Ministry-of-truth.com
This month is the centenary of George Orwell's birth. To mark it, programmers at the School of Information Management and Systems at Berkeley University, California, have produced a simple piece of code that converts any web page into one that might have been reprocessed at Orwell's fictional Ministry of Truth.

The code converts the text of any web page into newspeak, the totalitarian language Orwell invented for his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Any web page will do. The link below is taken from CNN.com, but you can make any page you like by replacing the web address at the end with one of your own.
http://dream.sims.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/calvins/goodspeak.py?url=http://cnn.com

Comrades reunited
"A uniform with two left arms and a gun from the previous war," is how one former soldier describes his experiences of the Home Guard. Next year is the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings, and memories such as this are being sought by BBCi. It is all part of a new website that aims to reunite service personal involved in the second world war and collect their stories.

By inviting veterans, be they fighter pilots or land girls, to recount their experiences, it is hoped that testimony from every military unit that served during the war will be collected. The site is looking for a small army of volunteer researchers to help coordinate the project, which will culminate in a television series next year.

A clutch of sites cater for forces reunions, like Friends Reunited only with military units, but they now face a considerable challenge from the editorial might of the BBC.
www.bbc.co.uk/history
www.lostforcesfriends.co.uk
www.comradesandcolleagues.com
www.lostcomms.co.uk

Astrobots
They are called Sandy Moondust and Biff Starling. Sandy is adventurous, strong, and independent. Biff is funny, laid-back, and speaks "fluent surfer". They are the Astrobots, two tiny Lego figurines aboard the Nasa Mars Exploration Rover Mission that blasted off earlier this month.

The site, aimed at getting kids interested in the mission, contains a weblog and is connected to five Lego replicas of the rover that you can steer over the internet. The real rover carries a DVD containing the names of four million people who submitted them to the site earlier this year.

http://planetary.org/rrgtm/astrobots/meet.html
http://planetary.org/rrgtm/tps.html
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer

Iraq body count
"Civilian casualties are the most unacceptable consequence of all wars. Each civilian death is a tragedy and should never be regarded as the 'cost' of achieving our countries' war aims, because it is not we who are paying this price." So reads the rationale on the site that has been recording just how many Iraqi civilians have been killed during the ongoing war in Iraq.

The idea is a simple one. Count the number of reported civilian deaths and represent them in a regularly updating counter. It is available to place on your own site, where it will update automatically and all too often. The site also accounts for differentiating figures, by presenting a range of civilian dead. As Online went to press, the counter estimated that between 5,567 and 7,240 Iraqi civilians had been killed in the war.
www.iraqbodycount.net

Sars art project
Sars isn't funny, but the hysteria surrounding the disease has become a prime target for online wags. A few weeks ago, people started posting Sars related humour on the boingboing blog, which has now launched a dedicated site. Some of it is crude and juvenile, some of it satirical and irreverent. www.sarsart.org
www.boingboing.net

New & noted

Save the Pluto and Europa missions
www.planetary.org
Flemish renaissance multimedia
www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/
Are you John Green?
www.johngreen.nl

Six of the best Summer festivals

The Big Chill
www.bigchill.net
Glastonbury
www.glastonbury-festivals.co.uk
The Eden Sessions
www.edenproject.com
Summer at Somerset House
www.somerset-house.org.uk
Cream Fields
www.cream.co.uk
All the rest
www.virtualfestivals.com/festivals