2009 Jun 1, 3:26Some unbelievable stuff in this video for future Xbox features. And I write 'unbelievable' as in, I find it difficult to believe the 3d motion sensing 'you are the controller' stuff would work as
well as it does in the demo video. The rest of the described features seem practical and sound neat.
blog microsoft video videogames xbox e3 2009 Jun 1, 3:21"Marc Weber Tobias can pick, crack, or bump any lock. Now he wants to teach the world how to break into military facilities and corporate headquarters."
via:boingboing hack diy business politics security video lockpicking lock crime wired 2009 Jun 1, 2:03Wow, read this without expectations of what its about. This is the second identity-theft/Internet/personal-relationships story I've read. It makes me think we need VeriSign to do cert verification
for personal relationships but then I must remind myself that this must not be very common...
via:swannman identity identity-theft story psychology web blog joey-devilla 2009 Jun 1, 11:07
When I heard that
Live Search is now Bing one of my initial thoughts was how'd they get that domain
name given
the unavailability of pronouncable four letter .COM domain names. Well, the names been used in the past.
Here now, via the
Wayback Machine is a brief, somewhat speculative, and ultimately anticlimactic
history
of bing.com:
-
2003 July: The first archived version of bing.com features "bing! is a small device (e.g., possibly even a small
Band-Aid(R)-like sticker!) that vibrates when a person's cell phone rings." I can't recall 2003 cell phones, were they big enough to require this device?
-
2004 August: Site for the same device is rewritten and looks much better, IMHO.
-
2006 June: The domain is now parked by easyDNS. I guess the "bing!" device didn't work out?
-
2006 November: Its now "BING*" and they won't say what they're working on ("we're still in stealth mode") but they are
hiring C#/.NET developers.
-
2007 January: And they're gone. Without even exiting stealth mode. Too bad, I liked their logo. Their domain is now for
sale...
-
2007 February: Looks like EasyMail buys the domain and offers a physical mailing service in Australia: "By simply clicking
a button on your computer, mail is beamed electronically to a bing post office. Your mail is automatically printed, folded, enveloped and dispatched into the Australia Post network the very same
day."
-
Present: Now its the new home for Live Search of course.
The new name reminds me of the show Friends. Also, I hope they get a new favicon - I don't enjoy the stretched 'b' nor its color scheme.
microsoft technical domain history search archive dns bing 2009 May 29, 9:28"During nighttime patrol, persons or vehicles using the entire NightMarker Detection Portocol can illuminate areas from distances of at least 100 meters out and look for disturbances in the road or
guardrails. Long Lasting IR Paint and Aerosol Spray is guaranteed to last at least 6 months in direct sunlight."
ir ir-paint military 2009 May 29, 9:17"Anyway, the idea is to find techniques, be they arrays of bright infrared LEDs, or paints that shine well in infrared but are not obvious in visible light, and create invisible graffiti that only
shows up in tourist photos and videos."
humor graffiti ir ir-paint magic tourist photography 2009 May 29, 9:13"Developed in the late 1960s by Dutch physicist J. R. J. van Asperen De Boer, infrared reflectography (IRR) is a technique used to look through the paint layers. ... Many paints will appear partially
or completely transparent while others, such as black, will absorb the infrared radiation and appear dark."
art history science ir ir-reflectography 2009 May 29, 8:49Howto on goggles that block out everything but the small range of IR that's barely visible. "INFRARED GOGGLES FOR UNDER $10, A Human IR Vision Experiment, Sept. 14, 2002 Bill Beaty"
ir infrared hack howto science photography diy hardware light 2009 May 29, 2:50
I like the idea of QR codes, encoding URLs and placing them
on real world objects, but the QR codes themselves are kind of ugly. To make them less obvious I thought I could spray QR codes on to an object with an infrared reflective paint and shine infrared
light on the QR codes, since most cameras, for instance the camera in my G1 phone, pick up infrared that our eyes do not.
In my search for infrared paint I've found a seller of IR ink (via programming forum) and an Infrared Paint Recipe (via IR FAQ).
In looking for this paint I've found that it comes up a lot in relation to the military for things like paint markers that are visible at
night with proper equipment, and paint that absorbs IR light to make vehicles less obvious to night vision goggles. Even though the first
reflects infrared light and the second absorbs it websites end up refering to both as infrared paint which made it difficult to search.
Additionally I found links to some other geeky infrared projects:
ir paint technical ir infrared qr qr code 2009 May 29, 12:12"Any object in Amazon S3 that can be read anonymously can also be downloaded via BitTorrent. ... Retrieving a .torrent file for any publicly available object is easy. Simply add a "?torrent" query
string parameter at the end of the REST GET request for the object." Yes, this is awesome!
torrent amazon s3 bittorrent p2p via:pskomoroch 2009 May 27, 3:39A fancy tab completion script for Vim that does neat things for Java. Links to other Java+Vim tips as wel.
vim java script reference 2009 May 27, 3:01"The Microsoft Connect service is a web-platform for communication between Microsoft Software Engineers and their developer community... Unfortunately the sign-up and feature request process is a
little confusing, and long-winded, so I have put together a guide to help people get to the right place."
microsoft internet ie ie8 ie9 html5 canvas humor reference screenshot 2009 May 26, 11:28"But Data.gov is different. It is primarily for machines, not people, at least as a first step. It is a catalog of various sets of data from government agencies. And the idea is to offer the data in
one of several standardized formats, ranging from a simple text file that can be read by a spreadsheet program to the XML format widely used these days for the exchange of information between Web
services. Other data is presented in formats that are meant to feed into mapping programs."
data nytimes xml government 2009 May 25, 10:19"Wallace and Gromit return-this time as purveyors of the Top Bun bakery, despite the fact that 12 other local bakers have disappeared in the previous year. Now it's up to Gromit to solve the mystery
while Wallace woos new love interest Piella Bakewell."
humor movie wallace-and-gromit animation claymation for:hellosarah 2009 May 25, 3:02
Checking out at a grocery store to which I rarely go, the cashier asks me if I want an
Albertson's card. I respond sure and she hands me the form on which I give up my personal information. I ask if I need to fill this out now, and she says yeah and it will only take two minutes,
which surprised me because at QFC they just hand me a new card and send me on my way. I fill in my phone number as the first ten digits of pi so I don't have to worry about getting phone calls but
its something I can remember next time I'm there and don't bring the card.
I turn to leave and the cashier asks me is that a '759' or '159' in my phone number. I stop for a second because I only know the digits as a sequence from the start and pause long enough reciting
it in my head that its clear its not my phone number. And she calls me out on it: "Is that your real phone number?" I sigh, "No, does it have to be? Are you going to call me?" "Yeah," she says,
"I'll call you." (ha ha) "Well I'll try entering this number," she says doubting the computer will accept the fake phone number. "On the number's already registered," she says, "So you already had
a card." "No," says the manager who had walked up during for this exchange, "It means someone else used that same number." So the moral of the story is, try your fake phone number before trying to
use it to get a new card.
personal2 pi albertsons 2009 May 23, 4:45
In honor of Google Chrome's recent v2 release and because I read they don't make too big a deal about version numbers, I thought to create a graph of browser major version numbers over time.
Yeah that's not too useful of a graph. I got the release dates from Wikipedia of course.
As you can see from the graph, Netscape and Opera are leading all other browsers in terms of major version number. The other browsers really need to get on that.
browser technical boring google ie graph 2009 May 22, 6:59"...but we do know enough to say that if time travel were possible, certain rules would have to be obeyed. ... So if you wanted to create a fictional world involving travel through time, here are
10+1 rules by which you should try to play." I always liked Bill & Ted's time travel mechanics better than Back to the Future's - not that it made for a better movie of course. I'd like to see a
chart comparing the time travel mechanics of well known fiction that features time travel.
time-travel movie fiction bttf 2009 May 22, 6:37Famous people are just like me! That is, Jorge Garcia (Hurley from Lost) also has a blog on which he writes about and posts pictures of his visit to the Neuschhwanstein Castle in Munich (the basis of
the Disney castle). But apparently unlike me he didn't take the Bus of the Year 2005 to get to the castle.
via:kottke hurley lost tv blog germany for:hellosarah 2009 May 22, 12:10
sequelguy posted a photo:
Sarah and I have a new place in Redmond and we'll be moving
there in a few weeks. Exciting! Incidentally, when researching the place on the Internet I found that the nearby park used to be a radar site for the Project Nike missile system in the fifties.
Fun!
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