Countdown to Apple “Showtime”: Blog212 sifts through the last minute rumours and speculation over Apple’s forthcoming announcements. Call me cynical but I reckon it’ll just be iTunes 7 with “enhanced” video downloads.

Democracy Player v0.9 released: “Stop squinting at tiny web video. Instead, download and watch all the best internet TV shows in one powerful application: any video RSS feed, video podcast, video blog, or BitTorrent file. Fullscreen, high resolution, 100% free and open source. New channels arrive daily in the built-in Channel Guide.” For Windows, Mac and Linux. (via BoingBoing)

Universal to close Back To The Future: The Ride in Orlando: It’s not clear whether it’s just the one in Florida or whether the Hollywood ride also has a similar fate. As much as the execution sucked it was still quite good fun, particularly as a fan of the movies. It’s rumoured that it will be replaced by a Simpsons or Transformers attraction. More details on the ride at Wikipedia.

The Ultimate Blog Post: “you’d be surprised how many people are fascinated to hear you have a blog and want to know more, especially if you were expecting the number to be greater than zero.”

Banksy at Disneyland: Only one artist could possibly get away with placing an installation of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner beside the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.

The Big Round Cubatron: “is the world’s largest 3-dimensional full color dynamic light sculpture. It is an array of lights 40 feet in diameter and 10 feet high. It consists of 28 spokes, each of which is 24 lights wide by 9 lights high. Each light is independently controllable to display any color and brightness level and the entire display can be updated 50 times per second. There are 6048 total lights (28 * 24 * 9) made of 18,144 LEDs.”

If you didn’t make it to Burning Man in person, you can see it in action here and make it youself (if you’re rich).

One Million Ways to Die: your appendix is more likely to kill you than al-Qaida is.

The bitter legacy of 9/11: The Independent.

A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse: “He has assumed an ever more childlike appearance as the ratty character of Steamboat Willie became the cute and inoffensive host to a magic kingdom. By 1940, the former tweaker of pig’s nipples gets a kick in the ass for insubordination (as the sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia). By 1953, last cartoon, he has gone fishing and cannot even subdue a squirting clam.”

Overheard in New York: “Yeah, it made fun of Hitler, but it was in, like, a positive way.”