What is it about the whole retroactive continuity thing that is so attractive nowadays? Read more »
State of the Multiverse 63
Monthly Archives: February 2010
Compact "Eggy" speakers: your ultra-portable audio drivers
Compact speakers may not pack the most punch for your music system, but what they might lack in power they make up for in portability. And, having said that, there are some pretty decent mini speakers around that are more than a match for their bigger cousins. Take a look at S&J’s new “Eggy” speaker. We can easily see why it has the name, and it’s not far off the size of a chicken’s egg either, because it can fit into the palm of your hand. Unscrew the two halves of the egg and you have two speakers complete with their own mini stands. The units are driven from micro-mini Read more »
ShadyURL: Make Tiny URL's really scary and suspicious!
With the proliferation of URL shortening services like TinyURL, Bit.Ly and Ow.ly, it has become loads easier for people to engage in link bait tactics by masking the SEO-friendly permalink with random gibberish. And yeah, it makes using services like Twitter more link friendly (it really goes without saying that apps like TweetDeck have auto URL shortening to make links more Tweet-friendly). ShadyURL does the opposite — since the more wary web denizens are aware of malicious links, why join the bandwagon? My only thing with ShadyURL is that it defeats the purpose of shorter URL’s for Twitter. For instance, if we try to turn ForeverGeek.com’s URL shady, we get: Read more »
CubeStormer: robot solves Rubik's Cube in record time
Though plenty of new puzzles have come from the house of Rubik since the Cube, there’s no denying it still holds a special place in the heart of geeks and enthusiasts. For that reason, and for the joy of combining the Rubik’s Cube with robotics, we present CubeStormer from RoboticSolutions. The claim is that this Lego Mindstorms RCX Speedcubing Robot can solve any 33 in under twelve seconds. The video shows this: I’m happy to take their word on the machine being handed random cubes. Just brilliant. Kinda makes your human attempts at solving the cube rather futile, eh? Never mind. You can always dress up as a Rubik’s Cube Read more »
Happy birthday Photoshop: Hits 20 today
Today, February 19, heralds the twentieth birthday of probably the world’s most famous image and photo editing software. Photoshop A new “celebrate” tab on the Photoshop Facebook fan page lets users who love the software that much to change their profile picture to the 20th anniversary logo. Adobe TV will air a special demonstration of Photoshop 1.0 on a rebuilt Mac. Photoshop itself evolved out of a pixel imaging program called Display, created by Thomas Knoll in 1987. In 1988, Adobe licensed a version of the software that could manipulate digital images, and in 1990 the first version of Photoshop was born. Of course, the best thing about having Photoshop Read more »
Green screens in TV series
I’m a TV series addict, I watch a minimum of six currently showing shows and countless of reruns. Not to mention I always have a “Friends” DVD in my DVD player. I never stand still about the fact if the story line is realistic or not. I watch TV series precisely because it’s not real life, it’s a break from real life. Back when “Grey’s Anatomy” was at its height I didn’t like reading weblog posts and comments on it because all viewers complained that in real life Izzie would face hard consequences for cutting a patients LVAD wire. And I just wanted to yell at people if it bothers Read more »
Diagram: choosing a secure password
Here’s an interesting diagram that seems to have been created against Google’s password strength checker. It shows weak, fair, good, strong and “unbreakable” passwords, as might be created by teenagers, douches (you work that one out), geeks, nature lovers, professionals, and “normal” people. Who’s normal? Interesting that ‘g01111001110011101100e’ — of which the central zeroes and one form five-digit binary groups each referring to a letter position in the alphabet, and actually form the password ‘goggle’ (not ‘google’, ha-ha) — is deemed “unbreakable”. I doubt it is, but I wonder how many geeks would choose a password along these lines? Not strong enough for my liking, but it’s way better than Read more »
How many oranges does it take to charge an Apple (iPhone) ?
You know how important getting a regular intake of fruit is, right? Well, if you were ever thinking of trying to charge up your iPhone using oranges (c’mon, of course you were) here’s someone else doing the experiment so you don’t have to… or at least, you’ll know how many oranges and charging paraphernalia to order in. It’s a nice video, anyway. Highly impractical, but then who said that experiments like this had to be practical? We’d never have “will it blend” if that was the rule. So, who’s going to try it with potatoes? Or, hum, apples? Click to see the video. If you can’t wait to see the Read more »
Tech helps to save energy at the Winter Olympics
With all the excitement of the opening ceremony and on-piste sporting action, it’s easy to forget that the Vancouver Olympics was also touted as being one of the greenest on record. To help with that, a system called the Venue Energy Tracker has been devised to monitor how much electricity is being used to provide heat, light and power to the Olympic Village and main venues. The results are pretty impressive, too. In the first three days of the Games, a 20 per cent reduction in energy consumption has been marked thanks to sustainable practices. In total that’s around 66,000 kw/h saved so far, with a target of 18 gigawatt Read more »
There's nothing more manly: Painstaking efforts to land a "car" on Mars
Jerry Seinfeld once said that it has been a motivational desire for man to conquer the moon — and drive around when they got there. I think the same applies here, except that since the conditions for actual driving around are logistically unfavorable due to travel time to Mars from our good old Earth, scientists have invested over USD $2 billion and a lot of delay to putting a titanium clad lander (with wheels) on Mars. The MSL as it is called, weights a ton and it is there to be used for collecting samples to be shot and sent back to Earth. Watch the video, and you’ll see just Read more »
