What would happen if you put your hand in the Large Hadron Collider stream? It would probably sting just a bit.
Speaking of the LHC, here’s a pretty cool picture tour.
Category: Scary
Why I Will Never Live In The Midwest, Reason #418
This is size of the hail and some of the damage it did in parts of Kansas last night, sent to me by a former Bend-ite that had to move there when Columbia was bought up by Cessna:
Update: A couple more from the storm, this time from a local golf course, sent by our Kansas corespondent:
Reading (and Watching) Material
- Top Gear’s “Stig” Revealed and subsequently canned, called a “Greedy Twat” by one of the hosts. Apparently the upcoming U.S. version of Top Gear will have a stig as well.
- 25 Mario Facts for the 25th Anniversary.
- Speaking of Mario, here’s an adaptive Mario game that gets easier or harder depending on how and where you die (or how quickly you finish the level).
- You may have read Stuff White People Like, but here is the real stuff that white people like.
- From Canada to Mexico on a single tank of gas.
- Three Ways Facebook is Killing Your Website.
- More Facebook news: Facebook lets publishers contact “Likers.”.
- AMD to take stand against laptop stickers. Too bad the problem stickers on most laptops are put on by the manufacturers and are usually a pain to get off cleanly.
- Turn your blog into an iPad Web app with Padpressed.
- 10 Free WordPress Themes for Small Businesses.
- According to one politician, Girl Scouts breed “pro-abortion” lesbians.
- A good post 9/11 column by the late Hunter S. Thompson that everybody should read.
- Young gamer goes back and tries playing games older than him, and gets his rump kicked by a couple classics (I finished Contra with a friend of mine, but only because of the Konami code).
- I’m amazed that space shuttles can ever take off, consider the amount of satellites orbiting our planet. You can see the entire mess in Google Earth.
- Why our government never gets anything, reason #4817: obscene flowcharts.
- Install the new versions of iTunes without the bloatware.
- A local blogger (and friend of mine) is working on an Oregon XC Documentary and I’m sure I’ll know quite a few people in the final product.
- Every app has a scary basement.
- A good list of netbook operating systems to Windows.
- A stamp I need for the oddball crap that ends up on my desk.
- Ozone allows you to get instant suggestions from 15 sources to find what you’re looking for fast.
Check out some videos after the jump.
Why You Won’t See Me On A Cruise
Crazy stuff like this can happen. Watch the middle pillar as a storm rocks this ship as seen from CCTV footage:
And what did these folks get for their suffering? A discount on a future cruise.
Reading Material
- Where’s my red turtle shell for that guy that just cut me off? Mario Kart Symbols appearing on bike lanes in Portland.
- If you have an iPhone 4, here’s a pretty good collection of wallpapers.
- I’m doing a bit of research on creating a iPhone-friendly version of a site for my day job and the UiUIKit CSS and HTML framework is going to help out quite a bit, I think. PhoneGap, Appcelerator and Sencha Touch also look interesting as well. Booking marking that all for my reference.
- I’m terried of older web developers because I’m becoming one.
- Introducing JITB. a Java-based Flash player that runs pretty dang fast.
- Because you never know when it will come in handy: File I/O in Every Programming Language.
- Looking for a way to compress JS and CSS? Convert it to a PNG.
- Great list of Lifehacker’s best Android apps.
- What’s my computer doing? is a simple way to figure out what programs are thrashing your CPU and hard drive.
- A graphic illustration of music industry licensing madness. That flowchart makes my head hurt.
- How to disable Facebook’s new “Places” feature.
- 12 Great Ways to Customize Your Facebook pages.
- Need to see if a site is safe for work before visiting? Variably Safe For Work might help.
- 100 Quality WordPress Themes.
- That’s going to sting a bit.
Reading Material
- A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives.
- An interesting way to look at the world: Google Maps without the Maps.
- Need special paper (like line/graph paper) but don’t want to buy it? Print it up here or here.
- He was touting family values during the Clinton impeachment, but Newt Gingrinch likes to play around, too.
- More songs are covers than you might think.
- 40+ billionaires pledge to donate half of wealth via the Giving Pledge.
- Now this is stupid: Man who gives free rides home to drunks was arrested for operating a taxi service without a license (related: watching your neighbors’ kids before they go to school could get you fined for running an unauthorized day care).
- Want to generate a URL that will failover automatically to a mirror should the original site go down? I Can Has Mirror might be able to help.
- 10 free web UI kits and resources for designers.
- Everybody acts like photo tampering is a new thing, but it’s been around for over 100 years.
- A hilarious visual diary documenting a flight from New York to Berlin.
- Want to be notified when a web site is sending data to Google? Here’s a nice obnoxious alarm for you (please note: many sites out there, including this one, will trip the alarm, because they use either Google Adsense for ads or Google Analytics for web stats).
- CCleaner Enhancer makes the best system cleaner even better.
- If you’re the exercising/fitness type, here are a bunch of great mobile fitness apps for your phone.
- That’s gratitude for you: The man who made iPhone 4 has been ousted at Apple.
- It’s amazing what you can do with 1KB of Javascript or 10KB and some libraries.
- A stupid-simple way to
hackchange a Windows XP password.
Thirty Years Later, and These Images Are Still Haunting
While I was only a couple years old when Mount. St. Helens blew its top 30 years ago today, I’ve heard loads of stories from family members who lived in the Portland-area when it erupted. These pictures bring those stories back into my mind.
Reading Material
- If the Empire’s IT tech’s wrote a blog, it would look something like this.
- Really nice HDR wallpapers.
- If I’m ever old and have a disabled parking permit, I’m going to be just like this guy.
- 10 Things you Didn’t Know Google Maps could do.
- The hacks will always continue: CSS3 solutions for Internet Explorer.
- XKCD’s results from its color survey are in.
- Top 10 Reasons you should quit Facebook.
- After Steve Jobs ripped up flash, Adobe responds and confirms plans to move away from Apple.
- The Taco Bell Chihuahua is going on a beeg, beeg treep (thanks, Dren!).
- Somebody with far too much time on their hands: A DIY Lamborghini (thanks, Ben!)
- How Wired.com Tracked Down The iPhone 4G finder.
- 17 Tips Every Windows 7 User Needs To Know (related: 60 Tweaks and Hacks for Windows 7, Vista, or XP).
- The most clever ways to use Dropbox that you’re not using.
- What is everybody on Facebook “Like”-ing? Find out (though I still prefer popurls to see what everybody’s liking or linking to).
- TechCrunch hacker identified: Should they press charges?
- All newscasts could be better if their cutaways were accompanied by the Law and Order “chung chung” sound. Anybody want to over-dub a KTVZ broadcast and send it my direction?
- Bend is #4 in America’s top-10 cities for start-ups.
- Think an image might be photoshopped? Throw the URL into here, and it might help you find out.
- If you’re going to plagorize somebody’s art and win a huge chunk of money, the original artist is bound to find out.
Reading Material
- Before you start mouthing off about Hitler, you’d better know your Nazis.
- If it’s Condition 1 weather in Antartica, you want to stay indoors.
- Open *.eml files in Outlook.
- The Virtual Choir is an amazing compositional and technological work.
- The question everybody is asking, with the iPad’s release coming up, is whether they should buy one.
- And everybody wonders why folks have less respect for the GOP vs. The Democrat party — just look at their Web sites.
- ChatrouletteMap is disturbing and fascinating in so many ways.
- Schlinder’s List is for sale.
- An alarm clock that had better wake you up.
- NASA’s photos have nothing on this guy (and he did it a lot cheaper).
- Speaking of outer space, vintage postcards, invaded.
- 2,015 in a single Scrabble move.
- New Research Suggest That Government May Fake SSL Certificates.
- Geek Dream Girl: Woman who balances book on her head while solving a Rubik’s cube and counting Pi to 100 places. That’s hot.
- pwnat is serverless NAT-to-NAT — UDP hole punching for
- Google Contact Sync with Facebook.
- Funambol, Soocial, and Thunderbird Sync.
- Good collection of independent, unbiased, news sources.
- Dear Texas: Please shut up. Sincerly, History.
- f.lux is better lighting for your computer.
The Worst Christmas Present Ever
It’s a bathroom scale that takes pictures of you and posts them to twitter.