Classic Comedy: Tony Hancock

Back in the 1960s Tony Hancock was one of Britain's best loved entertainers - both on the radio and on television. His deadpan style of comedy still works well today.

Many of you may be familiar with "The Blood Donor", "The Bowmans" or "The Radio Ham" - but less well known are the series of commercials he did for the Egg Marketing Board.

Just remember, "Happiness is Egg Shaped!"

Tony Hancock - Egg Commercials - 1965

The Can Can

The Goodies do the Can Can. . .

Comedy Magic

As I'm still feeling lousy - some comedy to beat the snots. . .

I have always thought in the back of my mind

Cheese and onions!

Read i.ytimg.com

I'm not sure how often this must have been showing in the Firefox status bar, but today I noticed the message "Read i.ytimg.com". That is certainly an unusual message to get.

Visiting i.ytimg.com redirects you to a secure https:// version of the url before giving you an unable to connect error.

Being a typical geek, rather than letting the matter lie I decided to find out what the message relates to. As it turns out the ytimg.com domain is owned by YouTube and I was playing a YouTube video at the time.

Apparently this server is used to serve thumbnail images into the YouTube player (YouTube IMaGe server).

Damn.

Another mystery solved.

Maybe I can make a conspiracy theory out of it? How about this: YouTube is sending subliminal messages via our browsers? Or this one: YouTube is run by aliens who are tracking our browsing habits to learn more about humanity before taking over the planet?

Can you come up with something more outlandish?

Update

If you are receiving the error "Reading i.ytimg.com" but some web pages aren't loading or YouTube videos won't play, then you will need to check your script blocking software (such as NoScript for FireFox) or anti-virus software (like Kapersky AntiVirus) and enable access to i.ytimg.com. Pages relying on it should then load and you'll be able to play your YouTube videos again.

Update 2

Youtube has a number of servers that pass various components into its player, so as well as i.ytimg.com you may see messages relating to s.ytimg.com (and possibly others too). An anonymous reader has posted the following link which returns the graphical "skin" for the youtube player as served by s.ytimg.com:

http://s.ytimg.com/yt/img/master-vfl44411.gif

Another example image here, this time the "upload from mobile" icon:

http://s.ytimg.com/yt/img/icn_mobileupload_29x64-vfl20830.png

It isn't just images either (at least not from s.ytimg.com):

http://s.ytimg.com/yt/swf/watch-vfl43900.swf
http://s.ytimg.com/yt/css/buttons-vfl33583.css

As has been pointed out in the comments, the "read i.ytimg.com" and "read s.ytimg.com" messages are purely a FireFox issue, but the non-working youtube video caused by anti-virus or adblocking software blocking these sites will affect other browsers too.

Update 3

John has pointed out that Google own the ytimg.com domain. The explanation for that below:

Link to original press release


Update 4

Ishino has let us know that Google's anti-phishing API also uses ytimg.com. See http://code.google.com/apis/safebrowsing/ for more details on this.

This is used by Google's HTTPFox Firefox plugin to avoid phishing sites, so you may start seeing messages such as GET http://s.ytimg.com/safebrowsing/rd/goog-malware-shavar_s_(number) or
GET http://s.ytimg.com/safebrowsing/rd/goog-phish-shavar_s_(number) presumably as it is checking the links with Google.

Max Payne: Hero

This is one fan film that really manages to capture the spirit of the Max Payne games, in the form of a short music video. I know, this has been kicking around for a while now but who knows, you may have missed it. If so, then enjoy.

Video of Chaos Caverns and RetroVaders

Thanks to the magic of the freeware CamStudio I've put together some demo footage of my other games, RetroVaders and Chaos Caverns.

First up - Chaos Caverns.



Followed by RetroVaders.



More later.

Batty Junior - Video Preview

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I wonder what a video is worth?



This is a short clip from the first level. The game itself is far from finished, but this gives a general idea of the current state of play.

(Remember kids - games seen on YouTube may appear crapper than they actually are)