16 Links: The Engadget Edition

So I just had the task of trawling through all the Engadget posts that I missed while I was away (some 43 pages of posts). I must say, Endgadget has turned into something that doesn’t quite cut the mustard for me. Maybe I’ll have to start subscribing to Gizmodo – maybe they’ll have a better SNR. 20 out of 440+ isn’t so bad! /sarcasm.

In any case, there are a hell of a lot of links, so I’ll just get right into it:

DIY Screw-Nut Rings
Corny? Undoubtedly. Geeky? For sure.

DIY Prosthesis in Tasmania
A post on Engadget, about Tasmania! Woot!

DARPA’s 1.8 Gigapixel digicam
Whatever happened to “less is more”? Then again, this is DARPA we’re talking about…

Cell Phone Reunion
iPhone is bad-ass. Owning one doesn’t make you so.

LaserPup
Lazors fire! PEW PEW PEW!

Recompute – the cardboard PC
Cool design. Recyclable exterior.

Windows 7 SKUs
Wait – how many versions?!

Tokyoflash’s Heko watch
Again, this is the watch I’d be wearing. If I wore watches.

Seagate’s 2TB HDD
Lots of data (to lose).

Western Digital’s 2TB HDD
But this ones’s GREEN-er.

Days to 1 million
How long did it take to each smartphone to hit 1 million units sold? FYI, the iPhone 3G took 3 days.

Gigapixel image of Obama’s inaguration
Because we need a mega-close up, okay? You can buy one of the devices, too!

Canon doesn’t suck
No, they do not. For those of you that don’t know – no, Canon do not make vacuum cleaners.

Windows 7 Beta Impressions
It’s good, actually. Better than Vista, and better than XP.

Apple vs Palm
A good read, if a little long.

That’s it!

Go away – I don’t want your comments anyway. 😉

Malaysia 2009 – Part III

24 Hour McDonalds Delivery!

24 Hour McDonalds Delivery!

So – while I was in Malaysia, I needed some way to access the internet ocassionally, to check email, Facebook, and so on. There wasn’t any at where we were staying, so each week or so we would take the car and drive down to the local McDonalds. Luckily, they had free Wi-Fi that anyone could access and use. I didn’t feel like being a douche and steal their Wi-Fi without buying anything, so a trip to McDonalds usually involved a small snack as well.

Anyway, it was on one of these particular trips that I discovered that that particular McDonalds offered 24-hour delivery. 24 hours! Delivery! McDonalds!

Needless to say, I was pretty impressed. If you woke up at 3am and wanted a burger, or some curly fries (only available during Chinese New Year), then all that stood between you and your deep fried goodness was a phonecall.

Of course, I never tried out the service – but still, impressive, no?

Comments below.

Previous entries in the Malaysia series can be found here:
Part I – Don’t Sweat It
Part Ia – Keeps Getting Better
Part II – Dactyl

7 Links I Know You’ll Enjoy

Continuing with the theme somewhat, here are 7 links I know you’ll enjoy. I’ve put them here for your satisfaction, but really, they’re just here so I can get them out of my webbrowser and make room for more news that I missed out on. I’m under 2000 RSS items (I started at 4000), so progress is being made! Enjoy.

So, in the list we have:

  • Dynomighty Mighty Wallets
    These things rock. I already own a tri-fold dot-matrix wallet which gets questioned frequently in public, and to stand out more, I’m going to get some more. They make great gifts, but really – if the Australian dollar wasn’t so sucky at the moment, I’d buy them in  a heartbeat. They’ll have to wait, however.
  • Glow Grafitti
    I’m no grafitti artist, but glow in the dark spray paint? That’s like any childhood dream! I found this on the internet – thanks Boing Boing Gadgets – a while ago, lost the link, but then found it again, so here it is for posterity. There’s probably nothing cooler than glow in the dark grafitti. Again – a little exxy at $59 a can, and when you convert that into Aussie dollars, well, it hurts.
  • Uma Doodlebook Frame
    A tradition photo frame (read: non-digital) with a twist – you can create your own borders simply by drawing them. It’s got 80 pages, so you can create up to 80 custom borders for any of your pictures. Again, how cool is that? I rekon I’ll just stick one photo in it, and then use it as a scratchpad for notes and stuff.
  • iTunes Music Store – the web version
    Yeah – again, props to df.net for this one – this one’s cool. It’s essentially a webbrowser-based version of the iTunes store. It’s a pretty good rendition of the actual store, but you need to open itunes to buy stuff from it anyway, so yeah. Handy if you don’t have iTunes on your current computer, or need to browse something quickly at the library or whatever.
  • Windows Shutdown Crapfest
    I had no idea Windows developement was this convoluted. It’s actually amazing that they manage to ship products at all, considering that they’re “the left hand cannot see what the right hand is doing” approach with regards to all their code. No wonder Vista was so bad – here’s to Windows 7, the start (hopefully) of a new era in Microsoft computing.

Update – here’s your seventh link, folks.

  • Palm, Google, and Apple

    Unlike Siegler, I think the large number of recent Apple employees now working at Palm on the Pre suggests that the relationship between the two companies is cold — ice cold. What I heard last month at Macworld Expo is that Palm has a standing offer for engineers at Apple to jump ship, with a starting salary of 1.5 times their current Apple salary.

When you’re done perusing the links – give us your comments below, yeah?

Facebook and PayPal join OpenID…so?

The Facebook Connect experience is simply better than that offered by OpenID, and from a competitive standpoint, Facebook has an opportunity to be the standard identity provider for other websites.

via Facebook Joins OpenID Foundation; So What?.

Just when I thought it was pretty much dead – both Facebook and PayPal have now joined the OpenID foundation.

If you’ve never heard of OpenID before this, you gotta be living under a rock. OpenID allows you to “sign in” to websites using just your OpenID login – so you don’t have to do the whole “registering” process which each and every website you come across.

In practice, it only works if sites have OpenID access enabled – and it would work far better if it were made as a standard, such as HTML and CSS. That way, every web site that allowed you to login would also allow you to login with your OpenID.

Sure, we’ve enabled both Facebook Connect and OpenID login over at freshbytes, but I don’t really see the point of Facebook joining especially since it has it’s own Facebook connect implementation of secure login.

And PayPal? Well, it really does go to show that PayPal still has some clout. Needless to say, it’s imperative that the OpenID security right on this one – and from past experience, OpenID is a little clumsy to use, compared to something like Facebook Connect…

Comments below.

Using the Earth as a hard drive?

Where Google gets all that Gmail hard drive space.

★ The Joy of Tech! ★.

…and somehow, it’s probably possible within the next decade or so.

From Boing Boing Gadgets:

BLDGBLOG does some fascinating navel gazing on the subject of hard drive storage on the planetary scale: if ferromagnetically charged minerals can be arranged to make hard drives, what’s stopping us from turning Earth into one giant binary storage capsule, short of the technology?

I kid you not. In years to come – we might be using the earth as our hard drive. I’m not talking about terabytes here, not even petabytes – nope, if we used the earth as our hard drive, I couldn’t even begin to imagine the amount of data a hard drive of that size would hold.

If a 1.8″ drive can hold a quarter of a gigabyte, then the earth, measuring 6371km in diameter, would hold a hell of a lot more – obviously.

Good luck with those seek times, though. You random access times would be shot to pieces (unless you had heads that travelled at the speed of light). 😛

Cool, huh?

8 Videos That You Won’t Regret Watching

Well, it’s about time I did one of these… so here it is.

You know how you sometimes watch a Youtube clip that you think could be good, but it’s completely sucky and leaves you in tears? Well, I’m here to put a stop to that. I’ve complied a tiny list of videos that I missed out on while I was away on holidays – so if you’ve already seen some of these, I apologise. Now, let the show begin!

  • Four Chords, 36 Songs (Today’s Big Thing)
    This is actually amazing. Whatever happened to originality? Sure, we love our epic riffs, but seriously? 36 songs based on variants of a 4 chord progression? You’ve got to be kidding me.
    Sure, the singing isn’t that top notch. But it conveys the message well, so enjoy.
  • Sleeping Girlfriend Eyebrow Waxing (Today’s Big Thing)
    Ouch. I can only assume that the guy doing the waxing doesn’t want to be with his girlfriend anymore, or he’s a professional joker – and his girlfriend loves him for it… Either way, it’s funny to see how he keeps saying “I love you baby” and stroking her while putting on the wax…
  • Verizon Operator Gets Math Lesson (Today’s Big Thing)
    Can you please tell me the difference between $0.002 and 0.002c? It’s an oldie but a goodie (it’s from 2006) as a Verizon customer tries to educate two remarkably ignorant Verizon operators on things called “decimals”. Everyone should know basic math like that, right? Right?
  • Enter Kazoo Man (YouTube)
    Heard Metallica’s Enter Sandman? Yeah, I though so. Heard Metallica’s Enter Sandman played solely on the kazoo? No? Well, this vid is perfect for you, then. He gets a little quirky at some stages, but still impressive nonetheless.
  • David After Dentist (YouTube)
    Ohhhhh – now I get it. All the teenage kids in America want to recreate scenes from after the dentist, when they’re completely high on some strange medicine, so they try various drugs to get that feeling again. No wonder they have random locker searches… Hilariously funny.
  • Sony Releases New… (Boing Boing Gadgets, via The Onion)
    Yet another excellent big-company parody by the same people who bought you the MacBook Wheel a couple of weeks ago. All the details are pretty much spot-on – everything from the interviews, video overlays, advertising, and more. They really put effort into these productions, and it shows. Probably NSFW – contains copious amounts of swearing.
  • Imperial March Scraped Across Hard Drive (Boing Boing Gadgets)
    So someone’s pretty much revived the “using a hard-drive as a speaker” revolution again. This time around, though – it’s the Star Wars Imperial March being played, and damn, does it sound awesome. Read the comments on this one, folks – #10 is particularly funny, in my opinion…
  • How To Mount A Tyre On A Wheel With Explosive Gas (Boing Boing Gadgets)
    This is actually a collection of short clips that demonstrate that it’s possible to mount a tyre (rubber bit) onto the wheel (silver, middle bit) using nothing but explosive gas. As one intrepid commenter points out – it’s not the vacuum effect that pops the tyre back onto the rim, but pressure from the expanding gases. Still impressive.

That’s it – hope you enjoyed them as much as I did.

Comments below, thanks.