Boing Boing: One-quarter of LA's air pollution: made in China

This is funny for a lot of different reasons. America, the number one pollution generator in the World, is complaining that 25% of pollution in LA is from China! Boing Boing: One-quarter of LA's air pollution: made in China

digg, technorati, delicious

anybody fancy explaining them all, or finding out what they're all about, how to use them, how to get traffic from them to your site?

http://www.digg.com/ - "Digg is a technology news website that employs non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do."

http://www.technorati.com/ - uses keywords/tags - "Technorati is the authority on what's going on in the world of weblogs."

http://del.icio.us/ - uses tags. keeps your links for you (if you have an account). looks a bit badly designed.

and have you noticed the "bookmark this on del.icio.us" (eg) / "Submit to Digg" / "Technorati Tags" (eg) on blogs?

geekpatrol.ca: Geekbench Comparison

geekpatrol.ca: Geekbench Comparison - they have written a cross platform benchmark program and tested on pretty much all CPUs (including new Mac Intels, Mac G4, Mac G5, Quad G5, AMD64, Intel etc, although it is missing the Dual Core AMD64, and Dual Core Pentium 4)

Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP

Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP - Windows XP Power toys are really good - for example, one of them "Image Resizer" will resize an image, or a group of selected images, all you need to do is select the image(s) right click, and it's there as a menu option, you can choose to resize to a preset size or a custom size. Especially useful if you want to upload and get 50 digital photos printed for free!

Boing Boing: Drunken gluttons order and eat 100-patty hamburger

Boing Boing: Drunken gluttons order and eat 100-patty hamburger. At "In-N-Out" you can order burgers with as many "pattys" (the meat bit) as you want. These people ordered 100 and then ate the burger!

Look who's back, back again

Apparently, Time are back, bought from the liquidators, Time UK Factory Ltd : : About Us. Scary stuff.

Boing Boing: Music video tells story of Atari's E.T. game debacle

Boing Boing: Music video tells story of Atari's E.T. game debacle. It looks like it's Atari day today, because here's some Atari inspired art (work-safe-ish, cartoon nudity)

Welcome to Llamasoft

Welcome to Llamasoft - Jeff Minter's updated his website, creator of classics such as Llamatron (ST/Amiga), Tempest 2000 (Atari Jaguar) and inventor of the virtual light machine (now featured/copied in iTunes, Winamp*, Windows Media Player) - his latest VLM, Neon, now features in the XBOX 360.

* "I was at a computer show in the US and one of the guys from Nullsoft (winamp) came up to me and apologised for "borrowing" the techniques I'd used on the Jaguar VLM for their own visualisations" link.

BBC NEWS | Business | The world according to Google

BBC NEWS | Business | The world according to Google: "In the 18 months since its stock market flotation, Google has been transformed from a company that prided itself on being simple and effective, into a multi-headed high tech beast which wants to get involved in everything." - Watch this 29 minute documentary online.

Backup your hard drive, automatically

Automatically backup your hard drive data Guide here. Hard Drives dying is fairly common (happened to my laptop hard drive over christmas), so make sure you have a backup somewhere (on a seperate HD, CD, DVD, Internet etc).

(PS - Posts now have title's displayed! early design, another old design, ooh and here's the original from 2002, 2003, and 2004) )

You Want One...

Link

Laser projected keyboard. Frikkin' sharks with frikkin' head attachments not included.

links

links that look good:
Persuasive Games - Disaffected! - have a naff time in this game that mimmicks real life.
1980s Computer history, scans of original brochures and catalogs. (matt might like this the most)
People advertise on the top of buildings for satellite photos simply for google earth.

Blame Bill (Why don't PCs work properly?)

Blame Bill - Wired News: Gates to Comdex: PCs Work Poorly: "Bill Gates admitted it: PCs don't work very well. And he promised to fix things, although it will take him a decade."

Google Pack (background info) is this clever package of software that's great for fresh / new PCs, it gives you 6 months of free anti-virus software, acrobat reader, ad-aware (anti-spyware), google toolbar etc all in one install package, so you only need to click "I accept" once, and don't have to download / install all the programs seperately. Would be nice if it included shockwave/flash player as well though.

Did you hear about the one eyed kitten (picture) that was born and lived a day. It had an eye where the nose was supposed to go. (I've just noticed I've worded this like some kind of crappy joke, it's not a joke.)

microsoft / logitech / kensington trackball reviews

microsoft / logitech / kensington trackball reviews - updated!

Whilst ergonomic solutions to RSI is generally a personal thing as people may find different solutions more or less comfortable compared to other people, this is just a quick guide / review to point out the good and bad bits of the following trackballs:


kensington expert mouse - mechanical + forward/back buttons - big / chunky + big ball means it seems much more precise and controlable compared to the others. still get RSI from too much use.


kensington orbit elite - mechanical + glowing blue ball - small/wobbly on desk - brand new and wheel sometimes seems to stick. Not recommended, doesn't work properly after very little use.

general negative points about kensington: kensington's american website has much more up to date versions of the trackballs compared to the uk/europe version. (ie. optical version of the orbit elite, plus a redesigned more ergonomic version of the 'expert mouse').


logitech marble mouse + optical + forward / back buttons - can still get gunked up with dirt thus slowing down the ball, even though it's optical. Definitely my favourite. Recommended.


microsoft trackball optical + optical + glowing red ball - uses the thumb / seems least controlable / precise out of all of them - seemed to make rsi worse in my thumb.

New Link: zero tension mouse.

MacWorld Keynote Speech Time again, coverage here:
Engadget, Gizmodo (live link), MacRumors, MacNN (started 5pm-ish UK Time).

Expected rumours:
15" Intel ibook, Plasma TV, Shuffle with screen etc

Things announced:
- FM Tuner and remote control for iPod (lets you listen to FM radio through your ipod), $49 (alternatively buy one for £1 from the poundshop!)
- New OS X 10.4.4
- New iLife. New iPhoto with Photocasting. (podcasting for photos, uses RSS)
- New iMac with Dual Core Intel 2.0ghz CPU (in 20" version) Shipping Today - "The new iMac is 2 to 3 times faster than the iMac G5."
- New MacBook Pro - Dual Core Intel 15.4" widescreen LCD. (shipping Feb)

What's impressive here is that, probably last week, dual core Intel PC Laptops were appearing (being announced!), but desktop PCs are/were still stuck with Athlon (dual core available) or (crappy) Pentium 4 CPUs (dual core available) or niche Pentium M (single core chips), whereas now, right now, in a Mac you can get dual core Intel chips (based on the pentium m*)!

* The Pentium M is pretty much the fastest x86 cpu available (or was before they made a dual core version) and is the fastest at SETI, so these dual core versions must ROCK!

Apple.com now updated with full details, pictures and specifications.

Zombie Robot Cockroaches. Link (with picture).

"A research team at Tokyo University is making these bio-bots by lopping off the antennae of regular roaches and replacing them with pulse-emitting electrodes. The researchers then send signals with a remote control to a backpack worn by the roach that powers the electrodes. The roaches can be told to go left, right, forward and back, and the team sees all sorts of "betterment of humanity" applications such as outfitting the bugs with mini-cameras to take on the good old search and rescue, or for a bit of espionage."

I don't know whether this is any good or not, as it's now become too late to read this, but here's a story of a Linux guy switching to Windows. It's written as though he's never used Windows before / never installed it before... I think if I read enough I'll figure out it's a comical take off of all the Mac/Linux people that want you to switch over to them. (turns out it's quite funny :)

save knobbly snacks

Golden wonder have gone into administration. What is the wordld coming to? Perhaps there will be shortages in the shops. I might just have to go out and panic buy. Right.. I'm off. What do they make again?

Chuck Norris

Chuck Norris Facts gave me a giggle over Christmas. (link fixed - j)

joshwaller.co.uk blog: New Years Eve 2005 - 2006 at Mood

Happy New Year! What did you get up to? Here's what I did (with photos).

I've removed the nedstat basic code / tracker, as it was generating the annoying pop-up adverts that seemed to bypass mozilla's popup blocker. If you want a tracker put back on, we could use extreme or perhaps sitemeter?