OK Go Rube Goldberg Machine Wonder
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This might be the best music video ever. Ever.
The Wonder of Wot U Do
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If you want to see what people can do with new, shiny, technology you should take a look at the Wotudo site. It has a whole bunch of really interesting/useful articles along with source code, neatly categorised into useful chunks and able to be asset stripped for parts of your projects.
Great stuff.
Platform 2010 Free Games Conference at Hull
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I’m going to be doing quite a lot of speaking in the next month or so. Good thing I know lots of jokes.……
Anyhoo, in a couple of weeks or so, on March 25th, I’ll be treading the boards at Platform 2010, which is a digital gaming event in Hull. It is at the spiffy new Hull Truck theatre and they have some really good speakers lined up. And me.
It is free to attend, so if you are in the neighbourhood and want to take part you should head over to here and register your interest via the “Contact Us” link.
…so I built a centrifuge to find out
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This post and video is amazing. I don’t think many people would build a centrifuge in their living room just to find out if a lava lamp would work on Jupiter.
Hull Girl Geek Dinners
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The Girl Geek Dinners at Hull are going from strength to strength. We started them a while back and their next event is scheduled for next week on Thursday 11th March at Hive in our department. Girl Geek students from the university can even register at a discount. For the event details and a programme for the evening you can go here:
Donate Somebody Else’s Money with Bing
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Microsoft are doing this deal at the moment for where for every 10 searches you make using Bing they will donate 5 pence to Sport Relief. This means that you are doing good and raising money for charity just by searching the web. Which you would do anyway. Works for me, even though I had to download and install a little app to count the searches.
Dodgy Memory Chips
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The thing that amazes me is that the memory card on the left has a thousand times the capacity of the one on the right. And this advance took place in five years or so. Amazing.
If you are interested in the slightly murky world of memory chips and hardware manufacture you will find this post from one of the engineers behind the Chumby very interesting.
Tom Speaks
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If you want to get ahead, get a blog. Last week I reported that Iain had started blogging, and today I’m pleased to be able to tell you that Tom Hulton-Harrop is now also blogging. Tom is one of our final year students, very into programming and XNA.
Iain Speaks: new Technical Blog
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Iain Kelwick, the Manager of SeedSoftware has started a blog. This is a proper technical blog which will have genuinely useful things in it. The kind of thing I aspired to before I started going on about CSI and Silent Witness. You can find his first posts here:
Human Clock
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The Human Clock project is a really neat idea. The creator is taking pictures from all over the world which contain the time and then using them to make a clock from all the different images. You can submit your own images on their web site, and if the author approves you can get a tiny slice of sort-of immortality. I’ve just sent the picture above. I’ve no idea how busy the 3:10 pm slot is (you can find out how many photos they have for each time) but you never know…
Phishing Spotter
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How good are you at spotting phishing emails? Take a test here.
http://www.sonicwall.com/phishing/
(I got 9 out of 10 – which is nice)
isobuster for your Dreamspark Images
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If you are making use of your Dreamspark access to get hold of lovely free Microsoft software then you might have noticed that a lot of the good stuff arrives as ISO disk images. The idea is that you burn these images to disk and then install the software on them.
However, if you have a netbook with no CD-ROM drive, or are simply in a hurry I can recommend IsoBuster. This tool lets you copy files from ISO images onto your hard disk or memory key so that you can install programs from the disks without needing a physical disk.
There is a copy you can pay for, but I’m told that the free version will do all you need to get hold files from a disk image. IsoBuster is also useful if you have a damaged disk that you need to recover.
Update on 2009-12-01 15:58 by Rob
Thanks for all your constructive reponses. Boss reccomends Virtual CloneDrive which also looks rather good.
Poisonous Apple
/I really like the idea of this.
eZ430 Chronos Wireless Watch
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I really want one of these. I’m not surprised they have sold out.
Lego Letters
/While we were in Berlin we went into the gift shop attached to Legoland Berlin. One new Lego product is the Lego nameplate. It comes with a bunch of shapes and an alphabet design you can use to make letters:
If you want one of your own you can find it here.
Lights
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Went to York today to do some shopping and meet number one daughter for lunch. I’m a sucker for coloured lights, and so I bought another set. I think I only get them so that I can take pictures of them before I hang them up.
Hanging Out, Messing around and Geeking Out
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danah boyd (deliberate lower case here) is a researcher who ponders how the networks are changing our lives and the way we do things.
She is the co-author of a book which contains a set of case studies that investigate how different people live, learn and work around the networks of the 21st century. I’ve just started working my way through it, and I’m finding it very interesting.
TechEd and Mauerfall 2009
/TechEd started today. I went to a very good session on Windows Azure first thing. Then I had to go off and sort out some presentation related bits and bobs, which was a bit of a pain as there were a couple of other sessions I wanted to see. However, once the day’s work was done we headed off the the Brandenburg gate to see the Mauerfall event.
This was a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall by the toppling of an enormous row of domino-like blocks that stretched for over a kilometre. They had all kinds of heads of state there, a full orchestra and a live appearance by Bon Jovi.
The inside of the station
The outside of the station
A nice view across the river
On the way to the gate
Waiting by the wall
We found a good spot near the food and drink stands and began to wait. And it started to rain. And rain. After two hours in the rain I found that most of the things I had with me that I thought were waterproof, like my coat and shoes, were not. After three hours in the rain everything was wet. After four hours everything was wet and very cold. And then it started, We had speeches from the great and the good, music, and the blocks duly fell on cue. It was a great evening, even though I have never been so cold and wet.
Project Tuva – Richard Feynman Lectures
/If you’ve not heard of Richard Feynman then you are very lucky. It means that you can have the experience of finding out all about him for the first time.
Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize winning, safe cracking, bongo drum playing, beautiful women painting, atom bomb making genius. Go and read Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman! to discover more.
And now you can get to see the man in action delivering a set of lectures about physics that have been put in the internets by Microsoft at their Project Tuva site. This lets you view the presentations with annotations and additional linkable content. A great way to spend a lunch hour or two.
