What a fantastic little FireFox plug-in this Pic Lens is! In their own words, it “transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for enjoying photos and videos across the web.” In my words, it’s pretty sick – I love it. So do a lot of other people too. My advice: find 20 spare seconds and install it. Simple as that.
I have no clue how Yahoo! got the Tolkien estate to give them rights to use Bilbo and Gandalf to advertise how you can text and chat inside Yahoo!’s email offering. Half of me thinks it is oddly interesting to “watch” Mr. Wizard and the Halfling converse as if they were 15 year old girls. The other half thinks it is sacrilegious. You decide which half you fall on.
Wally Wallington has demonstrated that he can lift a Stonehenge-sized pillar weighing 22,000 lbs and moved a barn over 300 ft. What makes this so special is that he does it using only himself, gravity, and his incredible ingenuity. It will make you think thrice about how the ancients were able to build what they built.
Via J-Walk
PC Magazine has a short article about how hackers have been able to take control of certain power grids. It seems that several cities outside the U.S. have sustained attacks on utility systems and extortion demands and the CIA is taking careful note of what happened to try and prevent it from happening within our borders.
Considering the Internet really does not have any borders, this is troubling news as the world becomes more and more computerized. Let’s hope that the sys admins who manage our vital infrastructure locations have changed their default passwords from “password” to something harder to crack than “p@ssw0rd.”
The new year always brings new resolutions. Mine this year is twofold: to try and post more frequently and to change my eating habits. For the first one, in the words of Michael Pollan, the author of In Defense of Food, I plan to “eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”
For the second, as my first post of the year, I thought I would share some spiffy new designs, devices and user experiences that are in store for us in 2008 and beyond. These are really, really cool. I’m not easily “wowed” these days but over and over again I found myself scratching my head and thinking “how do they come up with this stuff?”
Check out the Innovative Designs and Devices and User Experiences of the Future courtesy of Smashing Magazine.
I love the Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard, the Hi-Tech Office: Eclipse Partitioning System and the Reactable. Most of these are spec only and not for sale which is good for me – it limits the temptation to run out and buy them today.
Who wouldn’t want their very own decorative Flux Capacitor? Maybe someone wants an actual working one, that’s who. How much does 1.21 gigawatt’s worth of power equal anyway?
Via Neu
It was only a matter of time: Digital wanted signs have arrived and are already proving to be quite effective. One guy in Alabama was on the run for 10 days – the police had no leads except for his photo. So, the police posted his photo to a digital billboard which acted as a giant digi “Wanted!” poster and low and behold, the fugitive turned himself in a day later. It seems he felt that with so many people driving by his face all day long, someone was bound to recognize him and better he turn himself in than have the police break down his door.
This is just the first step – the next is when we all have RFID chips under our skin. I say convicts will start to get “chipped” in the next 5 – 10 years, ACLU be damned.
If you love to connect to the net for free and you spent time in NYC, then CBS’s announcement that it will be developing a CBS Mobile Zone, a free Wi-Fi network for laptops and other wireless devices, in the heart of the Big Apple should make you very happy.
This zone will cover the area from Times Square to Central Park South, between 6th and 8th Avenues. It is an experiment between CBS and the MTA and I am very curious to see it if works, especially since Philadelphia has had such trouble proving free Wi-Fi.
Via See-Ming
Is Google outsmarting everyone?. It is quite possible.
Financially, the $2k that I didn’t invest in Apple in 2003 and the $2k I didn’t invest in Google when it debuted are worth around $25k total right now. Apple has gone up about 10x since when I thought about buying it and Google has gone up about 7x. Knowing that I would have only made “small” bets on these companies, and knowing that I would have 99% sold my stakes in them when they simply doubled or tripled, are the only things keeping me from kicking myself on a daily basis.
Some investment decisions should be made by your gut and invest in Apple when the first generation iPod came out and investing in Google when they pulled their dutch auction IPO were no-brainers. I think that is why they are called “no-brainers” – because if you use your brain, you’ll probably think yourself out of making the right decision.
Via Alex (who also crafted the nifty title on another blog post)
When John Kanzius of Erie, PA man announced he’d ignited salt water with the radio-frequency generator he’d invented, some thought it was a hoax. Not only is it not a hoax, scientists know why burns the way it does and he has been able to keep salt water in a test tube burning like a candle, as long as it is exposed to radio frequencies.
This leads me to think that the (to use the pun you know is coming) burning question is how can we use the world’s most abundant substance as clean fuel? Or, more importantly, as my friend and former WGTCTIP2 author Erik puts it, “Does it take more energy to run the necessary storage equipment than the process generates?”
To continue, Erik wants to know why the article does not mention the obvious:
“Hydrogen fuel cells are totally possible, but the one hang-up is the current effort and cost to generate pure hydrogen needed to fuel them. Right now you’d need to capture it from a fossil fuel burning reaction, which obviously isn’t ideal, and then store it at a gas station for people to fill up, making it a huge infrastructure challenge as well. With this machine, instead of burning the released hydrogen, capture it. We could all one day have these in our garages and use them to fuel our cars ourselves.”
Below is a clip from the local news about this cancer fighter who accidentally lit salt water on fire and maybe in the process has saved mankind:
Via Neu