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Hollow Spy Coins for those on a mission
We know that coins can be used to play a prank on others by squirting water, but here is something much more serious. It allows you to store precious information within without giving the game away. Do you have a microSD memory card containing risqué images of your weekend that you do not want anyone else to see, ever? Well, store it within the [...]
Beat Caffeine Addiction and Stay Awake with Placebos
Good news for those who get jitters, headaches, and really bad social graces when deprived of their caffeine fix—beating the habit and switching to a placebo can leave you feeling just as energized. After dividing up 16 "regular caffeine users" (sounds so clinical!) into two groups, researchers gave half of them the equivalent of 20 ounces of [...]
Amazon unveils the big screened Kindle DX
Amazon's Kindle DX has a 9.7" e-ink display with 1200x824 pixels, 16 shades of gray, and faster page transitions. 10.4 inches long and 7.2 wide, it is 0.38 inches thick and retains the basic capabilities of the standard model: EVDO internet and the Amazon store. (more...)
Ship Night Run
The video was assembled in Quicktime from 2000 still images taken by using a Nikon D700 in the "interval timer" mode. The camera was fastened to an outside rail and set to take a photo every six seconds. Quicktime then assembled the photos into a .mov file that plays back at 12 frames per second. So, one minute of movie time represents 72 minutes [...]
“I never said she stole my money” has 7 different meanings depending on the stressed word
Just had to spell this out to a colleague, so thought I may as well post it. It should be "didn't say," rather than "never said", but the gist is the same... I didn't say she stole my money - someone else said it I didn't say she stole my money - I didn't say it I didn't say she stole my money - I only implied it I didn't say she stole my [...]
Take this ROM and…
Indie developer Farbs -- creator of 8-bit videogame mashup Rom Check Fail and the later, similarly stylish Polychromatic Funk Monkey -- quit his mainstream job as gameplay programmer at 2K Australia in fitting fashion: he created a playable take on Super Mario Bros that delivers the message far better than any scathing letter could. Play the [...]
IBM Supercomputer to Compete on “Jeopardy!”
Pretty soon, "Jeopardy!" host Alex Trebek may face his toughest contestant yet: an IBM supercomputer. On Monday, the tech giant plans to announce that it'll be moving one of its Blue Gene machines to Los Angeles to appear on the popular game show, according to a report by the New York Times. Computers have played, and sometimes beaten, [...]
“Four Corners” is off by 2.5 miles
Hard to believe it took them this long to figure it out? I wonder if they're going to move the site or keep it where it is and simply hope no one reads the article. SALT LAKE CITY - Tourists who think they're putting a hand or foot in each of four U.S. states at the Four Corners area are apparently missing the mark — by about 2.5 [...]
Manga about running Ubuntu
Ubunchu, a manga-style comic for kids about the joys of running the Ubuntu Linux operating system. It's a free, CC-licensed .PDF, and it's been translated into a very large number of languages, and there are more editions to come. (more...)
Laser cutter motors play Super Mario Brothers theme song
Jed from HackLab wrote code that tunes the motors on a laser cutter so that it plays music -- here it is playing the Super Mario theme. This is slightly too perfect, leading me to wonder if it's not just some video of a laser cutter with a flanged-out version of the theme cut into the soundtrack. But hell, I want to believe.
How the Herman Miller Aeron Chair Inspired Burton
Office furniture doesn't usually inspire outdoor activity. But designers at Burton Snowboards saw more in the Aeron chair than a cockpit for sedentary pursuits. They found kinetics in ergonomics and high performance in space-age materials. By applying parallel design elements to the company's 2009 CO2 board bindings ($390), Burton took imitation [...]
Let Microsoft Live Search Do Your Algebra
Students in high school, or college kids without embedded math knowledge, take note: Microsoft's Live Search can solve math equations with variables. That means everything from 3x=18 to x+(x*8)=256, and basically any equation where there's a definite answer for one (possibly two?) variables can be solved from the Live Search bar. It might not [...]
Behind the scenes at Netflix
I always wondered about how they managed all of those rentals. I honestly thought it was all done by robots. Great behind the scenes photos. ...and I haven't seen that many redshirts since the last "Star Trek" marathon on SciFi.
Inside Google’s Server Infrastructure
Google is tight-lipped about its computing operations, but the company for the first time on Wednesday revealed the hardware at the core of its Internet might at a conference here about the increasingly prominent issue of data center efficiency. Most companies buy servers from the likes of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, or Sun Microsystems. But [...]
Nazi codebreaker which shortened the Second World War by two years
The rows of silver dials and tangle of scarlet wires look more like a telephone exchange. But this is the inside of the Turing Bombe, the part-electronic, part-mechanical code-breaking machine and forerunner of the modern computer, which cracked 3,000 messages a day sent on Nazi Enigma machines during the Second World War. There were 210 [...]
HOWTO: USB sniffing in linux
The linux kernel has a facility called “usbmon” which can be used to sniff the USB bus. It’s been in there for ages, and the output is really easy to collect, even from the command line shell. Simply mount debugfs and insmod the usbmon module: mount -t debugfs none_debugs /sys/kernel/debug modprobe usbmon Then you can just cat USB traffic [...]
Ryanair air hostess Edita Schindlerova exposed as porn star
A budget airline stewardess will keep her job despite being exposed as a part-time porn star. Ryanair hostess Edita Schindlerova, 22, secretly appears on X-rated websites posing as Edita Bente, reports The Sun. But airline bosses have supported Miss Schindlerova, despite appearing in graphic photos showing her having sex with a mystery [...]
BMW designs ultimate PC gaming computer
About a decade ago, pretty much every computer in the world was housed in a boring beige box, and the biggest design question was whether that container would sit vertically or horizontally. That's all changed now, partly due to the influence of Apple and custom PC manufacturers like Thermaltake, a Taiwanese company that specializes in PC cases [...]
Tear of Grief: Who knew this existed?
Don't be fooled by the nice photo in the Wikipedia entry; this sculpture is in a horrible location. It's located at the end of the Military Ocean Terminal in Bayonne and is SO out of the way, it probably gets no tourist traffic. The only reason I know about it is because a bus driver pointed it out while I was in Jersey, and even then I could only [...]
Why mercury is forbidden aboard airplanes
Unless you are a representative of a national meteorological bureau licensed to carry a barometer (and odds are you’re not), bringing mercury onboard an airplane is strictly forbidden. Why? If it got loose, it could rust the plane to pieces before it had a chance to land. You see, airplanes are made of aluminum, and aluminum is highly [...]
