded to the C128, Amiga 500, then Amiga 600, but I never actually finished anything because, by then I'd gotten into skateboarding, so I was trying to make my ultimate skateboard game - ambitious much? It was Commodore machines that showed me mak...

I t's hard not to get caught up with the political issues of the United States of America - as an outsider. This is why I stopped writing about American Politics in this blog. While one can easily make the argument that what happens in the US, politically, affects everyone (and it does, particularly US foreign policy and trade), many of their hot button issues are uniquely their issues. For example, while Australia (because this is an Aussie blog) does have some challenges with immigration , it has little to do with some manufactured need to deport 'illegal' immigrants as some warped idea of lowering crime rates or stopping terrorists and drug dealers from entering the country. Recent protest marches around Australia , all on the same day, seemed to send a bunch of mixed messages, as different groups decided that more protests about more things, all on the same day is one way to really get your message across (does anyone not remember the #Occupy Movement  of 2011 and its ...