Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

I just tried Omegle (chatting with strangers) for the first time.  I don’t think I’m the target audience.  This is the transcript of my first (and probably last) conversation on Omegle:

Your conversational partner has disconnected.

I think I now get what Omegle is really for.

ZoomIt

ZoomIt is the best PC-desktop-screen-zoomer-inner-thingy I’ve ever seen – and it’s free!  Great for zooming in on presentations or during software demos – both of which I do at home and at the QSFT.  I wish I had found it earlier.  Here’s a quick video of me using it (be sure to select HD mode when viewing it).

I’ve been looking for a smooth screen-zooming tool ever since I saw uber geek Chris Prillo use one on his desktop when demonstrating software and websites during his YouTube videos. His PC is probably more powerful than mine, but I could see he wan’t using the standard Windows magnifier, which magnifies a screen area into a separate window – his zoomer was zooming the whole screen into itself.  ZoomIt seems to offer the same effect, and as well as being free, it’s also tiny – less than 300KB, allows you to draw and write on the zoomed in desktop, and on Vista the magnified desktop is “live”, rather than a freeze-frame.

And yes, Mac lovers, this desktop zoom effect is standard on recent Macs – I know, I know.

It probably only works for people my age or older, but this YouTube video of the opening credits for Star Wars done in the style of the TV series Dallas made me smile.  I particularly like the way the creator used a shot of Tarkin turning around for his credit – Old School!  The whole thing was inspired by this Star Trek one.

Proposed Sculpture

Scaled Sculpture

Thanks to twitterer JamezRC, I saw this article about an oddly elongated, and slightly controversial,  sculpture being built in the UK, and as soon as I saw the picture of the proposed design (on left) I, it struck me that it was just a normal head that had been stretched in software before being created.

So by squashing the image by about 66%, I ended up with a normal looking head (on right) – I wonder if the face belongs to a real person?

I get a lot of spam emails. A lot. Most of them I never see due to my spam filter, but recent email problems meant I had to sort through them by hand. During this dull process I noticed that, as always, spammers disguise their real names with phony ones. But I also noticed that some spammers are getting a bit more creative and apparently using some sort of random access to a database of names/words to make up an endless variety of fake names.

Some of the results are quite goofy and Goonish/Pythonesque. Some recent ones were:

• Eight R. Straggles
• Stratagem B. Shipyard
• Fatalist H. Faraway
• Grunt P. Foreclose
• Beards T. Lively
• Gamma F. Transfusion
• Constance V. Barrage
• Swooned H. Stimson
• Resettle D. Outrigger
• Dogcatchers G. Abbess
• Checker G. Canards
• Balminess Q. Crawl
• Threatenings L. Chortle
• Sandy L. Gasping
• Flap C. Kerouac
• Nonfiction H. Miraculously
• Shrieking P. Delano
• Superficial I. Incumbent
• Dillydallied H. Yevtushenko
• Heliport S. Persecuting
• Handgun H. Deficient
• Churlishness H. Folk
• Striker M. Vistas
• Denver G. Commonwealth
• Discotheque H. Artificer
• Appeasement E. Percolated
• Injection V. Brenda
• Projectile S. Scuzzier
• Feting U. Deleterious
• Stereo Q. Sectarianism
• Infringement R. Swampiest
• Hesiod A. Probationer

The ones in bold are the ones I like so much I’m going to try and use them in a script or even in conversation. Such as “Wasn’t that written by the poet Grunt P. Foreclose?”, or “Wasn’t he killed by the gangster Shrieking P. Delano?”.

When two friends on opposites sides of the country independently emailed me links on the same day to the same cool video clip, I knew it must be worth checking out. And it is – it’s a demonstration of “Multi-Touch Interaction Research – a touch-screen technology based on a “frustrated total internal reflection sensing technique” (no, I don’t know what that means either). But check out the video demo at either of these two links (same demo, just different pages).

Multi-Touch Interaction Research at their NYU home page (its downloadable there), or:

Streaming version at YouTube.

The future of computing? Maybe – It would breathe new life into the tablet PC market I bet. Especially if they can get the system to be able to determine which finger you are using at any time, so that commands/modes can be mapped to certain fingers. I can see this one day making the computer mouse look as cumbersome as punched paper cards.

UPDATE: But not everyone agrees that it is a useful technology – see the discussion on the demo here. Personally, as a Wacom tablet user/lover, the uses for this are quite obvious to me,and there will doubtless be less obvious uses and improvements over time (the computer mouse did not always have a scroll wheel).

If this is real, I for one think it’s extremely impressive. It’s the Hawaii Five-O Theme, played on the hands (manualism) via Google Video. He squeezes his hands to gether to make… um… farty sounds that form recognizable tunes. It looks like the most fun that can be had with your hands without sending you blind…

Oh. My. The TACMAV. Oh. Yeah.

A foldable, electric model aeroplane that can both fly around under direct remote control or fly itself guided by it’s own GPS, while filming its surroundings using two colour video cameras, all fed back to a toughened tablet-based computer.

I want one!

Note, the first image on the page, despite its size on the page, is actually a very large image and will take time to download on some connections.

Thanks to slashdot I’ve just discovered Google Maps. An amazing repository of digital satellite images that cover the whole globe (not all of it in great detail). You can zoom in, drag the map around with your mouse, and it all seems to load pretty fast.

Searching for Australian cities and areas seems broken, but manually dragging the map around can find some interesting (to me) locations. Such as my old school, where I live now, where I teach, my favourite Brisbane park, and, just for kicks, some pyramids. If this sort of information is available for free to the general public, what must the military and secret services have access to?

Heh – a website where you can make your own South Park character. Lots of options for customising your character, and the results really do look like they came from an episode of the series. I guess the image at right is what I would look like if I was a child character on South Park. (click the image for a larger version)

UPDATE: Please note – the link above leads to an external website. I have nothing to do with that site and I did not create the South Park Character maker flash program. I just thought it was cool, so I linked to it.
To be able to save images of your south park creation

• press the “PrtSc” key on your keyboard. This takes a screen shot of your screen and places it in memory.
• Then paste the screen shot into your favourite image editor (photoshop, Gimp, etc), or even into your favourite word processor (Word, Open Office Writer, etc).
• Then crop/trim it till you just have your character.
• Then save it to your hard drive.

There does not appear to be any built-in saving feature on the site.

1 September 2005: Link updated.

22 April 2006: Update added.

19 September 2007 : Link updated again.

Here’s a cute idea from one of the boffins at MIT – hold a time travel convention! After all, you only need to hold one convention as time travellers from all ages could attend the one event, as long as they found out about it. So now everyone is supposedly spreading the word so that one day in the future, time travellers will see the invitation and decide to pop back to 2005 to attend. I found the link via Instapundit.

Here’s an idea – anyone with an identical twin sibling could have some fun. One of you show up ot the time travel convention looking normal and sane, but complaining about how few people there are attending. Then your twin rushes in wearing a futuristic suit and tells there other self “You fool, the convention is in another parallel universe, not this one, they are waiting for me… us!”, and then rush out.

I like playing with online chatbots now and then, but although they are starting to look a lot better, they seem to me to be getting no smarter at all. Read the rest of this entry »

After the US election, I looked at the numbers for the results and saw that they were actually quite close, then looked at the results shown on a colour-coded US map and saw a lot of red (Republican), especially if the map was colour-coded by county. I knew that many of the areas where Kerry won (blue) had a denser population, but it was hard to see this on the maps that every TV station, newspaper article, and web site were showing.

These US election result maps are different to the ones you’ve probably seen. They scale the actual shape of the US to reflect each state’s or county’s population. All of a sudden the closeness of the election is made clear in a simple, if twisted, graphic.

I wonder if anyone did anything similar for the Australian election?

I like The Onion, it’s a funny site. But when I read this short article entitled “Nerd Has Most Obscure Crush Ever” it caught my eye. The article starts:

JACKSONVILLE, FL—The unrequited nature of area nerd June Manzo’s crush on actor Peter Tuddenham, who provides the voice of piloting computer Slave on Blake’s 7, is only slightly more agonizing than the process of explanation she must put herself through every time her media obsession is discussed.

And at this point I thought to myself, “Surely, if she had a crush on Peter Tuddenham, it wouldn’t have been for his Slave voice in particular, as that was only one of the characters he gave voice to, a character that only existed in the final fourth season. Surely she would have developed her crush because Tuddenham also, and more famously, did the voices for the original ship’s computer, Zen, in the earlier seasons, as well as the voice for the portable super-computer Orac throughout the whole series (well, except for Orac’s first episode, where the actor who played Orac’s creator did the voice).”

Then I started to wonder if the author of the piece knew of this error and only put it there to entice B7 fans out into the light. At this point I realised that thinking all this, even knowing this information, meant that I was a bigger sadder nerd than the fictional Ms Manzo, so I went to bed.

Another political survey, another dodgy result (though this one is about right). I got a 22, which is pretty much what I thought I’d get. Though some of the questions are pretty arbitrary.

I just visited a web site called presidentmatch.com that asks you a series of policy questions, then presents you with a list of US Presidential candidates ranked in their order of compatibility with your opinions. The results were almost exactly opposite who I would actually vote for – so I suspect the quiz is flawed (or I’m woefully misinformed on some candidates’ policies). Here are my results:
Read the rest of this entry »

Phew. There’s nothing like a fresh WindowsXP installation to make you realise how many people out there must have virus-riddled PCs – after all, my new installation of XP can’t be to blame, can it? I’ve been getting all the usual spam lately – Nigerian opportunities to lose all my money, pills to make me hallucinate that my breasts are larger, the chance to buy fake degrees to ruin my career prospects, etc etc. But I’ve started getting a lot more of those disguised emails that attempt to trick me into running their attachments. The days of simple emails that state “open the attachment for a fireworks animation!” are gone. These days they are disguised as all manner of innocent or important-sounding things, and I’ve learned to ignore them all. Yet the latest virus email to quietly slither into my inbox is almost a work of genius in its presentation.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been getting a lot more dodgy emails sent from infected PCs lately (and I’m not the only one). So when all these emails containing dodgy attachments started appearing in my Mozilla email reader, my virus checker helpfully popped up and presented me with various ways of dealing with them. Like an idiot, I clicked “Wipe files”. The moment I clicked it I remembered that Mozilla stores all the emails for each folder as a single file. Which meant that my virus checker had just erased all of the emails in my inbox. All 1,627 of them.

Bugger.

But, thanks to my almost DAILY backups of about 8 Gigs worth of my data, I was able to restore them and only lose a handful of emails. So despite the raised eyebrows of those that think me nutty for backing up so often, it pays to be paranoid…

If you’re reading this and you sent me an email within 24 hours of this post, I may have lost it. On the other hand, if you’re one of the twenty people who are still waiting for a reply from me after sending me an email over three months ago… Um…. I have no excuse.

I’m going to die in 46.4 years, according to this quiz, since it estimates I will only live to 81.4 years of age. I wonder if it takes into consideration the likely advances in medicine over the next forty years? Surely not.

Maybe I should lower my caloric intake in order to live longer. Hmmm, 46.4 years to go. Pshuh, I’ve got plenty of time to finish that sprinkler system I’ve been promising to build for Kareena. Plenty of time. No rush.

Me Think…
I found a link to an IQ test here. Sure, I bet it’s way too short to be a reliable test of anyone’s IQ, but I couldn’t resist, so I filled it in. The results:

See? SEE? I’m not just bright, I’m an insightful linguist! Whatever the heck THAT means!

And for anyone that notices that this IQ test seems to be part of a dating website – no, I didn’t notice that till after I had done the test. Honest honey, I wasn’t looking for a date, I swear! THWACK! Ow!