Mr Speaker

mrspeaker's head in a monitor You find yourself at the entrance to the Hompage of Mr Speaker. In a darkened corner sits a trunk containing HTML5 games and some JavaScript tidbits. Next to it you spy a mastodon account. Exits are North, East, and .

Talking Boony Lives!

the modded boonWell, it has truly it has been a gruelling experience. There have been astonishing highs, and borderline-dull lows - but the Reverse Boonjaneering has been complete. Da Boony Code is broken and I am now proud to present to you a review of the resurrected Controllable Talking Boon!

It was a sunny Thursday afternoon, the city was quiet. Yet I was nervous - My Talking Boony was about to go under the knife. Not very carefully I wrapped the lil' plastic hero in bubble wrap, chucked him in a box, and sent him off to Melbourne. A mournful drink was drunk in honour. It was in Tim's hands now.

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Technical Difficulties and Brain Surgery

my brainSorry about the wierdness around here folks... I've been away for a spot of brain surgery. The craniotomy so far has not given me any of the special gifts promised by trepanning. I'll keep a third eye on it though.

In other Mr Speaker news, while I was gone my hosting provider (smartyhost) decided to pull some wizardry of incompetence on my site. It's kind of back and runnin' now, but I think I've lost a whole swag of comments from you lot. So, you'll just have to say something else to make up for it.

Update... no, not up and running. Even more dodgy-ness from my provider.

Update on the updates: HALLELUJAH!!!! Well, it only took two weeks of constant nagging and insisting that things were broken... but it's back! Sorry bout the down time...

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Boon From Beyond The Grave

ghost Of BoonJust when I thought the Boon related posting had come to an end, and I had headed back to my nerdy roots - he's back. Yes, it's true. Boony Lives. And thanks to an oversight by the Boony developers, it looks like he is here to stay!

We'll delve a little further into the how and the why - and show you how to make your Boony live forever...

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Client-Side Image Replacement

What is CSI - Replacement?RasterBlaster

Client-side image replacement is a technique to dynamically "render" text elements as images without CPU intensive server-side processing using some C64 inspired goodness. Viewing a page without style sheets or javascript will degrade gracefully to display the original tag text.

It's so dodgy it's almost beautiful.

Head over to the demo page to read this post in all its CSIR glory!

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A Boon To Mankind

boon on australia dayEvery good knock has to come to an end. We will fight on to bring Boon back through reverse boonjaneering, but in the mean time here are some submitted photos from Tom and Matt to remind us of the good times....

If you have something you'd like to add to the Boon shrine, send them in. I'll put them up when I can (and while I've got space!). And if you are feeling particularly sentimental, why not follow along with Trappers and build an Appreciation Cabinet so Talking Boony can spend the rest of his days in a prized position in the pool room.

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Reverse Boonjaneering

Talking Boonys watching cricketThe Boony fun and games are over - no more playin' sound files at the little bugger - it's time to crack Da Boony Code. Presented here are the collected findings of people smarter than myself. It will hopefully culminate it the complete unravelling of the inner secrets of the mystical plastic batsman.

These projects aren't going to require a degree in electrical engineering - Tim's got that - and he'll tell us how to do this with just a soldering iron and a couple of bits picked up from Dick Smith. Though before we get soldering, a few warnings...
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The fantastical DHTML angle-scroller!

 

leet char setThings were getting way too popular around here, so it's time we took it down a notch: Welcome to Tacky DHTML web tricks #2! Following on from the highly impressive poppy images - comes an even more annoying and useless DHTML effect: the Angle Scroller! Yes... as if it were not hard enough to read stupid ticker style scrollers - now you have to do it on a 45 degree angle!

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Talking Boony

Really Late breaking News: Tim has cracked Da Boony Code and is now offering a mod-chip service to Pimp Your Boony! Freakin' Awesome!

Not so late breaking News: Read out how 'n' why Boony is Back from the Dead!

In an effort to get to the bottom of the Boony mystery I have started the Facts Of Boon page and the Reverse Boonjaneering Project. Please contribute all you can to these noble causes. Or pledge your respect in our Homage to Talking Boony...Last update: 01 Sept 06, 9:17am

BoonAs a whipper snapper, David Boon was by far my favourite batsman. And even though he was um, plump, he was the fastest runner-between-wickets in the Australian side. That's pretty impressive. So when I learnt of the "Talking Boony" marketing ploy by VB, I had no choice but to ignore my taste buds and purchase a carton - I strolled out of the local bottle-o with a slab, a bubble-wrapped Boony statuette, and the instructional leaflet that accompanied him.

"How do I make it talk?", I thought to myself "And why would it be so difficult that I'd require an instructional leaflet?". The answer left me dumbfounded. Dumbfounded and incredulous.
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Hacking Windows Pinball

The Cheat
Okay, first up for those who perhaps are not so interested in spending many hours trawling through pages and pages of assembler code, I'll skip straight to the good bits and give you a run down of the sneaky CHEAT_MODE I found hidden in the pinball game included with windows XP.

Load up the game and type the words hidden test. Looks pretty normal? Well, as your ball is flyin' 'round, click on the pinball machine. Drag your mouse around. The ball follows your every command - blatantly ignoring the laws of gravity we have come to expect it to follow!

There's more too. The "hidden test" mode has a bunch of functions put in there to help the developers out during the game's creation. Here's ones I found, or can see in the code:
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