Here is a variation of a useful shortcut you might not be aware of. Just include the Shift key when you want to open a link in a new tab in the foreground rather than in the background. It also works for Control-clicks.
It is common knowledge that middle-clicking on a link opens it in a new background tab, but pressing shift while middle-clicking opens it in a new foreground tab. This especially comes in handy when you’ve got dozens of tabs open and don’t want to shuffle through all your tabs to find the one you just opened.
The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science
by Natalie Angier.
Mariner Books, 2008.
This would be a decent overview of a broad range of basic science topics, but unfortunately the writing style ended up really putting me off. Rather than making the material more accessible, the author’s attempts at wit just confuses things and after a while gets annoying.
This post on Freewaregenius lists a number of useful Windows utilities that will make your Windows desktop even better. Check out the rest of their site for other useful freeware programs.
When I first thought of this post, I more or less knew what programs I wanted to list here. The common theme that brought these together was that they were all really cool Windows “enhancements”: i.e. apps that tweak or change the way we work with files, folders, applications, or the system environment itself (or, apps that brings functionality to the Windows environment that could or should have been a built-in option in Windows ).
Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking
by Michael Ruhlman.
Scribner, 2009.
Ruhlman gives readers the ratios behind many basic recipes, and tells you when you should follow them and when you may need to make adjustments or what variations you might want to try. Most of the ratios are related to baking, but also included are some meat-based ratios, stocks and sauces. Knowing and understanding these ratios will ultimately give you great flexibility in the kitchen.
Robert J. Sawyer, a Canadian science fiction author, gave a fascinating talk at Google’s Waterloo office. He discusses how the world wide web might gain consciousness, the subject of his latest trilogy. The talk touches on several topics related to theories of consciousness, and is worth watching.
I would also recommend picking up his latest novel, Wake, the first book in the WWW (Wake, Watch, Wonder) trilogy. I’ve read the book and the trilogy is off to a great start. I will definitely be picking up the other books when they come out.
Good article in the New York Times on where Sriracha sauce comes from.
The lure of Asian authenticity is part of the appeal. Some American consumers believe sriracha (properly pronounced SIR-rotch-ah) to be a Thai sauce. Others think it is Vietnamese. The truth is that sriracha, as manufactured by Huy Fong Foods, may be best understood as an American sauce, a polyglot purée with roots in different places and peoples.
Excellent article on how to avoid common pitfalls and preserve the contract of equals() when writing an equality method in Java.
Class java.lang.Object defines an equals method, which subclasses may override. Unfortunately, it turns out that writing a correct equality method is surprisingly difficult in object-oriented languages. In fact, after studying a large body of Java code, the authors of a 2007 paper concluded that almost all implementations of equals methods are faulty.
When you need to make sure your data is truly destroyed, use one of these.
Manual Hard Drive Destroyer
Government specifications require that in an emergency situation a hard drive needs to be destroyed so that a person or persons can not spin the drive. This must be done quickly and reliably. The MHDD meets this requirement. It takes less than 15 seconds to destroy each hard drive. All one needs to do is to insert the proper drive height adaptor (if applicable) into the slot and crank the handle 8 rotations. The internal workings of the unit press down on the drive, bending it approximately 90 degrees. The MHDD then pushes the destroyed hard drive out for easy disposal.
In electronics, it is common to talk about single sided circuit boards. The most common type is a circuit board that only has printed wiring on one side, and components on the other side. There are also surface-mount boards, where all the wiring and components sit on one side. But aren’t all of those really just two-sided circuit boards where you only put components on one of the sides?
Here we present a method of making your own authentic single-sided circuit board.
Ever order the second-cheapest wine on the menu while dining out? You don’t want to spend very much, but you also don’t want to look like a cheapskate ordering the cheapest bottle on the whole menu. Well, one in four diners do (in the UK, at least). In the marketing world, we can define this as a choice set effect with respect to reference pricing—using the cheapest bottle of wine as a standard of comparison against which the other wines are compared.
But did you know that the second-cheapest bottle is usually the worst value?
This is an experiment, where I count one byte up – from 00000000 to 11111111. Decimal spoken, this is from 0 to 255. I have assigned a sound to each bit and when it switches from 0 to 1, the sound is played.
Here are the winners for this year’s Hugo Awards. There are links to some of the nominated and winning stories, including the winner for best short story, “Tideline” by Elizabeth Bear.
How many college students today ever flip through trays of library catalogue cards? Some of them may never have used an actual tabbed file. But the tab as an information technology metaphor is everywhere in use. And whether our tabs are cardboard extensions or digital projections, they all date to an invention little more than a hundred years old. The original tab signaled an information storage revolution and helped enable everything from management consulting to electronic data processing.
Published in Wired in 1996, this is still an excellent article written by Neal Stephenson, who travels across the globe to document how undersea communications cable are laid. While the article is very long (56 pages), it makes for fascinating reading.
FLAG, a fiber-optic cable now being built from England to Japan, is a skinny little cuss (about an inch in diameter), but it is 28,000 kilometers long, which is long even compared to really big things like the planet Earth. When it is finished in September 1997, it arguably will be the longest engineering project in history. Writing about it necessitates a lot of banging around through meatspace. Over the course of two months, photographer Alex Tehrani and I hit six countries and four continents trying to get a grip on this longest, fastest, mother of all wires. I took a GPS receiver with me so that I could have at least a general idea of where the hell we were. It gave me the above reading in front of a Chinese temple around the corner from the Shangri-La Hotel in Penang, Malaysia, which was only one of 100 peculiar spots around the globe where I suddenly pulled up short and asked myself, “What the hell am I doing here?”
Quite an incredible story about a powder being developed that can regrow body parts.
“I put my finger in,” Mr Spievak says, pointing towards the propeller of a model airplane, “and that’s when I sliced my finger off.”
It took the end right off, down to the bone, about half an inch.
“We don’t know where the piece went.”
The photos of his severed finger tip are pretty graphic. You can understand why doctors said he’d lost it for good.
Today though, you wouldn’t know it. Mr Spievak, who is 69 years old, shows off his finger, and it’s all there, tissue, nerves, nail, skin, even his finger print.
Great retrospective looking back at Clarke’s most influential works.
But relatively little space has been devoted to Clarke’s writing—the notable exception being the essays of his collaborator and friend, Gregory Benford, an astrophysicist and author of many science fiction novels including Timescape, the Galactic Center Saga, and Beyond the Fall of Night (a collaboration with Clarke).
In many of Clarke’s obituaries, there is a subtext (occasionally text) suggesting that while his way of seeing the future was extraordinary, his writing was perhaps not very good. Nothing could be further from the truth. Though he wasn’t known for vivid character portraits, his prose was always elegant, and its style precisely suited to his purposes: prompting readers to think and to wonder.
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