John Haller is pretty well-known in software circles - he's the guy behind PoartableApps.com. What you may not have known is that he's a big Billy Mays fan. And like a lot of Billy Mays fans, John was a little misty when Billy shuffled off this mortal coil earlier this year.

What better way for a coder to commemorate a fallen icon than with an awesome app? Enter BILLY MAYS CAPS LOCK!

While it won't make your whites whiter or fix the broken handle of your coffee mug, it is one of the greatest remedies I've ever found for computer-induced boredom. Need a quick, random jolt to break you out of your ennui? Hit your caps lock key, and virtual Billy Mays will chime in with one of his trademark catch phrases.

It's probably worth noting that the app does override your caps lock's real functionality, but only overexcited douchebags on Twitter use it anyway, right? Haller does build in shift + caps lock as a workaround in case you do need to enable cruise control for awesome.

HERE'S HOW TO ORDER:

Sorry, I got caught up in the moment there. It's a free download and is available as an installer or in PortableApps format - so you can take Billy with you and fire him up wherever you've got Windows and a CAPS LOCK key.

Welcome to a special "hump day" edition of Weird Wednesday (pun very much intended). An iPhone can do a lot of things, but can it make you better in bed? A new app called Love Vibes says it can. It works like this: Install Love Vibes on your iPhone, set the firmness of your mattress, and then, ummm, engage in activities. The app uses the iPhone's accelerometer to measure vertical and horizontal movement, and somehow manages to convert that into a score that indicates your prowess at making love.

On top of the obvious challenges of getting a partner to let you bring your iPhone to bed, it's not really clear how Love Vibes determines your score. The "duration" rating is obvious enough: how long did your session last? Stamina, variety and passion are a little more dicey. Although the science behind the app is based on surveys that indicate these are all desirable qualities, it's not clear how Love Vibes gets scores out of your accelerometer data.

I tried faking it out by moving the phone around wildly for a bit, hoping this would provide enough passion and variety to rate an impressive score. "Shaking the phone won't get you a high score," it told me. Huh. Well, what if I just move the phone rhythmically back and forth for a while as I do the exact opposite of making love - eating Doritos? SPOILER: just as in romantic encounters that don't involve an iPhone or anything Cooler Ranch flavored, rhythm is the ticket to a good review. You didn't need an app to tell you that, right?

You thought the music to "It's a Small World" would drive you crazy? Try the careening refrains of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, a blacklight-ridden motorized kiddie ride at Disney World in Orlando, Florida. At least, you could try it until 1998, when the Mouse saw fit to toss the toad and replace him with a cute, cuddly, one-crayon-short-of-a-sharpener bear named Pooh.

Enter obsessive compulsive behavior, computers and nostalgia wrapped in the tasty HTML and QTVR layers over on the shrine to Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, aka Virtual Toad. Do not lick Virtual Toad, but do be patient as you wait for the actually quite awesome QTVR walkthrough of the doomed ride. Was Mr. Toad scary? Nah, I remember riding it as a kid and being more concerned with the smell of 20,000 Leagues, which was directly across from Mr. Toad and is now a playground.

Is it weird? Well, if you consider fans of "dark rides" weird, then yeah. It's weird and wonderful, really. And how can you not call a mix of QuickTime VR, Walt Disney, an oddball British story and a website/museum/protest weird?

If you're looking for more info on the retired 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride in Orlando, this list of links is pretty complete. On the topic of toads, I would be remiss if I did not mention the all-glorious Hypnotoad.

Remember back in the early days of the web when all you had to do was punch a monkey to win? Millions of pummeled simians later the online ad industry had to evolve... And evolve it has, with two distinct paths for display advertising:

1. In-your-face gigantic ads or ads that "do something" significant to distract you. Common examples include full-page "interstitial" ads that interrupt your browsing, anything that flies around the screen or busts out of its little box or anything that expands when you hover over it.

2. Creative, "viral" ads that are so clever, weird, gross or unusual that they are passed around despite their more than obvious marketing nature. Let's look at some of these, shall we?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I prefer the latter. Unfortunately tracking down "weird" ads isn't easy. Ad campaigns, by their nature, are dynamic and ephemeral. The Internet Archive doesn't cache dynamic ads, either, so some of those golden oldies may be lost forever. If you snag a pic, please let us know in the comments.

A few of the more clever online ads are presented for your consumption on the next page.

Between the sundial, the dawn of digital watches and now cell phones taking a big dent out of the watch business, I'm not sure why you would need a clock in a browser, let alone one requiring an internet connection. Perhaps you sleep with your netbook by your bedside, complete with relaxing pzizz or other ambient noises. Or maybe you have an Ozymandias-style lair complete with dozens of monitors. Either way, here's a little round-up of clocks for your browser (and beyond). Weird to me, maybe useful to you.*

Oh, and here's something about clocks being the devil (pdf link). Much weirder.

Online Clock - the daddy of them all (if clocks are male). Comes in 4 sizes and 5 colors. But here you will find a list of all the other online clocks from Online Clock, including a stopwatch, space clock, military time, etc. If they set out to corner the market in online clocks, these guys are close. There's even a radio alarm clock. Google better get in the act soon or risk losing the Online Clock Wars.

Aptly-named Timeanddate.com provides a boss World Clock, complete with current time in dozens of cities around the world.

Kuku Klok boasts being "Swiss made" but also uses Flash for everything... here's hoping it doesn't crash as it is supposed to be an alarm clock.

Make your own darn clock using Flash and this tutorial. If you're looking for a real challenge, however, try building a meatspace clock. Yeah, coding is much simpler.

But of course there's a javascript clock, silly. Perfect for that fashion blog you were going to start.

Pixelbreaker created a cross-platform clock screensaver called PolarClock for Mac and Windows, plus an OS X Dashboard version and an iPhone app. There's actually a lot of tweaking for such a simple thing, and 28 languages are supported. Of all the screensaver clocks out there, this is my favorite.

Clockspot allows you to track employees online. It's a web-based punchclock. Now excuse me while I punch myself for bringing it up.

For only $3.99 a month (starting price) you can use Snoozester to send you wake up calls and reminder through the day. That'll get you 35 fresh starts a month.

And if you think the internet should turn into reality, help the Ambient Clock make the jump from Google Gadget to real, live plastic clock.


*Come to think of it, numerous science lab accident movie premises are based on the nerd falling asleep in the lab, so maybe these aren't as useless as I thought.

In some ways the olfactory (aka "smellable") web began 10 years ago. In other, more real ways, not so much. How many of you are able to smell your favorite websites today? Of course, among all the protocols and basic hardware required of modern computers, the ability to produce smell never quite earned a spot in the spec sheet. Too bad, maybe, as smells are powerful triggers in our brains.

I remember way back in 1999 when I worked for a now-defunct dot-com startup, as we suffered endless PowerPoint pitch sessions with folks looking to do business with us. One company was DigiScents, makers of the iSmell. Yes, it was seriously called the iSmell. Perhaps that is why DigiScents' website is now a blog, and not a very updated one at that. It could also be that only a few people wanted to smell the web. PC World Magazine (whose karmic retribution may be going completely virtual) called iSmell one of the 25 worst tech devices of all time way back in 2006, and since then the technology has fallen into obscurity. Sad, as in 2001 they seemed to be making all the right moves. Unfortunately I don't think people wanted to pay $200 for a USB device that made smells, no matter how "rich" the web experience could become. That's probably still true.

Or has it? I may be one of the small percentage of people actually wanting this technology, but I find it strange that we demand better graphics for games, louder and more realistic sounds, even exploring force feedback systems to immerse ourselves in online worlds, but we leave the powerful sense of smell alone. It could be that most games would smell pretty terrible (gunpowder and guts don't mix well with Cheetos and Red Bull), or it could be that people just haven't thought about it that much. NTT appears to be the only company thinking about this now, and all I've seen commercially available are some phones that stink.

And now, for your Moment of Zen: the Olfactory Transmission Protocol page from 1997.

If you've tried to register a domain name in the last decade or so you're probably aware of the "cromulent word scarcity syndrome" (yes, I just made that up). In other words, most of the good names are gone. Scratch another off the list with purplemonkeydishwasher.com, a reference to a line in The Simpsons. As is my wont, I typed this random URL into my browser and was pleasantly surprised to see a modicum of functionality (as opposed to a placeholder site with nothing but keyword links).

Purplemonkeydishwasher.com is running a fortune-telling application. Not so much a real fortune-teller, actually, but a simple random text fetcher. As the site explains:

fortune is a program which displays random messages, quotations, folk sayings, and other verbal fluff. Historically, it dates back to unix systems, and is believed to have been used by software developers to help break tension, or perhaps it was simply just an early version of a 'widget'. Because it was originally created by software engineers, some of the older fortunes are programmer's jokes and make little sense to most people. Since then, however, the fortune database has grown and forked off to numerous differing versions. Some fortunes are well dated or make social comments now out of context, others make no sense whatsoever, but many are gems, offering truly useful advice or food for thought, and many are timeless with origins unknown.

What other random URL's have you found?

Before there was Weird Wednesday, we had Freaky Friday Find -- a crazy app every week. Nearly 3 years ago I wrote a piece on an app called Tele Hypnosis, and guess what? That app still exists. Yes, you too can remotely control whomever you wish, all for the low, low price of $99. Unlike those darned fairies, this thing has no rules; you can make someone love you, cheat at math, or get your kids off drugs.

What's incredible is Tifareth has actually grown in the past 3 years, and there's an entire suite of hypno applications. Try the Studio Pro app to "Be full protected of all types of black magick, sorcery, goetia and psychic attacks." There are also add-ons in the form of sigils and symbols. As an added bonus, Tifareth offers Tarot readings online. One more thing: a full Radionic Workstation! Priced to move at $599, but you do get the app customized for your good/neutral/chaotic needs.

Does it work? Unfortunately I'm unable to access the parts of my memory where all my thorough tests were conducted. And the research is strangely missing from my hard drive. But here's a link to the original post.

This morning, Brad wrote about one enterprising individual's success with getting lightweight Linux window managers running on an Android handset.

That's cool and all, but a user at Polish site FrazPC has taken things to a whole new level of nerdiness. His project: getting Windows 3.11 to run on the Symbian-powered Nokia N95 (link to site via Google Translate). Sure, the graphics look better on the Android hacks, but there's something cool about seeing the OS from my family's first non-Commodore PC running on a cell phone. At last you'll be able to bask in the horror of Hot Dog Stand conveniently, no matter where you are!

Speaking of which, there's retina-burning rendition you can see at Hot Dog Stand Tribute. Sadly (or perhaps not so much), the Windows XP theme download isn't working.

In another flashback - this time to something a bit more recent, remember Vic's item about software that records your dreams? How about a piece of hardware you can buy right now that can pull off headshots using the power of your brain? If you haven't seen OCZ's Neural Impulse Actuator, it's a whole lotta crazy.

You can check out a video of its creator utilizing the device in a head-to-head combat on G4. Sure, he gets schooled, but that hardly takes away from the cool factor. I'm not certain I want my brain controlling my computer directly just yet. I'm a tad worried about possible detriment due to random, misguided thoughts.

Everyone knows you can't swing a dead lolcat without finding weird stuff on the internet. Before the web, the internet was a haven for all sorts of crazy "underground" information that was difficult to get published and distributed.

Fast-forward to the present day and you can indulge your weirdness with the push of maybe 5 or 6 buttons, tops. You don't need a real name, address, phone number or functional frontal lobe -- you too can pollute the mindscape of hundreds with a janky little free site dedicated to whatever weird crap you're into.

But how to find the weird stuff? Digg, BoingBoing, Fark, and many, many sites are dedicated to culling the "best" of the oddball sites out there (although more often than not the sites themselves are merely bad, not "weird"). But what about those rarely-curated Frontpage-compliant hyper-niche zany sites out there?

There's no way for us to find them all (DARPA cancelled funding for that project long ago), but here's a sampling of what we could find in about 30 minutes of searching. Something you'll notice: most of these sites also fall under the "fugly" category. Most haven't been updated in years, either.

As always, leave your own in the comments. PG-13 please, we know there are plenty of adult and "other" sites that indulge strange stuff -- and there are plenty of sites covering those, so no need for us to do the same.

History of Public Toilets. Joe the Plumber would be proud. The content is actually fascinating, even if the presentation leaves something to be desired. But there's no good way to dress up poop, really.

Until we can finally allow robots to craft everything via iPhone CAD/CAM apps, you'll have to get your fix of fake tombstones and dress-up robots online. Here's a roundup of some helpful tools -- maybe. Honestly, several are horrendous to use. Others are merely fugly. One frightened my hamster. Still, if you are looking for a way to express yourself on the cover of TIME magazine, this may be your thing. Please add more in the comments, I know I've missed a few decent ones among the junk.

Make these crazy things online:

Tombstone
Great for making a very specific point (see above). Etch directly into a tombstone and right-click to download the result. Dead simple.

Internet Diploma
We've covered My Internet Diploma in the past. We sorta wish we hadn't. Luckily, now that we have all graduated with honors and have mad ninja skills, we know better. My Internet Diploma is as fake as My Little Pony.

Magazine
Put your face or drunk/nude torso on the cover of numerous magazines. There are bunches of these, but I chose the one with lots of real magazine covers. The workflow is irritating. You upload a pic, which opens a useless (new) window. Close that window, keep following the steps. Each step spawns a new window. If anyone knows a decent version of this, leave it in the comments.

Robot
It's a dress-up doll with robot parts. A little part of me died while playing with this. Still, the owner of this domain will be rich... when the robots take over.

Signs
The link takes you to the classic Church Sign Generator, but there are others. If anything comes up as sign generator in the URL, however, you may have stumbled upon one of the vast linkfarms of the interwebs.

There are many other examples, like a place that claims to print fake pay stubs (for a fee). I'm not linking to that one, but you get the idea. With the right web skillz you can fake just about anything. But with great power comes great responsibility, so don't go throwing your doctorate of hyperlinking in our faces -- we saw your nude cover for Byte magazine.

Each Wednesday Download Squad takes a look at the weirdest software out there. From future tech being cooked up in the lab to bizarre shareware, we'll cover the offbeat and off-the-wall. If you have a suggestion for a strange application, leave it in the comments.

Scientists are working on ways to read your mind using software. It makes sense that if you know how to read brainwaves you'd be able to reconstruct what the eyes are seeing, right? But Yukiyasu Kamitani is taking it to another level: using a an MRI to scan your brain and recreate what you see in your mind on a computer screen. Ultimately the technology could be used to read your mind with enough fidelity to create a video of your thoughts or dreams.

As the article in New Scientist points out, all of this raises ethical concerns should the tech work from a distance. Do you want marketers to read your mind? What would Google do if they could put contextual ads in your life? Can you upload your brain to Flickr?

Of course, this is a long way off. Not only does the software need a lot of refinement, the hardware challenges of reading brainwaves with enough fidelity to recreate an image is a giant hurdle. In the meanwhile, keep buying Lightspeed Briefs to match your tin foil hats.