January 2009Monthly Archives

US President George W. Bush may be passing out of the White House and into history, but he has bequeathed to the nation and the world volumes of unforgettable quotes.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO will the voices shutup on this one – or at least that big green lizard over there….

People with a higher caffeine intake, from sources such as coffee, tea and caffeinated energy drinks, are more likely to report hallucinatory experiences such as hearing voices and seeing things that are not there, according to the Durham University study.

'High caffeine users' – those who consumed more than the equivalent of seven cups of instant coffee a day – were three times more likely to have heard a person's voice when there was no one there compared with 'low caffeine users' who consumed less than the equivalent of one cup of instant coffee a day.

Thanks to Claire at New Linux User:
I know that the hacker community has been uber busy since the Asus EeePC broke through the clouds heralded by bugling heavenly angels and Seraphims announcing its arrival in the digital firmament. The roll call of customised GNU/Linux distros has grown impressively. Most of them are designed for a full SSD install to replace the Xandros OS. There are versions too for running some distros from a USB stick but they were not, in the first instance at least, for novices. In the year since the EeePC arrived on my doorstep matters have progressed significantly. Several distros designed for standard laptops have developed GUI tools for installing GNU/Linux onto a USB stick that take the pain out of formatting, partitioning and making it bootable. If you can point and click you’ll be in hog Heaven.

It used to be that the design of a website was always left to a single web designer and some good ideas, but with Google Website Optimizer, Google's free testing and optimization tool, a website can harness the input of thousands of its visitors to produce results that really matter.

To install the default LAMP stack in Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) (also works in Intrepid)

As of the 7.04 release, the Ubuntu base system includes Tasksel. You can either install LAMP using tasksel or install the LAMP packages as detailed above.

sudo tasksel install lamp-server

With proper (that is, hideous) summer temperatures swamping most of the country, it seems timely to remind the Lifehacker community of some of the useful techniques you can use to make sure your beloved PC isn't a victim of heatstroke. Beyond keeping your working environment cool and ensuring decent airflow, there are more specific steps you can take. For laptop users, , though readers have differing views and testing shows some variable performance. Right now, I'm getting nice results from the HeatShift I wrote up recently, but that's not on sale to the general public yet. You can make your own laptop stand for better heat circulation using our Top 10 DIY Laptop Stands. If you want to see how hot your PC is running, check out SpeedFan.

While many people think of social media in terms of their computer, the iPhone and iPod Touch guarantee that you can interact anytime, anywhere. We’ve gathered up over 70 apps that will help you stay in touch with just about anyone, whether they are across the world or using the same Wi-Fi hotspot as you. Oh, and did we mention that all of these are 100% free? What isn’t to love?

Odds are if you access the Internet, you visit YouTube. But aren’t there some things you’d like to change about it? Maybe stopping the autoplay feature or only finding HD clips? Well, this collection of over 20 Greasemonkey scripts can completely change your user experience at the popular video sharing site!

TweetBacks are great, but they’re just a single feature, the integration of Twitter and blogging can and should go much deeper than that.
So today I’m releasing the first version of TweetSuite, a Twitter-WordPress integration plugin

Ever wonder why schools still use Windows? Boycott Novell has extracted the details from 2002 Microsoft email presented in the Comes vrs Microsoft case and other leaks. What emerges is Microsoft's desperate battle to 'never lose to Linux.'

Google is now spewing desktop text and image ads directly onto the Apple iPhone and the T-Mobile G1, an unattractive and uninspiring piece of plastic that runs Google's open source Android OS.

The winner of the 1961 Hugo award, Stranger in a Strange Land, finds the author of Starship Troopers in hippy mode

We didn't notice nearly as much crap at CES 2009 as we did last year, but what we did see was pretty stunning in its mediocrity — and then there was the amazing Dragon gamepad, which in our opinion was single best product of the show. Pick your favorite of the contenders below, then hit your local dollar store to see 'em in person.

If you have a website or blog you’re probably interested in who’s visiting your site and what they’re doing while they’re there. Way back in 2007 we did a post on web analytics but a lot has changed since then. Most analytics packages are now focusing on real-time tracking and graphical representations of visitor data. Below are more than fifty analytics tools to help you monitor and analyze your web traffic

Space X, the private launch company that successfully launched their Falcon 1 rocket into orbit last year, just revealed that their next generation rocket, the Falcon 9, is now vertical at NASA’s Cape Canaveral!

Almost every blog these days runs on WordPress. It’s a great blogging platform, and with the release of version 2.7 it’s a good time to go over some WordPress plugins that you should be using. Here are my top 5 that every blog must have:

nope, any computer can really fit in a pocket;)

Someone sent me the link to a document published using Google Docs, but I didn't have the permission to edit the document. I wanted to save the document to my Google Docs account, but none of the options offered by Google allowed me to do that.

Vimpress is a nifty plugin for Vim which allows you to publish and edit posts on your wordpress blog. sweet mother of pearl, bliss!!!!!!!!!!!
Thanks as ever to Claire at New Linux User!

The same way tabbed browsing revolutionized the web experience, GNU Screen can do the same for your experience in the command line. GNU Screen allows you to manage several interactive shell instances within the same “window.” By using different keyboard shortcuts, you are able to shuffle through the shell instances, access any of them directly, create new ones, kill old ones, attach and detach existing ones.

Joe the Plumber is unfortunately NOT going away but heading to Israel to be a propoganda "war" correspondent for Pajamas Media. Jon Stewart as usual puts this into the proper perspective that our sorry excuse for a "main stream media" does not.

Use this website to create a PDF file which can be printed and folded to create a paper CD case. For folding directions, see the about section. To add more tracks, a mailing address, or graphics to the case, use the advanced form. Mix CD cases created with the advanced form can be optionally added to our public mix CD database. To create a case for an existing CD, use our CD search engine to find the CD and it will fill in this form for you. Jewel case inserts can also be created.

Instead of paying good cash for cd cases, which eventually break and end up in a landfill, how about creating your own, unique folded-paper cd cases that are biodegradable and take up a fraction of the space?

The human comedy that is Wikipedia just lost one of its more intriguing players.
Late December saw the departure of uber-administrator Jossi Fresco, a longtime member of a worldwide religious movement that Time Magazine lists among the mega-cults of the 1970s, the heyday of the mega-cult.

When political candidates concede a campaign, they praise the "long journey" and talk about how much they've "learned." In the same mode, Microsoft's CEO has all but said he's given up on the Zune.
AWWWWWWWWWWW, dont let door hit your butt on way out…

AUSTRALIAN atheists hoping to join an international bus advertising campaign have hit a roadblock.
The Atheist Foundation of Australia's bid to get slogans such as "Atheism – sleep in on Sunday mornings" on buses has been rejected by the nation's biggest outdoor advertising company, APN Outdoor.

Australian Atheists president David Nicholls slammed the decision as an attack on free speech.

Victorinox — makers of the original Swiss Army knife — made its first trek to CES with this, its new Presentation Pro. Tucked away with insane precision are a removable 32GB USB drive with fingerprint authentication, laser pointer, and Bluetooth remote control for your Windows-only PC or laptop presentations. Yep, key ring and scissors too. It even features a blade to fight off your enemies and a file to scrape away any fingerprints after the deed is done. We went hands on with the device and were truly impressed with the build quality. Here's the rub: it'll cost you $330 when it ships in May. Did we say it had a laser?

Here is LWN's eleventh annual timeline of significant events in the Linux and free software world for the year.

We just got a nice look at the beastly Brother Quattro 6000D sewing machine here at CES. We've done a fair amount of embroidery in our day, and we have to say, seeing this machine in action is pretty impressive. Disappointing Disney branding aside (yup, that's Mickey Mouse beneath the giant 4.5 x 7-inch Sharp HD LCD), the Quattro boasts a 50 square inch workspace that is probably any quilter's dream, and it's also got 3 USB ports. Sadly, the purchase price ("about $9,000") is probably prohibitive for most of us casual stitchers. No word yet on availability, but check the gallery and video after the break.

Kicking things off is the iP29 portable speaker case, and stepping up the excitement level from zilch to one is the iP49 rechargeable audio system with alarm clock / FM radio for iPod and iPhone. Lastly, the iHMP5 two-in-one stereo speaker / headphone system enables users to listen in private or enter into "full speaker mode" for the posse to tune in. As with most everything else announced here at CES, pricing and availability have yet to be revealed.

Gamers have largely gotten a bad rep for being lazy, slothful people who spend their hours mindlessly pressing buttons. The Wii changed that a bit by getting kids (and their parents… and their parents) up off the couch, but what about giving their brains a workout too? For your family's little mind freak to-be Mattel is introducing the Mind Flex, a brain-powered game that relies on your mental activity to control the height of a ball suspended in a column of air. Don the headset then start concentrating to make the purple orb rise; relax and it lowers.

As webmasters and site designers, it's easy to fall into the trap of being so familiar with a site's interface that we disregard the notion that navigating does not come as easy for visitors. Often web users have different viewing habits than we do and eyetrack studies have worked hard to determine what they are:

Henry Rollings Writes a Love Letter to Ann Coulter
"You are a figure of fun, and I plan on having fun with that figure"

I've been sitting here silently mulling over exactly what to say about this — the look on my face probably resembling the blank stare that Beavis and Butthead used to share whenever they stumbled across a Milli Vanilli video (and right before changing the channel). But I swear, I just can't make this any funnier than it already is:

Joe the Plumber is going to be a war correspondent.

Keith Olbermann talks to Margaret Carlson about the snub of President-elect Obama by the Bush administration with their request to stay at Blair House when their children started school. According to Carlson, they asked Australian (EX!!!) Prime Minister John Howard to stay there after the fact to justify it being occupied, and they cost the taxpayers a great deal of money by making the Obamas stay at another location due to the additional security needed. The hotel the Obamas are staying at did not already have the security that was in place at Blair House.

with very little palin;)

Augmented Reality (AR) is an emerging technology described as, “a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time.”

Unsurprisingly given my job, I know a lot of people who write about technology for a living. A large percentage of that group are self-employed and work from home. As a result, when a discussion started on a tech journalist mailing list I subscribe to about the requirements for the perfect home office, there was plenty of lively debate and a lot of useful ideas. Here's some of the things that Australia's tech writers think are essential when working from home.

2008 will be remembered as the year that a simple "hockey mom" from Alaska, an ex-beauty pageant contestant and political neophyte, paved the way for history and helped prove once and for all that anyone can ascend to the highest levels of government in the United States — even a black man. It will be remembered as the year that Beyoncé inexplicably demanded that everyone call her "Sasha Fierce" and Britney Spears demanded that somebody call her an ambulance. Then leave her alone. Then give her back her kids. Then buy her album

The atheist bus journey
Not sure about proselytising, but the religious types do it, why cant we?:)
Thanks to you we raised enough money to put ads on 800 buses across the UK, and the campaign has gone global. Today, the overall total raised for the Atheist Bus Campaign stands at a truly overwhelming £135,000, breaking our original target of £5,500 by over 2400%. Given this unexpected amount, I'm very excited to tell you that 800 buses – instead of the 30 we were initially aiming for – are now rolling out across the UK with the slogan, "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life", in locations all over England, Scotland and Wales, including Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, Cardiff, Devon, Leeds, Bristol and Aberdeen.

wow!

I love Last.fm and i love my iphone, nuff said;)