Wired has some great photos of buildings lit with LEDs at night.
Light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, are reinventing the look and feel of skylines, bridges, facades and other architectural surfaces around the globe. The light bulb is being unscrewed by energy-efficient LEDs that are both environmentally friendly and cost-effective. The $10.2 billion industry is growing to provide new design options for architects and planners.
Here is a nice little tip to configure that annoying popup that keeps asking you to reboot after running Windows Update.
Anyone who is running Windows XP SP2 know what I’m talking about. That stupid, annoying, most ill-designed dialog box ever invented in the history of the computer science that asks “Updating your computer is almost complete. You must restart your computer for the updates to take effect. Do you want to restart your computer now?”
And there are only two options: Restart Now/Restart Later. “Restart Later” means that this stupid thing will ask you again in 10 minutes. Yes, if you’re willing to work for the next 4 hours until lunch before rebooting, this means you’ll need to answer this question 24 times. Did I mention that the dialog steals the focus?Now, to get rid of it:
Start / Run / gpedit.msc / Local Computer Policy / Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Windows Update / Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations
Good news everyone!
When Katey Sagal visited The Late Late Show the other day, she told Craig that the show is coming back to Comedy Central in 2008 for at least 13 episodes (I was watching that appearance, too. Must have slept through that part). Don Kaplan of the New York Post confirmed this; his sources told him that all the primary voice actors signed new deals this week. Also according to the article, FOX may have the option to air the new episodes, but probably won’t. The new episodes will also come out on DVD after they air.
Microsoft has released a robotics development environment, currently available for free download. It appears to be targeted for the Lego Mindstorms RCX, Lego Mindstorms NXT, and fishertechnik systems.
The Microsoft Robotics Studio is a Windows-based environment for academic, hobbyist and commercial developers to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware. Key features and benefits of the Microsoft Robotics Studio environment include: end-to-end Robotics Development Platform, lightweight services-oriented runtime, and a scalable and extensible platform.
If you’ve ever needed to generate an image of planet, here’s one easy way to do so in Photoshop.
Using just one texture in Photoshop, I’m going to teach you how to make a planet that looks somewhat realistic although, in the end, whether it looks realistic or not is entirely up to you and the way you play with settings.
American Scientist has published an overview of programming languages, and offers some explanation on their prodigious growth in numbers.
A catalog maintained by Bill Kinnersley of the University of Kansas lists about 2,500 programming languages. Another survey, compiled by Diarmuid Piggott, puts the total even higher, at more than 8,500. And keep in mind that whereas human languages have had millennia to evolve and diversify, all the computer languages have sprung up in just 50 years. Even by the more-conservative standards of the Kinnersley count, that means we’ve been inventing one language a week, on average, ever since Fortran.
This incredible bird has the ability to mimic other sounds it hears, including artificial sounds like a camera with a motor drive, a chainsaw, and a car alarm.
In April 2006, to celebrate naturalist David Attenborough’s 80th birthday, the public were asked to vote on their favourite of his television moments. This clip of the lyrebird was voted number one. A Lyrebird is either of two species of ground-dwelling Australian birds, most notable for their extraordinary ability to mimic natural and artificial sounds from their environment.
This is an interesting essay written by a chronobiologist on modern sleep patterns.
Sleep is one of the strongest human needs… While I am not advocating ditching modernity, cutting off electricity and going back to the old sleep pattern, we still do not know enough about sleep in order to make the 24-hour society work for us without too much in the way of health consequences.
This article goes into quite a bit of detail and determines how much power the Death Star would have had in order to destroy a planet.
So if we can’t use melting energy or vaporization energy, how do we determine the energy requirement to destroy a planet? The answer, in one word, is gravity. If you wish to destroy a planet, you must scatter its mass so quickly that the forces of gravity cannot reverse the expansion process. In other words, you must accelerate the planet’s entire mass to escape velocity. Another way of saying this is that you must bring the planet’s gravitational potential energy state up to zero. The concepts of gravititational potential energy and escape velocity are both discussed in the science page. Using those concepts, the energy requirement for blasting a planet apart can be calculated.
This short article documents how frighteningly easy it was to compromise a credit union’s network security. They simly left USB flash drives that had been purposely infected with trojans where employees could find them, sat back, and waited for sensitive data to stream in. Even worse, the employees had been tipped off that a security audit was going to be performed.
After about three days, we figured we had collected enough data. When I started to review our findings, I was amazed at the results. Of the 20 USB drives we planted, 15 were found by employees, and all had been plugged into company computers. The data we obtained helped us to compromise additional systems, and the best part of the whole scheme was its convenience. We never broke a sweat. Everything that needed to happen did, and in a way it was completely transparent to the users, the network, and credit union management.
An article at Wired News says that implanting a small magnet in your fingertip allows you to sense electromagnetic fields and metallic objects through your finger!
According to Huffman, the magnet works by moving very slightly, or with a noticeable oscillation, in response to EM fields. This stimulates the somatosensory receptors in the fingertip, the same nerves that are responsible for perceiving pressure, temperature and pain. Huffman and other recipients found they could locate electric stovetops and motors, and pick out live electrical cables. Appliance cords in the United States give off a 60-Hz field, a sensation with which Huffman has become intimately familiar. “It is a light, rapid buzz,” he says.
Instructables has a new howto on building a miniature trebuchet out of paperclips, for when you declare war on your coworkers.
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