Thursday 25 September 2008 at 8:37 pm
Awesome - probably what most people wish their intranets were like -
Elgg. Open source 'social' website builder for intanets.
Ingenious -
Worlds first satnav (without the satellite).
Nifty -
RockBox. If you have an older model iPod or supported MP3 player you can replace the firmware with RockBox and get some new features (incl Doom!).
If you're a fan of oddball music take a look at
DecrepitTapes. From the creator of
KiwiTapes.
Creepy -
Flash based Spider Simulator.
Useful -
Top Ten Security Issues.
Making decisions based upon flawed statistical analysis -
THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS. Goes some way to explaining the current world banking crisis (that and stupidity/greed).
Handy -
run a linux live CD direct from Windows.
How the Swedes solved their early 90's banking crisis -
Stopping a Financial Crisis, the Swedish Way. Pretty fascinating reading - "Sweden took a different course than the one now being proposed by the United States Treasury. ... It extracted pounds of flesh from bank shareholders before writing checks. . . . That strategy held banks responsible and turned the government into an owner. When distressed assets were sold, the profits flowed to taxpayers, and the government was able to recoup more money later by selling its shares in the companies as well."
On a similar note -
Michael Lewis' Mansion: A Subprime Parable.
And again -
How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers. Interesting to see them build fatally flawed mathematical models
One of those bizarre stories that makes you wonder how the public will react -
Britain will make foreigners carry RFID identity cards and will put us in a huge, Orwellian database: the rest of Britain will be next.
Monday 01 September 2008 at 06:35 am
Minimalist radio design -
Hidden Radio. Shown up in a few places - raise the lid to change volume and twist to tune.
Nifty -
Colour Palettes based on Bruises. Add a touch of darkness to your designs.
Wow -
Peta-centers: Huge Datacenters.
Impossible
Klein bottle. A Klein bottle is a surface which has no edges, no outside or inside and cannot properly be constructed in three dimensions.
I loves me some
Tiny Houses. Why can't I get these in NZ ?
Awesome -
Treventus Book Scan-robot. Scans at 1250 pages per hour.
Nice
create custom Communist Propaganda featuring your own image.
Useful -
Ten Unix Good Habits.
Joel Spolsky writes about the problems of
forming workable management channels in a small company. Jason Kottke points to other techniques of which the
General Electric Jet Engine plant looks pretty interesting - "a factory that had more than 170 employees but just one boss."
A new twist -
Dot Matrix Business Cards. Very cool.
Sony are putting the cell processor to use
Zego Server.
See how often body-parts are mentioned in various genres of music -
Fleshmap.
Interesting
Storage Statistics -
"Files rarely re-opened. Over 66% are re-opened once and 95% fewer than 5 times."
So having tiered storage or automatic archiving is become more important than ever. I suspect the same stats apply to email.
Wednesday 20 August 2008 at 06:39 am
Cool -
How to fold a piece of paper in half more than 8 times
Like
Slashdot, gadget sites like
Gizmodo &
Engadget have lost some of their appeal due to the lack of anything genuinely interesting but this
IOGEAR usb vga wireless adaptor is awesome! Now theres no need to worry about noise from your media PC if its not actually in the same room as your TV. Look like the truly wireless PC is coming another step closer.
Interesting photos with hand-made cameras -
Miroslav Tich. Nicely grainy and earthy shots. Via the always interesting -
Kottke.
Pretty nifty - Like
Sun, Microsoft are doing
Container based data-centers. Love the modularity - sealed horse-power which you replace when the number of failed boxes within the container reaches a threshold; then you just drop in a replacement container.
I never cease to be amazed by
silly browser tricks. Nice transitions.
Unfortunately the beta isn't quite as nice as the screen shots but it still looks promising
Circle Dock.
Interesting paper on
Digital Face Replacement and you can try it out for yourself on
Year Book Yourself.
The old Microsoft Network Monitor hadn't changed much since the NT4 days (much like the Font Control Panel) - the new
Network Monitor 3.1 even has a
blog and it looks like it would give Wireshark (ex Ethereal) a run for its money.
Thursday 31 July 2008 at 1:51 pm
For that retro vibe -
Web to Snail Mail. Reminds me of
Gmail Paper.
Wonderful -
Big Picture view of the Large Hadron Collider. Impressive piece of machinery!
Before wizzy graphics there was
Core Wars. Back when you had to write your own game-bots out of assembler.
Charles Stross (Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise, Halting State etc) writes about
Bechdel's Law which is a quick test for popular media (tv/movies/books) - 1. Does it have at least two women in it, 2. Who [at some point] talk to each other, 3. About something besides a man. Plenty of followups including
this great comic and another excellent article about
creating realistic female characters in comics and sci-fi/fantasy.
Very useful -
Adeona - Free Laptop Tracking Tool. Cross platform (Windows, Linux, OS X) and it works with an iSight camera. If you have the decrypt key you can retrieve information and images from the stolen machine. Installed.
Popmatters are running a great series of articles -
resurgence of vinyl and the
joy of second hand book shops.
Open source home automation and control project -
OpenRemote. Looks interesting.
I can vouch for number two -
Dirty Tech Jobs. Shifting server rooms and datacenters is a pain in the ass. Number four is not much better - getting inter-group co-operation is a nightmare.
Wednesday 16 July 2008 at 06:46 am
Fantastic Japanese watches -
Tokyo Flash.
Nifty -
Charles Mingus Jazz bassist and
Cat Trainer.
Genius -
Sean Tavis is running for State Representative in Kansas using an XKCD inspired viral campaign. Good luck to him!
John Robb always has interesting things to say about the state of the world -
End of Neo-Liberalism? NZ has taken the free market approach further than most (driven by a Labour government no-less) - almost everything is deregulated or privitised apart from core governemnt functions (even then people claim we're over-regulated).
Fascinating -
Economics of a WWII POW camp. Key point - save your ciggies.
Nice looking CMS
Silverstripe. Shame it needs a database backend. I'm still holding out for the new
Pivot to come out of testing. Of course if your a simlicity nut then
Blosxom 2.1.0 is out now - you just can't beat text files and perl.
Some nifty new mini-pc's coming out - like the
Ripple or the
Acer x1200. And as per one of the links in the comments theres a whole thread over at
Coding Horror on what mini pc's are available and what you can use them for.
A great write-up
comparing various Cloud Computing systems. Interesting stuff in there about the legal implications of running in a 'cloud' - do you abide by laws of the country in which the cloud resource happens to be running at that time ?
Finally via
kottke.org number five in a series on markers for humanities decline -
Bratty Brides. Brides who want their bridesmaids to get botox or boob jobs before walking down the aisle with them. WTF!? Seriously.
Friday 04 July 2008 at 06:40 am
A couple of great video manipulation posts to mess with your head
LiquidTime Chronotopic Anamorphosis (this ones trippy!)
On a similar 'messing with reality' bent is the
Image Fulgurator which detects when a flash goes off and projects an image on whatever is being photographed.
Fascinating -
Working at Google vs Microsoft. This is an apt observation (amony many others in the article) -
As all organizations mature they tend to add PROCESS. These processes exist to insulate the companies from the mistakes that occur after a company gets to a certain size and can no longer trust its employees to always do the right thing. Requiring code reviews, design specifications, black box & whitebox & unit testing, usability studies, threat models, etc are all the kinds of overhead that differentiate a mature software development shop from a fly by the seat of your pants startup.
My vi is getting rusty but these tips are handy -
100 vim commands every programmer should know.
A fascinating article on
200 Year Software from the inventor of the spreadsheet Dan Bricklin. Essentially Dan posits the idea that software for record keeping should be architected in the same way as key physical infrastructure or else huge chunks of our history are going to disappear due to technological obsolescense.
Similar to last weeks post about failing Electrical Infrastructure is another article on the crumbling use Infrastructure -
The cracks are showing. The
'grim meathook future' appears to be on the horizon.
Oil is the least of our worries, apparently we're running out of
Galium (and Indium, Hafnium, Zinc & Copper). Stock up on those flat screens while you still can.
A rather fascinating insight into a software developers debugging process (even for a non geek its easy to read) -
The greatest bug of them all.
Mel wrote a great post on attending the Henley Regatta - take a read for a glimpse at
real history and tradition in action. I can't believe they actually measured the dress lengths!
Sunday 29 June 2008 at 10:02 am
Mark Pilgrims
Five Minute Fudge. Great write up to go along with a simple recipe. Theres definitely a market for a book of simple recipes explained in an amusing way.
Nice graphic -
the worlds interweb pipes.
A different command line search utility -
Comparing ack & grep.
If you have a hankering for some outdoor cooking try a
Rocket Stove. The linked site at the bottom of the page has some other useful lo-fi lifestyle info too.
Interesting write up of the US electrical infrastructure -
The Brown Out Future. NZ is in the same boat - its electrical infrastructure dates from the same period and we cope with more power cuts and spikes than a first-world nation should.
How the pervasiveness of the internet means the backroom boys want to meddle more in the activities of the frontline soldiers -
IT vs Initiative.
I'm still a vi guy but for those on the darkside -
Ten Essential emacs Tips.
A list of under-used Unix command line tools
10 Linux Commands You Probably Dont Use and
10 Linux commands youve never used. I've used a few but only occasionally.
If you're a serious geek on a nostalgia kick try some Lego goodness -
Lego Secret Vault Contains All Sets In History and
Lego Employees Have Minifigs as Business Cards. Genius.
Interesting -
New York Times: I Freed Myself From E-Mails Grip which was linked from Ed Brills article
which makes a good counter-argument for the ongoing usefulness of email. On a related note
Email Free Fridays are gaining in popularity.
Wednesday 18 June 2008 at 6:03 pm
An interesting concept -
Scenius. "Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius."
Looks like some interesting apps coming up -
Adobe Air and the Corporate Desktop. Still hard to see how anyones going to dictate any kind of interface consistancyor make for better apps - isn't this just like Java but prettier ?
Nice
Storage VMotion Plugin. Annoying that Storage VMotion has been implemented with a CLI but no GUI - good to see someone fill the gap.
Sun are onto a real winner -
Using Flash in ZFS.
Self publishing really can't get much easier -
MagCloud. Upload a PDF and they'll take care of the rest.
Its good to know the
mighty intellects of the future are being put to good use. Don't laugh, as someone who knows how big organisations work I can vouch for the validity of this cartoon.
Congrats to Mel on getting published -
Thames A Rater Nationals at Bourne End Week.
Wednesday 04 June 2008 at 06:54 am
Some wonderful articles in
IEEE on The Singularity. The technological singularity is a hypothesised point in the future variously characterized by the technological creation of self-improving intelligence, unprecedentedly rapid technological progress, or some combination of the two - according to
Wikipedia.
A web based presentation app that mimics Keynote -
280 Slides. Quite a feat of programming.
Self monitoring Virtual Machines via
Vertebra. All part of the drive to bring about reliable and robust cloud computing.
Fascinating reading -
The Height Gap: Why Europeans are getting taller and taller-and Americans arent.
Brilliant (if pointless) -
TCP/IP via Drums. Two PC's communicate via drums (ie a 'ping' results in a drum sequence the other PC listens to and interprets before responding in kind.
Some nice desktop wallpaper - the Nature themed
Desktopography (the earlier ones look better than the more recent IMHO) and the always reliable
Pixel Girl.
Green those open spaces and derelict lots -
Guerrilla Gardening. Seed bombing looks like a fun activity.
Buy some of the distortion pedals used by
A Place to Bury Strangers at
Death By Audio. Remember '
Noise Annoys'.
If you need secure browing (ie you live in China or Burma) then you can take advantage of
TOR within your Firefox browser via
TOR Button.
If you're one of those adventurous souls playing with Windows Server 2008 then this tool might be really useful - its a gui for configuring
Server 2008 Core (which doesn't have a gui of its own).
Sunday 25 May 2008 at 09:53 am
Great thinking -
Nice and cheap quick-setup housing.
On a tenuous home and garden related note - this is awesome - a
folding greenhouse.
For some reason I started googling 'container house' and the first hit is a kiwi site -
Container Architecture. Nice way of recycling - shame there are no pictures of real houses.
These look interesting though.
Fascinating -
NIHONJIN, BURAKUMIN: Portraits of Japans outcast people. You don't really hear about this type of thing. Its surprising how groups of people always get left behind no matter how technologically advanced the country is.
Super geeky -
Science of keyboard design. Taking the mechanics of keyboard design to a whole new level.
Geeky -
RAID 5 Compact Flash Adaptor. Get a bunch of old CF cards and roll your own disk.
Will this become more popular -
Time to destroy your mail servers. An IT Director mentioned their company had moved from Notes/Domino to Google Apps and Mail. I was mystified. I can see benifits for a small organisation or for a very large organisation that needs to offload a bunch of work (ie student email at a University) but you're giving away a serious competitive advantage by outsourcing your messaging and groupware infrastructure. Its also interesting to see IBM offer hosted Notes.
Fascinating -
The future without IPv6. I wonder if this will really work out as described ? IPv6 has been around for a few years now and no one I know has thought seriously about implementing it.
This looks to be a kiwi site -
Read at work. Kind of interesting way to procrastinate while appearing to work.
If they pull this off it looks like Google will have a real iPhone competitor -
Live images and video of the Google Android phone interface. The immersion stuff looks fantastic - use your phone like a compass and Google Maps will rotate to match.
Awesome art -
Displacements. Films a room then whites it out and plays back the film using the white room as a screen.
Nice idea -
Obecalp Tablets. Available online. Read the name of the pills backwards.
