The Call of Cthulhu by HP Lovecraft. For beginning readers — via deviantART
Rubik’s cube is not just the quintessential hand-held puzzle, though: it’s also an iconic piece of design, so I co-opted it when making a new chest of drawers for my son’s room. This cubic piece of furniture has only one of the three required axes of rotation, so is unsolvable in the conventional sense, but can be arranged in any configuration you like by non-sporting means. The drawers do pose a brain-bending challenge: the first thing you have to solve is detecting that they’re there, and all three have hidden locks in different locations — via Instructables
GText is a new OCR utility that can help you scan text and extract it so you can copy it into another document.
Once installed, GTText lets you select an image file, load it, and then highlight the area where you’d like the app to translate the image into text. When the translation is complete, a pop-up window will appear that lets you highlight the text and copy it. If the app didn’t get it quite right, you can click try again
. GTText recognises BMP, JPG, GIF, TIFF, and PNG images, and is available for Windows only
A species of bee which was believed to be extinct in Britain has been found in East Sussex — 65 years after it was last seen.
A study by entomologist Steven Falk shows the solitary bee, Halictus eurygnathus, is at at seven sites on the South Downs.
Mr Falk said many of the species he recorded were rare and some were doing better than expected.
However, others, including one of Britain’s largest mining bees, were at risk of losing their habitats.
The study recorded 227 bee and wasp species during more than 100 visits to 15 chalk grassland and chalky heath sites — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Cray said it has sealed a deal to overhaul the US Department of Energy’s Jaguar
supercomputer, making it one of the fastest machines on the planet.
The supercomputer at the DOE Oak Ridge National Laboratory will be renamed Titan
after it is beefed up with speedy, powerful chips from California companies NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices — via redwolf.newsvine.com
An Edinburgh man who reported the theft of his cannabis plants to the police has been jailed for 10 months.
Sheriff Isabella McColl said she had no option but to jail David Williamson, 34, after he claimed he would continue to smoke the drug.
Police were called to Williamson’s home in May 2011 to investigate reports he had been assaulted and robbed — via redwolf.newsvine.com
This project [kadawittfeldarchitektur] is a museum for Celtic art, and is in direct proximity to a historic burial mound. Similar to an excavated archaeological find, the metal body of the museum juts out from the landscape and forms a counterpart to the burial mound. More of a mysterious object itself rather than architecture, the museum should be stumbled upon by its visitors as a marker of landscape discovery — via ArchDaily
An Austin Powers
actor convicted of torturing a woman in Orange County is suspected of killing his cellmate in a Central Valley prison, authorities said Tuesday.
Joseph Hyungmin Son, 40, allegedly killed his 50-year-old cellmate, who was found dead Monday afternoon at Wasco State Prison Reception Center in Kern County.
The cellmate was a parole violator who had been sentenced to two years in prison for failing to register as a sex offender, according to a prison report. A cause of death was pending — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Many people think heavy drinking causes promiscuity, violence and anti-social behaviour. That’s not necessarily true, argues Kate Fox.
I am a social anthropologist, but what I do is not the traditional intrepid sort of anthropology where you go and study strange tribes in places with mud huts and monsoons and malaria.
I really don’t see why anthropologists feel they have to travel to unpronounceable corners of the world in order to study strange tribal cultures with bizarre beliefs and mysterious customs, when in fact the weirdest and most puzzling tribe of all is right here on our doorstep. I am of course talking about my own native culture – the British.
And if you want examples of bizarre beliefs and weird customs, you need look no further than our attitude to drinking and our drinking habits. Pick up any newspaper and you will read that we are a nation of loutish binge-drinkers – that we drink too much, too young, too fast – and that it makes us violent, promiscuous, anti-social and generally obnoxious.
Clearly, we Brits do have a bit of a problem with alcohol, but why? — via redwolf.newsvine.com
More than 1.1 million Myki cards are set to be replaced as hackers have found a method of cloning the tickets.
Myki manufacturers NXP has recommended users upgrade to the newer, 2008 swipecard, the MIFARE DESFire EV1. The Transport Ticketing Authority has said it will replace Myki with the more secure card, but has not said when.
TTA financial reports state the authority has $22.8 million worth of tickets in stock — which could include metcards and single-use Mykis — but this figure was written down this year to $8.1 million after the decision to scrap short term Myki tickets worth $14.1 million — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Life expectancy for people with HIV in the UK has increased by 15 years in the past decade, thanks to modern drugs and earlier treatment, a study suggests.
Health authorities should consider more widespread testing for HIV, given the benefits of early treatment, UK researchers report in the BMJ.
The Terrence Higgins Trust says people at risk should get tested now.
Figures suggest more than 80,000 UK are living with HIV, and about 25% are unaware they have the infection — via redwolf.newsvine.com
After a deputy asked Matthew Falkner for his identification, the Palm City man started taking out a taco.
When another deputy noted the request wasn’t for a taco, the booze-smelling Falkner shrugged and laughed and again started to take out a taco while in the driver’s seat of a pick-up at Taco Bell, according to recently released Martin County Sheriff’s records.
The records didn’t state whether Falkner was thinking outside the bun — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Emergency crews called to an accident on a film set in Toronto were confronted with alarming blood and gore — but it wasn’t as bad as it looked.
Actors dressed as zombies for the latest Resident Evil film were injured when a high platform moved suddenly.
It did kind of catch us off-guard when we walked in,
said police Sergeant Andrew Gibson — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has aired its planned changes to the Numbering Plan that would see mobile phone users get access to free 1800 calls and cheaper 13 number calls.
The Numbering Plan sets forth how phone carriage services and phone numbering works around Australia. Initially enacted in 1997, the plan had been previously adjusted to make way for new geographical areas and new phone prefixes, as well as changes that allow easy access to 1800 and 13 numbers for charities — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Australia’s carbon tax is set to become law after the lower house of parliament passed the government’s historic but controversial set of bills to establish the world’s most broadly based carbon pricing scheme.
Against last-minute efforts by the opposition to delay the passage of the bills and 11th hour pleas for amendments by some business groups, the government passed its 18 pieces of legislation by a vote of 74 to 72 just before 10am — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Wild, extreme, outrageous, unrestrained: all might be used to describe MB&F’s futuristic Horological Machines, but traditional, classical… round? With its monumental central balance; superlatively finished movement; completely independent dual time zones; unique vertical power reserve indicator and elegant annular case, Legacy Machine No.1 (LM1) is a tribute to the great innovators of traditional watchmaking; and above all, an authentic three-dimensional MB&F Machine — via Maximilian Büsser & Friends
Success can be a drag. You yearn for it, strive for it, and then, when it finally arrives, it sets off repercussions you never anticipated that sometimes undo that success.
Take the German shepherd. Originally bred to the exacting standards of a German cavalry officer, it became one of the 20th century’s most popular working breeds. But in recent years that popularity, and the overbreeding that came with it, has driven the German shepherd into eclipse: even the police in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, who had relied on the dogs for years, recently announced they were replacing them with Belgian Malinois, because the less-popular Malinois were hardier and more reliable.
But there is good news about this bad news, if you are a lover of the breed, because less visibility, especially in inspiring roles as public servants, is likely to mean less demand for the dogs. That means less reason to produce too many puppies, which is the best thing that can happen to any purebred dogs — via The New York Times
I’ve always had a problem with the term jailbreaking
when it comes to Apple’s mobile devices. The term jail
came into usage long before iOS in reference to isolated user-space instances, but that old meaning seems to have been obscured through both overuse and continued attempts to paint Apple as a dictatorial company interested only in hamstringing users of its devices. I’ve let jailbreaking
slide until now because even though I think it’s a loaded term, it’s also a nice, short way to describe the act of opening the device to greater customization than Apple offers out of the box. It’s also a better term than Android’s “rooting,” which sounds a bit rude in my part of the world.
In the wake of Richard Stallman’s epically tasteless diatribe against Steve Jobs last week (Google for it if you’re truly curious, I’m not serving him any page views), I’ve decided I can’t let this slide any more. In addition to saying he was glad Steve is gone, Stallman also called Jobs “the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom.” So according to him, Mac users, iPhone users, iPod and iPad owners are all imprisoned and too stupid to realise it.
It’s at this point that I have to wonder whether Stallman or any of the other members of the free software movement have ever spent any appreciable amount of time in an actual jail or jail-like environment. I’m betting that few if any of them have. If they had, they’d see as I do just how full of hyperbole (and something else that rhymes with chit
) the jail
metaphor is — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Many people now rely on their smartphones, sat-navs or other GPS devices to find their way around. But when these fail us, and there’s no-one to ask for directions, there’s a more natural way to navigate, says Tristan Gooley.
It’s not every week that a massive solar flare knocks out the GPS network, but all it takes is a flat battery or a mechanical fault to hobble your automated orientation aids.
And if there’s no-one around to ask and no paper map on hand, you could be in trouble.
Natural navigation may be just what you need. This involves working out which way to go without using maps, compasses or any other instruments. It relies on awareness and deduction, so does depend on retaining some awareness of direction throughout each journey — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Gabriel Dawe has an ongoing exhibition of his piece plexus no.9 at Houston’s PEEL Gallery. Do not miss clicking through the entire Plexus series at the artist’s site — via MAKE
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