Tag: tech

humor

Top Auto-Correct Fails of 2011

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If you are using some sort of mobile device to communicate, you have probably experienced some sort of auto-correct failure. This is where you meant to say one thing but your phone/tablet/whatever automatically decided that you really meant to say something else, often to hilarious results.
Damn You Auto Correct is a very funny blog which features, you guess it, a collection of outrageous auto-corrected text messages submitted by readers. At the end of last year, it unveiled its top nine laugh-out-loud entries of the year, based on Facebook shares, tweets, comments and page views. For your reading pleasure, please see the list below. Enjoy!

  1. Intended word: “Monday,” not “Man boobs.”


     
  2. Intended word: “Clinic,” not “closet.”


     
  3. Intended word: “Mortgage payment,” not “MOTTSAPPLESAUCE.”


     
  4. Intended word: “Kissed,” not “killed.


     
  5. Intended word: “China,” not “vagina.”


     
  6. Intended word: “Dimples,” not “nipples.”


     
  7. Intended word: “Shirt,” not “shit.”


     
  8. Intended word: “Persian,” not “period.”


     
  9. Intended word: “Mistletoe,” not “cameltoe.”


     
art

The Patternizer

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Ever need to develop a pattern as a place holder, filler, background and didn’t know how? Well then, the Patternizer is for you.
From the creator, who happens to be a co-worker of mine:

“All patterns are saved with the URL patternizer.com/username/pattern , and each time you save, it creates a new version /1 or /2 or /24. For you extra-techies, this site is a front-end (or UI) for the patternizer.js < canvas > script I wrote. So the patterns you make on the site can be used anywhere with the code it generates.”

Good job Matt.

tech

How Twitter Works

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Designer / Illustrator / Blogger Jessica Hische developed an infographic for her mother on how Twitter works that I found enormously useful. I used to tell people that Twitter is “basically the Facebook status update feature as a stand alone site” and/or it’s “a real time search engine” which I’ve learned is true but not really true. There are parts of the site I come to understand, like how tagging works: you put a hash tag in front of a word, like #nyc, and then whatever is in your tweet is tagged as something as NYC related. Then, if you search by #nyc you will get every single tweet that has that tag in it, which is why I call it a real time search engine. When the plane landed in the Hudson a few years back, the easiest and quickest way to find out what happened was by using #hudsonplanecrash or something similar.
Well, after reading the infographic, I’ve learned a whole lot more which makes a stat I recently read make a whole of a lot more sense. The stat said that email use across most age groups has dramatically fallen and one reason was that people were tweeting much more. Well, now, again after the graphic, I understand how Twitter is robust and unique messaging platform. Want to learn more? Click on the image below:
how_twitter_works
Via Elizabeth

art

Today in Flux

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On today’s date 54 years ago, Dr. Emmit Brown was standing on his toilet seat attempting to hang a clock in his bathroom, when he slipped and slammed his head on the side of the sink (11/5/55 for those too lazy to do some simple mental math). Upon regaining consciousness Brown reported having “a revelation, a picture, a picture in my head.” A picture which he crudely scrawled down on a piece of paper and subsequently spent 30 years of his life and family fortune to build: the flux capacitor.
As evidenced by three movies, two theme park rides and countless exclaimations of 1.21 gigawatts!The world has never been the same since.

tech

GSM To The Rescue

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A few months back I read in a NYT Circuits (now called “Personal Tech”) article the eyeball’s equivalent to music to my ears: that the GSM Association (a cellphone-company trade group) said that its members have agreed to settle on a single, standard charger design for all cellphones – MicroUSB (what is currently used by Blackberries and Canon cameras) and that they will aim for New Year’s Day, 2012 as the deadline. Sweet.
So far, AT&T, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Orange, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, T-Mobile and Vodaphone are all aboard. No word on whether Verizon or Sprint, both non-GSM carriers, are on board.
This means no more “do you have a charger that fits a ____ phone?” “Sorry, I only have one that fits a ____.” conversations. Gone will be the company emails that say, “Do you have a ____ charger for our ____ Client who is visiting?” The new question will be much simpler – it will just be, “Do you have a charger?” Period.
I cannot wait!

politics

US Under Cyberattack

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Last night I post about how I’m so grateful that I don’t live in a war zone without ever thinking about how rooted I was by the bangs and the booms in a Twentieth Century mindset. Because of the US’s global geographic location, the kinds of artillery battles that I felt like I was in while in my backyard jungle on July 4th are very unlikely to happen here, though I could see some of the drug battles in Mexico spilling over the border.
I somehow forgot all about the Terminator movies and the existing botnets that might control the very computer I’m writing this post on. Today I have learned that since July 4th, the South Korean and US governments have been under a sustained and sophisticated cyberattack.
From the NYT, “The Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department Web sites were all down at varying points over the holiday weekend and into this week, The A.P. reported, citing officials inside and outside the American government. The fact that the government Web sites were still being affected after three days signaled an unusually lengthy and sophisticated attack, the news agency reported, citing anonymous American officials.”
Read the article for more geek nightmare details. We are living in the future.

tech

The First Artificial Contestant on America's Favorite Quiz Show

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Answer: This highly successful television quiz show is the latest challenge for artificial intelligence.
Question: What is “Jeopardy”?
Not content with simply winning at chess, IBM has decided to build a machine that can win at “Jeopardy.” One point that has been decided is that the box will not be hooked up to the net during the match – it will have to reference its memory just like the rest of us. While you might think who cares, it’s brain can be many terabytes in size, just remember the AI has to synthesize the answer and then search this ridiculous amount of data before a human can do the same to figure out the right question. Sounds like a huge query challenge. Because it is.
As Kasparov is to chess, Ken Jennings is to “Jeopardy” so I hope that the AI indeed plays KenJen and that KenJen takes it down to Chinatown…

tech

Ding Goes The Oven – Tweet Goes The Feed

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Twitter is just in the news more and more these days. First Lance Armstrong used it to get his stolen bike back. Then we have the rumor that Google is going to buy it. Now, we have the news that some excellent geeks at Poke have hacked together / masterfully crafted something they are calling BakerTweet.
What is it you ask? It’s a wonderful hardware / software solution for alerting people to the latest oven output from the Albion Cafe, Bakery and Food Store. It’s a wireless Arduino thing that can be customized via a web interface to allow for various custom messages to be Twittered at the twist of a dial and the push of a water/flour-proof button.
What’s brilliant is The Albion actually using it. And it actually works. Check out the video below:

BakerTweet from BakerTweet on Vimeo.

literature

Happy Birthday Theodor Geisel

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If you aren’t familiar with Theo Geisel, maybe you know him as Dr. Seuss. I am reading plenty of Seuss books these days and flat out love his rhyme scheme. If I could walk around all day talking like either Yoda or Dr. Seuss, I think I would choose Dr. Seuss.
Today was his birthday so to honor this auspicious date, Google remade its logo Seuss-style:
seuss_google.jpg
Even though he passed away in 1991, I have a feeling that his legacy will live on for a long, long, long time.
Via Phyll

tech

Dropped Your Phone in the Toilet?

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The Gray Lady has an article titled Low-Tech Fixes to High-Tech Problems and one problem that they discuss happens to a lot of people: dropping your cellphone in the toilet (or in my case a cup of beer while at a NJ Nets game). My phone in that instance was ruined but maybe it didn’t have to be if I followed the steps below:

  1. Take the battery out immediately, to prevent electrical short circuits from frying your phone’s fragile internals
  2. Wipe the phone gently with a towel
  3. Shove it into a jar full of uncooked rice.

It works for the same reason you may keep few grains of rice in your salt shaker to keep the salt dry. Rice has a high chemical affinity for water — that means the molecules in the rice have a nearly magnetic attraction for water molecules, which will be soaked up into the rice rather than beading up inside the phone. I have a strong hankering to watch old Mr. Wizard’s World episodes right now…
The rest of the article is full of interesting info, like how you can extend your house’s wi-fi range by making a wave reflector out of an aluminum cookie sheet. Enjoy.