Everyone love Magical Trevor;
‘Cos the tricks that he does are ever so clever.
Tag: news
Something Cheery
I see that Slate, a magazine run by MSN (and owned entirely by Microsoft), recently published an article promoting the idea of not using Internet Explorer. Whoopsie, say Microsoft. Better yet, the article suggests using Mozilla Firefox, their main competitor in the browser market, instead.
Promised you something cheery. There it is.
Software Projects In The Context Of Swings
Eons old, but I rediscovered it today while tidying up my hard drive, so I thought I’d share it with you all:
Parallel Parking For Dummies
Have a go at the parallel parking game – let’s so how good you lot are. I’ve managed to beat the rest
of the folks at work with a stunning score of 87.72, parking in 5.7 seconds flat… not bad for the only non-driver!
God Violates Intel Trademark
It’s all news, today! Lots of fascinating little stories and nothing about me. I mean, who’s blog is it anyway?
According to The Register, the authoritive source on such matters, God may have infringed upon Intel’s intellectual property. Only moderately funny, but nice and geeky.
In other news, I hear that AMD are planning to release a new dual-processor board designed to accomodate two older Athlon chips, optomised for playing 80s music on MP3. They’re calling it the Duron Duron.
Singing Flowers
Remember those silly plastic flowers that danced? Well, here’s the next inevitable step: a Japanese inventor has developed a device that can be buried in a plant pot and uses vibration to cause the leaves of plant therein to oscillate as speakers.
Grow your own speakers. Yay.
Personally, I’d have far too much fun burying such a device under a friend’s vegetable patch, on a long (buried or otherwise concealed) cable, and have his plants ‘talk back’ to him when he talks to them. Where can I get one?
MEP From Yorkshire States “[Never] employ a lady of child-bearing age.”
The BBC have an article: “UKIP MEP in row over working women”. It’s worth reading, if only to laugh.
Expect to see this particular MEP assassinated by a militarist feminist group within the week.
Developers Play Air Guitar To Megadeth
The Register have a report on a survey of the musical tastes of IT specialists, by profession. If you’re a geek, date a geek, live with geeks, or whatever, it’s worth a look.
A Selection Of News Items From Around The World
[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]
[more of this post was recovered on Friday 24 November 2017]
Here’s some stuff I found interesting this weekend:
Swedish health workers, in an effort to stem the growing cases of chlamydia among young people, have launched a ‘condom ambulance [BBC News]. If you find yourself ‘caught short’ in Sweden, just give them a bell and they’ll rush around to your house with a pack-of-three, for the equivelent cost of about £4.
Chinese researchers have used a carbon nanotube [Wikipedia] as a filament in a new, experimental light bulb [The Register]. This bulb emits more light and works at a lower threshold than tungsten at the same voltage, and was still functioning fine after being switched on and off 5000 times. The future of lighting?
And finally, researchers from Hebrew University in Israel may have found a solution to the problems associated with passwords. As it stands, ‘secure’ passwords are hard to remember, and often find themselves written down, whereas insecure ones can be cracker. Plus, for real security, passwords should be …
The Register Takes Off In Aberystwyth
The Register have this story and photo, taken in Aberystwyth: can anybody identify the woman in the picture?
The Importance Of A Sensible Patent System In Europe
If Haydn had patented “a symphony, characterised by that sound is produced [ in extended sonata form ]”, Mozart would have been in trouble.
Click Here — Sign The Petition
Just thought I’d share that link with you. This is something which could eventually affect the way we all use computers. To those of you who don’t recognise these images or have no idea what I’m on about, I urge you to read about the issue of software patenting in Europe.
Thanks for listening.
The Register Takes Off In Aberystwyth
[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]
The Register have this story and photo, taken in Aberystwyth: can anybody identify the woman in the picture?…
[picture removed]
Dan’s Best Impression Yet
[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]
Want to see me do my impression of a coconut?
[picture removed]
World’s Highest Bridge Completed
With it’s road surface 270 metres above ground, and 2,460 metres long, this bridge could be visualised quite well if you imagine a bridge joining the tops of Pen Dinas and Constitution Hill, in Aberystwyth. Just another impressive feat of engineering I thought I’d share with you. I like bridges. Read the full story here.
Blimps… In Space
Now here’s a funky idea – sub-orbital spaceflight in enormous helium balloons, up to a two-mile wide sub-space station (a permanant facility at the very boundries of our atmosphere). This could be used to carry spaceship components for assembly in orbit, and then launched using ion drives at a fraction of the price of rocket launches.
The designers estimate that they can have a functional prototype within seven years – given the funding they’d like – and that journeys into space could be done almost for free and much more safely (albeit at the time expense that it would take up to nine days to get there).
Marvellous.