Anybody who’s ever worn glasses and knows what a bridge piercing is, has probably contemplated combining the two at some point in time. The difference with James and Oliver is that they got their fingers out and did it. For a prototype, the end result is quite a nifty and practical item — via Warren Ellis
The United States has quietly acknowledged that it had stopped searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — one of its key reasons for invading the country
Computer helpdesk employee Philip Cummings had more than just a day job: he’s just gone down for 14 years in the biggest identity theft case ever. Apparently fake ID goes for as little as $60, and the total stolen over just a couple of years was somewhere in the $50-100 million range
An avalanche of malicious traffic knocked many of Macquarie’s customers’ offline earlier this week — just days after the company had upgraded its security systems
The discovery of two ancient devils
has challenged the traditional view of our distant ancestors as rat-sized creatures that scurried around the feet of dinosaurs. That view is now challenged after the discovery of two beautifully preserved fossils of related 130-million-year-old mammals, both bearing a resemblance to the Tasmanian Devil. They were found preserved in rock composed of volcanic and former riverbed sediments in north-eastern China’s Liaoning Province
With the hope of returning at least one corner of the web to its non-commercial roots, Google watcher Daniel Brandt, who curates the NameBase archive, has released the source code to a Google scraper. Brandt has been making an ad-free proxy available for two years using Google’s little known minimal ie
interface. By using this proxy, users bypass both Google’s notorious 2038
cookie (that’s when it expires) and the text ads. Brandt fully expects Google to throw legal and technical resources at him, but says he welcomes the challenge if only to clarify copyright issues. Google took people’s free stuff and made a $50 billion business from it, he argues
Both John Howard and Phillip Ruddock’s noses have been put firmly out of joint over the US announcing that it will release former terror suspect Mr Mamdouh Habib with no charges after three years of illegal torture and detention in Guantanamo Bay. Is anyone really surprised that the whiny toad is refusing an apology or compensation. If he can’t say sorry to the nation’s Aborigines, he certainly won’t be able to apologise to a single man
Amanda Monti, 24, flew into a rage after her former boyfriend, Geoffrey Jones, 37, rejected her advances at the end of a drunken house party. She yanked off his left testicle, which was later handed to him by a friend with the words: That’s yours
. Monti initially tried to hide the testicle by putting it in her mouth, but released it. Doctors were unable to reattach the organ — via Warren Ellis
Yep, that time of year again, time for a Mac conference. Steve Jobs unveiled the iPod shuffle, the Mac mini and iWork.
Lucie’s quick takes on these:
iPod shuffle is the size of a pack o’ gum, has no screen but can run on 2 AAA batteries when the internal one is drained, and has a flash based memory unlike the iPod. Love the battery thing, would be nice to see that incorporated to the rest of the iPod family. With the $150 price tag surely this baby will catch the eye of even the most cynical anti-iPodders.
What do you do with excess igloo shaped iMacs? Crush it into a small rectangle, trim off the monitor and keyboard, finish it off with that famous Apple styin’, and voila! Mac mini. This ‘puter is BYO mouse, keyboard and monitor/tv. It’s also the cheapest Mac ever! So if you’re a Windows iPodder, you might want to take a longer walk on the Apple side.
iWork is Keynote (slideshow program), and Pages (word processor). It’s cheap and Pages imports and exports Word docs. This is very good and means that you don’t need to fork out a lot of cash to create and view Word docs. Yay!
Side note: I like the new graphics on the iWork and iLife boxes.
IBM has announced that it will turn 500 of its software patents over to a patent commons
that can be freely implemented by anyone. This is big news for free software authors, since it’s often impossible for all-volunteer projects to defend themselves from patent infringement claims when there is a bogus software patent (like the thousands that IBM has accumulated) that overlaps with their work — via BoingBoing
The embattled undersea cable and satellite joint venture between Telstra and Hong Kong-based Pacific Century CyberWorks, Reach, has announced plans to dump external data customers to make way for the data capacity demands of its shareholders
BigAir, is offering 10Mbps broadband service to some of its residential customers. The ISP, which specialises in providing internet access for residents of low-rise apartments and tower blocks, claimed that the new offering was the fastest available in Australia. However, the 10Mbps service costs over 16 times as much as most basic ADSL services, priced at $500 per month with downloads capped at 100GB
Oracle has released Oracle Database Lite 10g, aimed at mobile devices, including laptop computers and PDAs. The software provides mobile users with seamless synchronisation with enterprise systems
Asked to forecast the impact of the Internet on society in the coming decade, a group of technology leaders and scholars have offered both dire predictions and high hopes
I came across this article about bikram yoga: Health fears over cult-like
hot yoga.
I’ve actually started taking these classes so I was interested to see what these concerns are. I really haven’t seen any specifics in this article except for it’s apparent cult-likeness
. I think calling a style of yoga cult-like because it claims to detox your body is a tad far fetched even if it doesn’t detox.
There’s a blurb about how exercising in that heat is bad, but they don’t say what these bad things are. Dehydration is of course the most obvious, but you are suppose to have had quite a bit of water before you go, and are to take a bottle of water in with you to the class so that this doesn’t happen.
Then they say that asthmatics, people with heart conditions etc, shouldn’t be exercising in a 37°C heated room. DERRR!
And no, I can’t say that I look to yoga for intense aerobic or cardiovascular exercise. I don’t want that, that’s one of the reasons I’m doing yoga.
Well no one said it was for everybody. I’ve gotta say so far I’ve had more stamina from it, (I can run for trains a lot longer now), it’s good to loosen up the muscles after cramping oneself into very bad work chair, and of course the sense calm that comes from being told to only think of your breathing for 90 minutes.
Rats can tell the difference between Dutch and Japanese, suggests a new study. But it is not because some spy agency has bioengineered them to eavesdrop on conversations in Tokyo or Amsterdam. They are simply recognising the difference in rhythmic properties of the languages, says Juan Toro, a neuroscientist at the University of Barcelona in Spain, whose study is part of an effort to trace the origins of the skills that humans use to analyse speech
BBC techies are advising staff not to use the corporation’s own news ticker service, Newsline. An item in the corporation’s internal mag Ariel
reported that high network load because of the application had prompted the advice. However, the BBC says the only reason staff are told not to use Newsline internally is that its developers haven’t produced an version of the application compatible with Windows XP or Mac OS X
Blogs and message forums buzzed this week with the discovery that a pair of simple Google searches permits access to well over 1,000 unprotected surveillance cameras around the world — apparently without their owners’ knowledge. Apparently many of the cams are even aimable. Oops!
Flash memory pioneer SanDisk has created a memory card packaging technology that enables memory cards to plug into both SD card slots and USB ports. The approach eliminates the need to use SD-to-USB adapters when accessing the contents of an SD card on a laptop, PC, or other system that lacks an integrated SD card slot
Rich is both a case modder and Lego fan, so it should come as no surprise that he combined his two loves to build Lego case mods. These are not just a Lego shell around a case, he’s used the Lego to support everything
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