Category: Interesting
Think You Could Build A Toaster? From Scratch?
I’m Thomas Thwaites and I’m trying to build a toaster, from scratch – beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99. A toaster.
A very interesting and well-presented project.
Good Question
So now that Bin Laden is toast, can we bring a bottle of shampoo on the plane?
Seriously, though, does anybody thing anything will change? Really, he probably hasn’t been involved in anything for over a decade, and this will probably just anger his followers and security will be tighter and basic constitutional rights will still be limited. Ideally, the Patriot Act would go away, but I seriously doubt it.
For a quick clip of the President’s speech, head here.
Worried About Radiation Exposure From Japan?
Don’t be. This handy-dandy chart shows that you get more radioactive exposure from many other places. And you’re still alive, right?
Yes, radiation poisoning can be a Very Bad Thing™ but the people who are freaking out about it unnecessarily need to calm down a bit. I’d still put a reactor in my backyard if I could.
Star Wars: Episode IV, Retold Simply
The entire movie, in icon form.
Reading Material
- I’m looking more into virtualizing a bit more to consolidate some old but still (unfortunately) necessary servers here at the office (still need the hardware to do it, but that’s another issue). They’re older Windows 2000 servers that won’t run well on Windows 2003 (I’ve tried). I’m leaning towards a Xen platform, possibly running on top of CentOS with Virtual Machine Manager installed. I’m more familiar with RedHat/RPM-based distros, but I’m just at the preliminary research stages so all that may change. Many of the solutions out there require XP/2003 or higher (like the stupid-simple Disk2vhd), but I’m going to have to look into some manual methods to get things moved as I really don’t want to rebuild the OS inside Xen. Thoughts/input is always welcome, since I know there are guys here that know far more about this type of thing than I.
- You thought BendBroadband’s 100GB data cap was bad? Try living in Canada and getting only 25GB. Because of the much lower cap, folks are much more inclined to block ads. Here are some ideas on how to block the ads on DD-WRT routers (another option — I’m sure something similar is possible on Tomato or TomatoUSB firmware as well). You can do it on a per-computer basis by using the MVP Hosts file.
- Is it me, or have people spent far too much time adding content to this Wikipedia entry? I wish that much effort was put into other articles on that site.
- Egypt is having a real democratic revolution, while the one in Iraq was fake.
- Is Netflix trying to embarrass certain ISPs? My streaming works great on my WDTV Live Plus so BBB must not be on that list. Wish Hulu would get onto my WDTV box and I’d rarely have to ever turn on my HTPC.
- Best okcupid profile ever.
- Some jobs I could do no problem. This isn’t one of them.
- Google is accusing Bing of copying their search results.
- The hilarious Axe Cop comic (written by a five-year-old, illustrated by his 29-year-old brother) really needs to be turned into a movie.
- Some stuff people are printing in my room over the internet. While live printing has been shutdown, there is some interesting stuff in the gallery.
- Another good list of Android apps and games.
Looking For Egyptian Riot Coverage?
While the coverage from American media online isn’t too bad (they were a little late on the ball, really), you’re better off going to Aljazeera’s English site or BBC’s site as they seem to have things better covered.
While the country’s internet has been shutdown, people are finding ways around and still getting out twitter posts. Anonymous (and many ISPs, too) is at it, too, using the good ol’ fax machine to get relevant information into the country.
There’s a good write-up on the first three days of the mess over on reddit.
This video is great and gave a very appropriate quote: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.” (John F. Kennedy)
Reading Material
- Why 3D movies don’t work and never will. Period.
- Poor Bullet Bill (if you’re a classic Nintendo geek, you’ll love Brawl in the Family).
- Speaking of Nintendo, here’s something I might have to try with our Wii: Install a Wii Game Loader for Easy Backups and Fast Load Times.
- If you need to do a basic layout for any type of room, this online tool is pretty nifty.
- Man, I feel old: Oregon Trail is turning 40 this year.
- Oldie, but interesting: Nine ways to obfuscate e-mail addresses compared.
- Behind the scenes on the Back To The Future set.
- Truly Decentralized BitTorrent Downloading has Finally Arrived.
- The man who started Big Picture is moving on to a new gig that will allow him to focus on it full time (he was also a web developer at Boston.com).
- Need some symbols or icons? The Noun Project has a great collection of free, public domain, icons, available in vector format.
- BoingBoing has updated their stats dump. Hopefully Andy Baio will update his fun stats page.
- How to Print Gmail on your Android or iPhone using Cloud Print.
- Handy little guide to make your own 5-in-1 Network Admin cable.
- Cryptic JavaScript at its finest.
- Some more Android links, for my reference:
- wp clock is a pretty slick looking live wallpaper.
- Speaking of Live Wallpaper, this Super Mario wallpaper is pretty sweet.
- How to factory reset your Epic (I used this when I was trying — unsucessfully — to get Nebula ROM installed).
- Here’s an interesting read on how changing the Epic file system from RFS to EXT4 will speed things up (I tried this and it didn’t work right for me, but I didn’t really have time to dig into it).
- Now that I have Froyo installed on my phone, I was able to free up a bunch of phone memory by moving apps onto the SD card.
- Now that I have Froyo, I can now have a TI-83 in my pocket.
- If you’re looking for directions on installing your own custom ROM for your Epic, this might help.
- If you need to do a clean install and restore, Titanium Backup will help a bunch.
- If you need a way to track down a lost or stolen phone before it happens and the Prey Project isn’t enough for you, Theft Aware looks pretty dang powerful.
- Things you can’t do with your iPhone: Customize it a zillion different ways.
Reading and Watching Material
Some videos and some interesting reads for you all (videos after the jump as to not clog up the front page):
- The Best of 2010 lists are tricklying out, so here are a couple: The Source’s Top 10 Local News Stories of 2010 and imgur’s Top Images of 2010.
- A great list of Free and Paid SEO Tools.
- Diving into the heart of Stuxnet, one of the most frightening viruses I’ve seen.
- I don’t know where I came across this guy, but Engineer Guy has a bunch of great videos and whitepapers that take some high-end engineering topics and explain them to us common folk.
- I may have linked to this before, but I’m doing it again, now that we have an Wii and can try it: Dolphin Emulator is an emulator for GameCube and Wii games that can run Wii games at 1080p.
- Putting the Record Straight on the Lamo-Manning Chat Logs.
- If you’re looking at msconfig or your startup applications list and don’t recognize something, pretty good chance you can find it here.
- Adsense, no sense at all –
- Install Mac OS X on any Intel-based PC. Now I just need an extra PC that doesn’t suck to try this on (I have lots of old PCs, but nothing that would run OS X worth squat).
- Rosetta Code aims to “present solutions to the same task in as many different languages as possible.” It’s interesting to see how a bunch of different programming language solve the same problem.
- An interesting read: The Great Tax Con Job (or why the richer are getting richer and why folk like us are getting screwed).
Read on for the videos…
Reading Material
- The Vendor/Client Relationtionship in Real World Situations.
- I didn’t know video game graphics could look this realistic.
- The Background Dope on DHS Recent Seizure of Domains.
- Five Lessons Netflix Learned withUsing AWS (I think the Chaos Monkey idea is a great one).
- The Big Picture has their photos of the year series going: Part 1, 2 and 3.
- Wiki’s should have an ignorance test.
- Why one man rated the book as “very good”.
- Booboo Kills Yogi.
- 22 Essential Resources for Android Owners.
- Steam’s Holiday Sale has begun, and this Reddit thread will make it easier to follow.
- For the serious geeks: vmail is a Vim interface to Gmail.
- I don’t know where this hilarious image came from, but more parents should be given this in poster form.
- The NYT geeks are smart folks: Using flat files so elections don’t break your server.
- Those molesting pat-downs aren’t working: Man boards plane with loaded gun in carry-on.
- Favimon is a RGB-style battle of Favicons.
- I’m mostly book marking this for my future reference, but unRAID looks fairly interesting.
- Nudity detection with JavaScript with nude.js.
- Speaking of nudity, Accidental Penis (Safe for work, don’t worry).
- Google Labs has debuted Books Ngram Viewer which allows you to type in a word or phrase in one of seven languages and see how its usage frequency has been changing throughout the past few centuries. Naturally, somebody tried it with “penis” and there was apparently a spike in the early 19th century that has a bit of a phallic shape to it.