The United States of Supercomputers
Without counting secret machines, this is the state of supercomputing in the world: The United States’ government, companies, and universities have more computing power than the rest of the world combined. Each square within each country represents one supercomputer. (gizmodo)
I already knew the basic outlines of these proportions, and can’t say I am surprised by the US’ dominance. I didn’t expect to see Switzerland up there though, nor Saudi. And where are the aussies?
via gizmodo
Jon Stewart: Appholes
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Appholes | ||||
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via BitsAndPieces
The internet in 1969
So that’s how it was supposed to be: the wife would use the internet for shopping, and the husband for paying bills. They’ve got multiple screens though, or “Windows” if you will. And the husband even has a tablet!
via BitsAndPieces
Internet choir sounds surprisingly good
This recording was done through the internet, with 185 people in front of their webcamera singing the same song (though not simultaneously, I imagine). Beautiful!
CodeOrgan creates webmusic
Enter a website address, and CodeOrgan plays the html body as music. Not my kind of music, perhaps, but interesting still. Makes me wonder what a website would look like if it was built to sound like something recognisable – like Lennon’s Imagine. Something to consider for the numerous fan sites online!
via Geekologie
PWN’D support group
I can’t say I’ve ever felt the need for such a support group myself, not because I’ve never been pwned in a game, but because I never cared much about being … OK OK OK SO I DO CARE! Why can’t you just kill me and leave me be?! Would it take much effort not to wink at me, “yoo-hoo!” or flame me e-v-e-r-y time you manage a sniper coward’s headshot waaaaaay up from behind a tree? Come join me on WoW, I’ll ROLEPLAY you to tears, you… you…
Past 30, I no longer have the nimble agility needed for fast-paced games. I see that now. So getting hit every now and then shouldn’t come as a surprise. Considering 80% of the players I face are below 17, I really shouldn’t get upset by childish remarks either. Still…
via Geekologie
The Copenhagen Wheel
Photo: SENSEable City Lab, MIT
Yesterday, at the COP15 Climate Conference in Copenhagen, MIT students presented the Copenhagen Wheel, a hybrid smart wheel that harnesses your kinetic energy created when braking and stores the energy in the wheel for later use. The wheel can communicate with your smart phone, which may tell you how fast you’re going, where you’re going and when you’re likely to get there. Having the smart phone mounted on the handlebars, you can lock or unlock your bike, change gears and select how much the motor should assist you. The Copenhagen Wheel also monitors pollution levels, and this information can be shared online, making for a map showing you and your fellow citizens where to go to avoid pollution and traffic congestion.
The Face Transformer
In my blog article “My clone looks nothing like me“, I present the thought of having your own look-alike somewhere in the world.
Today, I found this marvellous Face Transformer created and hosted by the
University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Here, using the transformer script, my friend Sigurd has been given west-asian, afro-caribean and east-asian features, suggesting what his look-alike looks like:
Photo: Vetle Skatvoldsmyr
The Face Transformer also has options to show how you might have looked like as a baby, child or teenager, and how you might look like as an old man (or woman). Also, you can feminise your features, see yourself as a Botticelli painting or even mix fifty percent chimp DNA into the gene pool. Good fun.
Resizing your photo aforehand to 640×480 is recommended, as large images will load slowly in the script (standard webcam size should be fine).
My clone looks nothing like me
Yesterday, my friend Richard from London told me he saw someone over there that looked a bit like me. It got me thinking.
The idea of having a twin is strange. Of course, with 7 billion people in the world, chances are there’s someone out there who resembles you so much that people could be fooled, should you bring your twin to your hometown. That is, before your twin starts talking, laughing, moving, gesturing, all those other things that makes you you to other people. But at a certain distance, in a certain light, standing upright without moving or talking, you probably should be able to fool your own parents (or HE would fool your parents, rather). Somewhere out there is a man (or a very ugly woman) who looks pretty much like me.
Today, I came across http://facialprofiler.com, which is an ad campaign for Coca Cola Zero (they want us to believe it’s standard Cola’s twin – utter nonsense of course, tastes nothing like it). At the site, your picture is taken via webcam, pictures on Facebook or pictures from your harddrive and then compared to other people’s faces in their database. And then you’re waiting in excitement as “People ahead of you in the queue” gets matched – and their match actually looks like them! If you try this procedure a few times though, you’ll see the “people ahead of you in queue” are the same people every time, so that’s just something they’ve put in there to have you believe this thing works.
Well, does it work? You be the judge:
First try. Using photo from harddrive.
Second try. Adding a smile as parameter.
Surfing back in time
Using the utterly wonderful WayBackMachine at http://web.archive.org, I have spent a while walking down memory lane. On the internetz everything becomes old fast, and revisiting playgrounds brings back memories. Or, well… I hadn’t heard of Google yet back then.
This is what you would get if you pointed your browser to Facebook.com in 1999.
The up-and-coming Hewlett Packard features a modern website with an easily accessible drivers section. HP support hasn’t changed much since 1996 though.
Apple, 1997. The not-yet-full-white apple launches a bold new look with integrated Internet functions, while BMW offers free CD-ROMs.
And also, my very first homepage, from 1999. I remember feeling smug about the Loading Time Indication Diamond System. The missing GIFs are “Under Construction” signs, of course! There were still people on the internet who thought these things were cool. Or I did, at least.
The address was short and simple: http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Nova/9565 (though later I found I could use the redirect go.to/vetlemakt just by adding one more ad to my page!). GeoCities.com closed down earlier this year, taking my baby with it.
Trying to save a dying computer
My intern inspects a very small and probably very vital part before reassembly.
This is my computer, a HP Pavillion 9575. It’s been my loyal companion for two years, and I’ve driven it like computers should be driven – pedal to the metal, full throttle every day. I’ve had it in for repairs once, just before the one-year-warranty expired, changed the DVD player and motherboard. Two months later, I spilled a beer over the keyboard. Which, with notebooks, means I spilled a beer into the computer. Managed to pry it open and dry it over night, and it kind of worked fine after that. Until I did it again a month ago. This time my clumsiness cost me the fancy touch-slide volume control. But I created a nice little keyboard hotkey for it, so no real harm done.
Then, last night, it started acting up, shutting down, restarting, shutting down, going blank, restarting. So I figured it was dying.
I thought I would give it one last go, and unscrewed every single part of it, dusted and cleaned everything except for the dual processors, and reassembled it afterwards.
I turned the power on three minutes ago, and it still has not shut down or gone bonkers! If it should fail again, I am announcing game over for it, though. At least now I’ll have this nice blog entry to remind me of my brave computer.
*fingers crossed*
EDIT: It’s now been 24 hours, and it seems to be working perfectly, yay!
