Navigation

The Magic Review: a new review site started by Matt Tarrant from Australia. He hopes to “build a complete and honest, non-biased review styled site” reviewing Effects, Cards, Local Magic Shops, Lectures and Performances. They also have a competition to launch the site, just sign-up to the site and you are entered into a draw to win some Wynn playing cards.

The Cuso I Photography Competition: Alejandro is running a magical card related photography competion over at his blog, details from him as follows:

Today the I Photography Competition begins. If you are a magician, flourisher, cardist, xcmer, poker player, sleight of hand artist, cheater, playing card collector, or you just like taking photos you have a chance to Wynn, ehmm... i mean win these cool prizes:

1st place: 12 Decks of Wynn Playing cards (6 red / 6 Blue)
2nd place: 8 Decks of Wynn Playing cards (4 red / 4 Blue)
3rd place: 4 Decks of Wynn Playing cards (2 red / 2 Blue)

I've made a deal with John (AceKing Playing Cards) and he will ship the cards to the winners once they are decided. So please give thanks to him for these great prizes (and to me for paying them! ).

These are the rules:

-Only one pic per participant.
-The pic must contain at least a playing card or a deck of cards or anything related to playing cards (symbols, court guys running around or whatever).
-Only submisions to thecuso@gmail.com with the subject My Photo will be allowed for the contest.
-Emails must include your full name and nickname/screen name (if you have).
-Deadline is 29 February 2008.

There will also be runner ups for these categories:

Funniest pic: If you think you have THE pic that would make us laugh our asses out.
Most Artistic: If your pic has the best colours, lights or photoshop effects.
Most Original: If you did Pandora while jumping off a bridge bungee style.

The 3 runner ups will get my Nebula tutorial and some other unreleased clips of me.

FISM European Championships of Magic 2008: The 6th Balkan Magic Convention in Sofia, Bulgaria on 6-9 November 2008 will be the host of the first FISM European Championships of Magic. I am certainly hoping to go, it will be a good start to the run up to China in 2009. I believe they will use these championships to send the winners to the world competition in 2009, to try and raise the standard of entry. The European FISM is the first continental division with others to follow soon.

John Bannon's Fractal Card Magic: Spotted over at Fun Inc. John Bannon is releasing a trilogy of packet tricks entitled Fractal Card Magic, the first The Royal Scam is to be released in a couple of weeks: Prolific creator John Bannon, author of Smoke and Mirrors, will be releasing a trilogy of what he calls “fractal card magic.” Each part of the series will include an instructional DVD, and of course, the necessary apparatus.

The first in the series, “The Royal Scam,” is on its way to us from the duplicators, and will be available to dealers very soon, hopefully within two weeks or so.

If you do not recieve Andi Gladwin's newsletter (and if not why not?!) He announced over the weekend that the Jack Parker book is now available for pre-order. I am going to pick up my copy at The Session but if you are not attending (if not why not?!) you may wish to pre-order to recieve this when it launches next week, and to also be entered into a draw to win a limited edition Jack Parker book. Check Andi's site for all the details.

If you read this blog via the website (rather than the feed) you'll notice I have added some widgets to the right hand column, along with the obligatory blogroll and links, I now have my flickr badge, technorati search/profile, twitter updates and the two latest my lifestream widget which uses profilactic and shows you all the other sites I have a presence on, and also builds a mashup of my latest updates. Lastly I have just added a box for Skribit which allows you the reader to leave any suggestions as to what you may want me to blog/write about, so if you want to see something appear on the blog feel free to suggest a topic and I will see what I can do!

The Magic Classifieds: Jeff Pierce has started a free Classifieds Ad site where you can post magic ads to buy, sell, trade and view your auctions.

I'd been looking for a small sub-notebook for a while, something I could take away with me to magic conventions, on holiday, and generally use around the house, that would have wi-fi so I could post updates on the move, check e-mail etc. uptil just recently the price point of these sub-notebooks has been restrictive, but late last year I stumbled upon the fact that Asus where about to launch a small notebook running linux with wifi etc. at a very resonable price. As soon as these launched in the UK I put my order in, beating the Christmas rush! I have had a good chance to use it and have posted some photos over at Flickr.

The sheer size of this thing suprised me when I saw it and I thought it might be restrictive to use. The keyboard does take a little getting used to but is very usable even with my largeish hands, as reported the arrow keys are a little clunky compared to the rest of the keyboard, and the track pad takes a bit to get used to, however Asus have now released some add-ons along with a range of optical mice.

A lot of useful advice can be found on the eeeuser site on the forum and wiki. I managed to change my settings so it automatically starts up in the advanced mode which looks just like windows, and changed the size of the start icon etc. Also in firefox I am using the advice on the wiki using the whitehart theme and the fullerscreen add-on to get a full screen when pressing F11.

I plan to change the 512mb of SODIMM to 1G as Asus now say this will not invalidate the warranty. Other than that I am happy with Xandros install although you can install Windows XP or even OSX but the Xandros install has been tweaked so that it doesn't constantly write to the inbuilt SSD and it comes pre-installed with pretty much everything you would need for web-browsing and documents etc., with Firefox, Pidgin IM, Skype and Openoffice your pretty much set.

The small size also means it will fit in portable DVD bags which you can pick up quite cheaply, I haven't really bought any accessories for mine yet, but probably plan on picking up an extra MMC card for the external slot, and maybe a USB key for any offline working.

Asus have announced the launch of an 8G model, along with their 4G (which is what mine is) and their 2G surf models, with XP coming installed instead of Xandros. So look out for those, also this is bound to introduce competition for low-price sub notebooks, which can only be a good thing, eeeuser have already set up a sister-site for the about to be launched CloudBook apparently it will be sold in Walmart for $399 running gOS slightly larger than the eee and also with a slightly higher processor and an actual 30gb harddrive. Looks like it will be a good year for these mini-laptops and one which I will follow with interest!

The Cull: Tim Ellis recently culled his list of referring magic blogs, and added some new ones, two I would particularly like to mention are:

• Fun Incorporated - the new blog of Fun Inc. and the Royal Magic line talking about new products and the latest happenings at the company.


• Pursuit of Magic - a particular welcome back to Steve Pellegrino who as well as running the Ellusionist blog I mentioned in an earlier post has restarted his own personal magic blog.

Tim has kindly also linked to Watching Magic which brings me again to the topic of site updates, I read a post today on Simon Collison's blog about the state of blogging which kind of captured my thoughts, this year has seen me much more involved in the social-software side with facebook, twitter, flickr and the tumblelog, coupled with my problem of using this site for anything other than magic related posts. This may or may not change, you might start to see more unrelated general posts on here, just as a way to get me back to writing and posting again, possibly...