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.

Malaysia 2009 – Part II

Dactyl Highscores

Dactyl Highscores

So, I finally managed to beat Turk’s high score on the iPhone game, Dactyl.

As you can see from the image above, he’s managed to rack up quite a lot of scores – and finally, I’ve managed to beat him in a fit of epic boredom when I was in Malaysia.

Now – the next thing is to crack the 500 mark. Shouldn’t be too hard, considering that I got 492 without putting in much effort.

Maybe I should tell him that there’s already a sequel  – Dactyl 2 in the App Store – then again, maybe not…

This has been Malaysia 2009, Part II – brought to you by Benny Ling’s Bling.

Previous entries can be found at their respective links below:
Part I (Don’t Sweat It)
Part Ia (Keeps Getting Better)

Malaysia 2009 – Part Ia

So – lots of things to blog about.

I’ll try and break it up for you so that you don’t get overwhelmed with one MEGA-post – instead, I’ll break it up into about five (give or take) posts spread out over a couple of weeks. Please also note that they won’t be in chronological order – so I might blog about some place in Melbourne in the middle of a series of Malaysia posts, for instance. This isn’t just ‘cos I’m a lazy tool who just can’t be bothered, but mostly for organisational reasons – organising all the stuff would make my brain explode…

Thanks for bearing with me.

Also upcoming in the general Benny Ling Bling scheme of things is a post detailing what’s gonna happen next in regards to this blog.

Previous entries in the series:
Don’t Sweat It!

…and this has been Malaysia 2009, Part Ia, brought to you by Benny Ling’s Bling.

Okay – so this is a little short, and a little lame. Bear with me, though – it keeps getting better!

Don’t Sweat It!

When you live in a hot place like Malaysia, you sweat.

Sweat makes your skin all sticky.

Contrary to popular opinion, showers don’t help. They’re only there to get you wet.

No matter how many showers you take in a day, it doesn’t help alleviate the fact that you’re sticky – because that’s how you’re going to stay.

Every time you take a shower, it’s not helping how sticky you are. What it is doing, is washing off the previous day’s stickyness so you can build up a new layer – paving the road with a red carpet for more sweat; more stickiness.

The solution?

Don’t sweat.

I’m not kidding, either. If you don’t sweat, you don’t get sticky, and it’s as simple as that.

Keep cool, and don’t sweat. Works every time, although it can be a little hard to achieve.

Air Con helps a massive amount, as does dehydration. When you’re dehydrated, you don’t sweat (as much), but you also feel like crap 100% of the time, which is why I recommend copious amounts of air conditioning.

So – lesson for the day?

Don’t sweat it.

Comments below.

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Iain Anderson, from motionally.com did me a huge favour: he enabled the emoji keyboard on my iPhone for me.

The emoji saga as I’ll call it, happened when I saw the thread on MacTalk forums saying that a particular iPhone app (since removed from the App Store) enabled the Emoji keyboard for you – even if you weren’t with a supported Japanese carrier.

I then contacted Iain, who was willing to make a small ad-hoc app that ran the “Emoji-enabling” code when opened. All I had to do was send him my iPhone’s UDID (easy with apps like iStat for iPhone), and he did the rest.

Sure, there are now free apps on the app store that will enable the Emoji keyboard for you – just search “emoji” on the app store. I think there’s a $1.19 typing program that does it (as well as a free one).

To actually enable the emoji keyboard, though: Launch the app, hit the home button, go to Settings –> General –> Keyboard –> International Keyboards –> Japanese and then change “Emoji” from OFF, to ON. It’s that simple.

So, there you have it. Emoji will now be enabled, and you’ll be able to send cute animations to all your iPhone-friends. For the full FAQ, hit up the Mactalk link here.

Thanks once again, Iain. Your iPhone-registered developerness was much appreaciated in this instance! 😛

Cheers.