Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Geoengineering Away Global Warming
Paul Crutzen, the 1995 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry for his work on the ozone layer, has proposed injecting sulfur into the atmosphere so less sunlight will penetrate it. Artillery guns on high-altitude balloons would be used to fire sulfur into the atmosphere. There is historical precedent. "When Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991, it sprayed millions of tons of sulfur into the atmosphere. Much to scientists' surprise, the sulfur reflected so much sun that the Earth’s surface cooled by almost one full degree Fahrenheit in the year following the eruption." This could work, but only temporarily since sulfur only stays in the atmosphere for a couple of years while carbon dioxide lingers for over a century.Labels: Technology
Sunday, May 06, 2012
An Amazing Collection of Free Photo Sites for Your Blog
Just having text in your blog posts can be a bit dry. Photos help to liven things up, giving visitors something colorful to look at, but it's often difficult to track down a photo that matches your post. It's even more difficult sometimes to tell if you're even allowed to use the photo once you've tracked down one that you like. A good rule of thumb to follow is that images found in government sources like NASA Images are likely in the public domain since they can't copyright their work.
Luckily, Lorelle on Wordpress has done a lot of hard work and assembled a very comprehensive list of photo sites that are likely to be freely usable by anyone. Gimme sites like Flickr are listed, but there are dozens of more obscure sources as well.
Warning: Restrictions may apply in some cases so look for information about usage rights. Sometimes, you'll have to give a link back to the source where you got the image or register at the site.
Labels: Technology
Tuesday, May 01, 2012
Clear Private Information from Firefox
If you want to remove all user preferences and private data like cookies or web history from Firefox, there's a very simple way.1. Go to C:->Documents and Settings->Your User Name
->Application Data
2. Delete the Mozilla folder.
That will wipe everything, and when you restart Firefox, it'll create a new Mozilla folder.
If you aren't able to find the Application Data folder, it is probably because it is hidden. To make it visible, open up a folder and go to Tools->Folder Options->View.
Click on Show hidden files and folders and click OK. Then go back to step 1 and complete the process.
This method is only effective against casual privacy intrusions by nosey friends or parents. The data can still be retrieved through more sophisticated methods.
If you only want to delete the cache, cookies, and web history and not your custom browser settings, go to Firefox and go to Tools-> Clear Private Data. You can tweak the settings for this tool by going to Tools-> Options-> Privacy-> Settings.
Labels: Technology
Monday, April 30, 2012
Zamzar: Free Online File Converter
Zamzar lets you upload files up to 100MB and convert them into one of several dozen file types. Documents, audio, video, and images are supported. The UI is simple with four steps to completion. One neat feature is that you're emailed the link to the converted file once the file conversion is completed so you don't have to check back to the site.You can also convert multiple files at once although then you can only do one kind of file conversion.
Zamzar
[via]
Labels: Technology
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Billster Helps You Track Your Spending
Under the Bills tab, you can add personal expenses, group expenses, what's owed you, and what you owe. You can also tag your bills. A weakness is that, unlike Wesabe, you can't import your data directly from your bank. Manually entering your transactions data will probably get tiring although you can mark recurring payments as such, which reduces the burden slightly. The interface is similar to the one you use when doing e-banking (making single/recurring payments, etc.).
The most helpful screen is the Dashboard where you can visualize the flow of cash in and out of your account. If you use tags carefully, you can also get a sense of the relative proportions of your spending. Do you spend a lot on haircuts? How much of your income goes to rent? There's also a half-baked six degrees-ish graphic that shows how many connections you have, how many your friends have, and so on. Maybe more social features will be added soon, and this feature will have added significance.Once financially oriented sites start appearing, it's usually a sign that the market is maturing. I suspect we'll see several more popping up soon. Certainly, there have been a fair number of social stock-picking sites launching recently along with impressive rallies in the market.
Labels: Technology
Monday, June 08, 2009
Google Store: Get Your Lava Lamps and Google Gum
Probably old news, but new to me: Google is selling branded merchandise. If you can't live without a Google License Plate Frame or even Google gum, Google Store is the place to shop. There's a clearance on right now so get your Google Bib Bike Shorts and Google Trucker Cap while supplies last. Of course, they also stock Lava Lamps.
I wonder how much of their annual revenues comes from this.
Labels: Technology
Free Picasa Templates: Easily Create Photo Galleries and Slideshows
Picasa templates are one easy way to create photo galleries and slideshows to showcase your artistic works online. You don't need to know any HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or Flash to create professional looking webpages.
You can download dozens of templates from these sites:
Free Picasa Templates:
Future of Memories: Offers eight professional templates with names like Blur, Coloroid, and Show-tell.
To use these templates, you'll have to unzip them into the directory \Program Files\Picasa 2\web\templates\. Each template needs to go into a separate folder.
Once that's done, start Picasa and select the images you want in your gallery. Click Folder->Export as Webpage. Hit Next and select a template from the list. Click Finish and you're done!
Labels: Technology
Speed up your Hard Drive
Well, Windows XP has a Disk Defragmenter that will solve all your woes. It takes the pieces of each file and puts them together again so they can be read in one clean pass. Be sure to run this program at night since it takes several hours and make sure to close any open programs. Go to Start->All Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Disk Defragmentor to access it.
Click the Analyze button. It'll tell you if you need to defragment your hard drive. 
A lot of red is a bad sign. If it says "You should defragment this volume", click the Defragment button. Come back in a few hours, and your hard drive should be purring.
Labels: Technology
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Create Animated GIFs in Seconds with Gickr
Gickr is a really cool animated GIF creator. All you need to do is enter a Flickr tag or username and check the boxes next to a few pictures. Then choose a speed and size and click next. That's it. You can also upload images to use.
It's very useful if you want to quickly embed a slideshow or animation without using Flash or PowerPoint.
It literally took me less than a minute create this animation:
Gickr
(via Lifehacker)
Labels: Technology
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Kevin McKidd Cast as Thor
Kevin McKidd is in negotiations to star as "Thor." The 35-year-old actor who is best known for his roles on "Rome" and recently "Grey's Anatomy" is interested in portraying the Norse deity in the Marvel film due to be released on June 4, 2010. "Thor" is part of Marvel's attempt to take its comic book franchise to theaters with the success this year of "Iron Man" and "The Incredible Hulk."
"Thor" will be joined by "Iron Man 2" in 2010 with a "Captain America" and "Avengers" ensemble film to follow in 2011. Kenneth Branagh will be the movie's director.
Daniel Craig was apparently asked to play Thor, but the James Bond actor turned the role down.
Thor
Labels: Entertainment, Technology
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Chinese Peasant Builds Robot Dog (Video)
Wu Yulu builds robots in his spare time. The Chinese peasant farmer, who lives an hour outside of Beijing, has built creations ranging from a robotic rickshaw to a Sony AIBO-like robot dog without any formal education. He was invited to the Microwave International New Media Arts Festival in Hong Kong based on his fame as an robot inventor.
Starting in 1986, Wu Yulu has continued to experiment and tinker with robots, growing his crop to 26 robots in total. He uses scrap metal and parts to build mechanical robots. His most striking robot is a mechanical human-shaped robot that can pull a rickshaw for six hours and speak with moving red lips. He also built a miniature version for his son. Watch the video to see the rickshaw in action.
Despite his success today, Wu's path was not easy. He once burned down his house while working on a project. His wife complains that other husbands make money, but he only builds robots.
Wu Yulu's Robots Video
Rural Robots by Wu Yulu Video
Hat tip Mutant Palm
Labels: Technology
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Adam Guerbuez Fined $900M for Facebook Spam
Adam Guerbuez has been fined $873 million for spamming Facebook. The Canadian entrepreneur and his company, Atlantis Blue Capital, recently lost a four month legal battle in a San Jose court and are liable for statutory and aggravated statutory damages summing up to almost $900 billion under the CAN-SPAM Act.
In March and April, Adam Guerbuez sent four million emails advertising drugs and adult products to Facebook users. He managed to compromise users' accounts and send messages to their friends and Wall posts asking them to visit certain websites selling those products.
Although Adam Guerbuez did not show up to defend himself in court, Facebook's attorney are looking for him: "We know where he is and where he lives and we're looking for him to execute the judgment." He lives in Montreal, Canada. Although they don't expect to collect on the full judgment, Guerbuez appears to have "substantial resources."
Of course, Adam Guerbuez has also been banned from using Facebook.
Labels: Technology
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Lycos Cinema: Watch Full-Length Classic Movies and TV Shows
Lycos has been in a long and slow decline for many years now with nothing in particular to draw in new users (they've even outsourced their search to Microsoft). But Lycos Cinema might give some of you a reason to go back.
Lycos Cinema has a wide range to movies and television shows that you can watch on-demand for free. If you don't expect the latest Hollywood blockbusters, then you won't be too disappointed with the offerings, which are mostly decades-old classic movies like "The Phantom of the Opera" and "The Hunchback of Notre Dame."
The experience that Lycos is trying to evoke is that of a movie theater so the site lets you schedule screenings of movies with your friends and watch together at a set time. You can also chat with your friends while watching movies.
Lycos Cinema
Lycos' Painful Decline
Labels: Technology
Friday, March 28, 2008
Phonautograph: Oldest Recording of "Au Clair de la Lune"
Seventeen years before Thomas Edison patented his phonograph, there was the phonoautograph. Invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, the phonautograph "etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp."
The French inventor's device was not intended to playback sound like Edison's phonograph, but it is now known to be the world's first recording of sound. To get around the playback problem, scientists in Berkeley, California, made high-resolution scans of the paper and used a "digital stylus" to decipher the grooves etched by the phonautograph, which revealed a short 10-second rendition of the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" sung by a female voice.
Previously, it was thought that Edison's recording of "Mary had a little lamb" was the earliest recording, and instead of soot, the phonograph used a wax cylinder to record sounds.
The scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, who recovered the sounds from the phonautograms, are part of a group called First Sounds, which seeks to "make mankind's earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time."
You can download and listen to an MP3 of the phonautograph recording of "Au Clair de la Lune" here.
Phonautograph [Wikipedia]
Labels: Technology
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Herb Peterson: Egg McMuffin Inventor
Herb Peterson, the inventor of McDonald's Egg McMuffin, has died at age 89. His popular breakfast sandwich, which combines an English muffin, grilled egg, and cheese, has enabled McDonald's to maintain an enduring edge over its fast food competition.
Breakfast wasn't always part of the menu at McDonald's. Part of the problem was finding a breakfast item that could be eaten with your fingers like the other menu items (hamburgers, french fries, etc.). The Egg McMuffin was created by Peterson in response to this need:
By Christmas of 1971, Peterson had been working on the product for months. he had experimented with prepackaged Hollandaise, which he rejected as too runny. He replaced it instead with a slice of cheese, which when melted on a hot egg produced the consistency he was looking for. He also had to develop a foolproof way of preparing an egg on a grill to give it the appearance of a poached egg. Poaching eggs did not fit with McDonald's assembly line production process, but Peterson solved the problem by developing a new cooking utensil--a cluster of six Teflon-coated rings--that was placed on the grill to give eggs the rounded shape of an English muffin. When he added grilled Canadian bacon, Peterson had a breakfast product perfect for a sandwich-oriented fast-food chain.
In addition, the Egg McMuffin is one of the healthier items on the McDonald's menu with just 300 calories and 12 grams of fat.
Petersen started out working at McDonald's advertising firm, D'Arcy Advertising, before eventually becoming a franchisee and opening six McDonald's restaurants in the Santa Barbara area.
Egg McMuffin
Labels: Technology
Mind Habits Health Game
Mind Habits might just be a video game that's good for your health. By playing just five minutes a day, you can lower your stress and anxiety and increase your self-esteem. At least that's what researchers at McGill Univeristy have shown. This is how the creators describe Mind Habit's approach to helping you reduce stress in your life:
We started with the idea that just as playing the game Tetris over and over for hours can start to shape the way you look at the world (even in your dreams!), playing a specially-designed computer game might also help to improve your thoughts and feelings about yourself
We drew on research showing that certain people have attentional biases toward socially threatening information, so they automatically focus on any sign of rejection or criticism from others, which in turn perpetuates their sensitivity to rejection and heightened tendency to experience social stress.
The Canadian scientific study [PDF], which is used in Mind Habit's marketing,
asked call centre workers to play a very simple game for 5 minutes before they started work. The game involved finding, as quickly as possible, an image of a single smiling face in an array of 16 photos, the rest of which showed a frowning face. The team found that employees who had played the game produced 17 per cent less of the stress hormone cortisol after their shift than those who did not play the game.
How does this translate to less stress? Researcher Michael Baldwin thinks that when you "dismiss" the frowning faces in the game, you "disengage" from stress.
The Mind Habit game itself involves selecting words that positively reinforce your self-image ("Who Are You"), picking a smiling face out of a crowd of frowning ones ("Matrix"), and clicking on smiling faces in clouds ("Grow Your Chi") among other activities. You can play the demo here.
Mind Habits Game
Mind Habits Game Options
Labels: Technology
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Miss Bimbo Fashion Game
Miss Bimbo is a "virtual fashion game" that asks young girls to take care of virtual dolls called "bimbos." The controversy arises because girls are encouraged to put their dolls on extreme diets and have them undergo plastic surgery so they can "become the hottest, coolest most famous bimbo ever!"
Nothing is off limits. In keeping with the shallowness of the game's universe, breast implants, diet pills, and billionaire boyfriends are all part of process of becoming popular, and over 200,000 girls are playing the British version of Miss Bimbo.
So how much does it cost to keep your bimbo (just barely) alive?
Users are given missions, including securing plastic surgery at the game's clinic to give their dolls bigger breasts, and they have to keep her at her target weight with diet pills, which cost 100 bimbo dollars.
Breast implants sell at 11,500 bimbo dollars and net the buyer 2,000 bimbo attitudes, making her more popular on the site.
And to get more bimbo dollars for clothes or a face-lift, girls can, conveniently, either send text messages at $3 a pop or use PayPal. But if they get a rich boyfriend, all their needs will be magically taken care of. There's also a form of gambling on Miss Bimbo. Girls can "challenge" other players' bimbos and place bets using bimbo dollars.
Miss Bimbo's designers defend themselves by saying the game simply reflects "real life."
Nicolas Jacquart, the 23-year-old web designer from Tooting, south London, who created it, said: "It is not a bad influence for young children. They learn to take care of their bimbos. The missions and goals are morally sound and teach children about the real world.
"If they eat too much chocolate in the game it is bad for their bimbos' bodies and their happiness levels compared to if they eat fruit and vegetables, which reinforces positive healthy eating messages.
"If they are having problems with boyfriends or at work, the bimbos can talk through them with a psychiatrist.
"The breast operations are just one part of the game and we are not encouraging young girls to have them, just reflecting real life."
The concept first gained popularity in its French incarnation, Ma Bimbo, which has over a million registered users.
Miss Bimbo
Winning Miss Bimbo
Labels: Technology
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Easter Bunny Tracker
There are rumors that NORAD may create an Easter Bunny Tracker much as they have already done for tracking Santa as he hands out presents during Christmas.
The Easter Bunny Tracker will reportedly track the progress of the Easter Bunny as it hops from one house to another, handing out Easter baskets with Easter eggs, gifts, and candy all along the way.
Easter 2008 is on March 23. We'll update once we learn more details about the Easter Bunny Tracker.
In the meantime, some Easter Bunny videos:
Easter Bunny Attacks Comedy:
Easter Bunny Boogie:
Labels: Technology
Stuff White People Like: Blog to Book for $350,000
The Canadian behind the humor blog Stuff While People Like has reportedly signed a book contract with Random House for a staggering $350,000 advance.
The blog has only been around since January of this year, but it's already gotten more than 16 million hits. Top posts on the blog cover topics that "white people" supposedly like including Asian Girls, Coffee, Having Gay Friends, and Dinner Parties. The book will be two-thirds new material mixed in with one-third blog posts.
How the blogger, "clander", describes Stuff White People Like: "This is a scientific approach to highlight and explain stuff white people like. They are pretty predictable."
This isn't the first time a massively popular blog has gotten a book deal. I Can Haz Cheeseburger and Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle both have books in production.
Labels: Technology
Friday, March 21, 2008
Moonvertising: Rolling Rock Advertising on the Moon
Moonvertising involves shining a powerful laser at the moon and projected an advertising message that can be seen from around the world. Coca-Cola tried to do it in 1999 as the millennium approached, but the FAA was worried about interference with aircraft (i.e. "cutting flying airplanes in half").
Now, Rolling Rock Beer has announced plans to broadcast their corporate logo at the moon on March 21, 2008. Of course, they won't really do it even though moonvertising is technically feasible. It's just part of their viral marketing campaign to get people to check out their website.
On the website, you can leave messages of your own on the faux moon for other visitors to read. You can also watch videos and download a presentation from Ron Stablehorn, a fake advertising executive, on moonvertising.
The Boston Globe notes:
The brainchild of the advertising firm Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, the billboard directs curious consumers to a website for Rolling Rock beer, where an elaborate back story is spun about the campaign, featuring a faux vice president for marketing and a gimmick that lets viewers write their own ad on a screen version of the moon. To repeat: This is viral advertising; the company isn't actually going to project a laser beam 237,000 miles into space. Still, this spoof comes a little too close for comfort. With all nature merely a canvas, cloudvertising, lakevertising, and beachvertising are probably already on someone's drawing board.
Labels: Technology
