Happy 25th birthday, Linux! Here’s your f-ing cake, go ahead and compile it yourself.
Stolen 🙂
Category: computers
Information superhighway
Awesomeness.
Tan lines
Tan lines from typical summer activities:
Microsoft’s tablet: surprisingly good
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
“Eddie Izzard’s encore on computers”
Hilarious!
My conversation with Cleverbot
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
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
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
Via the amazing, great, fantastic, easy, beautiful FakeSteve 🙂
The art & science of seductive interactions
Stephen Anderson talks about creating seductive interactions and how to create passionate users. Highly recommended.
How to model a brain with a computer
Kwabena Boahen from Stanford University has come up with an ingenious way to model a brain with a computer chip.
History of the user agent string
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
I love this warning sign in fake German:
ACHTUNG!
ALLES TURISTEN UND NONTEKNISCHEN LOOKENPEEPERS!
DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN! ODERWISE IST EASY TO SCHNAPPEN DER SPRINGENWERK, BLOWENFUSEN UND POPPENCORKEN MIT SPITZENSPARKSEN.
IST NICHT FÜR GEWERKEN BEI DUMMKOPFEN. DER RUBBERNECKEN SIGHTSEEREN KEEPEN DAS COTTONPICKEN HÄNDER IN DAS POCKETS MUSS.
ZO RELAXEN UND WATSCHEN DER BLINKENLICHTEN.
Source: Wikipedia 🙂
The math grenade
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.
Booting a computer in your web browser
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
PicLens is quite possibly the most shiny Firefox add-on I’ve ever seen. Oh, and it’s quite cool too 🙂
An Introduction to Programming C-64 Demos
I found this wonderful introduction to programming C-64 demos. Ah, those were the days 🙂
* = $0801
lda #$00
tax
tay
jsr $1000 ; initialize musicmainloop: lda $d012 ; load $d012
cmp #$80 ; is it equal to #$80?
bne mainloop ; if not, keep checkinginc $d020 ; inc border colour
jsr $1003 ; jump to music play routine
dec $d020 ; dec border colour
jmp mainloop ; keep looping
How to hack a password
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.
Unicode
So true 🙂 You can buy it on a t-shirt via CafePress.
Super Mario in China
I like this adaptation of the Chinese flag I found on Boing Boing.
Trim Down Windows to the Bare Essentials
A nice tutorial that shows how to trim down Windows XP to the bare essentials. Might come in handy sometime.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe
I like this adoption of the Magritte classic:
Buy the t-shirt at Threadless T-shirts.
Formal apology
I kind of like this form I found. Nice indeed 🙂
Bill Gates’ open letter to computer hobbyists (February 1976)
An apparently famous letter from Bill Gates to computer hobbyists, dated February 1976. Interesting, especially in hind-sight.
Ruby on Rails alternatives
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
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
Smashing magazine has a write up of these user interfaces of the future. Not yet ready for prime time, but interesting nonetheless.
Rainbow tables
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 🙂