Tan lines

By akie

Tan lines from typical summer activities:

Pixels

By akie

Retro gaming!

Vimeo

Microsoft’s tablet: surprisingly good

By akie

This prototype of a Microsoft iPad-alternative looks surprisingly useful and well-designed. This video is dated before Apple’s announcement, so it’s not a iPad clone.

Given this video and their pretty decent IE9 preview release, can we conclude that Microsoft is not really going extinct after all?

A comedian’s take on computers

By akie

“Eddie Izzard’s encore on computers”

Hilarious!

My conversation with Cleverbot

By akie

At Cleverbot.com you can talk to a computer program. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be very clever yet:

User: Do you know the difference between white and black?
Cleverbot: Yes I know the difference.
User: Tell me.
Cleverbot: I have ears.
User: That’s not a very good answer.
Cleverbot: Yes. You think I am christina : I lied.
User: My my, the turing test is still way off for you, now isn’t it?
Cleverbot: The cuisine is more sweet than Biblical.
User: You call yourself clever?
Cleverbot: Hell yes I do.
User: Because a point about the turing test implies a reply about cuisine and the bible?
Cleverbot: What the heck?
User: Ok, simple things then.
Cleverbot: Like?
User: Nice weather, hey?
Cleverbot: Very nice!
User: Has it been this nice for a long time?
Cleverbot: About 7 years.
User: 7 years of nice weather - wow. You are one lucky bot!
Cleverbot: We don’t have ‘food’, only Mars bars.
Cleverbot (To myself): I love Mars bars.

Rethinking the desktop

By akie

How can you change a computer’s user interface to work with touch technology, like your iPhone? I think this video has part of the answer:

Great rant

By akie

I’m not really an Apple hater, but I immensely enjoyed this rant:

“I admit it: I’m a bigot. A hopeless bigot at that: I know my particular prejudice is absurd, but I just can’t control it. It’s Apple. I don’t like Apple products. And the better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them. I blame the customers. Awful people. Awful. Stop showing me your iPhone. Stop stroking your Macbook. Stop telling me to get one.

Seriously, stop it. I don’t care if Mac stuff is better. I don’t care if Mac stuff is cool. I don’t care if every Mac product comes equipped a magic button on the side that causes it to piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead and make holographic unicorns dance inside your head. I’m not buying one, so shut up and go home. Go back to your house. I know, you’ve got an iHouse. The walls are brushed aluminum. There’s a glowing Apple logo on the roof. And you love it there. You absolute MONSTER.”

More (highly recommended )

Apple brainwashing: how we do it

By akie

Via the amazing, great, fantastic, easy, beautiful FakeSteve

Electronic mail?!?!?

By akie

Via BoingBoing

The art & science of seductive interactions

By akie

Stephen Anderson talks about creating seductive interactions and how to create passionate users. Highly recommended.

How to model a brain with a computer

By akie

Kwabena Boahen from Stanford University has come up with an ingenious way to model a brain with a computer chip.

So, what are you doing Friday night?

By akie

Via Digg

Server room

By akie

Epic picture of a guy in a server room:

Source

Space Invaders T-shirt

By akie

I really like this Space Invaders t-shirt, called “A simple plan“.

Buy it here.

History of the user agent string

By akie

If you’re developing a website, or a web application, you sometimes need to know which web browser you’re dealing with. So how do you know?

That’s what the user agent string is for, but it has become a complete mess, as described in this hilarious article.

Blinkenlights

By akie

I love this warning sign in fake German:

Source: Wikipedia

IT agony bingo

By akie

Video game medals

By akie

I want one

Link

The math grenade

By akie

Behold the Curta calculator, the most popular analogue pocket calculator in its day, originally designed in a concentration camp as a present for the Führer.

^{Image credit: Rick Furr}

Here’s a movie on how it works:

More on Dark Roasted Blend, or try one yourself with this online simulator.

Poor teddy bear

By akie

I like this somewhat unusual USB-drive.

Buy it here. Found on BoingBoing.

Booting a computer in your web browser

By akie

This is a screenshot of a computer booting inside your web browser. Imagine the possibilities

link so you can try it yourself.

PicLens Firefox add-ons

By akie

PicLens is quite possibly the most shiny Firefox add-on I’ve ever seen. Oh, and it’s quite cool too

PicLens :: Firefox Add-ons

An Introduction to Programming C-64 Demos

By akie

I found this wonderful introduction to programming C-64 demos. Ah, those were the days

* = $0801

lda #$00
tax
tay
jsr $1000 ; initialize music

mainloop: lda $d012 ; load $d012
cmp #$80 ; is it equal to #$80?
bne mainloop ; if not, keep checking

inc $d020 ; inc border colour
jsr $1003 ; jump to music play routine
dec $d020 ; dec border colour
jmp mainloop ; keep looping

If you’re happy and you know it…

By akie

Syntax error!

Found on Reddit Programming

How to hack a password

By akie

How to crack a password? Bruce Scheier, of Wired Magazine, has some inside info on how to do it.

“According to Eric Thompson of AccessData, a typical password consists of a root plus an appendage. A root isn’t necessarily a dictionary word, but it’s something pronounceable. An appendage is either a suffix (90 percent of the time) or a prefix (10 percent of the time).

So the first attack PRTK performs is to test a dictionary of about 1,000 common passwords, things like “letmein,” “password1,” “123456″ and so on. Then it tests them each with about 100 common suffix appendages: “1,” “4u,” “69,” “abc,” “!” and so on. Believe it or not, it recovers about 24 percent of all passwords with these 100,000 combinations.“

But wait, there’s more.

Terrible dialog

By akie

This is what happens when you let a developer design your user interface:

Link

This one is even worse:

Link

Unicode

By akie

So true You can buy it on a t-shirt via CafePress.

Super Mario in China

By akie

I like this adaptation of the Chinese flag I found on Boing Boing.

Trim Down Windows to the Bare Essentials

By akie

A nice tutorial that shows how to trim down Windows XP to the bare essentials. Might come in handy sometime.

Link

Ctrl-Esc

By akie

 I like this image I found on Digg:

Link

Understanding art for geeks

By akie

Someone named Paul has put a nice photoset on Flickr: Understanding art for geeks

Ceci n’est pas une pipe

By akie

I like this adoption of the Magritte classic:

Buy the t-shirt at Threadless T-shirts.

Formal apology

By akie

I kind of like this form I found. Nice indeed

Bill Gates’ open letter to computer hobbyists (February 1976)

By akie

An apparently famous letter from Bill Gates to computer hobbyists, dated February 1976. Interesting, especially in hind-sight.

Ruby on Rails alternatives

By akie

If you, like me, have never programmed in Ruby - but are fluent in PHP, then take a look at this comparison of Rails inspired frameworks.

Scientists model the brain

By akie

A team of Swiss scientists have created a working software model of one of the brain’s most complex parts, the neocortical column.

In theory this opens the door to a complete software model of the human brain.

MIT’s Technology Review has the complete story.

User interfaces of the future

By akie

Smashing magazine has a write up of these user interfaces of the future. Not yet ready for prime time, but interesting nonetheless.

Rainbow tables

By akie

Rainbow tables are an elegant way to restore ‘forgotten’ passwords (cough). Basically, it helps computing the reverse of an MD5-hash.

Wikipedia tries to explain it, but I found this nice write-up much more accessible. Bad graphics though